EDIT 7650: Recommendations and Reflections

Recommendations

Implications for practice

As a result of this study, I intend to make the following changes in my practice:

• I will try to persuade the teachers to incorporate more reading aloud – and reading aloud at length in their classroom practice.  Most of the students reported that they had not listened to or been read to for more than a brief period.  It may be possible to work with one of the local actors’ groups to get accomplished readers in to read to the students.
• I will look for more opportunities to read aloud to the students.
• While I will continue to try to find funding to add more audiobooks to my collection (since there is a substantial body of evidence in the literature that shows that it is beneficial), I will make sure that there are books to read along with the tape so that the students are more engaged.
• I have been hoping to create a book club to read and discuss books, but now I think I will structure it differently.  I had been planning to have the students read and then we would discuss the books, but most of my students prefer very short books and many of them have reading difficulties.  After observing the students’ response to reading aloud, I intend to use that in the book club.  I (or a designated reader) will read aloud to the students, rather than have them read themselves.  This will allow us to discuss books that are more complex than they can read themselves and, I hope, therefore more interesting to the students.

Educational Significance

As I stated in the introduction to this research, education in the real world is about making choices.  We will never have the budget or time to use all the interesting technologies and instructional strategies available to us.  It therefore behooves us to examine the available strategies and resources carefully so that we get the maximum educational return on our investment.  We must weigh the opportunity cost.  We must ask not only what works, but what works best, and more importantly, what works best for our children.

This research study started out to answer the question “What are the differences, if any, in student reading motivation between reading aloud and listening to audio tape for students at a small urban school in the Southeastern United States?”  I wanted to find out which of these techniques was most effective, or if there actually was a difference.  Audiotapes are expensive, but great conservers of teacher time; reading aloud is cheap in monetary terms but expensive in terms of time consumption.  In a modern school, so much is crammed into the average day that time is just as important as money.  Which method works best?

What I found was that in my school, with my students, reading aloud seems to work better than audiotapes, at least where reading motivation is concerned.  Further research would need to be done on other areas of reading instruction such as vocabulary, fluency etc.  It is always dangerous to generalize from a small sample, to “look for the general in the particular” (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2008) but I believe that this study has shown that teachers and librarians need to be aware that these two techniques may indeed result in different student responses.  They need to try out both methods in their own classroom and see which works best within their own constraints of money, time and student sophistication.

Reflections

          I have learned two things from my applied project.  The first, and most obvious, is that by doing this study I have learned something about what I set out to learn -- about the effects of reading aloud to students and the effects of allowing students to listen to audiobooks.  Along the way, I have also learned something about how students are taught to read. Although my study was limited – I only used six students and they are all similar in age and demographics – it taught me that students may react differently to these two methods.  This knowledge is directly applicable to my practice.
         More importantly, I have learned something about how research works.  Working my way through writing the literature review,  designing the study and then implementing it has given me an appreciation for the difficulties faced by other researchers and an understanding of the processes involved.  I had no idea that there were so many types of research: qualitative, quantitative, action, exploratory, etc.  I feel that now I can evaluate the research I encounter better.  I will use the skills I have obtained to better refine my practice as a media specialist.