Student Engagement:
Reading comprehension is seldom a classroom activity that is anticipated with excitement, nor is it typically a captivating assignment that students enjoy completing. As an ELA teacher, it is my obligation to create and instruct engaging lessons for all subject matter; rather than reserving creative approaches to literature for smaller tasks, such as a film study and maintain traditional approaches of paper quizzes for reading comprehension, I decided to integrate engaging material into reading comprehension test preparation as well.
DERs provide an imaginative and engaging medium for students to practice reading comprehension skills and strategies. This operates both on the level of student interest in reading as well as using a "game" to create interesting learning material.
It is important to note that I did not conduct any tests to see if implementing DERs improved students' reading comprehension test scores, as I did not do any formal studies of students before and after completing DERs. Rather, this portion of inquiry was to find a way to better engage students in reading comprehension material/preparation.
Interest:
In a study of Korean adolescents, Bong Gee Jang and Ji Hoon Ryoo find that "reading attitudes significantly predicted reading comprehension scores (Jang & Ryoo, 2018, p. 1769). Implementing engaging reading comprehension instructional methods begins with addressing attitudes towards reading. My class consists of a range of readers, from students who choose to read at home for entertainment and educational purposes, and students to pretend to read during silent reading time; some students find regular reading comprehension engaging, and others find it dull and draining. I see it as my job to spark interest in the latter category of students, while challenging the former.
Initial work to maintain positive attitudes towards reading and literature was developed daily in my classroom. This included daily silent reading (culminating in a Book Talk) as well as open discussions about literature relevant to them. Having students read daily immerses them in their choice of fictional literature; while this will culminate in a summative assessment of its own, it also provided students with the opportunity to choose their own literature that they like, based on topics and themes that they personally enjoy. Having open discussions about literature also allows students to contemplate important, and quite often controversial, topics that affect their lives. Students were able to connect real life issues with literature, therefore creating relevant and intriguing connections to written literature. This was exemplified when discussing race, disability, and mental health when completing our novel study on Pamela Porter's The Crazy Man.
Creating a DER turns reading into an adventure. Students become “book detectives” and gives students who prefer science/math subjects due to their empirical nature a fresh outlook on literature. Having students go through a DER as opposed to recycling old reading comprehension tests time after time also gives students a low pressure way to explore necessary skills. It is important to note that I did implement DERs alongside old PAT questions as formative quizzes in order to provide context into actual PAT questions and test situations. While I did not have time to create an escape room based around past PAT questions, this is a strategy that could be implemented to enhance interest among students.
Games as Education:
"[a]s we reimagine English and language arts curricula to engage with the texts and literacies of our times, games occupy an important place as challenging but important hybrid textual forms that are inextricably linked with action. Indeed, they are embodiments of multiliteracies and richly intertextual sites for learning and play." (Beavis, 2014, p. 439).
Providing students with a chance to explore literature moves ELA out of books and papers and into a world of imaginative learning. Not only are students reading, but they are also doing as well. In Catherine Beavis's "Video Games in the English Classroom," video games are used as an exploratory way to navigate twenty-first century literacies. Not only do students develop reading comprehension skills, but digital literacy skills as well.
While DERs are far from a complex technology (a simple PowerPoint with hyperlinks), students must be able to navigate this technology in order to decipher the literature in front of them. Furthermore, creating DERs is just a way of simply making literature fun for students, which undoubtedly aids in their attitudes towards reading.