Teaching reading strategies in history lessons: A micro-level analysis of professional development training and its practical challenges

Abstract

Reading comprehension is an important skill in secondary education, yet many history teachers find it difficult to provide adequate reading strategy instruction. In this study, we designed a digital learning environment to support teachers' instruction of reading strategies based on student data. We provided history teachers in the experimental conditions with a visualisation of student performance data. Additionally, these teachers received professional development (PD) training and a guiding manual on how to translate these data into structured, explicit reading strategy instruction. Teachers in the control condition were only provided with basic data. We investigated teachers' personal experiences through micro-level analysis of qualitative interview data. Our results show that teachers in the experimental condition improved the variation of their strategy instruction and used modelling behaviour more often after the PD training. However, we also identified multiple contextual implementation barriers that provided us with important suggestions for future practiceoriented educational research.

Development of the Reading Comprehension Strategies Questionnaire (RCSQ) for late elementary school students

“…Empirical studies on reading strategy use have already focused on different target groups (e.g., children with autism; Jackson and Hanline, 2019 ; English Foreign Language learners; Habók and Magyar, 2019 ), in various subject domains (e.g., English language course; Shih et al, 2018 ; history; ter Beek et al, 2019 ), and at different educational levels (e.g., university level; Phakiti, 2008 ; secondary school students; Habók and Magyar, 2019 ). These studies mainly focus on reading strategy instruction (e.g., ter Beek et al, 2019 ) or on the relationship between reading strategy use and comprehension (e.g., Muijselaar et al, 2017 ). In this respect, good comprehenders appear to handle the use of strategies more strategically and effectively ( Wang, 2016 ; Zhang, 2018b ).…”

Relationships between adolescent students’ reading skills, historical content knowledge and historical reasoning ability

“…And, as Cheung and Slavin (2012) state, the use of technology to support and facilitate teachers' instruction is probably more effective than the use of technology in itself. However, teachers did not integrate the texts from the DLE with their regular curriculum, nor did they provide elaborate reading strategy instruction to their students during lesson observations (ter Beek et al, 2019). Nevertheless, future research could control for the possible influence of classroom instruction by including quantified observations of teachers' instructional practices as a background variable.…”

Benefits of business conference participation for Australian SME managers: a case study of a belt and road initiative conference

“…TPD programs have long been associated closely with professions as part of the requirements for continuous professional education. Studies focusing on TPD within the context of professions are quite plenty, such as TPD for teachers (Catalano et al , 2020; Dilshad et al , 2019; Erickson et al , 2017; ter Beek et al , 2019) or nurses (Black et al , 2019; Holloway et al , 2018; Welp et al , 2018). Studies on TPD within the business sector are also quite abundant, but they have predominantly focused on large-sized organizations (Cardon and Valentin, 2017; Short and Gray, 2018; Tam and Gray, 2016).…”