Abstract
Teaching reading comprehension strategies in elementary education has long been a topic of interest and concern due to the staggering number of illiterate and challenged readers in the United States. There has been extensive research (Palincsar & Brown, 1987, Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997) done on best methods as well as pedagogies such as reciprocal teaching and transactional strategies, yet the problem persists. One of the most commonly used methods of checking for comprehension is questioning. Adjunct questions dating back to the 1960s are typically found at the end of the text and used with the intent of assisting learning. This is also the type of questions found on many standardized tests. The problem however, is that decoding words when reading does not transfer into comprehension of the text's meaning. This action research will evaluate the effectiveness of using summarizing versus questioning on reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is an area that many elementary students struggle with. Specifically, we will examine the effects of using questioning and summarizing strategies to improve the reading comprehension of20 third grade students in an urban, low-performing school. These strategies will be taught and used separately in order to compare the results and determine the most effective intervention to increase reading comprehension. Working with low performing students, we have noticed that a major obstacle in success at school is centered on reading comprehension. If we could evaluate different strategies for teaching reading comprehension, we could then teach our students to be effective comprehenders and over-all readers. The major question we are examining is: How does summarizing versus questioning impact reading comprehension in a third grade urban classroom? The action research produced here evaluated the effectiveness of using Summarizing versus Questioning on reading comprehension. This study was undertaken because reading comprehension is an area that many elementary students struggle with. Specifically, the effects of using Summarizing and Questioning strategies to improve the reading comprehension of 20 third grade students in an urban, low-performing school were examined. Based upon the parameters of the given assessments, the Summarizing strategy proved to be more effective in improving reading comprehension than the Questioning strategy.