Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Daniel Levin
American University
Spring 2010
Avoiding the “I Just Guessed” Syndrome: Helping Students Read Test Passages
Abstract: This action research project looks at three levers to getting students to actually
Three interventions went into these categories: increasing student confidence, increasing
interest in daily reading, and increasing use of text annotation, respectively. With
strategies targeted to these three specific goals, students generally did show high levels of
English teacher wonders at one point or another how to get his or her students to read more.
Personally, I wonder this on a daily, perhaps even hourly, basis. Like many other urban teachers,
most of my 10th graders come to me reading on a middle school level and many below that. I
know that if they had been reading more as they grew up and went through their schooling, they
would not be in this situation. When my students come up against their standardized test in
April, it will include readings on a higher level than most of my students are prepared for. I
spend much of my year, particularly the 3rd quarter, preparing students for the DC-CAS reading
test. With the aforementioned problem of lack of reading skills in mind, my main concern is that
my students actually try to read the passages on the test. If I had a nickel for every time I asked a
student about his/her thinking on a particular question he/she missed on a practice drill and the
student replied, “I just didn’t read the passage,” or, “This was boring, I just guessed,” I could
retire on the money I would have. My students lack the patience and tenacity to deal with dry
testing passages that are in some cases above their comprehension level. In short, my action
research question is, how do I get my students to engage in reading passages so that they get test
questions right?
My exploration of this topic boils down to three major factors, which are the center of my
research. First, there is the component of the test itself. Students have varying attitudes toward
taking tests, and their investment in the test—whether or not they care about their results—is
must understand the reading if they are going to get the questions right.
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The third and most all-encompassing factor is engagement in reading. Students must be
willing to read the test and interested, at least on some level, in what they are reading. It seems
likely that engagement feeds into comprehension—after all, if a student is so checked out of a
reading passage that he/she pays little attention to it, he/she will not do a good job
comprehending the passage either. Furthermore, investment in testing may be directly linked to
engagement in reading, so all three major components of my question come together through
engagement.
My research first delves into existing literature to show the basis for the interventions I
tried. Then I lay out the main concepts that drive my interventions, followed by the data from
the interventions themselves. I analyze much of the data as I explain it, but my findings and
Literature Review
Component 1: Testing
Interestingly, many researchers have focused on different aspects of test-taking and test-
making over the years. With a lens on education policy in particular, many authors and
researchers are looking at standardized testing—its effectiveness, its accuracy, its impact on
curriculum and teachers. While some of these studies are relevant to my question, most are
important on a broader scale. In other words, I need to know how to get individual students to
attack a particular test, not how testing is changing the way districts look at test preparation or
how states are changing standards to prepare more rigorous assessments. But from these articles
and Ruth Kanfer do in their article “Test Length and Cognitive Fatigue: An Empirical
Kanfer find that self-reported cognitive fatigue is actually not related to overall test performance,
but it does correlate positively with self-reported effort. In other words, even if a student said
that he or she was feeling “overtested,” it would not necessarily indicate that he/she would get a
worse score, but rather that he/she stopped trying as hard on each question. This was an
unexpected result of the study. The more easily predictable result—that cognitive fatigue
increases with an increased duration in test time—was also confirmed. Another interesting
finding was that students are more likely to report cognitive fatigue if they have certain personal
dispositions or traits. Cognitive fatigue really is dependent on motivation and attitude. Student
with high anxiety are more likely to feel fatigued, and students with a high need for achievement
and a high desire to learn are less likely to feel fatigued. These findings have several important
consequences for my research: while I do not control how long each testing session will be, I can
try to improve students’ motivation and attitude toward the test, and that may actually keep them
Other studies have confirmed that fatigue and motivation both affect students’ test scores
(Doscher & Bruno, 1981), and a symposium held by ETS, the Educational Testing Service,
brought up the importance of other “noncognitive skills” in the framework of overall student
achievement. Motivation was highlighted among these skills, as were follow-through, critical
thinking, self-concept, enthusiasm, and dozens of others (Yaffe, Coley, & Pliskin, 2009). The
bottom line for my purposes is that there are a lot of factors that increase student scores on tests
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that have nothing to do directly with testing or the testing environment, but rather a student’s
In teacher Janet McClasky’s article “Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad TAAS? Rethinking
Our Response to Standardized Testing” (2001), the author describes her unwillingness to comply
with generic “test prep” curricula prescribed by her school. She highlights the fact that her
students pass the tests without practicing on canned worksheets designed for whole-class review.
She argues that by teaching novels, word parts and root words, and higher-order thinking, her
students, no matter their ability level, have always been able to cope with the state’s tests. Her
main point is that students must want to read books because they will never want to read tests.
Though she does not offer any quantitative data other than the assertion that all of her students
passed the test, her ideas are persuasive for their honesty. She has fifteen years of classroom
experience to add credence to her policies. McClasky’s observations are very important to my
battling with: students will not be invested in reading passages on tests. Her assertion that if
students love to read, they will read the test anyway, is a powerful idea for moving forward in
my classroom. It takes the pressure off of investing students in the test passage reading and
Component 2: Comprehension
Sometimes it feels like there are as many reading plans and strategies as there are
students to try them. For the purposes of my research, I will be looking at strategies that seem
particularly important to older students or to the testing environment, since that is the primary
informational texts, which are common on standardized tests. The PLAN strategy was
developed for college students, but has been successfully adapted for middle and high school
students as well. PLAN uses the idea that reading is an active process before, during, and after
the actual reading itself. Each letter stands for a step in a thinking and note-taking process that
students engage in while reading. Although I do not think it is necessary to draw a whole
concept map for each page-long reading the students will encounter on a standardized test, I do
think some of the elements could be used in a testing setting, namely the idea of recording
important concepts as during reading, not just after. Furthermore, the emphasis on reading
(2004) research that shows that combining two specific strategies is best for secondary students’
comprehension: reciprocal teaching and direct explanation. Reciprocal teaching is when a group
reads a text together, focusing on four strategy-based tasks while they read: generating questions,
summarizing, clarifying confusion, and predicting. These tasks take place at a paragraph-by-
paragraph pace. At first the teacher must model these tasks, then gradually students can begin
leading each other in the reading (hence the term reciprocal teaching). Direct explanation is
another term for what some other teachers call a “think aloud”: when the teacher clearly explains
the comprehension strategies being used as they are happening throughout a reading passage.
