Measuring Reader Confidence

This is part 4 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.

So I thought that I would try to measure this process as thoroughly as possible.  Obviously I’ll want to do it by measuring students’ abilities to read increasingly difficult texts, but simply testing kids with comprehension questions and observations of their annotations would leave out one of the most important factors – their sense of their own comprehension skills.  Since the problem is really students’ inability to confront difficult texts with the skills and the confidence to work through the reading, it seemed to me that I should measure the more subjective aspect of comfort with texts.  So I asked the kids how they felt about the texts I was giving them after a brief pre-reading skim. 

            Let me be clear about this.  I usually hate these kinds of things.  I’ve never found much use for interest surveys in reading workshops and I’ve never been able to use learning style tests.  It turns out that most kids would rather talk and have hands-on experiences.  No shit.  But I’m interested in the power of confidence and I wanted to know whether or not this methodology improved students’ senses of their reading abilities along with their more objectively-measured abilities.  So I just asked them how they felt and I’ll do it again from time to time. 

            Basically, I showed them the articles and said something along the lines of “If I asked you to read this and then we were going to do something that you needed to know it, how would you feel?”  Not terribly scientific.  I even neglected to survey my smallest class, from which 3 of my target students are drawn.  But that’s the day to day of being a teacher.  We had other things going on.  Their responses were limited to the 4 possibilities listed.  You can make what you want to out of these numbers.  The Stop & Frisk articles were part of my initial preassessment for the year, tied to a writing task.  They were the first things students got from me.  The Poe came about 7 or 8 classes later, after students had been introduced to the annotation method but hadn’t really seen it in action.  I’ll post a full bit on those lessons later.

            Hopefully, I can finish this introductory unit and reward kids with some more Poe – maybe “Tell-tale Heart” – because they loved “Masque.”  When I hand it to them, I’ll ask them the same question and get their response.  Hopefully, the numbers go up. 

New York Times Stop & Frisk articles

104 students surveyed

Very uncertain – 27  (26%)

Uncertain – 43  (41%)

OK with it – 28  (27%)

Comfortable – 6  (6%)

Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”

102 students surveyed

Very uncertain – 58  (57%)

Uncertain – 36  (35%)

Ok with it – 6  (6%)

Comfortable – 2  (2%)