Examining the Efficacy of Online Credit-Recovery Programs for At-Risk Adolescents

Running Head: ONLINE CURRICULUM AND AT-­‐RISK ADOLESCENTS

Examining the Efficacy of Online Credit-Recovery Programs for At-Risk Adolescents Charles I. Sutton Concordia University Portland

A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Program in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements Concordia University 2013

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Abstract This thesis discusses the problems that at-­‐risk, high school students enrolled in alternative education programs featuring Internet-­‐based curricula may experience with learning via online texts. The study relies on the assumption that at-­‐risk students typically possess learning profiles that feature lower reading ability. Since Internet-­‐based programs predominantly require the students to learn through texts, struggling readers may have a difficult time developing the academic skills that they need for success. Therefore, the author gleans from the literature the requisite skills needed for using online curricula, and determines what interventions have been successful for remediating older adolescents who lack these proficiencies. The author reviews academic literature and prior studies about reading skills and interventions involving mostly older adolescent students. While the research shows mixed results that are difficult to generalize to the specific group for this study, the author highlights approaches that have a strong possibility for success. The research reveals that the requisite proficiencies include fluency and comprehension, higher ordered thinking skills, and critically analyzing digital texts. To remediate, the author recommends repeated readings with expressive texts for improving prosody, peer and teacher led discussions for comprehension, and Reading Apprenticeship or similar reading strategies modeling teachers’ thinking processes when analyzing texts. The lack of extensive studies regarding adolescent readers and the difficulty generalizing the studies to the population of this study put limits on the researcher.

Therefore, the author recommends additional studies with the specific population.

Keywords: at-­‐risk students, online curriculum, reading skills, interventions

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Table of Contents CHAPTER 1—The Problem • Introduction • Defining Terms • Significance of the problem

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CHAPTER 2—The Development of the Problem in Published Literature • Overview • Historical development • Conclusion

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CHAPTER 3—Literature Review • Overview • The Literature • Transitioning from Reading-to-Learn to Learning-to-Read • Reading Paper Texts: The Big Five—Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension • Phonemic Awareness • Phonics • Vocabulary • Fluency: Speed, Accuracy, Automaticity, and Prosody • Reading with Speed, Accuracy, and Automaticity • Fluency as Prosody • Comprehension • Online reading: reading digital texts for Internet-based curricula, differentiating between multimodal vs. unimodal reading, and deixis.

• Learning characteristics for at-risk students.

• Interventions: remediation facts and suggestions.

• Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and Vocabulary • Comprehension Intervention Strategies • Response to Intervention • Learning Strategies Curriculum • Title, Examine, Look, Look, and Setting • Ask, Read, Tell • Reading Apprenticeship • Fluency • Speed, Accuracy, and Automaticity • Prosody • New Literacies • Reading Digital Texts • Applying What was Learned to At-Risk High School Students in Online Credit-Recovery Programs

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Assumptions and Limitations Chapter Summary

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CHAPTER 4—Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations • Summary • Reading Texts • The Literature • Fluency • Comprehension • New Literacies • Conclusion and Recommendations • Assessment • Automaticity for Fluent Reading • Prosody to Help Imply Meaning • Comprehension Strategies • Reading and Comprehending Online Texts • Professional Development • Assumptions and Limitations • Assumptions • Limitations

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REFERENCES

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Chapter 1 Introduction Since the advent of No Child Left Behind, accountability standards have caused school administrators to prioritize the goal of making adequate yearly progress (AYP). In order to ensure AYP, schools have several options. One possibility is for administrators and faculty to work toward improving the literacy rates of all students—by doing so overall academic performance on high-stakes tests may improve. Alternatively, schools may choose to target students from subgroups that are at risk for failure in order to find a way to move the at-risk students off the campus. In some cases, this helps to lower the numbers of students in the at-risk subgroup. If this practice is followed, the same students are no longer considered a substantial subgroup and thereby no longer have a significant effect on the school’s rating (Fisher & Frey, 2008). Unfortunately, many high schools are taking the second route by recommending that low performing students with a history of failure go to alternative education programs for credit recovery to catch up with their cohorts. The promise is made that these students will be allowed to return to graduate with their class once they have made up the credits; so many students are enticed to take this route rather than continue in a program in which they have had little success. These adolescent students and their parents welcome a change without questioning the efficacy of the program for resolving the student’s issues. This is especially true in low SES families who often come from generational poverty. In these families, the focus is on daily survival—not education (Beegle, 2003). There is little time or motivation to investigate the best options for the adolescent’s education. Rather, the focus is on quickly

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fixing problems so that they can get back to taking care of the family’s immediate physical needs.

As Ivey (2008) notes, students who have had a long history of failure in academic settings often dropout mentally and emotionally from school long before dropping out physically. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that the typical academic profile of an atrisk adolescent student is similar to that of a high school dropout.

Scanlon and Mellard (2002) reason that an important common factor that pushes students toward dropping out of high school is low academic achievement. One strong predictor of academic success or failure is literacy proficiency. Yet, statistics show that more than one in four 12th-grade students have not achieved even basic reading levels (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006). It stands to reason that many of these adolescents without basic literacy skills are the same group that is at risk for dropping out due to repeated failure in school. In addition, many of these students move into programs that offer little or nothing in the way of reading interventions. Furthermore, schools opt to place these students in online classes that require strong reading and writing skills for success.

Frequently, the alternative education programs use Internet-based curricula—like OdysseyWare—for all of the students that enroll. The majority of the work done by online students using these curricula involves reading large selections from the Internet or from traditional texts meant to supplement the individual lessons. After reading, they respond to multiple choice and/or essay type questions based on what they have read.

Some online curricula supplement the reading with video lectures, while others do not and the students must rely solely on their reading comprehension skills. However, if the

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majority of the students who end up taking credit-recovery classes are struggling readers, then this style of learning could present a problem for them.

Commonly, many Internet-based curricula do not attempt to match the students Lexile level or comprehension skills with the readability of the materials, although some do. Additionally, experts acknowledge that reading online involves new skills that may also affect the students’ abilities to understand the texts with which they are working (Leu & Zawilinski, 2007). Therefore, the question that this study raises is as follows: What aspects of online reading comprehension are most important for at-risk students to develop for them to be successful in academic programs that features Internetbased curricula?

Defining Terms In order to begin answering the question, it is necessary to define terms and differentiate between traditional reading skills and those required for online reading— which are often referred to as new literacies—so that one can determine which skills should be the focus of the study. Afflerbach, Pearson, and Paris (2008) define reading skills as “…automatic actions that result in decoding and comprehension with speed, efficiency, and fluency and or control involved” (p. 368). One might think that reading processes are the same—regardless whether on paper or via the Internet. Even new literacies experts agree that the Internet is primarily a reading medium (Leu & Zawilinski, 2007). Yet, they also acknowledge that the Internet alters the reading skills defined above in at least five different ways. Online reading consists of: 1. Problems and questions raised through social contexts 2. Content that is searchable in a different way than traditional books

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3. Evaluating information and sources more critically 4. Integrating multimodal information from a wider range of sources 5. Interactive communication (Mokhtari, Kymes, & Edwards, 2008) Therefore, this thesis will attempt to look at which of the traditional reading skills adolescents use for online reading and how the very nature of the Internet may affect those skills in given situations.

Significance of the Problem The practice of putting at-risk students into online learning programs for earning high school credits is widespread. According to NACOL (Watson & Gemen, 2008), these kinds of online learning program exist in more than thirty states and more than half of the school districts in the United States. The U.S. Department of Education (2008) has noticed an expanding trend toward using online programs for at-risk adolescents. The Department’s website suggests that, given the rate of growth in this area, “…it is critical to conduct rigorous evaluations of online learning in K-12 settings to ensure that it does what people hope it will do: help improve student learning” (para. 1).

The reality is that online learning has the potential to change the face of education permanently for at-risk students as well as for their more academically successful peers.

However, for these changes to improve the overall quality of education, it is necessary to evaluate exactly how the Internet affects reading comprehension, and what educators should do to prepare their students to be successful in online classes. Through the process of examining the study question, this thesis attempts to contribute to the ongoing discussion.

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Internet-based curriculum solutions are becoming popular for attempting to remediate at-risk students across the United States. Alternative education programs that offer these curricula are in widespread use as a way to move students who are failing in traditional classrooms off the campus thereby eliminating the students’ impact on the schools AYP while trying to help the student. This raises questions about whether these programs are actually helping students. In order to determine the answers to these questions, it is necessary to look at the skills required to successfully acquire knowledge in online classes. These skills may include traditional reading comprehension and new literacies. Once it is determined which skill set is most commonly required to access the materials, then one can begin to assess what strategies may be useful toward helping students who lack these skills upon entering such a program acquire them.

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Chapter 2 Overview Developing ways to help students who are at-risk for dropping out is not a new phenomenon. Removing struggling students from their local public school rosters and placing them in alternative programs that feature online curricula for earning high school credits is a novelty of the information age. Yet, if one looks at the historical development of at-risk education, he or she will see a progression of theories and practices—each designed to improve upon past programs that were not as effective for helping these students graduate with the skills they need to develop for a successful adult life. The question is—do these alternative programs fit into the logical progression that preceded the advent of the Internet? If not, should one assume that online credit recovery programs have become a convenient means for solving the public schools’ need for improving their AYP regardless of the program’s efficacy? To answer the questions it is necessary to review the literature that examines how schools have dealt with their at-risk students in the past, as well as to determine if the Internet-based curricula builds on the best practices developed over the years. Finally, even if the programs exemplify best practices, how can one determine whether individual at-risk high school students have the necessary reading and new literacy skills for success in the programs?

While searching for information about the history of alternative programs and curricula for at-risk youth in the United States, it became evident that the term “ at-risk” refers to a wide range of adolescent problems in the literature. The various authors use the term “risk” liberally to describe behavior, pregnancy, drug-use, sexually transmitted

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diseases, and dropping out of school among other things (Woodman, et al., 2013; Toleran, et al., 2013; Chapman, Buckley, Sheehan, & Shochet, 2013). While many of these conditions are present among students enrolled in alternative education, the programs do little—if anything—to mitigate the problems. Therefore, before reviewing the history of at-risk programs, it is helpful to define the kind of risk for which these alternative programs exist.

Wehlage (2001) defines at-risk students as “…those youth who have serious personal and/or academic problems that are likely to lead to dropping out” (p. 18). While this is a good working definition for most purposes, academic curricula does nothing to resolve the students’ personal issues. Nor, does it matter—for the purposes of this thesis—whether a student entering one of these programs has already dropped out of school or if they simply are not making enough progress to complete their high school diploma on time. Both groups of students essentially have the same relevant academic issues and similar distribution scores on academic achievement tests (Wehlage, 2001; Anderson & Keith, 2001). Therefore, it is more useful to define “at-risk students” for this discussion as those students who have a history of struggling with academics and/or failing courses, making it less likely that they will successfully complete high school.