This modeling and explicit explanation of strategies is followed by student practice. An earlier
study by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Bird (1985) emphasized the critical importance of explaining
the strategies rather than just modeling them, so the think aloud can be a time-consuming
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practice, but both studies showed it to be effective. In implementing her studies on the use of
these two strategies, Alfassi found that high school students benefitted greatly from the strategies
Judith Franzak (2006) takes a wide-ranging approach to finding the key to literacy; she
traces the development of the concept of literacy over the centuries and hones in on recent
pedagogical practices. She cites many current experts who are focusing on strategies that “good
readers” use to comprehend text. This is what she calls the “strategic reading approach” or the
“strategic-metacognitive model,” referring to the way students must be aware of the way they are
reading and thinking about reading. However, she notes (of critical importance to the current
analysis) “emphasizing reading strategies may have the unintended consequence of diminishing
engagement” (217). Franzak also emphasizes the importance of recognizing the political and
social aspects of reading instruction, and says teachers must not think of themselves as simply
teaching “reading” but rather what that practice means for the students as individuals. She notes
that reading is a socially situated activity, and many minority students, particularly African
Americans, may feel that reading is not part of their culture. She also says that studies have
shown that teens need a caring social relationship from their reading teachers and coaches to
become better. Similarly, they need to develop a purpose for reading and a reading identity,
especially those who have not found success with reading in the past. One way to do this is with
a reading workshop approach, where students choose their books. Franzak spends the end of her
paper discussing educational policy around literacy, and notes that standardized testing does
nothing to help literacy, since it neither truly assesses reading nor promotes its instruction. My
overall take-away from this extensive article is that literacy instruction to improve
comprehension needs to start with students seeing themselves as readers, and good readers at
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that. My next steps, then, will tie in carefully to reading engagement, my next topic, and make
sure students have books that they will enjoy and actually read so that they will see themselves
as readers.
In her article “Beyond the Yellow Highlighter: Teaching Annotation Skills to Improve
Reading Comprehension,” Carol Porter-O’Donnell argues that when a text is difficult, students
must really buckle down and interact with it, asking questions and finding key points. She notes
that simply highlighting or underlining is not enough because many students will highlight
everything they read, not showing any signs of comprehension. Instead, annotation—making
notes in the margins or “a visible record of the thoughts that emerge while making sense of the
text” (p.82)—is a process that students can really see and do. This interaction with the text can
really help with comprehension because it aids students in metacognitively identifying areas they
need to clarify and going back through the text to find answers to their questions.
strategy instruction can be useful and needs to be implemented—especially when modeled and
try to read and improve at reading and is therefore also critical to comprehension.
Component 3: Engagement
are self-reported phenomena. Many researchers have studied motivation in a general context and
more and more are beginning to look at reading motivation in particular. The following studies
engagement, published an article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy in 1997, along
with his colleagues Solomon Alao and Jennifer Rinehart. Their research focuses on motivation,
since they recognize that students who are not motivated are unlikely to do anything well. They
find that most students spend so little time reading during their free time that they are not gaining
the reading skills they need to succeed in school. Interestingly, the researchers separate the
terms “motivation” and “engagement,” stating that engaged readers have motivational goals, like
reading for a purpose or believing in their ability to learn from the text and use their cognitive
skills to understand the reading. The way their study means to improve reading engagement in
the classroom is with Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). The CORI theory states
that there are seven themes that lead to increased student motivation: real-world observation,
coherence. The reason I find CORI most interesting is that the authors specifically say that
CORI is related to strategy instruction, but also increases the motivational factor around those
strategies. So above all, strategies must be taught in a context that connects them to the real
In an article geared specifically toward students with low academic motivation (Hidi &
Harackiewicz, 2000), one interesting point that the authors make is the distinction between
“catch” and “hold” in student interest—activities that seem “fun,” like puzzles and computer
programs, catch student attention, but only meaningfulness and involvement will really hold their
attention. Importantly, they distinguish between individual interest and situational interest.
Teachers cannot control what individuals are interested in, but they can try to create “situational
interest” in their subjects and in their classrooms; that is, teachers must find things in the material
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that are most likely to connect with students and then allow them to interact with that material in
a way that will engage them, e.g. group work or peer collaboration. The authors then tie interest
into motivation, first noting that interest is an important part of intrinsic motivation. Then they
explain that though other studies have said that extrinsic rewards detract from intrinsic
motivation, they find that, especially in seemingly unmotivated students, some extrinsic
motivators are appropriate and helpful. Extrinsic motivation is especially helpful when it is not
on a small scale for short activities but tied into long-term engagement and useful feedback on
performance. Performance goals (based on markers of success like grades) may also help spark
interest in unmotivated students, though more highly motivated students may do better with
mastery goals (proficiency in a topic or subject). My work, then, must engage students in
reading, not just in the situation of the test; although, in the end, performance goals around the
Some research revolves around that elusive quality of intrinsic motivation. Studies seek
to discover what makes students intrinsically motivated and high-achieving. My purpose would
be to find out how to replicate these qualities in other students. Frank Pajares (2001) has found
(in correlation, not causation) that students with this internal drive are optimistic and self-
confident. While some students are naturally optimistic and self-confident, Pajares also stresses
the connection between positive psychology and motivation—making people happy will make
them motivated. This leads me to think I may have success in reading with some students if I
increase their confidence in their ability to succeed by providing a variety of books on different
Conceptual Framework
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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The way I see it so far, to make students motivated to read test passages and able to
At this point, I would like to take a moment to define the terms above that will be most
critical to the rest of my work on this project. Investment, engagement, and motivation are all
very closely related as far as I am concerned. The differences are as follows: investment is a
to succeed in my class but not engaged on a particular day. So, I want my students to be
motivated to read, invested in testing, and engaged in their activities on any given day.
