Module 1: Article and Book Analysis

As I was reading the text and the article, I was extremely drawn to the part in the text about RTI or response to intervention. I recently had the opportunity to go to a data team training through my county. In data teams we categorize our students into categories of how well they understand a concept. The fabulous part about it is being able to see the growth of students throughout the year. When we see, from the data, that students are not understanding the material, we implement interventions. This is what was mentioned in the text. I love seeing that we've got it right and are incorporating important aspects of reading for our students.
Since I am a kindergarten teacher, it is important to take into consideration the stages of reading as well. Since we have students that come in on all levels, we must take into account that some students may not have attended school before. They may be early emergent or emergent literacy. We must take their levels into consideration, differentiating as necessary.
The article I found was on comprehension and direct instruction. Since we incorporate direct instruction at my school, I am very interesting in the results it returns. According to the article, direct instruction improves reading comprehension. The awesome part of the program that we use is that it puts students exactly on their levels and allows for differentiation. This is where I really saw the book and the article tie together. Direct instruction gives us the data we need to find out the levels of students, see how they are responding to the instruction, and implement an intervention if necessary.

The effects of cooperative learning and direct instruction in reading comprehension strategies on main idea identification.

Stevens, Robert J.; Slavin, Robert E.; Farnish, Anna M.

Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 83(1), Mar 1991, 8-16. doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.8