| Abstract: | The research in the area of metacognition has dealt initially with developing a theoretical framework which includes the influence of the learner's strategic awareness of the four variables of text, task, strategies, and the learner's characteristics. Recent research in this domain has focused on instructional designs such as the reciprocal teaching method. The current study explored the efficacy of the reciprocal teaching method in producing reading achievement gains in decoding and comprehending when it is used with third graders who vary in both comprehension and decoding ability. The study involved twenty third graders from a low SES, rural community. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: 1) control, 2) decoding only, 3) comprehension only, and 4) decoding and comprehension. Each group received twenty minutes of intervention on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week for a total of twenty interventions. The pre- and posttests consisted of equivalent passages selected from an informal reading inventory (Longnion, 1982). These passages are expository in nature and are approximately three to four hundred words in length. The reliability coefficient of equivalent forms is a .92, and the comprehension questions following each passage have a reliability of .76. Students' decoding and comprehension performance on their instructional level was measured pre- and post-instruction. An analysis of covariance procedure with pretest as covariate was used to address the questions under examination. Additional post hoc analyses were conducted by means of Scheffe. Data analysis revealed a significant effect of reciprocal teaching in comprehension on decoding performance. There was no significant effect of reciprocal teaching in comprehension on comprehension. Also, no significant effects were found for reciprocal teaching in decoding on decoding. |
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