Historical Development Interviewing a senior, public-school administrator revealed that before the advent of alternative credit-recovery programs that utilize online curricula, public schools had few options for working with at-risk students. Schools often created a multi-track system to reduce academic challenges for struggling students while providing stronger academics

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for students who are more capable. Alternatively, schools frequently referred struggling students to General Equivalency Degree (GED) programs, or they recommended them for vocational education or Job Corps (G. Kispert, personal communication, November 19, 2013). Aside from remedial reading instruction in the public school setting intended to boost the students’ literacy abilities, in many cases, providing at-risk students with opportunities for catching up to their cohort or preparing struggling students for future academic challenges was not the priority. Rather, frequently the hope was to get them through high school and into working-class jobs.

Early on, schools attempted to help students who had a history of failure by removing many of the academic challenges these adolescents were facing. Administrators placed these students in lower tracks of learning that were less academically demanding.

While the intention of creating academic tracks was—and still is in some cases—to help these students, in reality removing quality academic work from their reach may have further jeopardized their likeliness to graduate. Placing struggling students in lower tracks eliminated any chance that the students would be able to progress academically, while at the same time reinforced negative stereotypes about these adolescents (Anderson & Keith, 2001; Hon & Shorr, 1997). Furthermore, studies have shown that the most reliable remediation elements for at-risk students include providing challenging academic work, creating motivational experiences, and offering quality schools and teachers. While many of the teachers working in the lower tracks provide quality pedagogy, putting adolescents into lower tracks removes intellectual challenge and demotivates the student. Therefore, tracking systems hurt the very students that administrators were trying to help. Anderson and Keith (2001) state that the results of their study suggest “…that historic and

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continuing trends in tracking at-risk students to nonacademic curriculum may indeed negatively affect their academic achievement” (p. 266).

Another possible solutions that administrators have used—and still offer—for atrisk students and high school dropouts is the GED. For years, when students were too far behind to catch up and graduate with a traditional diploma before they aged out of school, the common recommendation was to withdraw from school and enter a GED program. In such a program, they could learn enough in a short period to pass a battery of tests to earn a document that most colleges and employers still accept as the equivalent of a high school diploma. The original purpose of the GED was to help returning World War II veterans earn high school equivalency so that they could go to college quickly. By the late 40s, New York State allowed the test for high school dropouts. From that point, it took about a decade for all of the states to allow dropouts and at-risk students sixteen years of age or older to use the GED as an alternative to the traditional diploma (Garvey & Grobe, 2011). While this solution has helped people with academic challenges qualify for low-end jobs—about three-quarters of the people who complete the GED programs successfully pass the exam—it has not been an effective method for helping them go beyond. According to the Jobs for the Future report, “…while nearly half of all GED holders eventually enroll in postsecondary education, only 4 percent persist to earn a degree” (Garvey & Grobe, 2011, p. 1). The vast majority never makes it past the first semester because, while GED gives them high school equivalency, it does not provide the skills necessary for competing college-level work. In an age where most jobs that pay well require at least some postsecondary education, the GED is not a good solution for at-

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risk students. Taking that route almost guarantees them a low socioeconomic status for life unless they are in the small minority who are able to finish a college degree.

Sometimes programs in the past combined tracking or GED programs with vocational training or Job Corps. Vocational education programs are generally choice programs offered to all students in the high school. Students learn the skills of a trade while they simultaneously work on finishing their diploma or passing the GED exam.

One example of this type of program is the Career Academy at Hollywood High School.

In this kind of program, employers in growth industries within the community—that have an anticipated need for future workers—partner with the school to build a curriculum where the students’ academic subjects are taught within the training. Advocates of the program suggest that by imbedding learning in the job training, the work becomes more relevant for the student. Therefore, it is more naturally engaging, which helps motivate struggling students to work harder toward comprehending the materials (Hon & Shorr, 1997). Alternatively, Job Corps is a federal program housed on campuses around the country. Unlike vocational programs, for one to qualify for Job Corps, one must come from a low-income family (Job Corps, n.d.). Both vocational programs and Job Corps help young, at-risk students find internships and job placement, so they tend to help struggling students more than tracking or GED programs alone.

One last program for at-risk students that preceded the advent of the Internet curricula programs also featured partnership. Rather than partner with employers, these program partnered high schools with local colleges to help prevent struggling high school students from dropping out, and to give these students—especially minorities—the skills

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that they need to be successful in higher education programs. One example of this kind of program is Project Challenge, which is a collaborative project of Burke High School in Charleston, South Carolina, and a local military college, The Citadel. This program was created to work with at-risk students from the high school who were identified as having a history of failure in school and low motivation for success. Two important characteristics that most of the Project Challenge students shared before enrolling in the program were that they “lacked mastery of basic academic skills… [And they could not] conceptualize how they fit into the educational design” (Hewett & Byrnes, 1994, p. 30).

By creating an integrated learning environment where teachers often team taught and the curriculum was aligned across content areas—the teachers were able to build relevancy into the program. This approach helped the students feel like they were a part of the whole learning community as opposed to the kind of compartmentalized learning done in traditional school in which these students felt like outsiders. The Project Challenge program, and others like it, not only sought to get at-risk students through high school with a diploma or equivalency; rather, these programs worked toward building the students skills and self-concepts to provide each student with the best chance to leave secondary school with the potential to go beyond unskilled labor jobs.

While many of the aforementioned kinds of programs still exist in smaller numbers, the current at-risk education model is one that most frequently includes alternative schools where students primarily earn their credits though working individually using online, self-paced curricula. While it seems that the most effective and successful features of prior models included learning-communities that integrated subject matter, these programs have abandoned that tendency. Instead, they isolate students for

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much of the day using compartmentalized learning units on individual computer screens.

Although many programs offer direct instruction as well, it is relatively a small portion of the day. The bulk of the time consists of supported individual learning. Reeves (2005) suggests that although many of the pedagogies in alternative programs using Internetbased curricula intend for the teachers to provide individual and direct instruction, it is likely that: …teachers using ILS [integrated learning systems] may be so occupied with making sure the ILS are functioning properly and troubleshooting any problems, that they might not be able to conduct the one-to-one and small group teaching that the systems were supposed to allow teachers to conduct (para. 35).

Hence, there is little time devoted to community learning and much student time spent individually working on the computers.

Another important improvement in more recent academic pedagogies for at-risk students has been that the programs significantly reduced or eliminated tracking and remedial learning. Instead, challenging students with appropriate, quality work helped them build skills, self-efficacy, and motivation. One has to wonder if the credit recovery aspect of these online curricula is a step backward toward removing academic challenge, because it frequently allows students to pretest out of large portions of the class. Fratt (2006) writes, “Most online credit recovery programs individualize instruction by pretesting kids…funneling them back to lessons to review missing concepts and bypassing concepts they understand” (para. 9). It is understandable that if a student has knowledge acquired from a failed attempt at a class, that he or she may not need to relearn every aspect of the class. However, the student originally failed the class because their learning of the concepts and skills was imperfect. Since these pretests are usually comprised of

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multiple-choice questions, then students may recognize an answer without fully understanding the concept or they might take a lucky guess, and test out of that portion of the class. Therefore, the student never acquires the skill, but still passes the class.

The contrast between the historical trends in best practices for at-risk education and the current Internet curriculum model for struggling students at the very least raise questions about the efficacy of the programs. However, it is unlikely that these programs will be changed or eliminated; therefore, this thesis will explore what skills at-risk students tend to lack that are necessary for improving a student’s chances for success in alterative online programs.

Conclusion This chapter introduced an overview of the historical developments of education programs for at-risk students. Before doing so, a functional definition of at-risk learners was developed for the purposes of the thesis recognizing that the term has had a wide range of meanings throughout the literature. Over the years, schools used tracking systems, GED programs, vocational education, Job Corps, and partnerships with local business and colleges to assist students who were having difficulty meeting the requirements for high school graduation. The new model of using online curricula was compared to the development of the older models to determine whether it borrows from the best practices of its predecessors. While some of the positive developments in at-risk education have not made it to online curricula, the alternative programs are growing and will likely be around for some time. Therefore, the focus of this thesis going forward is on the skills required for reading and comprehending texts in a digital environment.

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Chapter 3 Overview Now that the historical development has been considered, the next step in the process of evaluating the efficacy of the Internet-based alternative programs for at-risk students is to determine which literacy skills are necessary for success in these kinds of programs. Discerning the most important literacy proficiencies and comparing those characteristics with the most common reading aptitudes and deficiencies of struggling students will help determine where to make efforts toward building interventions to enhance student achievement with online curricula.

It is important to recognize that individual students have different proficiencies, weaknesses, and learning preferences; so, this thesis will not attempt to paint a one-sizefits-all intervention. Rather, before engaging the students with the online curricula, the recommendation is that schools should assess each student’s individual needs to establish differentiated plans. Otherwise, universally applied interventions may focus on areas that some students have already mastered, while ignoring skill deficits that prevent those students from learning effectively online. For example, some adolescents may not yet have mastered basic decoding skills, while others may be excellent readers who simply lack experience with using digital texts (Biancarosa, 2012). As a result, the two groups will have very different needs. Pitcher, Martinez, Diciembre, Fewster, and McCormick (2010) conducted a study that provides numerous examples of real students placed into reading intervention groups that focus on building skills that are not congruous with the students’ actual reading deficiencies. Therefore, the interventions are not helpful. Ivey (2008) explains that happens because too much stock is put in the scores of reading

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assessments. Two students with identical scores do not necessarily have the same problems. Instead, they may have totally different needs. Overgeneralization of intervention needs based on summative test scores may explain why statistics show that students who are put into remedial reading programs—which is even more likely for students who have been identified with learning disabilities than for those without a diagnosis—are less likely to eventually graduate than others who did not receive reading interventions (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011; Scanlon & Mellard, 2002).

Perhaps being drilled in skills that they already possess rather than taking the time to determine each students individual reading problems is to blame for the lack of success for these programs.

Formative assessments—like literacy skills inventories—have to be used in conjunction with reading scores to find out where each student lacks skills and strategies for overcoming his or her deficiencies. If teachers and administrators do not recognize the different needs of students, then, it creates a situaution much as Tomlinson describes; “…I was routinely teaching classes that had such diversity in them that I realized that if I just did one thing for all the students in the same way and at the same time, I was missing nearly everyone” (Wu, 2013, p. 127). Therefore, identifying the literacy proficiencies needed for learning online curriculum should not be construed as a set of skills for which all at-risk students should be remediated prior to starting an alternative program. Rather, these essential competences should be known so that through formative assessment teachers can learn which skills need to be reinforced for each student. Differentiated learning plans should reflect specific student needs.

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Having said that, there is a high likelihood that many of the skills needed for effectively reading and comprehending online texts may be lacking for a large percentage of the students entering alternative programs. As established earlier, literacy skills are the best indicators of academic performance and students who are at-risk for dropping out of school have similar academic profiles and test scores (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011; Pitcher, et al., 2010; Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012; Wehlage, 2001; Anderson & Keith, 2001). Therefore, many of the students enrolling in these programs may lack one or more of the skills that will be identified in this chapter. Furthermore, the tendency that online programs are being offerred for struggling learners are expanding to the point were these programs are becoming ubiquitous throughout the country suggests that identifying these literacy proficiencies is of utmost importance if the adolescents served by these programs are to have a chance to graduate with sufficient skills for college and career as defined in the Common Core Standards (US Department of Education, 2008; Common Core Standards Initiative, n.d.). As things are now, students who would have failed or dropped out from traditional high school programs are graduating with diplomas and certificates of completion, but few even attempt to enter post secondary institutions. Of those students that do try, fewer than 10 percent have been able to pass college entrance exams, so they are finishing the programs without acquiring the necessary literacy and numeracy skills (Hemmer & Shepperson, 2012). Therefore, there is a discrepancy between being able to get through the program and acquiring the necessary skills to be successful after graduations.

