Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of single strategy instruction and transactional strategy instruction on reading comprehension and reader self-efficacy for ninth-grade adolescents. Fifty ninth-grade students were randomly assigned to control or experimental group classrooms at a rural high school in the Midwestern United States. Twenty-four students received single strategy instruction (SSI) in the control group while twenty-six students received transactional strategy instruction (TSI) in the experimental group during a nine-week, four-times weekly, intervention. Both groups focused on teaching the same reading comprehension strategies: previewing, predicting, questioning, identifying the main idea and supporting details, and summarizing, using the same fiction and nonfiction reading passages. The control classroom taught the strategies in isolation, focusing on teaching one strategy at time for each reading event. The experimental classroom received instruction using all of the strategies as a cluster in a before, during, and after reading fashion for each reading event. Based on research that interconnected multiple strategies instruction and gains for readers, the experimental group was expected to show higher gains in reading comprehension and reader
self-efficacy. Pretesting and post testing occurred using the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test, grades 7-9, and a reader self-efficacy measure. Analysis was conducted using a Repeated Measures ANOVA. General findings included that, regardless of the reading strategy instruction received (SSI or TSI), reading comprehension and reader self-efficacy increased for both the control and experimental groups. Most importantly, TSI students showed more significant growth than SSI students in both reading comprehension and reader self-efficacy. In summary, reading comprehension strategy instruction, particularly TSI, has been shown to positively affect ninth-graders reading comprehension and reader self-efficacy.
