Image: Shutterstock. Caption: Students in Socrative circle
A personal goal of mine as I entered the FSU MS-ISLT program was to bring the newest and greatest ideas to my learning environment. At this time I am working with a group of Middle School students who are "on target" for their reading comprehension skills. In any school this would make for a joyous occasion to have entire classes reading on grade level. However, as a part of our commitment to student excellence and acceleration, we are looking for ways in which students can be purposefully accelerated past their grade level. On paper, this sounds like an easy task. In practice, this is quite a bit more. With the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, research grants and interests where directed to understanding the needs of bottom quartile readers. A quick search of peer reviewed journals will show a paradigm shift in the direction research between the mid 90's and the early 2000's. In the educational community, this shift has lead to a systemic "blind eye" being turned to the students who are already achieving grade level proficiency.
Since the advent of school choice in the State of Florida, the parents of the "Achieving" students are now demanding more and aggressively looking for learning spaces who can offer more to their student.
How do we as professional educators provide rigorous and challenging curriculum that is supported by data when the data has not existed for the last 20+ years?
Luckily the data does exist but it is in the form of the influence of discourse (Social Media- SoMe) in comprehension. The British Journal of Educational Technology published a paper in January 2023 by Huang-Yao Hong titled Computer Supported Knowledge Building to Enhance Reading Comprehension. Hong found that 3 major benefits come out of allowing students to participate in guided Online (SoMe) discourse:
(1) students were able to enhance their overall reading motivation, in particular, their intrinsic reading competence;
(2) all students were highly engaged in the online discussion activities. In
particular, advanced online activities that demand high-level agency was found to correlate
to their reading motivation;
(3) process analysis of what was actually discussed online over
time also revealed that there is an increasing trend of knowledge building discourse focusing
on higher-level reading comprehension
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