To identify the needs of students in online alternative programs, several areas of interest related to literacy skills within the literature are investigated. Several studies and

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other expert writings strongly suggest how teachers in alterantive programs should proceed to help their students. These topics include the following: •

Transitioning from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn

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Skills required for reading from paper texts

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Additional skills for reading digital texts

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Similarities and differences between unimodal and multimodal texts

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The success of various intervention strategies with adolescent students

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Applying the data and information gleaned from the literature to Internetbased curricula designed for credit-recovery programs

The Literature While Internet-based learning sometimes features multimodal learning, the predominant skills required for accessing the curricula involve reading online texts.

Therefore, the most important studies for this thesis are those that introduce information about how adolescents—particularly high school students—read for learning.

Additionally, studies that explain the relationship between traditional paper text and digital text reading comprehension will be especially valuable toward answering the thesis question. Other studies that are necessary for consideration are those that discuss the typical reading ability level of at-risk students relative to others, and studies about which interventions help students build any skills that are lacking for the reading that they will be doing with online texts.

Transitioning from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn.

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According to Pence Turnbull and Justice (2012), around grade three or four, students transition from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn as they enter what the authors describe as stage 3 of later language development. In other words, at this stage students are no longer primarily working on decoding written language. Instead, children are beginning to use written documents to acquire information. This stage of reading development generally ends in early adolescence as students start to develop the skills to handle texts that are more complex. The latter stage—stage 4—is where most high school students need to have developed for success in secondary education. Stage 4 involves being able to compare and contrast multiple viewpoints regarding the same subject (Pence Turnbull & Justice, 2012). Additionally, as student progress in stage 4, texts become longer requiring reading stamina. Word and sentence complexity become more difficult. The text contains more varied and sophisticated vocabulary. The structural cues that aid early readers become less prominent. Understanding the associated graphics is more important for comprehending the text. Finally, the difficulty of the contexts in which the texts are used increases though the various content areas (Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010-2011). Yet, as noted above, many at-risk students are not able to read at a proficiency level expected for a high school student, and about one-in-four cannot read even at basic levels (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006).

One can imagine that this problem multiplies when multimodal digital texts replace the unimodal print texts that students in high school typically encounter.

Since most reading instruction ends around the time students arrive at stage 3, it is likely that at-risk students, who never develop proficient reading skills, are unable to transition to the more complex skills required for stage 4 reading. “Research findings

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suggest that students who do not read well by the end of third grade are likely to experience failure throughout their educational careers” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 257). Furthermore, even when students are successful with reading texts in the early grades, it does not guarantee success as texts become more complex (Biancarosa, 2012).

Failing students typically fall into the at-risk category because they are not able to comprehend the reading materials in high school. The ability to understand complex texts is the best predictor of academic success (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011; Pitcher, et al., 2010). The converse is also true; the students who cannot handle text complexity can be expected to be at risk for failure and/or dropping out of school.

Reading paper texts—the big five: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

There are essentially five characteristic skills that reading specialists have traditionally identified as important for reading from traditional texts. They include phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension (Leu, et al., 2013; Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010-2011). While these are all essential skills for reading texts, some are learned earlier in a child’s language development stages, and are therefore most likely mastered by the time students reach high school. While mastery of the early reading stages is not a guarantee of continued development, one should not necessarily assume that all struggling readers need to be placed in reading remediations that stress these early skills. Rather, regardless of which of the big five is causing low reading ability, each student should get what he/she needs, and not endless retraining in areas already mastered (Biancarosa, 2012). Yet, since the majority of students who reach high school will already have learned what it takes for

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early language development, these areas will be mentioned, but a greater focus will be made upon the skills that are more relevant for succeeding in high-school level learning.

Phonemic awareness.

Very young children learn to process phonemes and morphemes as they develop aural and verbal language. Phonemic awareness involves understanding that syllables in words are made from phonemes, which are the distinct sounds from which all language is built. Children generally master the ability to put together phonemes to build vocabulary and produce language around the age of five or six. As they enter their early school years, they learn that a grapheme to phoneme correspondence exists where letter representations are linked to the sounds that make up the chidren’s native languages. As soon as children can understand the links between phonemes and graphemes, they can begin to decode printed texts, which marks the earliest stages of reading (Pence Turnbull & Justice, 2012).

Phonics.

Phonics, or phonological awareness, is similar to phonemic awareness in that each focus on the sounds that make up syllables and words, but phonics go beyond simple sound awareness as the child begins to implicitly and explicitly analyze how these sound connect to build language (Pence Turnbull & Justice, 2012). Children use phonics to begin producing written language. Additionally, having phonics ability helps children decode and make sense of written words that are increasingly more difficult. Like phonemic awareness, phonics is a skill that, for most children, is developed in the very early school years.

Vocabulary.

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For obvious reasons, understanding written texts is difficult when one does not have the necessary lexicon for the task. Perhaps a student just has not developed prior knowledge about several words in a text, or he/she may know the words’ general definitions, but lacks the specific understanding about how the words’ meanings vary depending upon the content area in which the word is used. In either case, it is necessary for students to learn how to learn or glean meaning from the words in order to construct an understanding of the text (Vacca, Vacca, & Mraz, 2011).

Vocabulary understanding can be a problem for adolescents as they sometimes lack general vocabulary knowledge, but more frequently have difficulty understanding the technical or otherwise specialized vocabulary that is used in different content areas (Shanahan, 2008; Vacca, et al., 2011; Rubenstein-Avila & Johnson, 2008). To further complicate matters, not all texts used at a grade level have comparable reading levels, which means that the word complexity and familiarity can vary greatly from text to text (Shanahan, 2008). Conversely, once students build a strong vocabulary in a content area, their word knowledge helps promote better reading fluency in that subject, so they struggle less with the requisite texts in a course (Bromley, 2008).

Along with understanding root words, students need to lean how to use affixes effectively to extend the meaning of these roots. Some affixes ehance the meaning of root words without significanlty changing the meaning. However, some affixes change the meaning of the word through a process called derivational morphology (Jarmulowicz, et al., 2012). In these cases, students can misunderstand the meaning of the word thereby misinterpreting the entire passage in which it resides. Therefore, it is important that students understand how derivational moprhemes can change the part of speech of a

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word, and at times the connection between the root word and derived word is less obvious than others, so it is important for teachers to clarify the connection when possible to enable the student to understand the new vocabulary word that has been formed.

Fluency: speed, accuracy, automaticity, and prosody.

For this thesis, the topic of fluency will be divided into two aspects because that is how the relevant studies have dealt with the topic. The first aspect of fluency that will be considered is the part of fluency that is most often tested for in school. It contains three subtopics: reading speed, reading accuracy, and automaticity. The second aspect of fluency that is often ignored in school, but is necessary as it related to the thesis is prosody.

Reading with speed, accuracy, and automaticity.

Fluency is an area where many students lack proficiency because they do not practice reading the kinds of materials that they generally encounter in school. Fluency issues become evident when a lesson calls for students to take turns reading aloud. For a few, the task is of minimal consequence as they are able to read quickly and accurately, but many others stumble across the words of the reading—appearing to have difficulty decoding words that they should already know. Fluency issues may be exaggerated in oral reading performances due to added social stress; nevertheless, for most who struggle reading aloud, there is difficulty in reading fluently during silent reading as well (Goering & Baker, 2010).

Just as word decoding and vocabulary can affect an adolescents ability to read fluently, fluency often affects comprehension as students who are not fluent readers spend too much time—and focus too many cognitive resources—on decoding each word;

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so the overall meaning of the text is lost. It is as if they are reading a series of unconnected words and then asked to understand them as a group (Vacca, et al., 2011; Hawkins, et al., 2011; Paige, Rasinski, & Magpuri-Lavell, 2012). Having said that, some studies have shown that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correlation between fluency and comprehension. Hawkins, et al. (2011) report that “…increases in fluency were not always accompanied by increases in comprehension…and…the correlation between fluency and comprehension decreases as students advance in grade and as reading material becomes more complex” (p. 60). Therefore, it is important to recognize that although older, at-risk adolescents will benefit from fluent reading, they may need additional help with comprehension.

Automaticity is the aspect of fluency that comes when the parts of reading like decoding and metacognition are done without thought freeing up cognitive space for processing fluent language (Goering & Baker, 2010; Paige, et al., 2012). Like any other skill, reading becomes most useful when one does not have to think about every aspect of the activity. For example, when first learning to drive a car, the learner has to think about everything from fastening the seatbelt, to turning the key, to putting a foot on the brake, to shifting the car into gear, etc. When one has to think about each step in succession, driving is not yet automatic. Automaticity in driving comes naturally after a long time of practice, and it appears at a different points for everyone. Similarly, reading with automaticity only comes after significant literacy practice, and it comes at a different time for each reader. Ivey (2008) writes: I am bewildered by the fact that students who have never really read much are so often assessed and assigned labels that describe them as particular kinds of readers: poor comprenhender, weak decoder, nonfluent reader, resistent reader. I

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have never played the piano, but I doubt that anyone would call me a poor pianist (p. 253).

Fluency—which is linked to automaticity—can only come with significant practice, so teachers should certainly identify where at-risk adolescents need help, but resist labeling them until the students have had sufficient practice to ensure that the teacher’s perceptions about the student’ reading abilities are not clouded by the presentation of unpracticed skills.

Fluency as prosody.

Prosody, which is not measured by speed and accuracy of reading, is an aspect of fluency that can certainly enhance or detract from meaning. One can read quickly or slowly and still use the prosodic cues in the text to make the reading more meaningful.

Prosody is reading with expression as indicated by the context, word choices, and punctuation. It goes beyond reading automatically to recognizing that by choosing certain words and phrases, the author intends to set a mood, and the reading should reflect that mood. If one has ever witnessed a play put on by unskilled actors, it is obvious how words can be read fluently and with automaticity, but still lack the necessary expression to imply meaning. Conversely, when viewing a talented cast performing the same play with much more feeling, the audience receives the full message of the playwrite.

Similarly, when an adolescent reads without prosody, even during silent reading, the lack of expression takes away from the meaning of the text, and the work is more difficult to comprehend (Paige, et al., 2012). Therefore, practicing reading with expression can aid the student toward developing stronger literacy skills. Goering and Baker (2010)—citing the work of Dowhowser (1991)—explain, “Six markers can be directly linked to expressive or prosodic reading: pausal intrusions, lenghth of phrases, appropriateness of

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phroases, phrase-final lengthening, terminal intonation contours, and stress” (p. 62) Practicing for prosody requires repeated readings of materials with strong lyrical and rhythmic qualities and varied expressions (Paige, et al., 2012). One should look for these six qualities in a text when selecting materials for practicing expressive reading.

