Results Summary Report from
What Seventh Graders Say About Reading Online: Informing Pedagogy
Research Report No. 8
Presented by:
Jacquelynn A. Malloy, George Mason University
Angela M. Rogers, Clemson University
Amos O. Simms-Smith, George Mason University
Research funded by
United States Department of Education, Institute of Science Grant
(#R305G050154)
What Seventh Graders Say About Reading Online: Informing Pedagogy
Jacquelynn A. Malloy, George Mason University
Angela M. Rogers, Clemson University
Amos O. Simms-Smith, George Mason University
Abstract
This paper reports on findings gathered from the interview data of 53 targeted middle school students during Year 1 of an IES supported research grant. These 7th grade Internet users responded to structured interview questions regarding the ways they read on the Internet, in addition to completing online reading tasks while thinking aloud. Their responses provide insight into what they have learned about Internet reading in school and at home and what they think students and teachers need to consider in order to use the Internet for collecting and sharing information. These insights inform the development of authentic and relevant pedagogy for teaching middle grade students to read online.
It is through hearing the learners, a task unacceptable to authoritarian educators, that democratic teachers increasingly prepare themselves to be heard by learners. But by listening to and so learning to talk with learners, democratic teachers teach the learners to listen to them as well. Paulo Freire, 1998, p. 65
Purpose of the Investigation
This paper presents results from Year 1 of a three-year project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. The project was named Teaching Internet Comprehension to Adolescents (TICA), and reports of the various investigations are available online at the project website by accessing http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/iesproject/. The research takes place in seventh-grade classrooms in predominantly rural districts in South Carolina and largely urban classrooms in Connecticut. The schools recruited for inclusion in the study demonstrated demographic constellations consistent with an increased risk of dropping out of school, such as economic challenges and low district test scores.
The primary goal of the first year of this three-year investigation was to develop a theoretical framework for designing instruction that would produce high levels of online reading comprehension, engagement, and school learning among 7th grade students. During Year 1, we collected and analyzed two sources of information to inform subsequent work: a) a survey of students in our target population (N=1,025) aimed at characterizing Internet use at home and at school; and b) verbal protocol data obtained with think-aloud procedures from skilled, high volume Internet readers in our target population as they read informational texts obtained from the Internet. The findings resulting from these data sources informed the instruction that began a collection of formative experiments in Year 2, which were then used to create the more refined curriculum for online reading and method of instruction in a Year 3 traditional experiment.
In each of three verbal protocol tasks used in Year 1, students were asked to respond to a series of questions that would provide insight into their knowledge, expertise, habits, and dispositions about reading online. Their responses were then analyzed to determine how students are already using the Internet to learn about topics of interest to them, and how they believe the skills required to competently access online information can be taught in the classroom and integrated into the curriculum.
Rationale
The Internet has become an ever-present feature in our lives, whether at home, at work, or at school (Lebo, 2003; National Center for Education Statistics; 2003; U. S. Department of Commerce, 2002). Because of this, educational associations, such as the International Reading Association (2002) include integration of the Internet in the literacy curriculum as a key instructional issue. However, the research base to support the required pedagogy is just beginning to emerge (Leu, 2000; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002; Reinking, 1997), as is our understanding of how reading online differs from print reading (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). The 3-year IES project that supports the research reported in this paper was designed to advance our knowledge of instructional methods that are specifically dedicated to enhancing the comprehension of middle school students in reading and comprehending online materials.
It is also posited that well designed instructional methods that integrate Internet literacy with content knowledge in the middle grade classroom might also serve to engage students who present academic difficulty rooted in poor reading comprehension and lack of engagement with academic texts – factors often seen in students at risk of dropping out (Thompson, Mixon, & Serpell, 1996). Many middle-schoolers who experience difficulty with offline reading in their classrooms may go home to surf in the Internet to pursue personal interests – an activity reported by many of the students in this study. Therefore, the Internet may represent a particularly useful and promising avenue for reaching populations of students who are not invested in academic outcomes and who often lack the desirable engagement with texts, a characteristic more often seen in good readers.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project (2005) indicated that 87% of U. S. students between the ages of 12 and 17 use the Internet, and 11 million of these students do so on a daily basis. While these statistics suggest that reading on the Internet is becoming a defining technology for literacy and learning for adolescents (Alvermann, 2006; Reinking, 2001), we have yet to clearly understand the similarities and differences between online and offline reading and the pedagogical implications of teaching online reading comprehension. We do know from previous research (Coiro, 2006; Leu, Castek, Hartman, Coiro, Henry, Kulikowich, & Lyver, 2005) that while online reading shares a similar skill set to offline reading (i.e, reading with a purpose, deciding when to skim and to read carefully, the use of comprehension strategies and text structures provided), there are additional skills required for effective and efficient online reading.