Comprehension strategies are particular ways of reading or thinking about text that are
taught explicitly to students with the aim of having them better understand the text. A strategy
should attempt to clarify what “good readers” do at a conscious or subconscious level as they
read. My primary focus in strategy use will be on text annotation, which I will define as making
notes and marks in the text other than just underlining or highlighting.
Testing will refer to a situation where the students work individually and silently on a
formal assessment. Testing will be in the form of reading passages with multiple choice
questions and occasionally short responses. The test I am working towards is the District of
Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) and I will be working with materials
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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that replicate its style and testing stems (McGraw-Hill, 2010). I also refer to the DC-BAS, which
In many ways, motivation seems to be the key behind all three of my research
subcategories. Students need to motivated to read, motivated to test, and if they are, they will be
more likely to comprehend text—just reading the whole passage would increase their
comprehension, since many of them skim or skip passages. The three tenets of my research align
(Gambrell, Palmer, Codling, & Mazzoni, 1996) provides a nice summary of J. Eccles’s 1983
work on the theory. In short, Eccles argues that motivation is a combination of expectancy—if a
person expects to succeed—and value—how attractive the person considers the task. If I can get
students to believe that they are good readers, good test-takers, and capable of success on the
DC-CAS, half the battle will be won. I need to convince them that their work on this test is
worthwhile so that they value it even if they do not find it fun or amusing.
Concept Map
Expectan
cy-value
Text
annotatio
Engagement: n
interest in and
willingness to read Comprehension: ability
to understand reading
Student
self- Testing investment
impacts engagement
percepti with passages
on as
reader
Testing: assessment,
with an emphasis on
reading
investme
nt
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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Research Context and Methods
At my school, 99% of students are black, and about 64% qualify for free or reduced
lunch. All of my students this year are black. Many students are from difficult neighborhoods or
household situations. Of my students, the average grade level equivalent for reading was 6.75 at
the beginning of this year. I teach 10th grade, so most of my students are 15 or 16 years old. By
Having defined my categories of research, I will now give specifics on the interventions I
used to try to improve students’ reading of test passages. My engagement strategies include
using positive messages about student abilities and increasing student choice in non-test reading.
My comprehension strategy is working with students on text annotation and increasing their
engagement in it by incentivizing the use of annotation. The ideas for these strategies come from
various elements of the literature review, and lead into several research questions:
• What effect does engagement in independent reading have on test passage engagement?
• How does student confidence and good self-image affect success on tests?
• How does student interaction with a text affect scores on related questions?
The interventions I decided on were varied, then, to approach all of these factors individually.
After all, getting students to read is a very complicated issue and I do not think that one type of
Specifically, I rewarded students for using text annotation, I gave students various
positive messages about their abilities and successes, and I got student-friendly books for
independent reading. These interventions took place between late March and early April of
2010; the DC-CAS started on April 19th, so all data was complete about a week before that.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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The first intervention I did was to begin a campaign of positivity and confidence boosting
for students about the test. My strategies included posters that read “You are brilliant!” and
“You are smart. You are prepared. Blast the CAS!” I also started writing notes at the bottom of
their weekly worksheets saying things like “smash the CAS!” and “I’m so proud of you!” I
spoke often in class about how the students were working hard and they were definitely ready for
the test. To gauge the effect of these messages, I took a student confidence survey that included
• Do you think Ms. Holoman believes you will pass the DC-CAS? Explain.
• On a scale of 1-10, how sure are you that you will pass the DC-CAS?
I triangulated the responses of these questions with other test data I have that shows whether the
data on providing high-interest independent reading books for the students, I got student input on
which books in particular they would want to read. I purchased a number of new books for the
classroom that were specifically of interest to my students. My data includes a list of available
books to document my attempt at securing interesting books. Other sources of data were
students’ reading journals, where they wrote daily reactions to their reading that day, and
interviews asking them if they are interested in their books and reading generally. I put a lot of
hope into to seeing a big impact here; several sources in the literature review (McClaskey,
Guthrie et al.) suggest that increasing engagement in real-world reading is the only way to get
following kinds of data to support the effectiveness of this intervention: field notes of student
observations, the annotated papers themselves as artifacts, and the students’ scores on the
comprehension questions. The field notes and papers will serve as documentation of the
intervention, and cross-referencing the students’ amount of annotation with their scores and
survey answers will show its effectiveness. As an incentive for annotation, annotation is tied
into the students’ grade on the assignment. Students get half of their credit from answering the
questions and the other half from annotation. Thus students have an extrinsic reward and a
performance goal to motivate them to annotate the text, which I hoped would lead to increased
scores on the questions. My overall goal is that the students read the passage, and they cannot
accurately annotate if they do not read, so in theory incentivizing annotation would be effective
on their reading.
Data Collection
1. Student Confidence
student confidence, I gave a three-question survey (the questions are outlined above). I decided
their answers would be the best way to find out how they really felt about the upcoming test. I
note that there is a threat to validity in that students may have overstated their confidence levels,
knowing that I want them to be confident on the test and therefore trying to please me with the
“correct” answer. I do not have a specific way to address this threat, since self-report is the most
reliable way I know to find out how students feel. However, I did tell the students that the
surveys would not be graded in any way and I asked them to be honest, so that is one attempt to
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address that threat. I would also like to dismiss the threat to a certain extent because in the end,
many students reported that they did not, in fact, consider themselves to be good test-takers. A
Of all the survey responses, roughly half of the students (22 out of 52) reported that they
were good test-takers. The other half said “sometimes” or even just “no,” in almost all cases
citing various reasons. Interestingly, though, when asked about the DC-CAS specifically, almost
all the students seem relatively confident that they will succeed. On a scale of one to ten, only
one student responded with less than five to the question “how sure are you that you will pass the
DC-CAS?” (That student happens to be one of the most successful test-takers I have, and her
other answers on the survey were inconsistent with that answer, leading me to believe she may
have inverted the meaning of the scale.) Here is the full breakdown of the data on this question,
although the numbers do not total 52 since a few did not respond to the last question, perhaps for
lack of time.