Comprehension.

When decoding (phonemic awareness and phonics), vocabulary understanding, and fluency (reading speed, accuracy, automaticity, and prosody) all come together, the reader is generally able to understand the meaning of the text. This is reading comprehension. Yet, comprehension can also happen when a student does not automatically know the meaning of a passage. Rather, good readers develop strategies that they rely upon to comprehend difficult texts (Vacca, et al., 2011). In chapter 1, this thesis defined skills as the automatic actions that a reader utilizes for decoding and comprehending texts (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008); it is now necessary to define strategies so that the two can be easily differentiated. Strategies are procedures under “…the reader’s deliberate control, goal directedness, and awareness…” (Afflerbach, et al., 2008, p. 368). In other words, skills are the actions that we use automatically when confronted with text, and strategies are what one employs purposefully when his or her skills are insufficient for comprehension of the literature. Therefore, Vacca, et al. (2011) suggest that good readers bring a combination of these innate abilities and tactics to the table so that they are able to work on understanding the most complex works.

Furthermore, the literature suggests that “… reading comprehension is gained as students develop text-based decoding and lexical skills, increase in domain knowledge, topic knowledge, and interest, and develop in congnitive monitoring and strategy use as

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texts become more complex” (Chambers Cantrell, Almasi, Rintamaa, & Madden, 2012, p. 257). These strategies require continued education and guidance to ensure that the readers have the requisite tools to successfully comprenhend the texts they need to learn from to be successful in high school. Unfortunately, reading instruction for most students ends around grade three or four, and these necessary strategies are not taught or reinforced for many high school students unless they slip so far behind that they are labeled as a slow or disabled reader (McCallum, et al., 2012). The intervention section in this chapter will introduce a number of the strategies that teachers can use to help readers employ tactics for understanding challenging texts.

Online reading: reading digital texts for Internet-based curricula, differentiating between multimodal vs. unimodal reading, and deixis.

While today’s high school students are digital natives—meaning they never knew a time before Internet technology—they still lack some of the requisite skills for using online texts for academic purposes (Wilber, 2008). Research about students’ abilities to use the Internet for literacy purposes shows that they often lack proficiency in finding texts, critically evaluating them, and discerning information from online texts (Leu, Forzani, & Kennedy, in press). Additionally, “…online reading may require even greater amounts of higher-level thinking than offline reading” (p. 2). Therefore, it is important to understand the similarities and differences between reading digital and traditional texts.

Reading online texts involves many of the same skills that one uses when reading paper texts—including decoding (phonemic awareness, phonics, and grapheme to phoneme correspondence), syntax, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency (speed,

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accuracy, automaticity, and prosody). “The Internet, after all, is a reading issue, not a technology issue” (Leu & Zawilinski, 2007, p. 1). Walsh, Asha, and Sprainger (2007) suggest that these reading similarities come in the form of meaning making skills and strategies, much in the way that a reader derives meaning from images and text in traditional books.

On the other hand, reading digital texts also requires an additional set of skills.

For example, most readers use paper texts in a linear manner reading from front to back in sequence. When reading on the Internet, different readers may choose to navigate online texts in diverse ways (Vacca, et al., 2011). Generally, these navigational choices come through a digital text’s use of hyperlinks and hypertext, upon which a reader can click to be taken to another page of information. Since these links open in a variety of ways—in the same page, in a frame, in a new tab, or in a new page—finding one’s way back to the previous text or homepage may not always be evident, so navigation may be more difficult. Coiro (2005) points out that one strategy that readers employ with traditional texts is skimming through the passage to look for relevant information. Since web-based texts tend to contain fewer words on a page with the rest of the text on additional pages, navigation issues makes it difficult to skim for information as what one is looking for may be on multiple pages, or even different sites that are linked to the first page of text. However, others are of the opinion that “…negotiation of hypertext and hypermedia links in such texts is more likely to augment than to harm the reading process” (Walsh, et al., 2007, p. 41).

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Internet texts tend to be multimodal, which divides the reader’s focus and utilizes multiple learning channels—sight, sound, and sometimes kinesthetic through interactive pages—to simultaneously input information. The working memory can only handle a few bits of information in each channel at once, so trying to concentrate on complex texts though multiple channels is more difficult than anything that can be presented through unimodal text, which only processes through the visual channel (Clark & Mayer, 2008; Walsh, Asha, & Sprainger, 2007). Yet, the literature describes how student navigation between websites shows the importance of understanding and identifying hypertext, and anticipating what will happen when clicked (Walsh, et al., 2007).

The digital reader frequently has the opportunity to choose from endless sources about the same subject, so he or she needs to be able to scrutinize and discern the value of texts for academic purposes. It is important to consider that since many of the at-risk students in these programs have never become proficient at stage 4 reading, which requires comparing and contrasting different viewpoints between two authors about the same subject (Pence Turnbull & Justice, 2012). How much more difficult is it for these same students when they are presented with the tens of thousands of possible resources delivered by a typical search engine response? Students not only have to compare and contrast the author’s meaning, online learners also have to discover how to add parameters to their search to limit the returns to more relevant responses (Coiro, 2005).

Additionally, they must learn how to evaluate the sources critically for reliability as well.

This skill is known as critical literacy, and it is essential for online research and reading (Coiro, 2005; Biancarosa, 2012; Pitcher, et al., 2010; Leu, Forzani, & Kennedy, in press; Leu, et al., 2013; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Casek, & Henry, 2004; Lapp, Moss, & Rowsell,

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2012). Unlike the card catalog at the school library, which was the search engine of the past, online searches bring documents from authors with diverse purposes, so students need to critically evaluate them for reliability.

Another difference between reading traditional texts and technology-based literacies is that online learning is usually more interactive. Students utilize online texts in social ways. The parameters of online learning require them to respond to teachers and other students in blog posts, on social networks, by providing feedback for online portfolios, or in other ways that one would not normally encounter with traditional reading. Students can work together doing an interactive project online using a wiki, collaborate through a web 2.0 site like Popplet, or they can respond to the teacher’s questions found during a WebQuest (Vacca, et al., 2011). Regardless of the online medium, Internet literacy is much more social than traditional literacies, which tend to isolate the students or puts them in small groups for support. As such, students have to be cognitive about things that they typically never encounter in the traditional classroom including the effects of audience, vernacular language, idioms, jargon, register, and other considerations.

One last difference that both teachers and students working in online education have to acknowledge is that due to the rapid changes in technology and the proliferation of new materials that appear on the Internet daily, literacy in the 21st century has a deictic nature (Leu, et al., 2013; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Casek, & Henry, 2004; Leu, Forzani, & Kennedy, in press). That is it is constantly changing. As a result, what makes a digital reader proficient one day may change the next; so, readers must be able to keep up with

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the continuous modifications to remain functional consumers of digital texts. Therefore, when one says new literacies, he or she is not simply referring to the literacies that are new in the information age. Rather, literacy “…becomes new every day of our lives” (Leu, et al., 2004, p. 1150). For students who are already struggling readers, keeping pace with the changes can add another dimension of challenge.

All of the additional skills mentioned in this section make reading digital texts more complex than paper based texts. However, there is a positive aspect of digital learning onto which at-risk students may grasp. Research shows that there is little correlation between traditional comprehension and online comprehension as measured in test situations. That is to say that poor offline readers are not necessarily disadvantaged when it comes to reading online texts. In a study, Leu & Zawilinski (2007) noted that one particular student who “…had been formerly identified as learning disabled in reading, received the lowest score on the state reading assessment in his class while also obtaining one of the highest online reading comprehension test scores” (p. 2). Furthermore, teachers can use this knowledge to level the playing field for struggling readers as new skills that are ubiquitously needed in the class can be taught to the struggling traditional readers first making them the ones who are literate with this new skill (Leu, Foranzi, & Kennedy, in press; Leu, et al., 2013). Other classmates will have to come to these students—who have the new literacy—for assistance helping their self-esteem. While all this is encouraging news for at-risk students, it can also make a teacher’s job more difficult when trying to identify the needs of at-risk students entering an alternative program with an Internet-based curriculum. Therefore, one must learn to do a formative

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learning assessment with each student to find out exactly which skills the student can use effectively, and which skill deficits will hinder accomplishment with the curriculum.

Learning characteristics for at-risk students.

According to Wehlage (2001), “A school’s drop out rate is the best indicator of its at-risk population” (p. 18). The reason is that virtually no difference exists between the factors that cause a student to drop out and those that identify him or her as at-risk. Some of the academic issues that most at-risk students share include low academic achievement, repeated failure, disciplinary issues, absenteeism, and retention (Wehlage, 2001; Somers, Owens, & Piliawsky, n.d.; Scanlon & Mellard, 2002; Anderson & Keith, 2001). Considering that the most accurate predictor of school success in all content areas is a student’s literacy ability, it stands to reason that the converse is also true—that these shared characteristics of at-risk adolescents relate strongly to low reading ability (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011; Pitcher, et al., 2010).

As a result, many of the students who are at risk for dropping out of school or fall behind their cohort spend time in remedial reading programs at some point in their academic careers (Scanlon & Mellard, 2002). This is especially true for students with exceptional education needs. While one might assume remedial reading classes should help the students get back on track, enrolling in a remedial reading course makes it more likely that a student will drop out than one who has never had the course (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011). One possible explanation is that many remedial reading programs take one-size-fits-all approaches that tend to focus on a specific area of reading, like decoding. This approach may not help because the student could have a different

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problem that is not addressed in the program, so he or she experiences more failure with reading tasks and demotivation toward school (Ivey, 2008; Pitcher, et al., 2010). As these at-risk students go into alternative schools with online curricula, it is necessary for teachers to assess the students’ literacy abilities, and to match them up with the classes in which the students enroll. If there is a strong disconnect between a students literacy abilities and the literacy skills associated with gleaning knowledge from the program, then specific skill deficits must be assessed, and interventions should be customized to make up those deficiencies before the student tries to make progress. If not, the student will either go through the motions to appease his or her parents and teachers until he or she is too far behind to catch up with the cohort, or he or she will continue in their pattern of failure and motivation will recede making dropping out a stronger possibility (Ivey, 2008).

Interventions: remediation facts and suggestions.

Phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary.

While decoding skills like phonemic awareness and phonics are important for reading ability, generally, one learns these skills in early childhood long before a student reaches adolescence. Therefore, intervention studies have not focused on these aspects of literacy for high school students. Biancarosa (2012) notes that at times high school students do require these interventions, but they should be conducted with a reading specialist rather than the classroom teacher.

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Vocabulary interventions are generally not necessary for online learners, except when working with EALs who tend to need their language competencies—including vocabulary—scaffolded by the teacher to help enhance comprehension (Rubenstein-Avila & Johnson, 2008). While there is a strong correlation between comprehension and vocabulary knowledge, reading in an online envrionment provides ample opportunities for a student to look up unfamiliar terms through online dictionaries or in general search engines. Additionally, many online curricula front load the lessons with vocabulary words that are necessary for understanding the material, and even include vocabulary games, puzzles, and user glossaries to reinforce the vocabulary learning (OdysseyWare, n.d.; Edgenuity, n.d.). Therefore, students can generally work with the vocabulary from within the lesson and using the other online lexical tools on the occasions that the assistance within the curriculum is not sufficient.

