<\/a>English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?”<\/p>\nWarnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading<\/a> on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they wanted. And it turned out that her so-called “reluctant readers” weren’t all that reluctant after all.<\/p>\nThis is a story about student choice, student engagement, and how action research can impact student outcomes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAction research into Sustained Silent Reading<\/h2>\n\n<\/path><\/path><\/svg><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\nFull transcript below.<\/p>\n\n<\/a><\/h2>\nMy name is Laela Warnecke, and I’m a middle school educator in Poultney.<\/h2>\nI teach English.<\/h3>\nBefore we get started, most, if not all of us in this room are teachers. So I\u2019d like for you to just close your eyes if you\u2019d like and think about a moment in your life where you had maybe an epiphany and you realized, \u201cWow, teaching is exactly what I\u2019m meant to do and I am so excited that I chose this as my vocation.\u201d<\/p>\nFor me that moment came when I was in a course titled Shakespearean Tragedies.<\/h4>\nIt was at Castleton University, where I completed my undergrad, and we were sitting in a circle discussing Titus Andronicus and I caught sight of my professor and she was so engaged and enthralled with the conversation and I thought, \u201cWow, she loves her job.” She gets to collaborate with authentic learners everyday who are involved in the process and engaged and she gets paid to do this. And then I thought, \u201cWow, I\u2019m going to be an English teacher and I\u2019m going to have the same opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\nThen I started to do middle school. \u00a0And I realized that not everything is as organized as I maybe thought.<\/p>\nThis picture right here was taken when I went outside to talk to the principal for a second and I came back in and all of the boys in the class had assembled themselves in a dogpile in the corner of the room:<\/p>\n <\/p>\nIt was maybe 30 seconds that I was out. So I realized right off the bat that teaching was not exactly what I had in mind but I learned to roll with the punches.\u00a0We can all kind of laugh about the chaos of middle school but one thing that I think we can\u2019t really laugh at is the idea that many students claim to hate reading.<\/p>\nThey don\u2019t like doing it, they think it\u2019s a painful experience, they believe that they\u2019re not good at it, they\u2019ll never be good at it. By the time they meet me in the 8th grade, they’re completely disengaged.<\/p>\nWhen I was going into my second year of teaching, I wanted to determine if there was a method that I might use to engage those reluctant readers and mostly to allow them to see that reading isn\u2019t this painful experience, but reading can be something authentic and something that you can continue with\u00a0past school.<\/p>\nThose lead to my goals as an educator.<\/h3>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe main goal was that I really wanted to share my love of literature, and create an authentic classroom where students are really engaged in the same way\u00a0I am with stories and other texts that we\u2019re reading. Mostly I really want to collaborate with thoughtful, authentic learners and as I said before, nurture lifelong readers.<\/p>\nAnd then I came across the method of sustained silent reading.<\/h2>\nThere are many different models of sustained silent reading but in a nutshell, it\u2019s a time of the day where students are given the opportunity to read, for the most part, whatever they would like to read.<\/h4>\nThere\u2019s not accountability with sustained silent reading in its most simplest form. The big thing is that students are allowed to choose what they want. And all of those buzz words that we talk about come up with sustained silent reading: there\u2019s student choice, student self-direction, flexible pathways, diversity and a democratic classroom.<\/p>\nThis particular student right here is engaged in sustained silent reading:<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThis student (whose name is Lucas) was a very reluctant reader at the beginning of the year. But this was taken in April and he\u2019s just completely lost in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow might sustained, silent reading impact 8th grade students?<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nI wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\nMethods<\/h2>\nI decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\nThe population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\nElementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/h3>\nI came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading<\/a> on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they wanted. And it turned out that her so-called “reluctant readers” weren’t all that reluctant after all.<\/p>\nThis is a story about student choice, student engagement, and how action research can impact student outcomes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAction research into Sustained Silent Reading<\/h2>\n\n<\/path><\/path><\/svg><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\nFull transcript below.<\/p>\n\n<\/a><\/h2>\nMy name is Laela Warnecke, and I’m a middle school educator in Poultney.<\/h2>\nI teach English.