Advancing third graders’ reading comprehension through collaborative Knowledge Building: A comparative study in Taiwan
Introduction
One of the core functions of reading literacy is to support the development of one's knowledge and understanding of the world around them. Reading comprehension – the ability to read, process, and reflect on written text – helps students develop reading skills, mastery of language, critical thinking skills, and core knowledge for progressively more challenging academic work (Kohzadi, Azizmohammadi, & Samadi, 2014). Having excellent reading comprehension skills also increases students' enjoyment and effectiveness of reading (Whitten, Labby, & Sullivan, 2016). More importantly, reading comprehension enables students to express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings, which, in the long run, helps them become active citizens in today's democratic societies (OECD, 2010).
Given its importance as the central task of formal schooling, countries around the world regularly participate in an international comparative assessment for measuring reading comprehension called the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) as a way to evaluate students’ reading competitiveness. Many East Asian countries have been doing fairly well, including Taiwan, which ranked eighth in the 2016 PIRLS test (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Hooper, 2017). However, as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, rapid growth of Internet technologies and artificial intelligence in all sectors of society bring new challenges and opportunities for reading and working with information (Mullis et al., 2017). For example, Internet bots are now able to perform low-level reading comprehension of written texts as well as generate false information online. Policymakers assert that “Educators will be required to support students to develop new digital competencies and literacies, and promote a greater awareness of issues in the digital environment” (UNESCO, 2020, p. 138).
To remain competitive, education systems need to engage in continuous reform to raise the standards for literacy instruction. The Taiwanese government has been encouraging teachers to experiment with new pedagogies for advancing students' reading comprehension (Taiwan Ministry of Education, 2020). This paper investigates the use of an innovative pedagogy called Knowledge Building (KB) in reading education in Taiwan. Knowledge Building is distinguished from other forms of inquiry-based learning by its focus on not only generating ideas, but on continually improving them through progressive discourse (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). It is often regarded as a form of deep constructivism as it is guided by a set of principles rather than procedures – the Knowledge Building principles enable collective inquiry into an expanding range of topics, through interactive questioning, theory development, idea refinement, and rise above explanations (Scardamalia, 2002). In the following sections, we first review a traditional method for teaching reading in Taiwan called direct instruction. Next, we discuss how an idea-centered, principle-based pedagogy such as KB can contribute to reforming reading education in Taiwan. Then we describe the comparative design used in this study to examine the effects of direct instruction and KB pedagogy on young students' PIRLS reading scores. Finally, we present and discuss the findings regarding how KB pedagogy helps enhance young children's reading comprehension and collaborative meaning-making skills.
Section snippets
Direction instruction for teaching reading
In East Asian countries, a widely adopted approach to developing young children's reading comprehension is teacher-centered, direct instruction (Lau, 2017). As a generic teaching model, direct instruction is a set of instructional practices that target the development of cognitive skills via explicitly sequenced learning procedures, activities, and structures, including individual tasks, small group tasks, and face-to-face instruction (Carnine, Silbert, Kameenui, & Tarver, 2016; Hollingsworth &
Participants, contexts, and class activities
The participants were two third grade classes from an elementary school located in a low socioeconomic neighborhood in Taipei, Taiwan. Students were randomly assigned to the experimental class which engaged in Knowledge Building (n = 24) or the comparison class which engaged in direct instruction (n = 27). The teacher in the experimental class had five years of teaching experience, two of which focused on innovating practices with KB pedagogy and KF technology. The teacher in the comparison
Students’ reading comprehension scores before and after the intervention
To address RQ1 regarding students’ reading comprehension, first, an overall one-way ANCOVA analysis on the total PIRLS score was performed to see if there were any differences between the two classes. The hypothesis of homogeneity of regression slopes was first tested and no violation of this hypothesis was found (F = 2.84, p > .05). Then, as Table 2 shows, the ANCOVA test found that the increased total score from the pre-test (M = 16.29, SD = 6.50) to the post-test (M = 25.79, SD = 6.67) in
Conclusion and implications
This study explores traditional and innovative designs for teaching reading to young students in a Chinese literacy class over the course of a semester. First, we assessed an experimental and comparison class' reading comprehension and found that students experienced more benefits in the innovative context, which involved Knowledge Building pedagogy and Knowledge Forum technology, rather than the traditional context, which involved direct instruction and worksheets. More specifically,
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Huang-Yao Hong: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Supervision, Resources, Funding acquisition. Leanne Ma: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Pei-Yi Lin: Methodology, Formal analysis. Karen Yuan-Hsuan Lee: Validation, Funding acquisition.