Comprehension intervention strategies.

While many intervention programs show promise for effectiveness for remediating a variety of literacy skills, the literature has few studies that show positive results when using these interventions with high school students. For years, reading intervention studies have focused on the early elementary grades, when students are still learning-to-read. As was stated above, for most students, reading instruction ends around the time they reach fourth grade. Therefore, since there is little instruction given to older readers, researchers have tended to focus on the younger grades. Having said that, high school comprehension intervention studies exist. The results of some of these studies are summarized below.

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Response to intervention.

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a program designed to improve literacy rates for early primary school students. As such, the focus of the program is to identify students in grades 1-3 who may be in need of reading interventions. While the Institute for Education Sciences: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance does not specify which interventions should be used, they provide some best practice suggestions through the What Works Clearinghouse (Gerston, et al., 2009). While RTI was designed for the lower grades, the structure of the program may be helpful in secondary education as well, so it is described below.

RTI is a tiered structure into which different levels of intervention services fit.

Generally, most programs use three tiers. Tier 1 interventions are whole class lessons where the teacher instructs according to the literacy needs of the group. After assessments, most students should have learned the skill that was taught. If not, it reflects on the lesson, and the teacher should use another tactic with which to reteach the skill.

When the majority understands the material and demonstrates mastery of it, then it is clear that the teaching method is effective for most students in the class. Those who do not master the skill are put into small groups of students with similar needs for intervention; these groups are at Tier 2 of the RTI model. In time, the majority of the students in the small group instruction—who have experienced a couple of different interventions for the same problem—should have mastered the skill. They return to the class for Tier 1 instruction. For the few who do not master the skill in Tier 2, the teacher refers these individual students for stronger interventions—usually in a one-on-one

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learning environment at Tier 3. Often, after this more intense direct instruction, the student is able to acquire the skill and return to the Tier 1 group. If not, then it is appropriate to begin discussing special literacy services for the student and perhaps an IEP (Gerston, et al., 2009). While many interventions may be used in the three tiers of instruction whether at grades 1-3 or beyond, some of the intervention studies may be helpful for choosing remediation plans at each tier for high school students.

Learning strategies curriculum.

One comprehension strategy recently explored for its effectiveness with high school students is the Learning Strategies Curriculum (LSC). Chambers Cantrell, et al.

(2012) conducted this study. The authors researched the effect of using six LSC strategies over the course of a year with 365 sixth- and ninth-grade students and compared the study group’s comprehension advances with those of 290 control group students from the same grades who did not receive the intervetions. The study shows that significant gains in reading comprehension were made by the study group sixth-graders above the increases made by the students in the control group. However, it failed to show a meaningful increase for the high school aged students (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012).

This study was conducted because of the concern that although reading difficulty is a factor for many students through high school, reading interventions generally stop for most students in the early years. Citing Alexander (2005-2006) , the authors write, “The intense and exclusive focus on early literacy policies and practices fails to acknowledge that reading is a complex developmental process in which individuals increase in competence over the lifespan” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 257). Therefore, the

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study was conducted to see which strategies generally taught to younger students are still effective when used in secondary education. This group chose a mixed-method study of interventions based largely on the prior research of Slavin, Cheung, Groff, and Lake (2008), which claims that “…effective reading programs for struggling adolescent readers suggested that mixed-method models that include large group, small group, and computer-assisted individualized learning had positive effects” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 257).

The six LSC strategies that were chosen for this study involve the “…processes of word identification, visual imagery, self-questioning, vocabulary, paraphrasing, and sentence writing, and seeks to facilitate comprehension monitoring that enables children to flexibly use these strategic processes to better understand text” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 258). Since adolescent reading is more complex and individualized than early reading, employing a range of strategies that can be applied depending upon the text and reading situtions is theorized to be more effective than teaching a single strategy.

The study was built on three tiers of related theory. The first theoretical tier is that comprehension takes place on multiple levels, so a reader must construct a comprehension strategy built on the levels of understanding needed to be gleaned from the text. The second theory built into this study is that reading is a developmental process, and therefore the reader must use strategies based on his or her level of development. Therefore, the study was split between sixth- and ninth-graders to differentiate between developmental level and the use of the strategies. Finally, the third tier of the authors’ hypothesis is based on the notion that reading strategies must be

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applied flexibly as no specific strategy or set of strategies works in all cases and with all texts (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012).

The LSC intervention was implemented in three strands including acquisition— where words are identified, storage—which involved mneumonic tricks to help students remember vocabulary, and expression—during which students wrote sentences to help solidify their understanding of the texts. The interventions were given in two strands. The first was a whole school model intervention were every student in the twelve middle schools and eleven high schools received literacy instruction from their content area teachers. The second strand was an intensive LSC intervention for a randomly selected group of students who scored two or more grades below grade level in reading ability from those same schools. These students received an extra fifty to sixty minutes of LSC instruction every school day over the course of the year. The expectation is that all students’ literacy levels would improve, but those that had the intensive interventions would show significantly more progress. The data was stratified by “…special education status, free or reduced-price lunch stuatus, ethnicity, and gender” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 262), so that significant changes within these subgroups would not be masked while analzying a whole group result.

The study utilized two instruments. The first is GRADE, which “…is a normreferenced, standardized test of reading achievement that yields standard [normal curve equivalent] NCE scores and scale scores labeled Growth Scale Value (GSV) scores” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 262). The second intrument is called Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI). This is a self-reported measure

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based on the students perception about how well the strategies work for them in academic reading situations. The survey items are presented on a Likert scale of 1-5 (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 263). Both of these tests have traditionally reported having high ratings for reliability.

Along with triangulation of the data, the study used high inter-rater reliability standards, and qualitative data was taken into account from classroom observations to compare with the quantitative data measured by the instruments. A few possible threats to this study were identified. First, the teachers gave feedback to the students after pretests, which could affect the outcome of the post-test independently of the interventions. A second threat is in the procedure to the whole school instruction. The researchers acknowledge that different amounts of time were devoted to these literacy lessons depending upon the individual teachers perceptions of the students’ needs. Therefore, if the high school teachers perceived more intervention time was needed in the whole group intervention that could partly explain the lower difference for the ninth-grade intervention group. A third possible threat is that there were more students receiving IEP services in the intervention group than the control group. Even though the results are stratified by IEPs, the intervention group many have either received additional intensive intervention from their special education teacher, or they could have been pulled out of whole class interventions lessening the impact of the additional 50-60 minutes per day marked for the intervention group. Additionally, there is an inequity in the experience and education levels between the sixth- and ninth-grade teachers, which may have affected the comparison of the results for the groups (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012).

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As stated above, the results of the study showed a significant increase for the sixth-graders who received the intervention over the control group, but the outcome for ninth-grade students was not as promising. According to the authors, “This dissimilarity in impact for sixth- and ninth-grade students raises questions about the point at which strategy-based interventions such as the LSC are most beneficial to struggling younger and older adolescents” (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012, p. 269). The researchers question is valid in that the child’s reading development changes over time, so the requisite strategies may also need to change. Another possibility that is not considered by the study authors is that since sixth-graders have received reading interventions up until as late as forth-grade, they may be more willing to utilize the strategies. Conversely, students in ninth-grade or later have not received reading instruction in at least five years. Therefore, they may be less inclined to try new strategies rather than relying on the ones they have been using for such a long time. While a year-long intervention may be enough time to get some students motivated toward trying the interventions in practice, it may take a longer time for intervetions to compete with the intertia of ingrained practices. The researchers do suggest that some of the reason that LSC strategies may not succeed with older students is that they may be less engaged and more apathetic than younger students.

Therefore, they suggest that future studies include motivation factors.

Title, examine, look, look, and setting.

The next intervention that considers the comprehension skills of high-school-aged adolescents was conducted by Ridge and Skinner (2010). It is called Title, Examine, Look, Look, and Setting (TELLS). TELLS is a prereading strategy, which the researchers

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applied to 3 ninth-grade students—a very small sample size. However, the results were positive for all three students, but not generalized from reading passage to reading passage with these students.

While this study is somewhat about the connection between comprehension and reading speed fluency—as the authors are concerned not just about the level of understanding gleaned from the text, but the rate at which a student comprehends the material—it is placed here as a comprehension intervention as the design of the instruction does little to improve reading speed, but does deal with how a student can use prereading strategies to activate prior knowledge and enhance comprehension of the materials.

TELLS is applied to a text prior to reading. The student is instructed to use the “T” title to form clues about the story. The “E” is for examime. Durining this stage the student skims the passage for content clues. The two “Ls” are both for look. The first thing that reader should look for in the passage is for words that seem to be important for the story as they are repeated frequently. Next, they should look for difficult words in the text and look up their meanings to facilitate reading more easily. Finally, the “S” is for setting. At this time the student skims the passage once more for clues about the time an place of the story. By the end of the process, it is theorized that the students will have developed a stronger hypothesis about the passage, so they are ready to read with comprehension (Ridge & Skinner, 2011).

Prior studies with the TELLS procedure were performed with younger students.

The studies seemed to produce results—although the students frequently regressed after

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the intervetion was taken away—so Ridge and Skinner (2011) conducted their research to see how effectve the strategies would be with ninth-grade students who have a history of struggling with reading. The study used a sample of students that were picked by the teachers. With a convenience sampling such as this, it is difficult to generalize results to a wider group, so at best the results can show possible connections that suggest the need for further studies (McMillan, 2012).

In the pretest stage of the study, the instruments used were the Wechsler Invidivual Achievement Test, second edition (WIAT-II) to test for comprehenion, and the ORF probes from the Timed Readings in Liteature series, which were conducted for setting comprehension and reading speed baselines for each participant. All of the texts were approximately 400 words written at an eighth-grade reading level. During the intervention, students were asked to read expository passages from the Timed Reading series, and two additional fictional passages from the Timed Reading in Literature series.

After each, the students were asked to respond to locally created worksheets about the content in the passage they read. The reading speed and comprehension were assessed for each of the readings to show each student’s percentage of comprehenion, and percentage of comprehension per minute of reading time. The experimenter also scored and collected data about accuracy for each reading, and a words correct per minute (WCPM) rate.

Since the score relied upon the experimenter’s accuracy in recording responses, interrater reliability was checked using an independent scorer for twenty percent of the data recorded with high correspondence between the two checkers.

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The research showed that all three students improved in comprehension of the material from the baseline testing to the intervention stage suggesting that the interventions helped the students understand the texts with more accuracy. Nevertheless, the sample of data and generalization parts of the study are too small to make accurate predictions about how this study will work for a random student population. There is, however, some suggestion for generalization in that for each of the three students the first generalization probe after only three intervention sessions was significantly lower than the second generalization probe taken after six interventions. Of course, with only two probes and three students a number of factors could account for the change including the difficulty difference between the first and second probe (Ridge & Skinner, 2011).