<\/h3>\nBefore we get started, most, if not all of us in this room are teachers. So I\u2019d like for you to just close your eyes if you\u2019d like and think about a moment in your life where you had maybe an epiphany and you realized, \u201cWow, teaching is exactly what I\u2019m meant to do and I am so excited that I chose this as my vocation.\u201d<\/p>\nFor me that moment came when I was in a course titled Shakespearean Tragedies.<\/h4>\nIt was at Castleton University, where I completed my undergrad, and we were sitting in a circle discussing Titus Andronicus and I caught sight of my professor and she was so engaged and enthralled with the conversation and I thought, \u201cWow, she loves her job.” She gets to collaborate with authentic learners everyday who are involved in the process and engaged and she gets paid to do this. And then I thought, \u201cWow, I\u2019m going to be an English teacher and I\u2019m going to have the same opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\nThen I started to do middle school. \u00a0And I realized that not everything is as organized as I maybe thought.<\/p>\nThis picture right here was taken when I went outside to talk to the principal for a second and I came back in and all of the boys in the class had assembled themselves in a dogpile in the corner of the room:<\/p>\n <\/p>\nIt was maybe 30 seconds that I was out. So I realized right off the bat that teaching was not exactly what I had in mind but I learned to roll with the punches.\u00a0We can all kind of laugh about the chaos of middle school but one thing that I think we can\u2019t really laugh at is the idea that many students claim to hate reading.<\/p>\nThey don\u2019t like doing it, they think it\u2019s a painful experience, they believe that they\u2019re not good at it, they\u2019ll never be good at it. By the time they meet me in the 8th grade, they’re completely disengaged.<\/p>\nWhen I was going into my second year of teaching, I wanted to determine if there was a method that I might use to engage those reluctant readers and mostly to allow them to see that reading isn\u2019t this painful experience, but reading can be something authentic and something that you can continue with\u00a0past school.<\/p>\nThose lead to my goals as an educator.<\/h3>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe main goal was that I really wanted to share my love of literature, and create an authentic classroom where students are really engaged in the same way\u00a0I am with stories and other texts that we\u2019re reading. Mostly I really want to collaborate with thoughtful, authentic learners and as I said before, nurture lifelong readers.<\/p>\nAnd then I came across the method of sustained silent reading.<\/h2>\nThere are many different models of sustained silent reading but in a nutshell, it\u2019s a time of the day where students are given the opportunity to read, for the most part, whatever they would like to read.<\/h4>\nThere\u2019s not accountability with sustained silent reading in its most simplest form. The big thing is that students are allowed to choose what they want. And all of those buzz words that we talk about come up with sustained silent reading: there\u2019s student choice, student self-direction, flexible pathways, diversity and a democratic classroom.<\/p>\nThis particular student right here is engaged in sustained silent reading:<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThis student (whose name is Lucas) was a very reluctant reader at the beginning of the year. But this was taken in April and he\u2019s just completely lost in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow might sustained, silent reading impact 8th grade students?<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nI wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\nMethods<\/h2>\nI decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\nThe population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\nElementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/h3>\nI came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
This is a story about student choice, student engagement, and how action research can impact student outcomes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Full transcript below.<\/p>\n
Before we get started, most, if not all of us in this room are teachers. So I\u2019d like for you to just close your eyes if you\u2019d like and think about a moment in your life where you had maybe an epiphany and you realized, \u201cWow, teaching is exactly what I\u2019m meant to do and I am so excited that I chose this as my vocation.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was at Castleton University, where I completed my undergrad, and we were sitting in a circle discussing Titus Andronicus and I caught sight of my professor and she was so engaged and enthralled with the conversation and I thought, \u201cWow, she loves her job.” She gets to collaborate with authentic learners everyday who are involved in the process and engaged and she gets paid to do this. And then I thought, \u201cWow, I\u2019m going to be an English teacher and I\u2019m going to have the same opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then I started to do middle school. \u00a0And I realized that not everything is as organized as I maybe thought.<\/p>\n
This picture right here was taken when I went outside to talk to the principal for a second and I came back in and all of the boys in the class had assembled themselves in a dogpile in the corner of the room:<\/p>\n
