Learning With Text in the Academic Disciplines: Research From the Last Decade

• In Event: Adolescents Learning With Text in the Academic Disciplines

Abstract

Beginning with the 21st century, the national organizations have turned their attention toward adolescent literacy for a number of reasons. The U.S. Department of Education published a survey of college graduates and found that high school dropouts were easily the most prone to lack of basic literacy (http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2005/12/12152005.html). Other studies examined specific data related to how adolescents learn from text. For example, the Rand Reading study group (Snow, 2002) found that comprehension scores were not increasing, and this lack of increase could be due to the increasing level of complexity and technicality of content area texts. The Rand Study group (Snow, 2002) also found that that secondary teacher were woefully ill-prepared to teach literacy strategies that are necessary for comprehension of content-specific texts. When Ness (2007) examined 4 secondary teachers’ instruction, she found that out of the 40 hours of classroom observations, only 82 minutes of instruction or 3% of instructional time was devoted to the explicit teaching, modeling and scaffolding of students’ comprehension of text. Of the 3% of instructional time on comprehension that she observed, teachers spent the majority of their time asking literal questions and assigning a written summary of the text, rather than teaching them how to summarize text effectively. In another study of 8 science and social studies teachers, Ness (2009) observed 2400 minutes of classroom instruction, and once again, she found only 3% of instructional time was spent on comprehension. The most common comprehension strategy was question-answering, with some time spent teaching text structure, and summarization. The social studies teacher incorporated more comprehension instruction than the science teachers.
Given the aforementioned statistics and research, the focus on adolescent literacy and how adolescents learn from text is certainly warranted. In this paper, we explore the trends and issues that have emerged in the last decade related to how adolescents learn from text. Our purpose was to examine the various articles about adolescent literacy published within the last ten years and garner some key findings concerning how adolescent learn from text. Our search for these findings began with a database search in both ERIC and PSYCH INFO for articles published during the last ten years that focused on adolescent readers and learning with text. Our key word search included such terms as comprehension, comprehension instruction, learning with text, and understanding text. We narrowed our search to adolescent literacy in grades 4-12. We read each article gathered from the databases and examined the references in each in order to find additional articles that focused on adolescent literacy and learning with text. From the 43 articles that we garnered in our search, we then grouped each article according to the particular focus and goal of the article. While the articles that specifically focused on comprehension and comprehension instruction in 4-12 classrooms were sparse, we were able to determine some common themes that emerged which we report here.

Authors

• Tamara L. Jetton, Central Michigan University

• Richard Ian Lee, Central Michigan University