Furthermore, there is no control group against which to measure the success of the program, so caution is advised. Therefore, while there is some reason to be optimistic about the results, one should be careful not to assume that the outcomes will be the same for a more randomized sample.

Ask, read, tell.

The next relevant intervention study was conducted by McCallum, et al., (2012) using the Ask, Read, Tell (ART) of reading program. For this study, one hunderd fifteen high school students from low socioeconomic status (SES) were randomly placed into one of three groups. The first group was a control group who were not given the ART strategies. The second group was an experimental group given the ART interventions.

The last group was a second experimental group given the ART strategies, but they also received additional peer discussion (PD) time to determine whether ART works best

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alone or if PD is necessary for improvement. The results showed that the ART + PD group scored significantly better than either of the other groups on a series of comprehension tests.

This study was created because the researchers learned from earlier studies that students are not always able to develop reading strategies on their own, so they require some intervention to help them develop ways to better comprehend academic texts. The researchers, at the request of teachers, sought to develop “…a simple comprehension enhancement intervetion that could be used to enhance comrpehenions in at-risk high school students…” (McCallum, et al., 2012, p. 79). The sample students were all enrolled in a two-week reading enrichment program, so all participants in the three groups were considered struggling readers. The researchers decided to include “…pre-, during-, and post-reading activities, designed to enhance comprehension” (p. 79). During the prereading phase of the intervention, readers in the two experimental groups were asked to preview the title and “ask” themselves questions related to the possible content of the passage. During the second stage of the intervention, the same students were asked to “read” the text and to stop after every paragraph to underline unfamiliar vocabulary, and to assess how well they were understanding the content at each point. During the thrid part, the experimental student were instructed to tell themselves what they had learned and to answer the quesitons they had come up with during the pre-reading exercise.

Based on prior studies, the experimenters added a PD section to the second experimental group (group 3), where the students followed up the ART activity with a peer discussion during which they could clarify one anothers misunderstandings about the passage before answering the comprehension quesitons.

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The instruments chosen for this study were 400 word passages from the Timed Readings series. However, unlike the TELLS intervention mentioned above, the researcher decided to use fourth-grade level passages to “…minimize the probability of some student becoming frustrated over reading material that was too difficult” (McCallum, et al., 2012, p. 79). Each passage was accompanied by ten comprehension questions, presumably created locally in the same manner as the TELLS questions were created, but the authors are unclear about the origin of the questions. The researchers do claim to have created an ASK activity worksheet for experimental group one (group 2), and an ammended worksheet for use with experimental group two (group 3).

These interventions were all covered over six days with two passages given on most days. As stated above, there was no improvement from the control group to the ART groups, and the data actually shows a slight decline in the mean score for the first experimental group (group 2). The researchers explain that there were some threats to the reliablity of this study as there is a possibility that at other parts of the camp day, students may have discussed the ART procedures with the control group students, so they may have been using them even though they were not so instructed (McCallum, et al., 2012).

Perhaps it is more likely that the fourth-grade level text was too low for high-school-aged students to have challenged them sufficiently that the intervention strategies would help.

The Art + PD group did, however, show significant improvement in their median score over the other two groups, which suggests that discussion with the intent to clarify meaning after reading a passage is an effective method for improving comprehension for at-risk readers. Having a fourth group that just received the PD aspect without the ASK intervention would likely show whether there is a cumulative effect of using both, or if

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the PD works just as well without other added intervetions. Future studies should consider evaluating the value of peer discussion used alone.

Reading Apprenticeship.

Another kind of intervetion instruction works on the idea that content area teachers are experts in using the texts related to their field; so, in a similar manner to how someone new to a learning a craft often finds a mentor to which he or she can apprentice, inexperienced readers can apprentice to their teachers. The master craftsman or craftswoman knows how to use his or her craft in a special way, which is not always obvious to the apprentice. Therefore, the mentor must make the invisible aspects of what he or she is doing obvious to the novice. So, too, can the reading apprentice glean valuable information if the teacher makes his or her own literacy skills and strategies transparent so that the student can learn from the expert in the subjet (Cassidy, Valadez, Garrett, & Barrera IV, 2010).

According the the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), out of twenty-seven studies that investigated the effectiveness of Reading Apprenticeship on adolescent learners, only one met their standards for evidence (Institute of Educational Sciences, 2010). Therefore, this article was sought for information about how the study was conducted, and for evaluating the results. Rather than independently implementing the intervention for their study, the researchers studied existing schools already using Reading Apprenticeship. They evaluated how well the schools’ implementation of the program were aligned with the philosophy Reading Apprenticeship, and gathered evidence about whether the program is successful in helping high school students gain

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competence in reading comprehension within these schools (Kemple, et al., 2008).

According to the WWC’s evaluation of this study, Reading Apprenticeship is of small value as a comprehension intervention for adolescent learners—showing only an average of two percent increase in comprehension for students who received the intervetion when comprehesion is looked at without other factors (Institute of Educational Sciences, 2010).

Yet, despite the results of the Kemple, et al. (2008) study, it would be helpful to have an independent study conducted that includes a random sampling and a control group of atrisk high school students to evaluate whether students who receive the intervention improve their comprehension skills.

Fluency.

Speed, accuracy, and automaticity.

The first intervention study under the fluency heading is based on Repeated Readings (RR) and Vocabulary-Previewing (VP) conducted by Hawkins, et al. (2011).

Like the TELLS study above, this study is evaluating the interventions for fluency, comprehension, and comprehension rate, but the focus of the authors seems to be more on fluency, so it was placed in this section of the chapter.

The focus on fluency is due to the researchers’ belief, based on prior studies, which suggest that comprehension suffers when students do not read with speed, accuracy, and automaticity. The author’s claim that when student do not read fluently they “…must use their cognitive resources to decode words. As a result, fewer cognitive resources are available for comprehension” (Hawkins, et al., 2011, p. 60).

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Prior studies have shown that RR has been an effective way for increasing reading speed, accuracy, and automaticity; therefore, the researchers employed RR as the main intervention for this study. The authors decided to include VP as an added component to some interventions to see whether improving vocabulary knowledge for the passage would help the participants’ comprehension rates—the speed at which the passage is understood. The authors suggest, “Incorporating vocabulary-building strategies within fluency interventions is one possible way to enhance the effects of reading fluency interventions on reading comprehension” (Hawkins, et al., 2011, p. 61). The researcher’s hypothesis was that although both interventions—RR and VP—would increase comprehension rate, the RR+VP interventions would lead to the greatest increase.

The participants for this study included six, special-needs students in the tenth- or eleventh-grades that were at least one reading level behind their current grade level. Since a special education teacher referred the students, they are not a random sample; so, the results of the convenience sample are difficult to generalize to the larger population of students.

Students were pretested using reading passages to find a base grade-level at which each one was able to read between seventy and one-hundred words correctly per minute with fewer than seven errors (Hawkins, et al., 2011). The instrument used for the interventions included 400 word passages from the Timed Reading Series at each student’s pre-determined grade level. The students were given ten comprehension questions as described in the above studies, but the authors do not specify the origin of the questions. However, the researchers identify that they consulted with the special

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education teacher to choose the ten vocabulary words from each passage to use for the VP interventions. The procedure adherence and inter-rater reliability were both high for this study.

In this study, each student was alternatively in the control, RR, and RR+VP groups for successive interventions, and all of the students scored higher with the interventions than they did when they did not receive them. Similarly, most students in the study increased the most significantly in comprehension rate when they received both interventions than when they had RR alone (Hawkins, et al., 2011). One possible explanation for the few instances when the VP did not improve the learners score over the RR score could be that the vocabulary words selected on those trials were already known by the participants, so they would not have been aided by the additional intervention. This study had some limitations in it sample size, selection, and number of interventions performed. Future studies should endeavor to use a larger, more randomized sample that could be compared to a control group so the study will be more easily generalized.

Prosody.

Goering and Baker (2010) conducted a study of high school students to determine through a mixed-method approach, “…how participation in dramatic oral reading interventions affects both reading fluency and comprehension” (p. 61). Like other studies above, the nature of the researchers’ focus was prioritized—in this case it is on dramatic oral reading—so the best placement for the study is under prosody. This study attempts to determine the effect of increased prosody on both fluency and reading comprehension for

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adolescents. The main concern of the researchers is whether social consequences that an adolescent may suffer as a result of poor reading performance in front of his or her peers inhibits oral fluency instruction in high schools. The authors describe the situations as follows: What goes through the mind of adolescents when they are asked to read aloud in secondary school settings? What pressures do they feel from their peers and teachers? Many students in American high schools are competent oral readers, but most teachers have experienced awkward moments as red-faced, sweating students stutter and stammer their way through a passage as their sympathetic peers look away, and their not-so-sympathetic peers sneer (Goering & Baker, 2010, p. 61).

To study both aspects of the problem, the researchers set up a mixed-study where the qualitative data could help assess the effect of the social setting of school on oral reading practice, and the quantitative aspects could measure the fluency and comprehension improvements of the students.

The sample in this study included 25 high school students enrolled in a literacy improvement program. Of the original 25, there was a 32 percent attrition rate leaving only 17 of the participants by the end of the program. The teachers recommended students to the program based on the prior school year grades, so it was not a random selection.

The qualitative aspect of the study was conducted by modeling good and bad prosodic poetry reading, then allowing the students to practice in groups of two doing repeated readings of the poems and providing feedback to one another. The poetry selected was at grade level or higher for each student. The researchers switched the partner groups several times to ensure that the students had an opportunity to work one-

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on-one with many people in the class thereby making them more comfortable about reading in front of the group. At the end, the students presented their dramatic reading before the entire class, and then a sample of five of the students were interviewed about their experience. The researchers categorized the experiences described in the interviews into one of five codes hoping to explain the effect of social pressures on the sample students. The qualitative data showed that in order for oral fluency interventions to work, the positive aspects of the social situation has to outweigh the negative social feelings about reading aloud before an audience.

The quantitative research used the Gray Oral Reading Test 4 (GORT 4) as the instrument for the pretest, and an alternative form of the same test (form b) for the posttest. The results of the testing found that repeated oral readings and practicing prosody significantly helped the students’ comprehension skills. While the increase was significant, the researchers caution that the usefulness of the findings are limited in that there were some who took the pretest that dropped out before the post-test. Additionally, since all of the participants tested well below average in the pretest, there was an expectation of regression toward the mean for the post-test that could account for some of the results (Goering & Baker, 2010).

The second prosody study is from Paige, et al (2012). Their research used a larger sample of 108 randomly selected students from a pool of 282 enrolled high school students who provided parental consent (Paige, et al., 2012). This is a more significant and randomized sample, so it is easier to generalize from the study than the Goering and Baker research.

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The instrument selected for the pretest for this study was the Test of Reading Comprehension: Fourth edition (TORC-4). For fluency, each student read a 408 word passage, which was scored for prosody according to the Multidimensional Fluency Scale, which is “…a rubric that allows teachers to listen and to rate students’ readings based on four prosodic dimensions…” (Paige, et al., 2012, p. 69). Since there is some subjective measure in the ratings, the researchers re-rated some of the reading to determine interrater reliability, which was high for this study.

