Andrea Boykin

 

Government mandates and recent state and national standards require students, regardless of their ability levels, to access and make progress towards specific standards (Thurlow & Quenemoen, 2011).  Although these standards often include literacy skills, including reading and writing, these skills are not limited to the language arts or reading classrooms.  Specific standards to require students to demonstrate specific competencies in reading in writing in content areas including science and social studies, which can be very difficult for at-risk students and students with disabilities who have underlying issues with reading and writing.  Students with disabilities require specific supports and strategies to access and be successful with the literacy components in the content areas.  Interventions are required to support students in areas of content literacy, and experimental methods are needed to determine the impact of the intervention on the content literacy of at-risk students and students with disabilities.

Content literacy is the ability to read, write, understand and interpret informational texts typically in content areas including science, social studies and mathematics (Klein, 2008).  Many students, especially at-risk students and students with high incidence disabilities, have difficulty understanding and writing within the content areas (Seifert & Epstein, 2012).  Since most text in secondary and post-secondary school settings are informational texts and students are required to read and write about the content, it is important for students in primary grades to increase their content literacy skills in order to be successful in classes in the upper grade levels, as well as after graduation.  Although the text structure and content of science and social studies classes can be difficult for at-risk and students with high incidence disabilities, specific content literacy supports and strategies can help students increase their understanding of this content.

Although students are required to read and write about content area topics, which are often associated with informational texts, most text presented within the lower primary grade levels are narrative texts, with informational texts as the least accessed and taught within the primary grade levels (Duke, 2000).  Fifty percent of texts on standardized assessments require students to answer questions based on informational text in the fourth grade; however, seventy five percent in the 8^th grade (Moss, 2005), demonstrating a sharp increase in the type of text used in standardized assessments as grade levels increase, although a limited amount of instructional time is spent teaching content literacy with these texts (Jeong, Gaffney, Choi, 2010).  The increase of the use of informational text in upper elementary grades is often associated with the drop in achievement levels as student’s transition from primary to secondary school (Chall, 1983).  The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) also reports a drop in scores in some content areas, including social studies, from grade four to grade eight.  Without specific strategies to help students read, write, and understand content in primary grade levels through the incorporation of information texts and content literacy strategies to understand this text, students not only lack the skills to access and be successful within their current grade level, but will also lack the appropriate foundation to understand informational texts in the upper grade levels (Chall, 1983).

Content literacy can be supported by the incorporation of literacy strategies through the use of informational text and specific strategies to access and create products about this text.  However, very few teachers incorporate content literacy strategies in their teaching in primary and secondary contexts (Fisher & Ivey, 2005).  Conversely, national content specific learning standards require students to write within these content areas. Specifically for the area of science and social studies, the National Science Teacher Association, National Social Studies Teacher Association, and the Common Core standards require students as young as the third grade to write explanatory, informational or position papers to demonstrate their understanding of the content (NSTA, 2013; NSSTA; 2010; CCS, 2014 ).

Students of varying ability levels, including students with high incidence disabilities, are required to make progress towards these standards. In addition, specific state and national assessments require writing tasks, including the creation of sentences, paragraphs, and essays, that are related to both narrative and informational texts (Kulikowich, Mason, Brown, 2008). However students with high incidence disabilities often have difficulty in content literacy due to underlying challenges in reading, including de-coding, comprehension, and vocabulary, and writing.  Specifically for expository writing related to content literacy, students with disabilities write fewer words, have greater grammatical errors, and fewer complete sentences.   The difficulties of constructing essays and presenting the information in a coherent manner may prevent students at-risk and students with disabilities from accurately demonstrating knowledge on state assessments as well as increasing their understanding of the content material.

According to NAEP, students with disabilities perform lower on national standards in reading as well as the content areas of science and social studies in comparison to their peers without disabilities.  The 2013 NAEP fourth grade reading assessment, reports that the national reading average of students with disabilities is 184, well below the reading proficiency score of 250, compared to students without disabilities, whose average reading score is 227.  For content areas, students with disabilities and students without disabilities scored 124 and 155 respectively in the area of science and 134 and 160 in social studies. Students with disabilities also performed lower than students without disabilities on the NAEP writing assessment with an average score of 113 compared to 154.   Since these assessments require student to read and comprehend informational texts as well as construct short responses, the deficits that students with disabilities exhibit in reading and writing may demonstrate the difficulty students with disabilities have accessing the content material due to cognitive deficits which impact their reading and writing in the content areas.

