MIST Graduate Capstone 2018

School of Computing and Design

California State University Monterey Bay

Title: Reading Strategies for First Graders

Student Name: Nuong Nguyen

Advisor: Jeanne Farrington

Summary:

This capstone project stems from a current need for explicit instruction of 22 first graders at
John E. Steinbeck School on reading strategies that will help them improve their reading fluency
and decoding skills. At the beginning of the year, first-grade students took the Developmental
Reading Assessment (DRA) that assessed their reading abilities. The majority of the students only
knew one or two reading strategies while decoding words and thus were struggling to progress to a
harder DRA Level. The goal of the eLearning module is to teach first graders reading strategies to
help them with word recognition, word patterns, and to build automaticity while reading.
My solution is to design a learning module to teach them Karen Jones’s (2016) seven
reading strategies: Learn to look at pictures, make each phoneme sound, stretch out the word,
change the vowel sound, reread the sentences, break up the words into word families, and use
context clues to figure out the unknown word. If students are able to read fluently, this will, in
turn, help them with their reading comprehension. From the formative evaluation, I decided to
change the instruction to teacher-led mainly because the students had trouble with their fine motor
skills on the touchpad. After the usability test, I made minor changes to the drag and drop and fill-
in-the-blank activities.
The summative assessment included a reading survey, pre-test, questionnaire, and post-test.
The reading survey showed the majority of the students had at least one person that read with them
at home. Most students enjoy reading books with a lot of pictures. The pre-test and post-test
showed the instruction was effective in teaching the students how to decode words. My hypothesis
was that my reading strategy instruction will improve the students’ reading ability. The dependent
sample t-test was used to analyze the pre-test and post-test for the same group of first graders.
Since the hypothesis is directional, I used the one-tailed t-test. The absolute value of the t-stat
result is greater than the critical value (11.03>1.72). So, we reject the null hypothesis and support
the research hypothesis that the learning modules improved the students’ reading ability. The
questionnaire showed the students had positive responses with learning the reading strategies and
felt confident about applying what they have learned.