Conferring with Students to Improve Their Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading comprehension is important because it is how readers understand and interpret what they read. Recently, reading conferences have resurfaced as a common instructional practice in elementary classrooms with the promise to improve reading outcomes. Existing research primarily emphasizes the teacher’s instructional strategies and student engagement behaviors rather than the impact on reading comprehension. This study aims to fill that gap by exploring the effectiveness of weekly reading conferences in improving second-grade students’ comprehension skills. The research question is, how does conferring with second-grade students on a weekly basis improve their reading comprehension as measured by asking questions and observations? To answer this question students were given two comprehension assessments as baseline data, the AimsWeb+ Reading Comprehension assessment and the CORE Reading Maze assessment. For eight weeks, the researcher met with each student individually to discuss the text they were reading, ask comprehension questions, and set a goal for them to work on. At the end of the eight weeks, the students took the AimsWeb+ Reading Comprehension assessment and the CORE Reading Maze assessment a second time. According to those two measures, the majority of the students showed a decrease in their reading comprehension, which focused on their ability to answer questions. However, looking at anecdotal notes, students found success in their comprehension in their ability to retell and summarize. This study would be beneficial to educators and administrators looking to evaluate the effectiveness of current conferring practices and to inform the design of targeted interventions and professional development.