Document Type

Project

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

I was introduced to a reading strategy called reciprocal teaching. Placing an emphasis on group work, reciprocal teaching allows students to investigate the text and deepen understanding of it. Since I am an actor and I thoroughly analyze text daily, I wanted to thread the concepts together and to impart my knowledge. This made me wonder what would happen if reciprocal teaching was implemented in a secondary special education classroom in the hopes of improving reading comprehension. The research question I sought to answer became: Does the strategy of reciprocal teaching help improve the reading comprehension skills of high school students in Special Education?. The intent of this project was that reciprocal teaching can better prepare students to thoroughly analyze passages of text across their high school journey and beyond.

This research was designed to pilot the learning strategy of reciprocal teaching. The goal was to introduce an intervention to potentially improve students’ reading comprehension. This project used grade-level texts that were separate from the ones we read as a class, to not give students unfair advantages during instructional time. Since I am a paraeducator and not a licensed teacher I found it important to select materials and an intervention that would accompany the teacher’s educational framework and teaching style. Additionally, several strategies for collecting data were selected to support the individual students and their needs. With the selected intervention, the hope was that students will gain more confidence in their ability to read and work in small groups with fellow students.

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