Scaffolding Middle School Students’ Comprehension and Response to Short Stories

Abstract

Teaching narrative text selections is an important part of the middle grades English curriculum. As middle grades educators search for ways to best support their students’ reading, it is important to consider carefully the effects of various approaches to teaching literature. This study focused on the two most popular approaches to teaching literature, the cognitive-oriented and reader-response approaches, and compared the effects each approach has on students’ comprehension and response to a narrative text. Specifically, the study examined the results on 85 sixth grade students’ comprehension and response to literature when they were taught stories using a reader-response approach and when using a more cognitive-oriented approach. To compare the two methods, each was operationalized in a Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE), an instructional framework designed to foster students’ understanding and engagement with individual texts. Results showed that using a reader-response approach resulted in students’ achievement of reader-response tasks but not of cognitive-oriented tasks and that using a more cognitive-oriented approach produced the opposite result. Overall, the study suggests that teaching literature with a particular approach does affect students’ comprehension and response to text, and, thus, teachers should match their teaching approach with the outcome desired.