Consider that in the online format, a staggering set of decisions must be made, based on a developing conditional knowledge of searching and evaluating strategies that are crucial to locating appropriate texts to provide the sought-after information. The choices made when choosing and negotiating various search engines, results pages, web pages and links may produce a completely different set of online pages for one student to read than another, even though they seek the same information. Finding ways to teach students to navigate the complexities of the World Wide Web in search of the information they desire, whether for school-related, job-related, or purely recreational reasons, and to understand what they read well enough to use and communicate that knowledge, served as the impetus of the three year study from which these results are reported. This focus is supported by the findings of the RAND Reading Study Group (2002), who comment that “…accessing the Internet makes large demands on individuals’ literacy skills; in some cases, this new technology requires readers to have novel literacy skills, and little is known about how to analyze or teach those skills” (p. 4).
Theoretical Perspectives
Multiple theoretical perspectives inform the work of the three-year project, as recommended by Labbo & Reinking (1999) in their discussion of the multiple realities of technology in education. The contexts for addressing the nature of online reading comprehension are complex and therefore require an integration of perspectives from information science, cognitive science, sociocultural theory, multiliteracies, critical theory, and sociolinguistics (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008).
With particular regard to the nature of the interviews of students who were involved in the verbal protocol tasks, Freire’s (1998) theorizing on education from the critical perspective were found to be most useful. In one particularly poignant excerpt from his Teachers as Cultural Workers - Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (1998), Freire states:
Only insofar as learners become thinking subjects, and recognize that they are as much thinking subjects as are the teachers, is it possible for the learners to become productive subjects of the meaning or knowledge of the object. It is in this dialectic movement that teaching and learning become knowing and reknowing. The learners gradually know what they did not yet know, and the educators reknow what they knew before (p. 90).
While the verbal protocol tasks that the students were invited to complete included provisions for the students to think aloud while working so that we could access the strategies these comparatively savvy Internet users employed, we were also interested in their thoughts and dispositions regarding online reading and how they came about learning to negotiate the online environment. The primary goal of the Year 1 research was to develop a preliminary taxonomy of skills and strategies that are important to reading online and a secondary goal was to determine how and from whom their skills were developed. With increasing access to the technologies surrounding the Internet, more so than other generations of students who have entered our schools, the participants who were involved in this study have been using the Internet with or without formal or high-quality instruction for a fair portion of their lives. Our informants report varying amounts of in-school instruction in using the Internet, and a wide range of in school applications for online reading. Much of their online interaction occurs at home, and aside from a smattering of homework projects, for their own interests. Inspired by Freire, we sought to determine what we could learn from students who learn about and use the Internet in their daily lives, both in and out of school.
Methods and Modes of Inquiry
Participants
The participants were selected from a larger sample of approximately 1,200 seventh grade students from 14 middle schools, eight in SC and six in CT, who completed an online survey of in-school and out-of-school Internet use and online reading skill. Students who exhibited high relative levels of frequency and diversity of use and demonstrated proficiency in negotiating online tasks were included in a sampling frame for possible participation in the verbal protocol and interview sessions. The top 53 students received parental permission to participate and agreed to meet with a researcher on three separate occasions of about 45 minutes in length to complete a series of online tasks while thinking aloud and to respond to structured interview questions. For further information regarding the development and findings of the Internet Use Survey used to determine the sample of students who would participate in the verbal protocols and interviews, please access the report that is available online at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcbjhrtq_10djqrhz
Data Collection
In the spring of the school year, the participants completed three different online reading tasks, which lasted from 40 minutes to an hour each. Following a short interview, the student was guided through a series of online activities designed to highlight their use of the Internet to develop questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of information, synthesize information, and communicate information. These broad categories for describing the skill set required for reading online are derived from earlier work to develop a theory base for online reading comprehension (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro & Cammack, 2004), and are central to the layered investigations of the TICA project. These essential elements of online reading were important to developing the pedagogical implications of the findings from the Year 1 research.