To access and be successful within these standards, students will require specific strategies embedded in core content areas to increase their content literacy.  Supports that help students comprehend and organize information as well as specific strategy instruction can increase content literacy by providing support for the reading and writing tasks required in content area courses.    According to current research, content area lessons that embed supports including graphic organizers and self-regulation strategies can support the student’s access of the content area curriculum. Several research studies have effectively incorporated strategy instruction and graphic organizers to support the content literacy, including reading and writing, of of students with disabilities in the content areas of social studies and science (De La Paz, 2005; De La Paz, 2013; Dollins, 2012).  These studies were successful in helping students with high incidence disabilities, including emotional disturbances and learning disabilities, make progress towards grade level material within content areas. However, additional research is required to determine evidence based practices that increase content literacy for students with disabilities.

To study the impact of strategies to increase the content literacy of at-risk students and students with disabilities, intervention research through the use of experimental research methods is required.  Experimental research methods, including single subject and group experimental research, allows for the manipulation of variables to determine causation.   In using an experimental design, a baseline measure of content literacy could be obtained, the intervention could be systematically introduced, and then content literacy could be measured again.  This would determine the impact of the intervention on the student’s content literacy, as measured by specific instruments.

Prior to the implementation of the intervention, the intervention must be developed based on previous research that has supported literacy skills of students with disabilities.  In addition, since content literacy is a broad term, the specific aspects of content literacy that are supported by the intervention must be identified,  constructs for these components should be developed, and then appropriate instruments to measure these constructs of content literacy should be obtained, modified, or created.  It is important for the instrument used to be a quality measure that measures the specific construct, and for the instrument to be directly linked to the information taught in the intervention to demonstrate the causal relationship between the results and the variable.  Considering the needs of students with disabilities, appropriate measures for content literacy could include curriculum based multiple choice questions paired with a content interview and developed rubrics that are sensitive enough to demonstrate growth.

In addition to experimental research methods as a way to study content literacy interventions, qualitative methods, although not able to determine causality, could provide important information regarding the process of reading and writing as related to content literacy.  Student interviews could provide important information about the process that the students used while utilizing the intervention to access content material.   The information gained through interviews about the process of reading and writing could provide important information to explain how the intervention supported student access and learning, could highlight specific parts of the intervention that impacted the students, and could provide understanding to the process the students took that supported their learning.

References

 

Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of reading development. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

 

De La Paz, S. (2005).  Effects of historical reasoning instruction and writing strategy mastery in culturally and academically diverse middle school classrooms.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 139-156.  doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.97.2.139

 

Duke, N. K. (2000). 3.6 minutes per day: The scarcity of informational texts in first grade. Reading Research Quarterly, 35, 202-224. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.35.2.1

 

Fisher, D., & Ivey, G. (2005). Literacy and language as learning in content area classes: A departure from “every teacher a teacher of reading.” Action in Teacher Education, 27, 3–11. doi: 10.1080/01626620.2005.10463378

 

Jeong, J., Gaffney J., Choi, J. (2010). Availability and use of informational texts in second, third, and fourth grade classrooms.  Research in the Teaching of English, 44, 435-456.

 

Kulikowich, Mason, Brown (2007).  Evaluating fifth and sixth grade students’ expository writing: task development, scoring, and psychometric issues.  Reading and Writing, 21, 153-175. doi: 10.1007/s11145-007-9068-8

 

Moss, B. (2005). Making a case and a place for effective content area literacy instruction in the elementary grades. The Reading Teacher, 59, 46-55. doi: 10.1598/RT.59.1.5

 

U.S. Department of Education (2010) Civics assessment. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved May 10, 2014 from http://nationsreportcard.gov/

 

U.S. Department of Education (2010) Science assessment. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved May 10, 2014 from http://nationsreportcard.gov/

 

U.S. Department of Education (2011) Writing assessment. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved May 10, 2014 from http://nationsreportcard.gov/

 

U.S. Department of Education (2013) Reading assessment. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved May 10, 2014 from http://nationsreportcard.gov/