Confidence, Number of
from 1-10, of students
passing the DC- reporting
CAS
5 2
6 4
7 9
8 16
9 5
10 11
12 1
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The table shows that the plurality of students is, in one way of describing it, 80%
confident in passing the DC-CAS. In fact, only fifteen students are less than 80% sure they will
pass! This is a remarkably high number for a group of which half see themselves as poor test-
takers.
The other question, whether the students think that I think they will pass the DC-CAS, is
most subject to the aforementioned “please the teacher” threat to validity, since it is about me.
All but one student replied with varying degrees of enthusiasm that yes, they think I believe they
will pass the DC-CAS. The one exception was a student who said, “I don’t know.” This
unanimity may be in part due to the desire to make me happy, but such overwhelming results
So, one major finding from the student confidence survey seems to be that students are,
generally, confident about their upcoming reading test. However, the survey does not speak to
whether or not their confidence is justified. There are a lot of interesting conclusions that can
come from these answers compared to how students have typically done with practice tests like
the DC-BAS. Will students actually do as well as they think they will? I cross-referenced some
student answers with previous test scores. Though I hope that all the students will do better on
this test than they did on the practice test, it is interesting to see how their answers correlate with
previous performance. The practice test itself is not available for the appendix because it was
produced by a standardized company and the materials are not available to teachers. However,
the score data was released and has been very interesting to break down.
Some students are very accurate (based on past performance) in their self-perception.
Here are some examples of students who seem to know whether or not they are likely to pass
they are generally high-scoring and underestimate their abilities or generally low-scoring and yet
overly confident, some students have opinions of themselves that the other data do not support.
Some students, like TarJee, have gotten the message that they can pass this particular test,
but they have not changed their opinions about themselves as people. Statements like “I’m bad
at reading” take a lot of work to correct, and hopefully if students continue to have encouraging
2. Independent reading
One of the factors I was trying to increase was investment in reading overall rather than
specifically test passages. For evidence of whether students were enjoying reading, I took
several student interviews. While I was concerned about validity because students might not
want to tell the truth when speaking with me directly, I am able to triangulate some of this data
The first part of this intervention was to introduce new books into the classroom library
to attempt to engage more students with the new material. I polled the students for titles,
authors, or genres of books they would like me to get for the independent reading library. I just
did this by asking for suggestions verbally or written down, and recorded the suggestions that
they called out immediately. Many were interested in more urban fiction (“books about people
like me,” one student said); others requested easier books; some wanted sports books; a few
wanted another book in the Clique series by Lisi Harrison. I then went to the bookstore and got a
wide variety of new titles and reading levels. For a full list of new titles, see the appendix. Were
I to repeat this experiment, I would take data on which of these books were picked up most often
(perhaps the number of times it was read throughout the week); however, I can say anecdotally
that most of the new books were read by one student in at least one block every day. The most
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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popular books were Precious, the Sharon Draper books, and The Outsiders. I even had to buy
another copy of Precious because I had a student who could not bear to wait to read it. On these
anecdotal notes, I claim that making sure students get a say in what reading material is available
to them as well as providing new, fresh material is definitely effective in engaging students in
reading.
To triangulate this assertion, I also have samples from the students’ reading journals. I
took a selection of students from my first block class and copied what they wrote in their daily
reading journals. One day they responded to the prompt, “Write a one to two sentence critique
of your book,” (this was in conjunction with our lesson on the difference between summary and
critique) and another day they were to write a short summary of what was happening currently in
their book. I take the critique as evidence of the students’ like or dislike of their book and the
summary as evidence of their engagement with it; while neither piece of evidence is foolproof, it
is unlikely that students lie in their reading journals because they are fairly personal records and
not graded for content or accuracy but rather completion, and students who are engaged in their
books are able to write summaries while students who are not really reading during reading time
generally have only vague ideas of what their books are about. Generally, it seems that the
students were reading the new books. Out of the nine journals I sampled, only two were not
reading new books. However, I do not think that having a new book automatically leads to
engagement—one of the students (Benjamin) reading a new graphic novel the first day dropped
it to read a sports magazine the next day instead. In spite of this, all nine students said they liked
their independent reading books, so at least at some point they felt engaged with them.
Meanwhile, it seems fairly clear to me that Khadijah, for example, was not reading her book very
carefully or at all the second day because she failed to complete her summary journal entry. All
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the other students included some details in their summaries, ranging from the more vague and
questionable—Arnice wrote “Theres [sic] drama and a lot of commotion. The friends are
turning on each other. Her bf is lying to her”—to the specific details that indicate definite
engagement, like Jasmin’s “In today’s reading, Kiara takes Andy’s lil brother Monty to her
school cookout to get the death of Andy of [sic] their minds. They played games, grilled foods
(hamburgers and hot dogs) and had fun.” The rest of the students’ entries are in the appendix.
