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By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
An education professor at UGA is leading a collaborative project that has received a $5 million federal grant to find a way to improve reading fluency in young children.
Fluency in reading is one of the subtle steps in a child’s development that is crucial to learning science and social studies in later grades, says Steven Stahl, a professor of reading education. Stahl has spent much of the past several years studying how early elementary school students develop fluency in reading. The new study will be a five-year project involving more than 400 students in 27 different classrooms at schools in Atlanta and Athens and in Brunswick, N.J.
“It is especially important for the University of Georgia to be directly involved in the improvement of Georgia’s K-12 school system,” says President Michael F. Adams. “Increasing reading fluency is one of the fundamental ways that we can help improve the academic success of Georgia’s students. I congratulate Dr. Stahl and his colleagues for their efforts.”
Fluency has long been a neglected area of reading research, despite studies showing that 44 percent of students were dysfluent, even with grade-level stories read under supportive testing conditions, Stahl says. Children typically develop fluency in reading in the second or third grade. By the fourth grade, children are expected to learn independently from text, and the curriculum begins to shift from information that is generally known to children to information that is new.
“What I hope to do is figure out the best way to teach kids how to be fluent readers and to do it in a way that will transfer to a national scale,” Stahl says.
He may already be well on his way to creating that national model. His previous research has produced dramatic results. Using his Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction program, students in 14 different Athens-area classrooms gained on the average nearly two years in reading growth in their second-grade year. Over the two years of that study, all but two of 184 children who began the second-grade year reading at a primer level were reading at a second-grade level or higher at the end of the year.
The research has been widely cited, but the study lacked a control group and a measure of silent reading comprehension. Stahl hopes to confirm his previous findings in the new study.
What makes Stahl’s approach different? Simply put, it gives students more practice reading. The teacher begins by reading a story aloud to the class and discussing it. This discussion puts comprehension right in front, so the children are aware that they are reading for meaning. Next, the teacher reviews key vocabulary, does comprehension exercises and repeats reading activities around the story. Then the story is sent home for the child to read to his or her parents. For children who struggle, the story is sent home additional times. Children who do not have difficulty with the story do other reading at home on these days. On the second day, the children re-read the story with a partner who monitors the reading, and then the partners switch roles.
Although the repeated reading is an important part of FORI, it is not the only reading the children do; 15-20 minutes per day are set aside for children to read books that they choose. Children are also required to read at home for a minimum of 15 minutes per evening. This reading is monitored through reading logs signed by parents.
Stahl and Paula Schwanenflugel, a professor of educational psychology, will examine the skills children need in order to develop fluency, create a classroom pedagogy to encourage fluency, and develop approaches for remedial readers.
Schwanenflugel will study the psychological mechanisms that underlie fluent reading.
Robin Morris, a researcher at Georgia State University, will study the remedial part of the project, and Melanie Kuhan, a UGA education graduate and researcher at Rutgers University, will assist in the New Jersey trials. |
