Gastos Médicos y Dentales
Lección 7: Crédito por Contribuciones Extranjeras Pagadas
Metacognitive assessment is defined as an evaluation of a reader’s awareness and knowledge of the mental processes engaged during reading. It also tests if a reader can monitor, regulate, and direct their thoughts before, during, and after reading to obtain a complete comprehension of text (Block, 2004; Harris & Hodges, 1995). Metacognitive readers know how they comprehend and why, at times, they do not comprehend well. They activate relevant prior knowledge before, during, and after reading, and easily use newly learned information in their lives (Pearson, Roehler, Dole, & Duffy, 1992; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). They im- age and determine the most important ideas in a text (Brown & Palincsar, 1985; Reznitskaya & Anderson, 2001). They ask questions, draw inferences (NICHHD, 2000; NRP, 1999), and use a variety of fix-up strategies (Block, Gambrell, & Pressley, 2003; Garner, 1987).
Unfortunately, such readers are a minority in today’s schools. Researchers (as represented in this book) are working diligently to make this minority population the majority. This work has been listed as one of the nation’s most pressing needs.
To date, not enough programs have been developed to promote metacognition, much less the assessment instruments that can be used to measure their success. More curricula and evaluative tools must be examined empirically. There is an equal need to identify the factors that contribute to the speed with which above, on, and below grade level students become automatic, metacognitive readers. Do students of variant reading ability levels require different instructional methods to build lifelong automatic use of metacognitive thinking?
Since the last century, teaching comprehension has been dominated by merely providing instruction to read and answer questions over what was read (Durkin, 1976/1977). This must change. Students cannot be left to learn how to think metacognitive on their own. Recitation of facts must be deemphasized. Re- sponsive individualized interactions with text must become commonplace in the classroom. The metacognitive assessments described in this chapter are a first step toward attaining this goal.
The National Reading Panel (1999) and the Rand Reading Study Group (Sweet & Snow, 2002) found that the elementary school years are the most criti- cal years in which educators must diagnose the depths of students’ metacom- prehension competencies. Unless such determinations are made by third grade, most students will have developed too many defense mechanisms to camouflage their weaknesses. Their shame, guilt, and history of failure as a reader further di- minish their desire to make meaning from text. Only very precise and effective assessment instruments can tap these students’ metacognitive thought processes while they are engaged in reading so that teachers can assist these readers to dis- arm this arsenal of defenses. If these students’ metacognitions are not developed early, most will develop even more elaborate camouflages of their reading fail- ures, and the chances of ever experiencing pleasure from reading in their lives is significantly decreased (Block, 2004).
Stewart et al. (2004) completed a research project to answer these empirical questions, involving 1,310 students from states in the southwestern United States. Fifty-four experimental and control classrooms of approximately 25 stu- dents each were randomly assigned to treatment groups in second-, third-, fourth-, and sixth-grade classrooms. Students represented high, middle, and low socioeco- nomic levels. Subjects came from Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial backgrounds. All experimental subjects engaged in three metacognitive programs. Method l employed structured, charted whole-class dis- cussions. Method 2 utilized post-it note prompts, proceeded by enhanced think- aloud, and guided instruction. Method 3 used visual metacognitive prompts in the form of bookmarks to alert students’ to 12 metacognitions that have proven to enhance comprehension at specific points in a text (Block & Israel, 2004).
Following 6 weeks of participation in each method, students were adminis- tered a few of the end-of-treatment metacognitive assessments described in this chapter, as well as the Stanford Achievement Vocabulary and Comprehension Subtests. Data from structured weekly oral interviews, and work samples were
also collected. Analyses of variance and regression analyses were used to deter- mine the statistical value of these metacognitive programs. Work samples were tallied in three ways, and they were tested through a repeated measures design. Interviews were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results demonstrated that the three instructional programs and assessment methods significantly in- creased elementary and middle school students’ metacognition in six distinct ar- eas. Students who became metacognitive readers outscored peers who had not developed metacognitive reading abilities, as measured by the metacognitive as- sessments described in this chapter. The least amount of time that it took for a significant number of students to attain automatic metacognitive reading ability was 6 weeks with students who were not exposed to proper treatments and assess- ment tools being unable to reach automaticity after 16 weeks of controlled condi- tions without metacognitive instruction (Block et al., in press).
Other studies are under way to examine the effects new staff development pro- grams designed to enhance teachers’ assessment abilities. These are entitled the Best Comprehension Practices Consortium, sponsored by the Institute for Liter- acy Enhancement (Mangieri, 2004). These training programs are creating new assessment initiatives that enable teachers to “get inside the heads” of students’ independent silent reading processes. The work at this institute documented that teachers want new metacognitive assessment tools. They want tests that not only assess what they have taught about comprehension, but also how much students are actively using them to craft their own metacognitively guided meaning. When such measures are developed, it has been argued that children’s zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) and their rates of learning can be ad- vanced. Moreover, of the 12 principles needed to advance the assessment of com- prehension, the following 7 relate specifically to how we can assess students’ metacognition better (Block, 2004; Tierney, 1998):
· Assessments should lead from behind. They should help students assess themselves, with instruction being delivered to address individual needs af- ter students’ metacognitions have been assessed.
· Assessment should extend beyond improving present tests to making new tests that are more conceptually valid.
· Unfortunately, in the past, test developers tried to make tests culture free, which is impossible: “Cultural free assessments afford, at best, only a partial, perhaps distorted, understanding of a student’s [meta]comprehension abil- ity” (Tierney, 1998, p. 381).
· Future comprehension tests must allow for different students to have differ- ing amounts of encouragement and support to measure the degrees that they are interrelating metacognitive processes. Some students have the potential to reveal their inner thoughts accurately, others do not, and still others do not process meaning metacognitively as they read. Future tests must tap into this metacognitive knowledge more directly.
· Some things worth assessing cannot be evaluated except through student self-assessment (e.g., self-questioning, self-reported engagement, and de- grees of interpretation).
· The interaction between speed, factual literal recall, vocabulary develop- ment, inference accuracy, and metacognitive depth must be assessed. Pres- ently, few tests measure such interactions.
· Assessment should be developmentally appropriate. They must contain sus- tained silent reading rather than “dipstick approaches” to assessment. In- stead of measuring all of children’s ability in one day, using only a few para- graphs or page-length passages, metacognitive tests should continue for several days, and be calculated through reading for longer than 5 minutes on a specific topic.