It was maybe 30 seconds that I was out. So I realized right off the bat that teaching was not exactly what I had in mind but I learned to roll with the punches.\u00a0We can all kind of laugh about the chaos of middle school but one thing that I think we can\u2019t really laugh at is the idea that many students claim to hate reading.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t like doing it, they think it\u2019s a painful experience, they believe that they\u2019re not good at it, they\u2019ll never be good at it. By the time they meet me in the 8th grade, they’re completely disengaged.<\/p>\n
When I was going into my second year of teaching, I wanted to determine if there was a method that I might use to engage those reluctant readers and mostly to allow them to see that reading isn\u2019t this painful experience, but reading can be something authentic and something that you can continue with\u00a0past school.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe main goal was that I really wanted to share my love of literature, and create an authentic classroom where students are really engaged in the same way\u00a0I am with stories and other texts that we\u2019re reading. Mostly I really want to collaborate with thoughtful, authentic learners and as I said before, nurture lifelong readers.<\/p>\nAnd then I came across the method of sustained silent reading.<\/h2>\nThere are many different models of sustained silent reading but in a nutshell, it\u2019s a time of the day where students are given the opportunity to read, for the most part, whatever they would like to read.<\/h4>\nThere\u2019s not accountability with sustained silent reading in its most simplest form. The big thing is that students are allowed to choose what they want. And all of those buzz words that we talk about come up with sustained silent reading: there\u2019s student choice, student self-direction, flexible pathways, diversity and a democratic classroom.<\/p>\nThis particular student right here is engaged in sustained silent reading:<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThis student (whose name is Lucas) was a very reluctant reader at the beginning of the year. But this was taken in April and he\u2019s just completely lost in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow might sustained, silent reading impact 8th grade students?<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nI wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\nMethods<\/h2>\nI decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\nThe population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\nElementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/h3>\nI came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The main goal was that I really wanted to share my love of literature, and create an authentic classroom where students are really engaged in the same way\u00a0I am with stories and other texts that we\u2019re reading. Mostly I really want to collaborate with thoughtful, authentic learners and as I said before, nurture lifelong readers.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s not accountability with sustained silent reading in its most simplest form. The big thing is that students are allowed to choose what they want. And all of those buzz words that we talk about come up with sustained silent reading: there\u2019s student choice, student self-direction, flexible pathways, diversity and a democratic classroom.<\/p>\n
This particular student right here is engaged in sustained silent reading:<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThis student (whose name is Lucas) was a very reluctant reader at the beginning of the year. But this was taken in April and he\u2019s just completely lost in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow might sustained, silent reading impact 8th grade students?<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nI wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\nMethods<\/h2>\nI decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\nThe population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\nElementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/h3>\nI came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
This student (whose name is Lucas) was a very reluctant reader at the beginning of the year. But this was taken in April and he\u2019s just completely lost in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow might sustained, silent reading impact 8th grade students?<\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nI wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\nMethods<\/h2>\nI decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\nThe population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\nElementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/h3>\nI came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nI wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\nMethods<\/h2>\nI decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\nThe population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\nElementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/h3>\nI came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I wanted to be able to quantitatively measure students’\u00a0attitudes toward reading, so I had to do some research on that to determine how I might go about it. I also wanted to be able to engage through some qualitative research and conversational interviews to find out\u00a0the stories behind negative attitudes towards reading. What happened before 8th grade that caused these students to come up to me — and say to my face — \u201cI hate reading, I really don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
