Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 59, Issue 4, December 2012, Pages 1170-1183
Computers & Education

Instructional effectiveness of a computer-supported program for teaching reading comprehension strategies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.05.013Get rights and content

Abstract

This article examines the effectiveness of a computer-based instructional program (e-PELS) aimed at direct instruction in a collection of reading comprehension strategies. In e-PELS, students learn to highlight and outline expository passages based on various types of text structures (such as comparison or cause-and-effect) as well as to paraphrase, self-question, and summarize. The study involved 1041 fourth-grade elementary students from 21 schools distributed in three regions in central Chile. Participant teachers integrated this program into the Spanish language curriculum, instructing their students during thirty sessions of 90 min each during one school semester. Pretest-to-posttest gains in reading comprehension scores were significantly greater for students instructed with this program than for students who received traditional instruction (d = .5), with particularly strong effects for lower-achieving students (d = .7). The findings support the efficacy of direct instruction in specific learning strategies in a computer-based environment.

Highlights

► Computer-supported program for teaching reading comprehension strategies can be effective. ► Such effectiveness was tested with 1041 students distributed in 27 classes in 18 schools. ► Findings indicated that computer-based instruction was highly effective (d = .5). ► Particularly strong effects were observed for lower-achieving students (d = .7). ► Efficacy of teaching-specific learning strategies in a computer-based environment is supported.

Introduction

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a computer-supported program for teaching reading comprehension strategies. The program included visual cognitive strategies such as highlighting key ideas and using graphic organizers to organize information based on types of text structures, and verbal strategies such as paraphrasing, self-questioning and summarizing. Does direct instruction using a multiple-strategy program embedded in a software application improve reading comprehension? This was the main research question that guided this study. The strategies embedded in the software application were specially developed and selected to meet the curricular standards and requirements of 4th grade elementary students.

Section snippets

Strategy-based comprehension instruction

A learning strategy is defined as the set of actions carried out by a learner during learning which are intended to improve knowledge acquisition (Dole, Nokes, & Drits, 2009). Cognitive strategies for reading comprehension support readers' efforts to select, organize, interpret and understand text (Vellutino, 2003). Reading comprehension strategies can be grouped into levels according to the cognitive processes they support. One scheme, proposed by Román and Gallego (1994), includes strategies

E-PELS: a multiple-strategy instruction program for reading comprehension

An important new issue addressed in this study concerns whether cognitive strategies for reading comprehension can be taught effectively within a computer-based system that systematically uses direct instruction and practice. The computer-supported multiple-strategy program was named e-PELS (“Programa de Entrenamiento en Lectura Significativa” or “Program in Deep Reading Comprehension”). The basic idea to develop e-PELS was taken from Román (2004) who designed a paper-based instruction program

Research questions

The theoretical motivation for this study comes from the idea that expertise in reading involves learning how and when to use a collection of cognitive strategies (Mayer, 2008; Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995). In particular, reading comprehension depends of the reader's knowledge of cognitive strategies for recognizing types of text structures and translating them into spatial arrangements (Chambliss & Calfee, 1998; Cook & Mayer, 1988; Holley, Dansereau, McDonald, Garland, & Collins, 1979; Jairam &

Participants

This study involved 1041 fourth-grade elementary students from 21 schools distributed in three regions in central Chile. A total of 939 students from 18 schools constituted the e-PELS (experimental) group and 102 students from 3 schools constituted the traditional instruction (control) group. Several schools participated with more than one class, yielding 27 classes in the e-PELS group and 3 classes in the traditional instruction (TI) group. Table 1 shows schools distributed by region, number

Findings

The main focus of this study is on comparing the effectiveness of the e-PELS and traditional instruction (TI) groups on their changes in reading comprehension performance. Table 3 summarizes the main descriptive statistics — the pretest score, posttest score, and gain score — for all students in each group on the reading comprehension test, as well as separately for low-achieving and high-achieving students and for boys and girls in each group.3

Discussion

A primary objective of this study was to evaluate whether students using e-PELS — a computer-supported multiple-strategy program for reading comprehension — would increase their reading comprehension scores in comparison to students who learned under traditional instruction. Participant teachers in the e-PELS group instructed their students following a structured set of approximately 30 sessions of 90 min each, which were integrated into the Spanish language curriculum. Sessions combined

Acknowledgement

Funding for this study was provided by the Chilean Ministry of Education through ENLACES project DEX8619-2008 and FONDEF projects TE04i1005 and D08i1010. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Nancy Collins, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California at Santa Barbara for her helpful advice on statistical analyses.

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