The results suggested that for older adolescents, fluency and comprehension have a reciprocal relationship in that increasing one will also have a positive affect on the other. Additionally, they found that the more prosodic ability that a student has, he or she scores better on silent reading comprehension tests, which suggests that oral expression is “…likely to be embedded in silent reading” (p. 71). Furthermore, their data indicated that few students in high school have sufficient prosodic reading skills, which may affect the students’ literacy abilities. Therefore, the authors of the study suggest practicing with materials that lend themselves to dramatic reading to improve expressive use of literature.

They suggest strong narratives, poetry readings, and reader’s theater for this purpose.

New literacies.

There is no question that online credit-recovery programs require that students be proficient with using new literacies skills. Yet, although many papers and journal articles talk about the needs of students for reading digital texts in Internet-based curricula, few actual studies demonstrate interventions for these new skills. A couple of limited studies are mentioned below.

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Reading digital texts.

Walsh, Asha, and Sprainger (2007) conducted qualitative research by observing students reading habits and determining whether teaching them the metalanguage of online images will help the students discuss and understand digital texts. Their research was conducted using a case study format in three stages with primary grade students (p.

42). Stage 1 involved videotaping and observing students working with digital texts. In stage 2, teachers participated in online research with the researchers who trained them about how to use the correct terms and descriptions of visual language for conducting online research. The teachers went back to their classrooms and used the correct terms and research descriptions with their students. In the third stage, the teachers felt that the students understood the new literacy terms, so the researchers were called back in for another videotaping and observation session with the students.

The researchers were seeking the answer for two essential questions. They wanted to know:

•

What traditional reading skills were being used for reading digital texts?

•

Did the teacher’s professional development session have a positive effect on the students’ abilities to comprehend digital texts?

In the first part of the inquiry, there was no evidence that the students used metalanguage, nor did they show an understanding about how to comprehend the images to enhance overall understanding of the digital texts. They showed some minimal navigational skills, but did not know the correct terms for describing what they were

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doing. The researchers also discovered some necessary coding skills associated with the search process. For example, they realized that correct spelling of URLs is essential for navigation. They also found it was necessary for students to learn keyboard shortcuts, drop down boxes, hypertext, copy and paste, and other important skills that differed from what they normally did when searching for something in a paper text. Additionally, they discovered that students had difficulty with some of the semantics involved with online texts. For example, there was trouble associated with refining searches to narrow the number of pages returned to those more relevant to the intentions of the search (Walsh, et al., 2007).

After the professional development provided to the teachers was passed on to the students, the researchers found that students were “…more aware of the constructedness of the digital texts they viewed” (p. 48). They also had a better understanding of the use of images to imply meaning and they more frequently used metalanguage correctly in context when they were discussing their searches.

Although this journal article gives little information about the sample and instruments of the study, a few things can be gleaned from the data the researchers collected. First, there is a difference between the skills required for paper texts, and digital texts requiring that the students learn new skills. Another thing that can be learned from the study is that teacher preparation is important for adequately helping students use Internet-based texts for academic pursuits.

Harris (2011) conducted a study to show whether multimodal texts can be assessed using some of the same methods used by teachers in the past for assessing

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traditional, unimodal texts. He collected data through a series of task sheets constructed using the Here, Hidden, Head model where the students answer questions that are explicit in the text, some that are hidden in the text, and others that they have to respond to from their own experience as it relates to the reading. Harris’ sample included 21 students in a single classroom, so there was no random selection done. The students were between the ages of ten and eleven years old.

The findings of this study suggest that although the multimodal texts increased student interest on a number of different levels as the study progressed, the cognitive load made it so that it took practice through exposure to multimodal texts for the responses to more complicated questions to improve along with the students’ comprehension (Harris, 2011). Although the results of this study are limited, it does demonstrate that some traditional comprehension assessment tools and strategies can successfully be adapted for online learning. More studies should be conducted with different traditional and online tools to determine better ways to help students develop new literacy skills.

While these two studies give some insights into the new literacy skills that are required for online learning, there has been little done in the form of intervention studies for helping high school students gain the requisite skills needed for multimodal, Internetbased curricula. Much of the available literature focuses on how to introduce new literacies into the classroom, and which skills the students will have to learn. What is needed is a body of literature quantifying the efficacy of methods for introducing best practice interventions in the new literacies—especially in the area of at-risk students who are suddenly placed in online credit-recovery programs.

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Applying What was Learned to At-Risk High School Students in Online CreditRecovery Programs Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from the literature is that at-risk students coming into a credit-recovery program typically arrive there because they have a history of problems that frequently stem from reading issues. Yet, alternative programs immerse these students in a rich reading environment and expect them to read and comprehend multimodal texts as their primary means of earning credit. Is there any chance students will get the skills to prepare themselves for college and career from these programs if the issues that placed them in a credit-recovery program are not first remediated? Therefore, schools must figure out where each student lacks skills in fluency, comprehension, new literacies, or a combination of the three to prepare a cocktail of interventions for helping these students succeed.

While there is some evidence for using the interventions mentioned in this chapter to work with students, there really is insufficient data for recommending or discarding any of them based on current studies conducted with students that match at-risk high school students’ age, development, and abilities. There have not been enough relevant studies within this group to strongly suggest including or excluding any of the interventions. Furthermore, the studies listed above are mostly difficult to make generalizations to other populations due to sample sizes and construction, instrument reliability questions, and threats present in the research that may have affected their findings. Therefore, additional studies that more specifically address the learning needs of this population of students are necessary.

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Assumptions and Limitations of this Study The author of this thesis has based his work on the assumption that the majority of at-risk students are part of the school population that has low reading ability. This assumption is based on the data that describes literacy ability as the best predictor of academic success. Since these students have not had academic success—or they would not be in the risk category—a connection is made between the typical academic profile of these students and low reading ability.

The lack of a strong body of prior research conducted for this particular population of students limits the study of this thesis.

Chapter Summary The chapter opened with a discussion about the use of formative assessments, including literacy skills inventories, to accurately determine the reading needs for each student entering an online alternative high school program. The recommendation was made to avoid using a sweeping one-size-fits-all intervention because these kinds of intervention strategies often cover skills that the student already possesses leading to demotivation.

Next, the various reading skills for both print and digital reading were explored starting with the “big five” and going through several new literacies skills. Three of the “big five” were considered less important for this study because two of them—phonemic awareness and phonics—are problems generally associated with early readers in stage one or two of development. Most adolescents in high school already have proficient use

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of these and there are relatively few if any studies for helping students in high school exhibiting these issues. Alternatively, vocabulary was also set aside because the general feeling is that there are so many online vocabulary tools that specific lexical interventions are not needed for Internet-based curricula.

Because of these evaluations, the focus of the chapter turned to comprehension, fluency, and new literacies skills. Studies for interventions in these areas were reviewed, and information was gleaned from each study to suggest possible methods for helping atrisk high school students improve the requisite reading skills to handle online, multimodal texts.

To conclude the chapter, a discussion about the difficulty of generalizing from the reviewed studies suggests that more research needs to be conducted as it directly relates to at-risk students enrolled in online credit recovery programs. The assumptions and limitations of this study were then discussed.

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Chapter 4 Summary The purpose for writing this thesis is to explore whether at-risk students placed into alternative programs with Internet-based curricula have the skills to successfully learn in these programs. Can they build the proficiencies that they need to be prepared for college and career? Additionally, if many of these students lack the requisite skills for learning with online curricula, then what interventions are best for remediating the issues that they have so that they can use the curriculum effectively? After all, the goal should not be simply getting a diploma if they have not developed the skills for success in college or for meaningful employment. Students need to be able to develop proficiencies from their high school coursework, so if they do not come into the program with the necessary abilities to build skills, completion of credits will not effectively prepare them for more advanced work. Since alternative schools are generally exempt from demonstrating college readiness for their students, many students are leaving schools either without a diploma or with a diploma but without the ability to pass college entrance tests (Hemmer & Shepperson, 2012). Therefore, this thesis explores the literacy skills needed for graduating from an online credit-recovery school with enough skills to be successful after graduation. Once the requisite skills were determined, the thesis compared the results with the academic profile of the typical at-risk student as discussed in the literature, and interventions were explored to determine which strategies teachers could use to help their students get the most value from the curricula.

While both consuming and producing texts is important for Internet-based learning, this thesis focuses on reading ability rather than writing skills. Analyzing the

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literature for solutions to both would have made the thesis too cumbersome while detracting from the main problem, which is using online curricula to gather learning.

Therefore, only the literature that addressed traditional reading abilities and the additional skills required for comprehending online texts were consulted. Furthermore, while it is acknowledged that Internet-based learning is frequently social in nature—requiring both reading and writing—the social element of writing is often conversational (Leu, Forzani, & Kennedy, Providing classroom leadership in new literacies: Preparing students for their future, in press). The curriculum itself generally addresses formal writing and other forms of language production, so they are not necessarily a prerequisite to performance and skill building within the alternative classroom.

Reading texts.

While the literature generally identifies five major skills necessary for traditional reading, this thesis focuses on fluency and comprehension. Students learn phonemic awareness and phonics early in language and reading acquisition, as they are a part of learning-to-read, so they are typically less of a problem at the high school level where the expectation of using texts is for reading-to-learn. This does not mean that if a student comes into the program with weak decoding skills that his or her needs should be ignored. Rather, they are less common, so a certified reading instructor can address them on an as-needed basis. Conversely, vocabulary is a very important issue for high school learners, especially in the content areas. However, online curriculum tends to directly address vocabulary words in the lesson, and the programs have built in glossaries that students can easily use to search for terms that they do not understand. Furthermore, multimodal texts include sound effects, visual representations, animations, and graphics

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that help students predict the meaning of difficult vocabulary terms; so, it is less urgent to address this need upfront (Leu, eta al., in press; Walsh, Asha, & Sprainger, 2007).

The trouble with suggesting interventions that address comprehension and fluency problems is that until recently few researchers have conducted extensive studies with these tools at the high school level because the focus of reading intervention over the past couple of decades has been in the early primary grades. Even RTI—which is a threetiered framework for providing levels of intervention services—was designed and has been primarily implemented in grades 1-3 (Gerston, et al., 2009). Only recently have educators realized that early success in reading is not a guarantee of later proficiency as texts become more complex (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012; McCallum, et al., 2012).

The researchers now studying reading remediation issues for older adolescents are testing individual interventions and groups of strategies with high school students that have previously been successful in studies with younger children. Using these interventions with older adolescents has yielded mixed results. Often the studies have been with small groups of participants that have been convenience sampled, so the authors of the studies have not been comfortable generalizing the results to other populations (Ridge & Skinner, 2011; Goering & Baker, 2010). Even those studies with larger, random samples have not specifically applied the interventions to students in the at-risk population that this thesis is targeting, so it is questionable whether their relative successes with the interventions would translate to this group who have very specialized circumstances. The third issue is with the constantly changing nature of new literacies, one has to wonder whether interevntions that worked a year or two ago could be relied upon today as new technologies and information sources are introduced into the classroom.