I decided to administer a\u00a0survey before the sustained silent reading period, and then give the same survey after sustained silent reading to\u00a0see if there was any sort of change.<\/p>\n
The population of students that I worked with are twenty-eight 8th graders. I had 16 males and 12 females. Three total classes, which I call the Oak, the Birch and the Maple classes. Eight students had\u00a0individualized education plans, all of which are designated as reading specific.<\/p>\n
I came across a fantastic survey: The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey<\/a> which many of you maybe have seen. Students completed this survey in September of 2015 and then completed it at the end of June in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThere are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\nOkay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\nIf a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
There are 20 questions in total. Two subscales; the first 10 questions focus on recreational reading or reading at home, and the last 10\u00a0questions focus\u00a0on academic reading. They all begin with the phrase, \u201cHow do you feel when.\u201d<\/p>\n
Okay. This particular example is, \u201cHow do you feel when you read a book on a rainy Saturday?\u201d<\/p>\n
If a student circled \u201cReally angry Garfield,\u201d they would get a score of one and if they scored \u201cReally Happy Garfield,\u201d they\u2019d get a score of four. It\u2019s a one to four Likert Scale<\/a>. This survey is\u00a0really great because there isn\u2019t that middle option that so many students tend to circle when they\u2019re not really sure. It allowed me to get some really great data in regards to my students\u2019 attitude toward reading.<\/p>\nScoring the survey is very simple: you take a look at the raw score for each subscale and there’s a\u00a0really great percentile chart. You can see where students fall on that percentile chart in regards to their attitudes toward reading.<\/h4>\nMotivation to Read Profile<\/h3>\nIn order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\nObservation Journal<\/h3>\nI also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\nAchievement Data<\/h3>\nI made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
In order to gather some qualitative data, I carried out a Motivation to Read Profile. There\u2019s two parts to that. The first is sort of quantitative measures and then the second is a conversational interview. It\u2019s just really simple, open questions you can ask students about reading and how they feel when they read. So if a student loved reading on a rainy Saturday but hated reading in school, I was able to kind of probe and see why. What has happened in this student\u2019s past to make this occur and how might I change it while I\u2019m with this student in my classroom?<\/p>\n
I also kept an observation journal as well. I also wanted to see \u2013 because I know that there\u2019s a correlation between attitude and achievement — how might increased attitudes toward reading increase student achievements towards reading.<\/p>\n
I made a decision to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)<\/a> to measure changes in achievement, because it\u2019s the standardized test that our school uses and I also knew I\u2019d be able to get a lot of detailed data from that test. The pre-sustained silent reading data I used was the student\u2019s 7th grade SBAC scores and then the post data was the student\u2019s 8th grade scores. The independent variable of the study was SSR and the method was really simple. It was 20 minutes per week. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\nIt happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nPhilosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\nQuantitative Results<\/h2>\nThis chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n<\/p>\nLight blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\nAnd the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\nWorth mentioning:<\/p>\n\nstudents who loved reading at the beginning, they loved reading at the end. There wasn\u2019t any negative effect.<\/li>\nstudents who hated reading in the beginning, many of them loved reading in the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
It happened every Thursday and whenever the weather was nice, as you can see here, we went outside:<\/p>\n
Philosophies of sustained silent reading\u00a0were respected, specifically student choice and flexible pathways. If a student chose a book that he or she really didn\u2019t like, they were able to toss it aside and try something new. And that\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t often happen in the ELA classroom. Generally they\u2019re kind of stuck to that book, especially if it\u2019s part of the core curriculum and we\u2019re all reading it together as a class.<\/p>\n
This chart represents the average score for each question on that Garfield survey focused on recreational reading:<\/p>\n
Light blue bars represent the average response before sustained silent reading\u00a0and the dark blue represent after\u00a0sustained silent reading. As you can see, every single question went up.<\/p>\n
And the increase for the overall score was an increase of 7.357 which might not sound substantial but on a one to four Likert Scale and only ten questions, that\u2019s pretty powerful. I was able to determine that after sustained silent reading, participants had an increased attitude toward recreational reading.<\/p>\n
Worth mentioning:<\/p>\n
