Researching and Reflecting in the Classroom
How does silent sustained reading and blogging on the web affect reading comprehension skills?
In my current eighth-grade Language Arts classroom I researched and monitored the effects of a silent sustained reading program on students’ reading comprehension skills. Sixty-eight students participated in a silent sustained reading program which consisted of ten minutes of silent reading at the beginning of each Language Arts class. Students were able to select their own independent reading novels and were required to read an additional twenty minutes each night. Another component of the study involved a class blog, which fostered communication about each student’s individual reading novel. Students were required to respond to two blog postings describing their novel and describing which character they would like to be and explaining why they made that decision. Collected data involved student responses to the blog, student interviews, as well as STAR and Accelerated Reader tests. At the completion of the study, it was determined that the ten minutes of silent reading did in fact slightly improve students’ reading comprehension abilities.