The verbal protocol tasks, hereto referred to as VP1, VP2 and VP3, were designed to incorporate two dimensions that were judged to be of importance to the understanding of how students use the Internet: teacher-directed versus student centered tasks and prompted versus uninterrupted think-alouds. The first two verbal protocols involved teacher-directed activities, such as evaluating the reliability of a website (VP1) or completing a series of search and locate tasks (VP2) and reporting conclusions using email, IM, or blog. The third verbal protocol task required the student to investigate a topic of personal interest and report the findings using one of the three online methods provided (email, IM, or blog). Similarly, the use of prompting during the think-alouds, or allowing the students to report on their navigations without interruption or probing by the researcher, was varied across the VP tasks. Prompting by the researcher allowed for further clarification of avenues of investigative interest to the researchers, while providing time for students to think aloud without interruption provided data for which the researchers would not have thought to ask.
In summary, VP1 involved an uninterrupted think-aloud activity using a researcher-designed task; VP2 used a structurally prompted think-aloud of the students’ choice of a set of researcher-directed activities, with fixed structural locations for thinking aloud incorporated into the protocol. VP3 involved a student-directed activity followed by a viewing of the Camtasia video of the session, with an accompanying audio recording of the students’ comments regarding their Internet navigations and decisions. In this way, we sought to tap from a wide range of activities and conditions for using the Internet to find and report information.
Students involved in the verbal protocol sessions were invited to respond to a series of structured interview questions both before and after the online task. The questions used in the interviews were suggested by the research group as being of interest to understanding how students learn to negotiate online formats and were then refined to supplement the nature of each of the three verbal protocol tasks. Although the questions differed during each of the verbal protocol sessions, the following table represents a listing of questions by content focus:
Table 1. Structured Interview Questions by Domain
ExpertiseHow did you get to be so good at using the Internet?
Attitudes
If you had a choice, would you rather do research using the Internet, or using books in the library?
What would you say are the advantages or disadvantages of using each?
When you want to learn about something in school, is it easier for you to find the
answer by looking in a book or looking on the Internet?
Dispositions
Do you enjoy the challenge of trying to find something using the Internet?
Can you think of a time when you had trouble finding something on the Internet? How do you feel when this happens?
What do you usually do when you get stuck like this?
How long do you keep trying before you give up?
Practices and Habits of Mind
Why do you look for information on the Internet?
What kinds of things do you look for on the Internet?
Do you ever have a question in your mind just before you use the Internet?
Do you ever begin using the Internet and not have something that you are trying to answer, find, or figure out?
When you read on the Internet, do you ever change your mind about what you want to find out?
Instruction
How should teachers help their students learn how to read with the Internet? What do you think teachers should do in their classes?
If you were going to teach a friend how to read on the Internet, what would you teach them?
What is easiest for you about using the Internet for research?
What is hardest for you about using the Internet for research?
What do you know about using the Internet that some kids your age might not know?
What do you know about using the Internet that lots of adults might not know?
What’s one thing you could learn to do better when doing research on the Internet?
Evaluation
Tell me what the word “reliable” means to you?
Can you give me an example?
While students responded to researcher queries that centered on how they gained skill in using the Internet in general and how they learned to find and communicate information using online resources in particular, some questions were included to complement the online tasks that were completed during the session. For example, the questions pertaining to the student’s understanding of website reliability were asked before and after an online task that involved an investigation of a site about a Northwest Pacific Tree Octopus (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/). While students were consistent in reporting pre-task knowledge about the natural habitat of the octopus, particularly that it required an ocean environment, many of the students judged the hoax cite to be reliable based on its face validity and the clever inclusion of a photo of an octopus in a pine tree.