Reading comprehension improvement when readers use pictures and reciprocal questioning to activate and build schemata

The effects of a sequential and cumulative set of activities designed to build and activate schemata were investigated with sixth- to tenth-grade students who decoded adequately, but comprehended at least two years below grade level. The interventions consisted of exploring concepts extractable from a picture, first by means of teacher-led questioning (B), then by an interactive process within the reading group called reciprocal questioning about the picture (D). The final intervention included reciprocal questioning about a passage whose theme the picture depicted (E).Thirty students were assigned to two groups in a time series design involving three special education teachers and the author. The design featured five 5-session phases: ABDEM for the Early intervention group and ACBDM for the Late group, where B, D, and E were the conditions described above, C was a control condition in which the student wrote a summary of the passage, A was a baseline, test-only condition, and M ("maintenance") was an identical trailing baseline condition. Each teacher worked with one instructional group in a resource room.The findings were as follows: (1) Both groups gained significantly from A to M on 16 of the 17 dependent measures of reading comprehension, picture comprehension, general knowledge, and vocabulary. These gains indicated a general reading comprehension improvement that can be attributed to practice, to motivation, or both. (2) Both groups did better on most comprehension and transfer measures during intervention phases than they were expected to do, given baseline-to-maintenance trend lines. Thus, picture interventions had a general facilitative effect on comprehension, apparently suggesting that their proposed mechanism, schema instantiation, mediated comprehension improvement. (3) However, direct comparisons among conditions indicated that B, D, and C facilitated reading comprehension equally, suggesting that their facilitation was underlain by motivation and not cognitively grounded. (4) Reciprocal questioning on the comprehension passages themselves facilitated passage comprehension significantly more than the other conditions. This finding would be predicted by a number of theories of learning and motivation, including schema theory.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio