Collaborative learning for reading enterprises

In order to understand reading in collaborative settings, first reading comprehension needs to be defined. However, in the current state of reading a definition is being

created to include our new understandings of online activity. Therefore, this thesis work adopts the accepted definition of reading, which has been delineated for offline reading environments, while including a more recent proposal. After this, a review of the literature of collaborative online reading will be exposed here to finally situate SOLE and its study in the context of research.

2.4.2.1 A definition of reading

A definition of reading comprehension is as elusive as the act of comprehending. Reading has morphed over time to reflect the historical tendencies, advances and policy reform in education (Pearson, 2014). It has been described in behavioural, cognitive and constructivist terms (Ertmer and Newby, 1993), and in more recent years, it has evolved to include new tendencies in computer literacy and online reading enterprises (Coiro, 2014). Reading is a dynamic construct influenced by sociocultural and political changes and expectations.

Influence by constructivist views, The RAND Reading Study Group (2001) defines reading as “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through

35

interaction and involvement with written language” (p. 11). However, cautioning the importance and insufficiency of the text, authors explain that it is the job of the reader to extract and construct meaning based on the reader’s abilities, implying that text interpretation depends on reader, activity, and context. This definition of reading encompasses three concepts: the reader, the text and the activity in which reading occurs, while these three concepts are influenced by the sociocultural context (See Figure 2.1). However, with the insertion of the Internet in everyday life, the work place, the classroom and other contexts, a new definition is emerging to include the constant changes in the understanding of literacy (Kiili et al., 2009; Leu et al., 2017).

Figure 2.1 A heuristic for thinking about reading comprehension (RAND Reading Study Group, 2001)

New Literacies (uppercase) and new literacies (lowercase) is a recently proposed solution to track the changing landscape of literacy (Leu et al., 2017). Lowercase new literacies refer to all research areas exploring emergent literacies and technologies. In this way, new literacies allow for the rapid track of new theories, discoveries and

approaches to literacy. In contrast, uppercase New Literacies track the common findings of the multiple new literacies in order to determine patters and commonalities. This enables new literacies to maintain their perspective while keeping track of the fast- changing landscape in literacy. In the face of upper and lowercase new literacies, online reading is defined from the two components of online activity: research and

comprehension. Online research and comprehension encompasses some of the features of the definition of offline reading to then include complex new features. For this, online research and comprehension become a better term when referring to online work, which is defined as follows:

36

“The new literacies of online research and comprehension include the skills, strategies, dispositions, and social practices necessary to successfully use and adapt to the rapidly changing information and communication technologies and contexts that continuously emerge and influence all areas of our personal and professional lives. Online research and comprehension is a self-directed process of constructing texts and knowledge while engaged in several online reading practices: identifying important problems, locating information, critically evaluating information, synthesizing information, and communicating

information. Online research and comprehension can take place individually, but often appears to be enhanced when it takes place collaboratively” (Leu et al., 2017, p. 7)

In this study, reader is defined as an individual and/or group of students who read together to extract and construct meaning from offline texts and in online research to solve questions, in which participants contribute with their own cognitive abilities, motivation, knowledge, experiences and ability to collaborate. The group negotiates text/information meaning to comprehend, making comprehension dependent upon reader, text, shape of the activity, context, time and space in which the activity happens. For the purposes of this study, the reader was defined as a group of fourth-graders of New York City sometimes reading together and sometimes alone, where meaning emerges when these groups engage in collaboration.

The RRSG (2001) points out that text features impact comprehension in different ways. Text in this study referred sometimes to printed passages (i.e. offline texts) and other times to texts found online as the reader navigates the Internet (i.e. online texts). Offline texts were limited to those provided in the study while online texts were of the

participants’ choice. Then, text features ranged from the common features found in offline informational texts (e.g. headings, bold words, captions, and illustrations) to the vast features of texts found online (e.g. hyperlinks in addition to all the above) when readers conducted research. These differentiated features impacted reading by changing how readers approach the act of reading.

Activity consists of three components: purpose, operations and outcomes (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). In this study, activities were the two research conditions of participation: reading individually offline texts and reading in groups offline texts and on the Internet for answering questions. Finally, the context in this study refers to two different situations: first, two classrooms in New York City that were adult

supervised but unaided. That is, the adult ensured participants’ safety, but she refrained from providing instruction, intervention or support. The second context was the

37

images, hyperlinks, personal accounts and explanations of texts, and distractors such as advertisement, offers of social media links and many other features influencing the context to be navigated and comprehended by the reader. In brief, reading

comprehension in this study depended upon reader, text, activity, sociocultural and Internet contexts. Participants navigated individually and in groups through offline and the Internet to answer questions.

2.4.2.2 Reading in peer-mediated settings

In the research review of peer collaboration for reading activities, it is important to mark the distinction between reading offline as opposed to reading in online settings, since the definitions between these two activities clearly expose substantial differences. In this review, studies geared towards collaboration in offline reading activities are presented first, then studies that include collaboration in new literacies settings are discussed.

Influence by constructivist and social theories (Pearson, 2014), peer collaboration for offline reading has shown to support improvement of student’s reading abilities, and a variety of programs are found in the literature (Murphy et al., 2009). For instance, Palinscar and Brown (1984) developed a reading program in which the teacher uses questions and teaches reading strategies to prepare students for group reading. Similarly, Rojas-Drummond and colleagues (Rojas-Drummond and Mercer, 2003; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2008; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2014) found that students improved reading skills as a consequence of teacher direct instruction and collaborative group reading. This and other similar programs have proven effective, and a

proliferation of research in this area is observed in the last 30 years.