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All that being said, the issue that is most prevalent is whether the preponderance of students entering Internet-based, credit-recovery programs have the ability to read and to comprehend the materials for academic growth. Therefore, it is incumbent upon schools to use the best available data to help remediate students toward increasing their fluency and comprehension proficiencies so that they can utilize high school level texts for producing academic work.

The literature.

Fluency.

In Chapter 3, the thesis examined studies related to two aspects of fluency— reading speed and oral prosody—to determine whether improving either or both would help students understand what they are reading more effectively. As was suggested in the studies, it is commonly believed that automaticity, which come with reading speed, is directly related to comprehension because it reduces the cognitive load leaving more of the students’ ability to focus available for discerning the meaning of the text (Ridge & Skinner, 2011; Hawkins, Hale, Sheeley, & Ling, 2011; Goering & Baker, 2010).

Although there is some evidence that reading speed does not always correlate with comprehenion, studies have shown that there is likely a reciprocal relationship between the two where increasing either reading speed or comprehenion also raises the other (Hawkins, Hale, Sheeley, & Ling, 2011; Paige, Rasinski, & Magpuri-Lavell, 2012).

Therefore, intervening exercises that build automaticity should have a positive effect on students’ literacy abilities. The most commonly recommended fluency intervention in the literature involves repeated reading sessions, though the data seems to be inconclusive at best as to how much they help adolescents improve automaticity. Repeated reading does

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seem to help more when the students receive additional support along with the readings such as vocubulary previewing (Hawkins, Hale, Sheeley, & Ling, 2011).

Conversely, prodosy—which is expressive reading—does not free up cognitive resources. Rather, it helps students understand the text better because the proper use of mood, tone, and inflection implies meaning into the text thereby aiding comprehension much in the way that an illustration has that ability (Paige, et al., 2012; Goering & Baker, 2010). Paige, et al. (2012) explain that much in the same way an expressive speaker helps the audience understand the meaning of the speech he or she is delivering, so too does reading with prosody help the reader. Additionally, it is generally agreed upon that when someone reads orally with prosody, that carries over to silent reading as well (Paige, et al., 2012). Studies suggest that dramatic reading experiences like poetry readings, readers’ theater, drama performance, and repeatedly reading heavily expressive texts are great ways for students to gain proficiency with prosodic reading.

Comprehension.

For comprehension support, some of the strategies reviewed from the literature include TELLS, the ART of reading, LSC strategies, and Reading Apprenticeship. All of these interventions had mixed results. One thing that stands out from the research is that comprehension seemed to be helped using strategies along with peer or teacher discussions after the reading to clarify misunderstandings before answering questions about the passages (McCallum, et al., 2012). While it is not always possible to have peer or teacher-led discussions after readings—especially when students are working in selfpaced online curricula or during summative testing—it seems that making the invisible parts of peer and teacher-led discussions that aid comprehension visible so that students

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can practice those on their own may help students comprehend more of the passages included in the curricula when they are working alone. The WWC recognized only one of twenty-seven studies done with Reading Apprenticship for adolescents as meeting its standards, and the Kemple, et al. study does not conclusively show much value in using Reading Apprenticeship with older students (Kemple, et al., 2008; Institute of Educational Sciences, 2010; Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, & Mueller, 2001). Yet, it is the only one of the aforementioned interventions that is based on making invisible teacher or peer comprehension strategies obvious to the struggling reader. Therefore, it may be worth pursuing additional research that specifically addresses this kind of intervention with older, at-risk adolescent readers.

New literacies.

In addition to the fluency and comprehension interventions, this thesis also examines the specific learning differences that are required for reading online digital passages. While there are many additional skills required for understanding Internetbased texts, the higher-ordered thinking and critical reading skills are most important for learning with online curricula because of the wide-range of available texts that one has to evaluate and synthesize for a deeper learning experience. Citing Lyman and Varian (2003), Leu and Zawalinski (2007) point out, “In 2002 alone, new digital information appeared on the Internet that was equivalent to the books in 37,000 new Libraries of Congress” (p. 1). One can imagine how much information is being posted a decade later with more and more people having access to the World Wide Web annually. Therefore, it takes strong skills to narrow search parameters so that one gets back only relevant

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information. Afterward, the reader must be able to critically discern the purpose and reliability of the author and the information (Biancarosa, 2012; Coiro, 2005).

While reading online has some additional facets that make reading comprehension more complex, it is also further complicated by the deictic nature of the medium (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Casek, & Henry, 2004). Because new information sources and additional technologies change the face of reading every day, so do the skills reqired for comprehending these new literacies change. While this adds layers of difficulty to a skill that is already problematic for many at-risk students, there are also some positive aspects that can help. As mentioned above, digital texts often aid a reader with vocabulary issues as the meaning of difficult words are generally available by clicking or highlighting the word. Additionally, images, sounds and graphics in multimodal texts can assist comprehension (Walsh, et al., 2007). Furthermore, Leu and Zawalinski (2007) explain that despite the nature of the Internet as a reading medium, studies show that reading scores on traditional comprehension texts do not necessarily correlate with online reading ability. In fact, some of the weakest reader of traditional texts have been able to comprehend online texts very well, and visa versa. Therefore, some struggling learners may actually benefit from the reading materials being online without further interventions.

For those who do not have good online reading ability, there have been few interventions studied to this point that suggest better ways of supporting older struggling adolescents working in online classes. Harris (2011) demonstrated that some traditional reading comprehension tools like graphic organizers and task sheets can be of some value. Additionally, the Walsh, Asha, and Sprainger (2007) study shows that providing

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professional development to give teachers the tools to use the correct language and procedures when teaching with digital texts can translate to students who are more proficient online readers. This is because even though most of the students today have never known a time before the Internet, they do not use online reading outside of school for academic purposes. Therefore, they need specific direct instruction that shows them how to make better academic use of the tools that they are already comfortable using casually (Wilber, 2008).

Conclusion and Recommendations Assessment.

Helping at-risk students entering alternative, Internet-based programs develop the skills to thrive in the curricula should be the goal if the programs are intended to help these students succeed. Based on the studies and additional literature reviewed for this thesis, several recommendations seem appropriate. First, it is essential to conduct formative and summative inventories of the students’ abilities for reading and comprehending texts for both offline and online reading. Ivey (2008) says that “…a simple reading score from a formal test does not capture the complexity within students and the differences between students” (p. 253). Therefore, a series of skill inventories conducted by a reading specialist could be useful to map out the specific needs of each incoming student. Once a student’s actual reading abilities and defecits are known, then specific interventions can be planned into the student’s schedule for improving upon areas that may impede his or her progress in the program and to enhance the adolescent’s ability to develop the skills necessary for college and career as well.

Automaticity for Fluent Reading.

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For students who lack automaticity in their reading, one should determine if the students fluency breaks down in the decoding stage or if he or she is simply out of practice with reading. For the former, a reading specialist should work one-on-one or in a small group to work on fixing the specific decoding issues that are preventing fluid reading. If the latter is the case, then practicing with high-interest, student selected reading materials in both unimodal and multimodal formats can help improve the students automaticity without further intervention (Ivey, 2008). Fisher and Frey (2008) suggest that the teacher should start out modeling and guiding the reading activities, but should slowly relinquish more and more responsibilty to the student before independent tasks are assigned. This kind of guided reading is similar to the Reading Apprenticeship intervention mentioned above, or a reciprocal teaching strategy may also work to give the students the modeling they need while gradually helping them become independent learners (Vacca, et al., 2011).

Prosody to Help Imply Meaning.

For prosody interventions, small group practice with reading expressive texts and peer feedback will help the students without causing too much of the reader anxiety that comes with oral performance in a large classroom setting (Goering & Baker, 2010).

Teacher modeling of good prosodic speech in class as well as for dramatic reading can be helpful for guiding students to develop their own expressive reading skills (Paige, et al., 2012). As was the case with automaticity, students may never have practiced expressive reading, so it is unlikely that they have developed those skills on their own. Therefore, putting students in a fun activities that require prosodic reading will help provide the

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practice they need so that they can incorporate the meaning-making into their silent reading practices as well (Paige, et al., 2012; Goering & Baker, 2010).

Comprehension Strategies.

Comprehension strategies can vary as much as there are different student reading deficits. Working with students to develop strategies that they can tailor to specific reading situations seem to be the best way to help them comprehend the widest range of texts (Chambers Cantrell, et al., 2012). Since peer and teacher-led discussions seem to help the most, then strategies that help student rethink what they read may help in a similar way. Using reading guides and having the students write polished summaries of what they have read are two possible ways that students are asked to cosider whether their comprehension upon a first reading was accurate; so, using them may force a student to reread the text for greater clarity (Vacca, et al., 2011).

Reading and Comprehending Online Texts.

Perhaps the most valuable way educators can help students develop strong online reading skills is to consider the students’ out-of-school online texts and to build a hybrid space in school where the students’ preferred reading materials can help enhance inschool texts (Xu, 2008). When educators allow adolescents to use the texts that they are familiar with and that they want to read in an academic way, we are giving them opportunities to develop the skills that they need to use digital texts for academic pursuits.

Professional Development.

Teachers in these Internet-based programs must become comfortable with the technology and texts that are available for the students to use. If the teachers do not

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understand how to be good digital text consumers, then it is impossible for them to help the students develop the requisite skills. Therefore, alternative programs should invest in professional development sessions to ensure that the teachers in the program are comfortable with teaching the academic uses of technology—not just casual users because it is likely that the students—being digital natives—already have casual skills with the technology. Teachers have to guide them in bridging the gap between how they use digital texts at home and how they are used in school.

Assumptions and Limitations Assumptions.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, there are some assumptions and limitations to this thesis. The primary assumption based on the literature is that many—if not most— at-risk learners are among the reported 27% of twelfth-grade readers that read below basic reading levels (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011). These adolescents are labeled at-risk because they share an academic profile with the students who typically drop out of school before completion. Furthermore, they have a history of struggling with academics, failing classes, and retention, so these adolescents quickly fall behind their cohorts. Additionally, at some point many of these students have been placed in remedial reading programs, which tends to increase their likelihood of dropping out (Scanlon & Mellard, 2002; Anderson & Keith, 2001).

Another assumption of this study is that most online curricula providers are using multimodal texts to support learning. It is possible to produce electronic workbooks that require no navigational skills, critical search abilities, or even higher-ordered thinking

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skills and provide no hypertext, graphics, or sound; so, these texts do not require the new literacy skills mentioned in this thesis.

Limitations.

The main limitation of this thesis is the lack of definitive studies showing best practices for helping adolescent readers develop traditional reading comprehension or new literacies skills. While the author makes recommendations based on the available literature, this thesis strongly suggests further studies to investigate the value of specific interventions for at-risk students who are overwhelmingly being placed in alternative programs with Internet-based curricula (US Department of Education, 2008). As things stand, many of these students are completing the programs and earning high school diplomas, but they do not have the skills or knowledge necessary for college or career (Hemmer & Shepperson, 2012). If schools do not determine the requisite skills that are missing for each student, and effectively teach them to develop those skills, then alternative programs are not really helping the students that they are targeting.

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