Harvard Graduate School of Education will work with the Strategic Education Research Partnership and other partners to complete a program of work designed to a) investigate the predictors of reading comprehension in 4th - 8th grade students, in particular the role of skills at perspective - taking, complex
reasoning, and academic language in predicting
deep comprehension outcomes, b) track developmental trajectories across the middle grades in perspective - taking, complex
reasoning, academic language skill, and
deep comprehension, c) develop and evaluate curricular and pedagogical approaches designed to
promote deep comprehension in the content areas in 4th - 8th grades, and d) develop and evaluate an intervention program designed for 6th - 8th grade students reading at 3rd - 4th grade level.The HGSE team will take responsibility, in collaboration with colleagues at other institutions, for the following components of the proposed work: Instrument development: Pilot data collection using interviews and candidate assessment items, collaboration with DiscoTest colleagues to develop coding of the pilot data so as to produce well - justified learning sequences for perspective - taking, complex
reasoning, academic language skill, and
deep comprehension.Curricular development: HGSE investigators Fischer, Selman, Snow, and Uccelli will contribute to the development of a discussion - based curriculum for 4th - 5th graders, and to the expansion of an existing discussion - based curriculum for 6th - 8th graders, with a particular focus on science content (Fischer), social studies content (Selman), and academic language skills (Snow & Uccelli).
As students progress in their learning, the practices of elaboration,
reasoning,
deep learning critical thinking and creativity become more and more important — and high performing education systems
promote these learning activities.
One possible
reason behind our students» perceptions of the Ning as an add - on rather than an essential tool is that both our class and the teacher education program as a whole
promoted meaningful,
deep, and ongoing interpersonal collaboration about questions of praxis.
Mathematics related technology is constantly looked at to expand procedures to that of arriving at a
deeper understanding that comes through discussion, conjectures,
reasoning and
promoting deep and lasting growth (SPTM 3.1).