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Improving US Elementary School Reading Comprehension through Knowledge Acquisition and Transformation

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Abstract

Reading comprehension is among the most challenging and complex skills to teach and research. Doing both well is critical to improving the reading comprehension proficiency of 67% of grade 4 students in U.S. public schools who scored below basic on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. This Chapter presents Knowledge Acquisition and Transformation (KAT) as a model of an evidence-based technology reading comprehension intervention. With a decade-long history of intervention design, development, and evaluation, KAT has caused positive, meaningful, and statistically significant effects on upper elementary students’ reading comprehension. KAT developers accomplished this by integrating theory, practice, technology, and evidence while progressing through iterative cycles of intervention development and evaluation.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The data include the original and secondary sources of text used for the text structure instruction, the preand post-test scores of the students on reading comprehension, summarization, text structure knowledge, and recall, and the fidelity of implementation data of the teachers and students. The data are not publicly available due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

Notes

  1. [1]The meta-analysis did not report the improvement index. The lead author of this article calculated it by converting Hedges g into Cohen’s U3 index, which is the proportion of comparison group students outperformed by average intervention student and subtracting it (after multiplying the proportion by 100) from 50 percent [see WWC, 2022, p. 185 and 186.

  2. [2]The RCT for grades 4 and 5 met standards without reservations but the RCT for grades 7 met standards with reservations.

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Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant U423A180074 to Texas A&M University and subcontractors Analytica Insights, Inc. The opinion expressed here are those of the author and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

Funding

The first author is a senior advisor to the Literacy IO team at Texas A&M University, which is implementing a scaleup version of KAT funded by the Institute for Education Sciences.

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  1. Analytica Insights, Inc., Fuquay-Varina, NC, 27526, USA

    Herb Turner & Annette Turner

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 6 reading comprehension outcomes for grade 4 and 5 students
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Table 7 reading comprehension outcomes for grade 7 students
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Turner, H., Turner, A. Improving US Elementary School Reading Comprehension through Knowledge Acquisition and Transformation. Tech Know Learn 29, 1293–1312 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-023-09708-z

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