Overall, this data indicates that students were engaging with their books, though it was less
dependent on whether the book was new or not than on other factors like general interest level.
to record an interview about their independent reading experience. A potential threat to validity
is that students who are not engage might be less likely to volunteer, and I cannot disagree with
that. However, not all the students who I did interview were overwhelmingly positive about
their experience, so this convinces me that students feel comfortable speaking honestly with me
and that the interviews still provide good data. One person I spoke with was India, who stated in
her confidence survey that she does not like tests. She scored basic on the practice test and reads
at a 5th grade level. She had been reading one of the new books in the library (Who Am I Without
Him by Sharon G. Flake), and I wanted to find out if it increased her engagement in reading. She
said that, yes, she liked it, and proceeded to give a detailed account of what she had read. (For a
full transcript of all the interviews, see the appendix.) I take the fact that she was able to recall
many details as evidence that she was, in fact, engaged in the text because I cannot monitor all
students’ reading at the same time, so if a student is not engaged, he or she is most likely just
staring at the book and not really reading it. A threat to the validity of my interventions is that
she could usually be engaged in reading, so her engagement would not be any comment on my
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interventions. To combat this threat, I asked India when she did most of her reading to try to
ascertain if the classroom strategies were helping her. Our interchange went as follows:
Me: Ok. Um, and when do you, do you usually read, when do you usually read
the most? Like, in class or—
India: In class.
Me: --outside class…In class?
India: I don’t read at home.
Me: Why not?
India: (pause) I don’t know. I be tired of school when I get home.
I take this as evidence that the books I have provided and structured reading time I enforce are
important components of making India more engaged in reading overall. Here is an example of
another student in a similar situation as India. I have trouble finding books Joe likes, and he
Joe is not a consistent reader, and though I think he was trying to make me sound good (knowing
I was taping the interview), he does read in class, so he is more engaged because of my
Other students, like Janai, who scored advanced on the practice test and reads on grade
level, are also engaged in reading but are more likely to have been engaged in reading in the first
place. Students who enjoyed reading before they got to my class also seem to appreciate the new
book selection. Here are examples of conversations with some of these students:
Me: Good. And, um, do you feel like reading in class helps your reading level?
Janai: Yes. Because they say that if you read 15 minutes a day, something like
that, you’ll get smarter, or you could read better.
Me: Ok. And…generally, do you like to read?
Janai: Yes.
Me: …Can you tell me a little bit about [the new book you started]?
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Kierra: Um…it’s about a little boy named Gabe—Gabriel? I don’t know. But I
call him G. And his mother used to be a prostitute and one day his mother left
him in the house, and he was playing with matches, and the house caught on fire.
So his mother went to jail, and he started living with his aunt, and he called the
aunt Queen, but then the aunt had, the mother got out of jail, and never told the
boy his mother got out of jail, til recently when she died, and then the boy live
with his mother now, and he ain’t want to. It was his little sister Angel, and his
mother, and his mother boyfriend named Jordan used to molest his little sister
Angel.
Me: Oh my.
Kierra: And the little sister Angel wouldn’t never tell nobody, cause the man
Jordan used to always threaten he would kill everybody in the family. But G
found out what happened, and he told another man but then told [indecipherable]
but then the man [indecipherable] G convince the police the man Jordan did
something wrong. Recently I just read the police locked Jordan up. Now the
mother in denial, she don’t want to believe her kids, and now she in there yelling
at her kids.
Me: Very interesting. So you like this book?
Kierra: Uh huh. [affirmative]
Me: On a scale of one to ten what would you give it?
Kierra: Right now it’s like a seven but I didn’t finish reading yet, so I don’t
know.
Like India, Kierra also spent a long time describing details of her book, which I take as evidence
of her engagement with it. However, Kierra is a voracious reader, so I think just having a lot of
student-friendly books in the classroom is the best way to keep her engaged.
3. Text annotation
My last intervention was to incentivize annotation of text. The literature said that
annotation ensures that students read and interact with the text. For my intervention, I wanted to
give them a good reason to annotate and see if that helped with reading the whole passage, so I
gave them a practice passage and I told the students that half of their grade on the assignment
would be a result of their efforts with annotation and the other half would be for getting the
answers correct. The obvious threat to validity here is that some students may not be motivated
by their grades. Anecdotally, I can say that most of my students are very concerned with their
Helping Students Read Test Passages
25
grades, at least to the point that they want to pass, which would have to be more than 50% on the
assignment. Of course, some are not, and that is a concern that I cannot really address with this
particular intervention. However, I saw a range of reactions to the assignment, so I think it was
an effective motivator for some students. For example, here is a piece of a student conversation
that occurred just as the students were starting the activity. I quickly typed it up at that time so
Quinn is a clear example of a student for whom the grade was an effective incentive for
One key point of this intervention is that I am taking the students’ success on the test
questions and their annotations as evidence that they did read the text. Since one question
involved details from the text and the other involved the main idea, students would have had to
read the paragraph with the details and the whole passage to get both questions right. While they
could have guessed, making the data less reliable, I find it more likely that when students
annotated and then got the questions right, they were genuinely interacting with the text as they
read.
To judge the effectiveness of annotation, I will just describe the annotations I saw; for
examples, see the scans of their work in the appendix. There were two questions with the
reading. By “no annotation,” I mean that there was no marking in the text or at best one sentence
Interestingly, the annotation seemed to be an effective strategy for many students. But I
cannot truly judge its effectiveness because some students would have gotten both questions
right even without annotating. The students who used the annotation varied widely in reading
level.
Some students did not annotate the text and did not get the questions right. This is a
logical result based on the point of the intervention. Those students read on a level that is, on
average, lower than that of their peers, so their lack of annotation may have occurred because
they did not understand the text, but it could also be due to unwillingness to use more effort on
Some students did appropriate annotation but still got the questions wrong. This is
obviously disappointing, but not completely unexpected; people will always make mistakes.
