Building a Science of Teaching Reading and Vocabulary: Experimental Effects of Structured Supplements for a Read Aloud Lesson on Third Graders’ Domain-Specific Reading Comprehension

ABSTRACT

Purpose

This study contributes to the science of teaching reading and vocabulary by illustrating how a ubiquitous classroom practice – read alouds – can be enhanced by structured supplements. This experimental study examines whether and to what extent providing structured supplements can improve student comprehension outcomes by helping teachers foster discussions about academic vocabulary that support schema transfer as students make connections between known and new topics.

Method

A total of 80 third-grade teachers and their students (N = 965; 32% Black, 31% Hispanic, 25% white, 9 Asian, 48% Male) were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Treatment students received a single social studies read aloud on the story of Apollo 11 with structured supplements while control students received the same read aloud story but without structured supplements. Students were from linguistically, economically, and ethnically diverse backgrounds.

Results

Effect sizes from hierarchical linear models indicated that students in the treatment condition outperformed students in the control condition on four measures of domain-specific reading comprehension: recall (ES = .17), near-transfer (ES = .17), mid-transfer (ES = .18), and content comprehension (ES = .18). Further exploratory analyses using structural equation modeling revealed that teacher language scaffolds – that is, temporary dialogic supports in which teachers went above and beyond the intervention script – explained 66% of the treatment effect on domain-specific reading comprehension.

Conclusion

Results from this study suggest that read alouds, when enhanced with structured supplements designed to facilitate schema transfer, can increase the amount of academic vocabulary teachers use during classroom instruction and improve their students’ ability to comprehend disciplinary texts.

Acknowledgments

We thank the teachers and students for their participation in this study. We also thank Joshua B. Gilbert, Ethan Scherer, Mary A. Burkhauser, Jackie E. Relyea, and Johanna Tvedt for their insights and expertise as well as Taylor Harrison for her transcriptions of the audio recordings and assistance coding the transcripts.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Data availability statement

The data set associated with this paper will be provided at a later date along with analysis code https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/LUKGIA.

Ethics

The Internal Review Board at Harvard University approved this study. All participants gave informed consent prior to inclusion in the study.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2368145

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Effect sizes based on standardized outcome variables are conservative because they do not adjust for measurement error. The following calculation, $\frac{\mathit{ES}}{\surd \mathit{\alpha }}$ gives the unbiased estimate (Gilbert, 2023; Hedges, 1981). Recall ES = .21; near-transfer ES = .19; mid-transfer ES = .21; content comprehension ES = .19.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the funding agency.