This is the second part of the Garfield survey, focused on academic reading:<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nSame thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\nAs I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Same thing, light blue represents pre-SSR, dark blue is post-SSR. As you can see, every single question went up. The increase was a little bit smaller but still, a 6.286 increase.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned before, the creators of that Garfield survey created a percentile chart and they came up with a method for teachers to be able to assess all of their students and then determine their overall classroom percentile rank. Before sustained silent reading, my overall class percentile rank was the 20th percentile, which is fairly low. After SSR, the overall class percentile was 66 which is a massive jump.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\nQualitative Results<\/h2>\nIn the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n\nself-perception<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at school)<\/li>\nmotivation to read (at home)<\/li>\npast experiences with reading<\/li>\nstudents\u2019 mindset toward reading (Do they think, you know, can they get better or do they feel like they\u2019re locked into that category of bad reader?)<\/li>\nself advocacy (Do they understand their needs as readers and their own interests?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThis table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
It\u2019s also worth mentioning: research has tended to show\u00a0that students’ negative attitudes toward reading increase as they get older, but this particular data is antithetic to that trend.<\/p>\n
In the face-to-face conversations with my students, six themes emerged:<\/p>\n
This table represents\u00a0the themes before sustained silent reading:<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nThe red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\nEffect on Academic Achievement<\/h2>\nMy goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The red bars are negative comments and the green bars are positive comments. So for example, if a student said, \u201cI love to go home and read a good book before I go to bed,\u201d they would get a positive score for motivation to read at home. If a student says something like, \u201cI\u2019m horrible at reading and I\u2019ll never be good at reading,\u201d they would get a negative score for mindset.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to really capture the shift through data like this. But from working with my students, from sitting down with a student who told me, \u201cI suck at reading, I\u2019m not going to like this class, I\u2019m going to be honest right at the beginning,\u201d to seeing that same student huddled up with a book, asking me if he can bring it home over summer? That\u2019s a big change. And that really can\u2019t be captured in the data.<\/p>\n
My goal was to bring sustained silent reading\u00a0to the school, not just my classroom. I wanted to see how students\u2019 scores on the SBAC changed. So before SSR when students took the SBAC, the population that I studied, 40.7 of them received a level 1 score. Which is a big deal. I needed to definitely pay attention to that at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
As you can see over here, after SSR, only 7.4 students received a one and out of the current total population, that was two students in total. \u00a0There was a massive<\/em> shift in student achievement. I know that the SBAC\u00a0isn\u2019t perfect but this is data to demonstrate that student achievement has increased. It\u2019s also worth mentioning that every single scale score increased for every single student on the SBAC\u00a0after sustained silent reading.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nAll data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\nSave<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
All data aside, the biggest thing is teacher\u2019s intuition. As I said before, I feel that I am now surrounded by skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers. Even though middle school is a little bit chaotic, I think that sustained silent reading\u00a0has made my job that much better.<\/p>\n
Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\nContinue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
How student choice can support literacy English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?” Warnecke examined the effect of sustained silent reading on the engagement and achievement of her students. She surveyed her students and helped them set aside time during the day to read whatever they … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Can sustained silent reading help reluctant readers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":11998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[89,580,629,631],"class_list":["post-11929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-literacy","tag-mgc","tag-poultney-middle-school","tag-sustained-silent-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11929"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31517,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11929\/revisions\/31517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"sustained](\"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/action_research.jpg\")
<\/a>English teacher\u00a0Laela Warnecke\u00a0set out to answer one question: “How might sustained silent reading impact 8th graders?”<\/p>\n![\"Action](\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/oSW7a9Z9CkE\/maxresdefault.jpg\")