Date of Award
2012
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Abraham S. Fischler College of Education
Advisor
John Kellmayer
Committee Member
William Frost
Committee Member
Ronald P. Kern
Keywords
Book Talk Café, Grade 8, independent reading, minilessons, motivation, reading achievement, reading instruction, reading intervention, reading levels, reading program, reading skills, Reader's Workshop, remedial reading, rural Alabama, SAT-10, STAR, standardized reading assessment, traditional reading instruction
Abstract
The applied dissertation examined the effectiveness of Reader’s Workshop (Orehovec & Alley, 2003) on students’ reading skills on the SAT-10 state assessment and the Standardized Test for the Assessment of Reading (STAR, Renaissance Learning, 2002).
The site of the applied dissertation was a school located in rural Alabama. Based on STAR tests administered in August 2008, 19 out of 48 (40%) of the 8th-grade students taking the STAR at the school that was the site of the applied dissertation scored below grade level in reading. The 8th-grade class for the 2009-2010 school year followed the same trend and produced scores that were much similar with 24 out of 54 students (44%) scoring below grade level.
Data gathered from the SAT-10 and STAR testing of the 8th-grade classes at the school that was the site of the applied dissertation allowed the researcher to compare the reading achievements of both 8th-grade classes over a school year. The remedial class, which was the class targeted for the intervention, participated in the Reader’s Workshop, and the other class continued with the traditional reading instruction.
The Reader’s Workshop incorporated independent reading; sharing literary ideas; minilessons, which focused on small- or whole-group sessions to teach reading skills and strategies; and state of the class, which focused on management of the reading program in order to make sure the students were on task. Book Talk Café, which was part of the Readers’ Workshop, was a motivational activity that supplemented independent reading bimonthly.
The results indicated that an intense reading program with motivational reading incentives increased students’ reading levels. Results also indicated that Grade 8 students met the proficient mark on the SAT-10 in reading for the first time in several years. The Grade 8 students for the year 2010-2011 scored a reading level of Grade 8, Month 8. This was a significant increase compared to the results in 2008-2009 when the reading level was 7.9 and an even bigger increase from 2009-2010 when the reading level was 7.1. Again, results showed that the increase in months on the posttest for the STAR exam was significantly greater than that of the pretest of the same exam. Results indicated that the traditional class began with a pretest score of 8.0, their posttest score was 8.6. Although these are very good scores, they did not show the significant increase shown by the students who received Reader’s Workshop intervention. Their pretest scores were 7.4 but they made a significant increase to 8.7 on the posttest. In sum, the results of this study suggest that Reader’s Workshop is an effective method for increasing reading achievement of 8th-grade students.