Seminar Paper Results

Below is the link to the audio overview of my seminar paper:  The Effectiveness of Explicit Vocabulary Instructional Strategies Prior to and During Reading with Special Education Learners.  Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/kfetterman/seminar-paper-

Below is also a written copy, if that makes it easier.

The topic of my seminar paper was explicit vocabulary instructional strategies used before and during reading, with a focus on special education learners.  I chose this topic because I am a 7^th grade special education teacher, and vocabulary is a major deficit area with my students.

My first study compared a rehearsal strategy and the keyword strategy, which uses pictures to help jog students’ memories.  The results of this study were clear.  The keyword method was more effective than the rehearsal method for both the recall measure and the comprehension measure.  More importantly, while there was a difference in effectiveness between the concrete and abstract vocabulary words for the rehearsal method, there was no major difference between them in the keyword method.  In fact, on the comprehension assessment, students actually performed better on the abstract vocabulary when using the keyword method.

In the next study, students participated in four different conditions; text reading, vocabulary learning, a combined approach, and a control group when reading science texts.  On the reading fluency measure, all three conditions produced greater fluency in students than the control condition.  However, the text-reading and the combined conditions provided the greatest amount of words read.  On the vocabulary knowledge measure, the vocabulary learning condition and the combined condition exhibited the greatest scores, 5.5 to 6.0 words correct, as opposed to 3 on text-reading and 2.5 on the control.  On the passage comprehension measure, the three conditions edged out the control condition slightly, with scores of 6.5 to 7, compared to 6 for the control.  It is clear that all varying conditions improve the measure which they are focused on, but can sometimes have positive effects on other measures as well.  For example, the vocabulary learning condition not only increased the score on the vocabulary knowledge measure, but on the reading fluency measure as well.

The third study compared two different types of vocabulary instruction with the regular curriculum.  One was word mapping, a generative morphemic analysis strategy, and the other was the vocabulary LINCS strategy, where students look up the meaning of the word and use a series of steps to aid in remembering the definition.  In this study, both students with and without disabilities from the Word Mapping and LINCS group improved significantly on the strategy-use and word knowledge tests.  On the morphological analysis assessment, the Word Mapping group made greater gains than the Vocabulary LINCS and the regular curriculum groups, going from 18% correct to 60% correct.  Interesting to note is the lack of difference between students with and without disabilities on the assessments.

The final study divided students into two groups; one would learn new vocabulary through semantic feature analysis (SFA), and the other would learn through the dictionary method (DM).  In this study, students gained and retained significantly more knowledge when educated using the semantic feature analysis.  Average scores showed that these students scored approximately eight out of ten on vocabulary and concept questions, while dictionary method students scored between five and six out of ten on both.  However, both groups showed retention over 6 months; neither group had any significant loss.  The difference in scores, however, shows that the semantic feature analysis is much more successful at teaching students new vocabulary and concepts, thus improving overall reading comprehension.  Researchers hypothesized this to be true because the SFA engaged students and made them think deeply and scaffold new information, while the DM students were able to complete their pre-reading assignment with little thought or processing taking place.

All of these studies addressed different vocabulary acquisition strategies that can be used with special education learners both before reading and during reading, with varying levels of success.  Whether they taught students strategies to break down words, memorize words, use prior knowledge, or consult other resources to supplement their knowledge, each strategy showed some type of improvement in the vocabulary knowledge of students with disabilities.

The findings of all four studies are all extremely relevant to special educators, as well as regular educators.  So often, teachers rush to get to the content that they are supposed to cover without giving a thought to how students will access the new vocabulary they inevitably come across in the text.  These studies exemplify how crucial pre-reading strategies are to students, and this rings true especially with our students with disabilities.  If students participate in some sort of pre-reading activity, designed to activate prior knowledge and scaffold new information, the studies showed that it greatly increased the overall comprehension of the reader.

In addition to the success rates of the studies, there were a variety of populations used across the four studies.  Even though the majority of the individual studies were narrowly focused on a specific population, as a whole, the research completed varied in areas of the United States.  A few also evaluated the results of their special education learners against the results of regular education students.  That basis of comparison is essential.  When writing IEPs, one major factor is including the deficit level of special education students with their non-disabled peers.  The studies that compared the two groups showed that there was not a major difference.  That is extremely encouraging news to hear as a special educator.  While our students may need extra modeling, practice, review, and reinforcement of skills, they are just as capable as a student without a disability.

In my own classroom, I can see myself implementing a variety of these strategies.  The one that resonated with me the most was the generative morphemic analysis strategy, referred to as Word Mapping in the study.  I found this strategy particularly useful because it doesn’t rely on a memorization trick or prior knowledge activation led by the teacher.  Once the strategy is taught, the more students practice it, the better they will become.  Word Mapping teaches students to break an unknown word down into pieces, and create meaning using the prefix, suffix, and/or root of the word.  This is an approach that can be used throughout a student’s life, whether it be on a standardized test in high school or in a job interview after graduating college.  This is a tactic I personally use, and once it becomes automatic, it can be incredibly helpful when an unfamiliar word pops up.

While the researchers of these studies presented a lot of information, there were some things that were left to be desired.  For example, there was not a lot of discussion about how time-consuming it was to create the materials used for each of these strategies.  While they are useful, of course, I wondered often about whether the time put into creating the materials is worth the knowledge gained by the students.  If you create 20 keyword index cards, and students only retain 4 of the words, it would seem to me that there must be a more effective way to integrate explicit vocabulary instruction.

In addition, I would be interested in seeing the long-term use of these strategies by teachers, and how much that impacted student learning and comprehension in a class as a whole.  A year-long study would be extremely insightful, and might shed some more light on the learning of our students with disabilities.

In conclusion, it is clear that teachers implement some sort of explicit vocabulary instruction both before reading and during reading, particularly when new concepts and ideas are being introduced.  While it is not realistic to expect this to be done every day, it is an extremely important part of ensuring that all students, including our students with disabilities, are getting the most out of their education.