Interestingly, these students read on an even lower level than their peers who did not annotate
and did not get the questions right; perhaps their level is so low that no strategy will really help
Some students got both questions right but did not annotate very much. These students
generally have high reading levels—on average, higher than any of their peers, even those who
got both questions right and did use annotation. This leads me to an interesting conclusion—that
perhaps students with high reading levels should not be forced to try strategies that might distract
Helping Students Read Test Passages
27
them from using the reading and comprehension talents they have already developed. This
would require more differentiation of activities in the classroom. I find it strange that more of
these students were not motivated by the grade attached to the assignment, but I suppose that
since this was the first time I graded an assignment in this way perhaps they did not understand
Some students did a lot of annotating and got both questions right. Whether this was
causation or these students just wanted the grade for annotation but could have gotten the
questions right without it is impossible to say. But the more of these students that fall into this
last category, the better, and if causation is a factor as the literature leads me to believe, then I
An alternate way to interpret the data, though, is to say that since the vast majority of
students who got both questions right did use annotation, forcing students to annotate is effective
and appropriate. I think by including the students’ reading levels in the comparison, though, my
Findings
I had three major goals in this research project, and I will discuss my findings for each
• Increase student confidence so that they will engage in reading the test passages
• Increase student engagement with reading in other contexts so that the reading on the test
• Increase student use of reading strategies so that they will be more likely to engage in
whole passages on the test. One flaw in this proposal is that I cannot judge how students will
react to the test before they actually take the test, which is after the deadline for this paper. No
Another major regret I have about my findings is that I did not foresee the need for a
specific type of data that would lead me more solidly to my conclusions. In retrospect, I know
that I should have created a reading passage with questions that could help assess whether or not
students actually were reading the whole thing. At the very least, I should have done more
interviews or surveys asking students if they read the entire passage on specific assignments.
However, when I designed this project I focused more on how to implement and measure the
intervention strategies than how to measure their results. Were I to do this research again, I
would make sure to design these two aspects to work together. So instead of trying to draw
conclusions about whether or not my students will read the testing passages, which would be no
more than predictions, I will analyze the success of the implementation of each of the
aforementioned interventions and trust to the literature that inspired them that they will have a
Intervention 1: Increase student confidence so that they will engage in reading the test
passages
With all the practicing we did and all the positive messaging I was giving the students in
class, I think this was an effective intervention. On the student confidence survey, nearly all the
students were at least an 8 on the scale of 1 to 10 for confidence they would pass the DC-CAS.
Since most students are confident, they are more likely to read passages and pass tests. While
Helping Students Read Test Passages
29
this intervention was not entirely successful in changing students’ ideas about themselves as test-
takers generally (rather than for this test specifically) and students were not always entirely
accurate in their self-perception as compared to past successes, the point got across that I believe
in them and that they are ready for this test. If the literature on test fatigue and test investment is
Intervention 2: Increase student engagement with reading in other contexts so that the reading
This intervention was somewhat successful. Though all the students I interviewed said
they were enjoying their independent reading books, classroom experience tells me that not
every student will be engaged in reading every day. The key take-away from this intervention,
as far as I am concerned, is that getting new books is one way to mix up reading in class. The
new books may increase the overall number of students who are engaged in their books. And the
more students that are engaged in reading on a day-to-day basis, the more students will read on
Intervention 3: Increase student use of reading strategies so that they will be more likely to
While text annotation correlated with success on test questions (which I take as evidence
of having read the text) for some students, others were able to read and answer the questions
correctly without this intervention. So my finding is that it would be most effective to pretest the
students, allow those who score high without annotation to do other enrichment activities, and
work with the rest on specific annotation strategies. The incentivizing of annotation by including
it in the grade was fairly effective, but I would also suggest trying other incentives—perhaps
immediate ones like candy or stickers so that students feel rewarded for the work of annotation.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
30
Through all of the interventions I tried with this research, along with the multitude of
other test preparation materials I prepared and taught, my biggest realization is that getting
students to care about and pass a standardized test is a mammoth undertaking and cannot be
approached in one single way. My favorite part of this project was that I got to try a variety of
strategies to get students ready for the test. I learned that I really enjoy talking one-on-one with
students about what they are learning, and that it can be very informative for my teaching. I
think that small group or individual tutoring outside of class would be an excellent strategy to
focus on next year. Students could be grouped homogenously according to their needs and those
small groups could learn strategies or content or both. I wish that I had spent more time trying to
differentiate my approach with the test-taking strategies for different students. I am glad that I
was able to get such a variety of new books and see students of all reading levels and interests
In many ways, this study confirmed what I already knew, which is that the more students
are invested in the test, the better they will do on it. Investment is a key lever of success in any
class and on any assignment, so of course the same applies to the practice exercises I used in my
research. My biggest surprise of the research was how highly confident students are that they
will pass the DC-CAS. I would have thought that past data I have given them (practice test
scores, class scores) would have discouraged them, because I have been pushing them pretty
hard this year. So I was happily surprised to see the positive results of my intervention—that
most of the students were fairly certain they would pass this test.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
31
Since one of my biggest areas of concern is the use of reading strategies, I think one
question that went unanswered and would be interesting to pursue is, what strategies are actually
the most effective in getting students to understand the reading passage? Moreover, are these the
same strategies that would get students the most engaged in the reading passage? For example,
if a student writes text-to-self connections in the margins of the passage, she might be engaged in
the text, but does that necessarily mean that she understands it? I would like to know the values
of the various reading strategies that I encourage my students to use. This goes hand in hand
with the biggest part of my project that I did not have time to take on—what methods are best for
teaching reading strategies? I wanted to use the teacher models and group practice methods
described in some of the literature I read, but I had already taught my students the basics of the
strategies I wanted to reinforce and my test preparation schedule did not allow for repetition of
strategy mini-lessons. But I would like to see the effect of certain ways of learning to annotate
In the end, I cannot make any great claims about how to get students to read test
passages, but I can say my students are enjoying reading more than they used to, they are
engaging in text more than they used to, and they feel confident about their upcoming test. With
a group of kids who came in more than three years under grade level in reading, I would say they
have a fighting chance on this test, and that’s a success for me.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
32
Works Cited
Ackerman, P. L., & Kanfer, R. (2009). Test Length and Cognitive Fatigue: An Empirical
Experimental Psychology .
Alfassi, M. (2004). Reading to Learn: Effects of Combined Strategy Instruction on High School
Bereiter, C., & Bird, M. (1985). Use of Thinking Aloud in Identification and Teaching of
Caverly, D., Mandeville, T., & Nicholson, S. (1995). Plan: A Study-Reading Strategy for
Doscher, M.-L., & Bruno, J. E. (1981). Simulation of Inner-City Standardized Testing Behavior:
489.