Acknowledgements
This work was, in part, supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST106-2511-S-004-008-MY2; MOST107-2511-H-004-004-MY3; MOST108-2511-H-007-006-MY3).
References (58)
- et al.
Observations on the use of direct instruction with young disadvantaged children
Journal of School Psychology
(1966) - et al.
Enhancing digital reading performance with a collaborative reading annotation system
Computers & Education
(2014) - et al.
Individual and team annotation effects on students' reading comprehension, critical thinking, and meta-cognitive skills
Computers in Human Behavior
(2010) - et al.
Direct instruction of reading comprehension strategies: The nature of teacher explanation
Education and mind in the knowledge age
(2002)- et al.
Direct instruction reading
(2016) The rise of the network society
(2011)- et al.
The development of productive vocabulary in knowledge building: A longitudinal study
- et al.
Schools as knowledge-building organizations: Thirty years of design research
Educational Psychologist
(2016) - et al.
Schools as knowledge-building organizations: Thirty years of design research
Educational Psychologist
(2016)
Building communities of engaged readers: Reading for pleasure
Using direct instruction flashcards and reading racetracks to improve sight word recognition of two elementary students with autism
Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities
The use of interactive environments to promote self-regulation in online learning: A literature review
European Journal of Contemporary Education
Direct instruction
Does direct instruction work?: A critical assessment of direct instruction research and its theoretical perspective
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Managing, understanding, applying, and creating knowledge in the information age: Next-generation challenges and opportunities
Cognition and Instruction
Explicit direct instruction (EDI): The power of the well-crafted, well-taught lesson
Towards an idea-centered, principle-based design approach to support learning as knowledge creation
Educational Technology Research and Development
Effects of reading mastery as a small group intervention for young children with ASD
Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities
PIRLS 2016 report for fourth-grade: Students reading literacy in Taiwan
Is there a relationship between critical thinking and critical reading of literary texts: A case study at Arak University (Iran)
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences
Creative and meaningful classroom activities to foster a reading community
Journal of Extensive Reading
New literacies
Classical Chinese reading instruction: Current practices and their relationship with students' strategy use and reading motivation
Teaching and Teacher Education
The impact of presentation format, task assignment, and prior knowledge on students' comprehension of multiple online documents
Journal of Literacy Research
Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the Internet and other information and communication technologies
Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading
Fluidity in the Networked Society--Self-Initiated learning as a Digital Literacy Competence
Electronic Journal of E-learning
Cited by (15)
Authenticity, engagement, and performance in online high school courses: Insights from micro-interactional data
2021, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :The student-directed nature of these activities enables students to focus on topics that they deem personally relevant in a manner that allows for the integration of students’ multiple funds of knowledge (González et al., 2006; Silseth, 2018). While there is room to improve access to authentic work in online courses, the most transformative restructuring of learning for students requires more collaborative, interactive, customizable instructional environments not available in the most popular, asynchronous online course systems currently on the market (Hong et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2014; Laurillard et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2020). Specifically, Laurillard et al. (2013) recommend that online learning platforms must have systems in place to match learning designs to student need and allow for customization and flexibility of learning designs to maximize the educational experiences of students.
Beyond the Cognitive Dimension: Emotion Patterns in Productive and Improvable Knowledge Building Discourse
2023, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Conference, CSCLWhat and How You Explain Matters: Inquisitive Teachable Agent Scaffolds Knowledge-Building for Tutor Learning
2023, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)