Individualized Program for Text Reading Teaching with Comprehension

Abstract

In Brazil, a large contingent of students has delays in reading. The present work aimed to plan, implement and evaluate the effectiveness of a computerized module for teaching text reading to students in the 5th grade of public schools, two from southwest region and two from Midwest region, with low grades in the Prova Brasil 2011. 123 students participated with at least 30% of errors in the pre-test of an assessment similar to the Prova Brasil. The teaching program used 15 stories adapted from children’s books and comprehension questions. Each text read on the computer had multiple-choice questions to assess and teach text comprehension. The questions were presented using different stimulus modalities (sound, text or pictures) and the answer was differentially followed, with one of a variety of gifs in case of a correct
answer and the repetition of the question in case of an incorrect answer. The text reading teaching procedure used in the present study used the same principles tested with the teaching of reading and writing of isolated words, including characteristics of personalized teaching that proved to be relevant to favor learning in general and reading.
in particular: individualization - each individual carries out their activities according to their learning pace; active participation - the learner continually responds to the demands of the task and does not just watch someone teach him something; providing immediate and different consequences for correct and incorrect answers throughout
the teaching trials; division of teaching tasks into small units; hierarchy of skills to be taught in increasingly complex units, with progress in the program dependent on the acquisition of previously taught repertoires; performing a unit’s tasks until it reaches full proficiency (with opportunities to redo or do more tasks of the same type if
it doesn’t reach the intended target). Measures of Reading Comprehension test applied after the procedure showed substantial increases in text comprehension in three schools, and moderate increases in the fourth school. In Prova Brasil three schools
had gains equal to or higher than government goals. The design used makes it difficult for the improvements in reading parameters to be undoubtedly attributed to the intervention used, however, considering the convergence of the different measures: those
obtained with the Reading Comprehension test before and after the intervention, the most accentuated progress in three of the schools in Prova Brasil, immediately after the intervention and the reports of teachers who monitored the procedures and pedagogical coordinators of the schools, there seem to be indications that the teaching
program used may have had a facilitating role, in the sense of preparing students to understand better the texts that were presented to them in the Prova Brasil, as well as in the continuity of formal school education.