RT Research

Reciprocal Teaching Research

When used for 15-20 days, two to three times per week, students' reading comprehension increased from 30% to 70-80%.
Reciprocal teaching is considered a multiple strategy approach since all four strategies must be used/included in each session to yield best results.
Research indicates strong readers employ more than one strategy at a time as they read. Once introduced it's possible to teach minilessons that focus on strengthening each strategy indpendently.
When students are encouraged and taught to ask questions as they read, their comprehension deepens. When students know prior to reading that they need to think of a question about the text, they read with awareness of text's important ideas.
Rosenshine and Meister (1994) reviewed 16 studies of reciprocal teaching and concluded that it improves comprehension.
Reciprocal Teaching techniques are especially effective when incorporated into intervention programs for struggling readers and when used with low-performing students in urban settings (Cooper, 2000 & Carter, 1997).
Although designed for small-group instruction with struggling middle school students, Reciprocal Teaching has been shown to yield positive, consistent results with primary and upper grade elementary students taught in large-group, teacher-led settings and peer groups.
Reciprocal Teaching yields positive growth in reading comprehension for ELLs who often experience comprehension problems due to vocabulary load and background experiences.
Researchers credit English Language Learners (ELLs) success to reciprocal teaching instruction that utilizes students' native languages in tandem with collaborative learning opportunities with peers and cross-age tutors.
Students not only improve their reading level but also retain more of the material covered in the text.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development says Reciprocal Teaching is an effective practice that is recommended to improve reading comprehension with all types of text.
Lubliner (2001) says Reciprocal Teaching is an effective teaching techniques to improve comprehension via Internet.
Success stories and student growth are based on students participates in Reciprocal Teaching lessons two or more times per week.
Grades 2-5: Improved comprehension and overall reading level across the entire school. Lowest readers showed 3-4 years' growth. Readers who were on or above grade level also showed significant improvement.
Grades 4-8: Student engagement improved to 80% during independent daily reading and fake reading decreased.
Grade 6: After 20 days of RT, the experimental group dramatically improved their oral language proficiency with an effect size of +1.09 and general reading progress with an effect size .66.
Reciprocal teaching also showed statistically significant improvement in the writing proficiency of students.
Research indicates that monitoring is an important strategy that distinguishes strong readers. Clarifying helps students monitor their comprehension as they identify problems, misunderstandings and the meaning of new and unfamiliar words.
Practice in summarizing improves students' reading of fiction and informational text alike, helping them construct an overall understanding of a text, story, chapter or article.
Reciprocal teaching relies on research-based think-alouds that improve comprehension.
Cooperative learning:
1. When students engage in purposeful talk with one another, they expand their thinking about a text.
2. Cooperative learning serves as a way for students to deepen their reading comprehension, especially in content area texts.
3. Researchers have found that RT helps students retain content-area material.

Page updated

Report abuse