THE READING COMPREHENSION – RECIPROCAL TEACHING PROGRAM TO IMPROVE TEXT UNDERSTANDING: THE IMPACT OF MODELING PRACTICES IN TEACHER TRAINING

The reading literacy is one of the basic skills that are essential for academic success, to be started as early as kindergarten and fully completed in the first cycle of education. In Hattie’s research, the cornerstone of the Evidence Based Education perspective, the Reciprocal Teaching strategy reports a particularly significant effect size (ES=0.74) for enhancing text comprehension. On the basis of this evidence, in the Italian context, the Society for Learning and Education informed by Evidence (S.Ap.I.E) has developed a Reading Comprehension - Reciprocal Teaching didactic program (RC-RT) addressed to pupils in the fourth grade of primary school. In particular, it has been suggested that the implementation of a training course aimed at teachers, based on the practical transposition of reciprocal teaching, actively involves children in the acquisition of reliable strategies to be adopted in the understanding process. In RC-RT, Reciprocal Teaching provides that the student, in turn, is called to implement metacognitive techniques (predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing) during the reading to elaborate good summaries through the integration of three fundamental factors: modeling, feedback and cooperative work (in pairs). The research plan envisaged the adoption of a quasiexperimental design with non-equivalent groups, organized into control and experimental classes. The teaching intervention in the experimental classes was conducted by the teachers, adequately trained in the application of the program, through video-modeling and support materials. In this scenario the experimentation, carried out in some institutes in Campania Region, is inserted with the aim of verifying the effectiveness of the training course in relation to both contextual situations and developed practicaloperational skills. In this regard, the objective of this work is examining “how” the experimental teachers put the intervention program into practice in order to compare the transposed actions and those presented during the video-modeling. From a methodological point of view, the observational method was used to focus attention on the relevant variables in the specific context and, through closed tools such as control grids and evaluation scales, the behavior of teachers during the performance of the activities among peers was analyzed in relation to the methodology envisaged by the program. The analysis shows the conformity of the teaching action with respect to reciprocal teaching techniques, alternating with feedback and cooperative work (in pairs). These results are in line with outcomes obtained from the extensive research at national level which confirms the effectiveness of the RC-RT program in the reading comprehension process. It can be translated into a gain of 3-7 months of progress compared to the control classes, according to conversion parameters of the Education Endowment Foundation.