Research in group reading activities has brought attention to the careful selection of materials such as books and reading comprehension questions (Stevens et al., 1991; Rojas-Drummond et al., 1998; Trickey and Topping, 2004; Castek et al., 2012; Henry et al., 2012). For example, some studies have used questions as leading prompts to elicit reading comprehension in students, while others believe books, computer software, and the Internet are important elements to consider in group reading. Nonetheless, these studies have failed to report the actual influence of these materials on student collaboration and academic achievement.

38

A short but important list of studies has focused on the impact of reading at different text complexity levels. Morgan, Wilcox, and Eldredge (2000) studied the level of complexity that would benefit struggling readers the most when reading with a more capable peer during dyad situations. Readers were first trained on how to collaborate, then for 95 hours of a school year, they read in dyads under one of three conditions: reading at instructional reading level, reading two grades above instructional reading level, and reading four grades above their instructional reading level. The results showed that while reading in dyads, poor readers scored better in reading scores in standardised tests when texts were two grade levels above the reader’s abilities as opposed to when texts were much higher than two grade reading levels or at grade level. Although this practice is not commonly used in the practice of reading,

McNamara et al. (2011), found that increased text cohesion (i.e. explicit cues to make a text more readable) had adverse effects on skilled readers because readers with well- structured prior knowledge need a more flexible text to form appropriate idea units, in individual reading situations.

The most common scaffold in the research of group reading activities is the teacher as a guide for learning and understanding (Stevens et al., 1991; Rojas-Drummond and Mercer, 2003; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2014). However, research in student autonomy has indicated that teacher behaviours correlate to students’ feelings of autonomy (Reeve, 2002; Reeve and Jang, 2006). These studies consistently show that teachers who allowed students to work at their own pace, praised as informational feedback, offered encouragement, offered hints when stuck, responded to student generated questions, allowed students to talk and communicated perspective-taking statements were perceived as autonomy supporters. The authors argued that although teachers could not give students a sense of autonomy, they provide the environment for students to experience it.

Reading has substantially changed with the Introduction of the Internet on everyday life, the workforce and school. A definition of reading is only an aspect of the New

Literacies enabling comprehension of Internet material (Leu et al., 2017). That is, as the reader performs research in the Internet, he/she or them encounter different material (i.e. printed, audio-visual, etc.) and it is in the integration of all these resources by the individual or the group where comprehension is enabled.

39

In the search for the understanding of reading in online situations, Coiro and colleagues (Coiro and Dobler, 2007; Coiro, 2011; Castek et al., 2012; Coiro, 2014) showed over the past 10 years that offline and online reading skills differ in sophistication and use of critical thinking skills. For instance, they demonstrated that limited prior knowledge does not affect comprehension in individual online reading practices as in individual offline reading situations: hyperlinks, videos, word definitions and other scaffolds weakens the need for prior knowledge in online reading. In contrast, online research requires the use of metacognitive abilities such as evaluative skills, critical thinking, problem solving to navigate the Internet, synthesize information, and digital wisdom to comprehend written and other accessed information (Kiili et al., 2009; Leu et al., 2014). Similarly, Henry et al. (2012) found that participation of students with learning

disabilities in collaborative online reading projects was facilitated by natural online scaffolds (e.g. hypertexts, videos, images, etc.), making interactions and reading successful. In brief, evidence indicate that online reading provides natural scaffolds unfound in books while challenging the reader to use higher-order thinking skills.

Jackson and others (Jackson et al., 2006; Jackson et al., 2011) found that students who used the Internet at home more frequently had improved reading scores in standardized tests over students who did not use the Internet as frequently. The authors argued this was because frequent Internet users were reading more complex texts than less frequent users. This indicated possible benefits to presenting children with complex texts,

challenging the well-established notion that young students need to be matched with books appropriate to their reading level.

Search and comprehension of the Internet have become two of the most important skills to succeed in school and work environments (Leu et al., 2017). An Internet search can result in thousands of links in a very short time, and for young students this is a serious challenge. An emergent group of investigations are starting to provide solutions to this challenge by use of collaborative learning groups. For instance, Passig and Maidel- Kravetsky (2016) found that when student read information from the Internet in dyads, they were able to produce better writing summaries than when students read alone. Similarly, Kiili and collaborators (Kiili, 2013; Kiili et al., 2016) found that in online group reading situations when provided with a few tools such as guides to summarize and critically think about Internet material or simple argument graphs, student

40

even essay-writing improved. Furthermore, in a comparison of collaborative groups, Chen and Chen (2014) found that when collaboration is supported by the use of explicit scaffolds (i.e. collaborative reading tool), groups were able to comprehend better than groups that did not use this scaffold.

In the quest to understanding online reading, Castek et al. (2012) evaluated how seventh graders collaborated in solving a question using the Internet. In this study, four different skills were identified: locating, evaluating, synthesizing and communicating as the main skills used to comprehend what they read. Additionally, it was noted that students were able to construct meaning together with teacher scaffolds when students failed to use either of the four skills.

In brief, despite the clear departure from reading to online search and comprehension, collaborative groups have shown to support both enterprises. As the Internet poses a greater challenge important to address, collaborative groups gain a special place in the instruction of learning from the Internet, worth researching and exploring.