Gambrell, L. B., Palmer, B. M., Codling, R. M., & Mazzoni, S. A. (1996). Assessing Motivation
Guthrie, J. T., Alao, S., & Rinehart, J. M. (1997). Literacy Issues in Focus: Engagement in
Reading for Young Adolescents. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 438-446 .
Hidi, S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2000). Motivating the Academically Unmotivated: A Critical
McClaskey, J. (2001, September). Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad TAAS? Rethinking Our
http://osse.dc.gov/seo/frames.asp?doc=/seo/lib/seo/2010_DCCAS_Resource_Guide.pdf
Porter-O’Donnell, Carol. (2004). Beyond the Yellow Highlighter: Teaching Annotation Skills to
Yaffe, D., Coley, R. J., & Pliskin, R. E. (2009). Addressing Achievement Gaps: Educational
List of newly acquired independent reading books and their reading levels
*The Lexile of a book is a measure of its difficulty. See the table below for grade
level equivalencies, from www.lexile.com.
11 and
940L to 1210L 1100L to 1300L
12
Helping Students Read Test Passages
36
Appendix B
Full transcripts of interviews with students about their independent reading experiences
India: Yesterday.
India: Yes.
India: Um. The first book was about the girl, and she [indecipherable] and she had a boyfriend,
everybody likin’ him cause he was on the basketball team and he was the cutest boy in school.
And then, it was some quiet girls at the bus stop with her. And they, they ain’t never say nothing
to her, but one of them liked her boyfriend. And then she got on the bus, her boyfriend made her
get on the bus. The quiet girl got on the bus first, and she slipped out the back door and got off
the bus with the girl’s boyfriend.
Me: Ooh!
India: And that’s when the girl, um, the girl wanted to fight her. She just went to school and the
boy had a test in the next class, and she told the teacher he was sick. She didn’t think he wanted
to break up with her.
Me: Good! Um…So you read all that yesterday? How many pages do you think that was? You
can guess.
India: It was like four pages…five pages…cause it’s like short stories in here.
Me: Ok. Um, and when do you, do you usually read, when do you usually read the most? Like,
in class or—
India: In class.
Me: Ok. That’s fair. Thank you. So when you get to class are you ready to read? Do you
usually like to read?
India: If I like the book, but if I don’t like the book, if it’s not interesting, I don’t want to read it.
Me: Ok. And, uh, not talking about independent reading, but, on, like, the DC-CAS and stuff, do
you usually read the whole passage?
Me: Do you use any, like, strategies or anything while you read it?
India: Yeah, I underline the…the most important stuff, like that I need to remember, and that I
think would be in the questions.
Me: I’ve seen that, you do do that. Well, that’s good. Do you think that reading in class, like,
affects the way you take the DC-CAS at all?
India: Yeah, it help us out…it help us practice reading in class…so that we could, um, read, do
the stories on the DC-CAS.
Me: So, Janai, what kind of books have you been reading in this class this year?
Janai: Most of the time I read books related to my life experiences. Like, more fictional books.
Janai: Yeah, it’s like, Black and White, Chasing Destiny, the…um…what’s that book called?
The Eli man?
Janai: I like books like that. But, uh, it was one of the Blue…Hill…what was the name of…?
Me: Good. And, um, do you feel like reading in class helps your reading level?
Janai: Yes. Because they say that if you read 15 minutes a day, something like that, you’ll get
smarter, or you could read better.
Janai: Yes.
Janai: Sometimes. Like if I find a good novel I like I’ll read it.
Me: Ok. Um…and the books you’ve been reading in class, have they come from my library or
have you brought them in yourself?
Janai: Both. Most of the time I bring books in myself, because I don’t like what everybody else
like, I like what I like.
Me: Ok. Um…and, like on a scale of one to ten, how much do you feel like you’re focused on
reading during independent reading time?
Me: So when you are reading on a test passage or a reading passage we do, do you usually read
the whole thing?
Janai: If it’s long, then I look at the questions first and then see, cause sometimes it say like in
paragraph 3, some questions are like that, so…
Me: Joe, um, how do you feel about independent reading generally?
Joe: I mean, you know, it really helps us out a lot, you know, um…it keeps you focused…and
um, yeah it helps you with your reading skills a lot for the DC-CAS
Me: Oy. Um, what book are you reading right now?
Joe: Yes. And you know, it expand me as a basketball player, you know?
Me: So when you read that book you feel like you’re interested in it?
Joe: Yes. Because I’m an athlete myself, you know….If it’s basketball, that’s what I’m most
interested in.
Me: So are there other books you would want to read for independent reading besides that one?
Joe: Um…there’s not any pacific [specific] books but I’m open to try new books.
Me: Ok. And on a different note, when you take the DC-CAS or when you do practice passages
in class, do you usually read the whole passage?
Joe: No, I read the questions first, and then I go and then I skim through and look for the
answers.
Joe: Yes.
Joe: Yes.
Kierra: Tears of Fire [she is actually reading Forged By Fire, the sequel to Tears of a Tiger]
Kierra: Yes. No. It wasn’t new, it was old, but I started reading it after I read the first one.
Me: Oh, ok, so this was like, we had the new books, and you read a new book then too, right?
Kierra: Yes.
Me: So you finished that and then you started Forged by Fire?
Kierra: Yes.
Kierra: No.
Kierra: Yes.
Me: Ok. And how’s that going for you? Can you tell me a little bit about that book?
Kierra: Um…it’s about a little boy named Gabe—Gabriel? I don’t know. But I call him G.
And his mother used to be a prostitute and one day his mother left him in the house, and he was
playing with matches, and the house caught on fire. So his mother went to jail, and he started
living with his aunt, and he called the aunt Queen, but then the aunt had, the mother got out of
jail, and never told the boy his mother got out of jail, til recently when she died, and then the boy
live with his mother now, and he ain’t want to. It was his little sister Angel, and his mother, and
his mother boyfriend named Jordan used to molest his little sister Angel.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
42
Me: Oh my.
