This study was designed to demonstrate the effect of implementation of multicomponent
vocabulary strategy instruction in fourth grade social studies. The
components used included explicit instruction, student study teams, active engagement
in learning tasks, vocabulary maps, connections webs, and semantic feature analysis.
The focus was on using direct, explicit instruction of vocabulary strategies and
the resulting outcomes. Curriculum was designed for a six-week period using the district
curriculum and state-required knowledge and skills for fourth graders. Teachers were
randomly chosen for assignment to the group receiving the intervention and/or to the
control group. The curriculum for this study was designed to actively engage students
and to reinforce retention of word meanings in isolation as well as in context.
The study included three different school districts, five separate campuses, and a
total of 375 students in grade four. There were 23 teachers in the study with students in
29 separate classes. Measures were employed to determine if there was an effect on the
students in the classrooms receiving the intervention versus those receiving regular classroom instruction. Measures used included a comprehension test, a content test, a
curriculum-based measure, checkpoints for content, similar to a unit test, the TORC3
vocabulary subtest for social studies, and the Test of Silent Contextual Reading Fluency
(TOSCRF).
A preliminary analysis included reliability coefficients of all instruments used in
the study. Difference score analyses and descriptive statistics, along with a one-way
multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and a repeated measures MANOVA were
completed using the effect for group, effect for time, and the interaction effect. The final
analysis included a plot of classroom means for each of the instruments used in the
study.
Outcomes were consistent across all administered measures. Although growth
was demonstrated in both the group receiving the intervention and the group receiving
regular classroom instruction, the gains were consistently greater overall with the
classrooms receiving the intervention. Experimenting with practices to determine their
effectiveness is critical for improving classroom instruction, and this study demonstrated
that students were retaining knowledge even after six weeks post-intervention.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1680 |
| Date | 2007 August 1900 |
| Creators | Graham, Lori Dear |
| Contributors | Joshi, R. Malatesha |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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