Kierra: And the little sister Angel wouldn’t never tell nobody, cause the man Jordan used to
always threaten he would kill everybody in the family. But G found out what happened, and he
told another man but then told [indecipherable] but then the man [indecipherable] G convince the
police the man Jordan did something wrong. Recently I just read the police locked Jordan up.
Now the mother in denial, she don’t want to believe her kids, and now she in there yelling at her
kids.
Kierra: Right now it’s like a seven but I didn’t finish reading yet, so I don’t know.
Me: You usually like books more or less when you finish them?
Kierra: More.
Me: Ok. So on a completely different note, on the DC-CAS or a testing passage, do you usually
read the whole passage?
Kierra: I’ll like…some quotes…I don’t know, it just pop out to me.
Me: And do you read the whole passage while you underline, or—
Kierra: Yeah.
Me: Ok. And do you think that reading in class has any effect on whether or not you read
what’s on the test?
Kierra: Yeah.
Me: Why?
Kierra: Because reading in class, we had a time limit to read in class, it made me read more
faster. And by me reading more faster, it made me get my information more quicker, and I don’t
gotta go back to reread, unless I absolutely have to.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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Me: Interesting. Ok, thanks a lot, Kierra.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
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Me: So Raymond, what are some of the books you’ve read for this class during independent
reading time?
R: Um, a book called Black and White, I read a book on Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and a
book called uh…what’s that book…
R: Shaquille O’Neal.
Me: [laughing] Alright, so it’s new to you today. And that’s cause that’s a new book to our
class, right?
R: Yes ma’am.
Me: What do you think about getting new books? Does that help you?
R: Yes, cause I really didn’t like some of the books in here, I mostly like sports books and people
be stealin the sports books.
Me: That’s true, we’ve had some theft issues. So when you read a sports book, that makes you
more interested in it?
R: Yes.
Me: Ok. So, on a scale of one to ten, how interested are you in independent reading time do you
think? (pause) Like how much do you like it, how much do you focus, that kind of thing.
R: Bout a six?
R: Cause sometimes when I read I get headaches because of a previous incident I had last year.
I had a concussion and ever since then when I read I catch headaches and my eyes start hurting.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
45
Me: Mmhm. Um, I noticed that this book has a little larger print, does that help you or does that
not really make a difference?
R: Either (indecipherable).
Me: Ok, so it’s any size text? (He nods) Ok. So on a slightly different note, when you read for
the DC-CAS or a reading passage we do in class or anything like that, do you usually read the
whole passage?
R: No.
R: I read the questions first, then I just look at the passage and see what I need to look for.
Me: So when you’re looking at the passage, are you, like, starting at the beginning and going
through it? Or do you kinda jump around? What do you usually do?
R: Jump around. Like, in the passage, if it’s asking a question like, what does this word mean, I
don’t read the passage, I just look around in the passage for that one word, and read probably a
sentence or two before and a sentence or two after the word.
Me: Ok. And do you think when we do independent reading in class, that changes the way you
take a test? Or has an effect in any way?
R: No.
Demel—Tears of a Tiger
• So far this book is pretty good. I like how there are so many details, but I think it is a
little below my reading level.
• There was an accident that caused Robbie to die and Andy is taking this really hard.
• My book is good. Two of the characters is just going through some things right now.
• No entry
• My book is like a 4 star book. It grabs your attention but then it get a little boring.
• So far I have read about how captian kidd died and how he became a legend
Antonio—Shooting Stars
• The book is very good and a inspiring story for youth such as myself.
• Lebron shot a 35 footer and bounce in then out. Leaving the team in despair.
• My book is a very good book and I like it and want to continue reading all the volumes
• Theres drama and a lot of commotion. The friends are turning on each other. Her bf is
lying to her.
• So far in my book Massie Alicia Dylan Kristen and Claire are asking boys questions so
that they can find the key first to help their reputation. [I have no idea what this means]
• I read about the NBA and how college students put up good stats [This is about Sports
Illustrated, which he picked over his book that day]
Kierra—Forged by Fire
• My book starts off with a young girl name Robin how was physically abused by her
father. Robin is now in therapy and she dealing with what happen.
• I began a new book today. So far I like the book. From 1-10 I would give it a 10. It
makes me just want to keep reading and get lost in the details.
• In today’s reading, Kiara takes Andy’s lil brother Monty to her school cookout to get the
death of Andy of [sic] their minds. They played games, grilled foods (hamburgers and
hot dogs) and had fun.
Helping Students Read Test Passages
48
Appendix D
Students’ scores and amount of annotation on the practice passage Claw Lock correlated with
Nate 4.9
Theron 4.9
Briana 4.9
Brittany 10
Jerome 11
Breyuanna 5.7
Ericka 10.5
Quinn 10.8
Brianna 10.5
Malencia 5.4
PreAnn 4.9
Dante 4.9
Javae 12.9
Raheim 7.7
Jamelle 6
Damante 12.7
Alicia 12.5
Rickia 5.6
Yesmina 8.7
Joe 6.8
Chris 8.3
Tykia 6.2
Kyle 10
Janai 12
Cierra 10.8
Average
reading level 8.344
Jasmin 11.2
Ben 7.5
Eric 7.4
Helping Students Read Test Passages
52
Avera
ge
readin
g level 8.7
Demel 12
Khadijah 7.5
Brian 9.3
Bryana 3.9
Brittney 4.9
Mykell 7.8
Derquacia 4.9
Dashon 8
Lorenzo 5.4
Chris 8.3
Eddie 9
Duyania 11.2
Jasmine 7.8
Monshaniq
ue 8.6
Average
reading 7.7571
level 43
Keivie
t 4.9
Chani
ce 4.9
Arnice 5.6
Avera
ge
readin 5.1333
g level 33