Determining the Effectiveness of Indexing on Student Retelling

1. Determining the Effectiveness of Indexing on Student Retelling By: Jenna Ferrara

2. Does Indexing improve students’ ability to retell text?

3. Why is retelling important? • Retelling can involve speaking, listening, reading, thinking, interacting, selecting and organizing information, remembering, comprehending, illustrating, vocabulary, sequencing, recall, and connection to prior knowledge (Morrow, 1984). • Mason, Snyder, Sukham & Kedem (2006) explained that students may self-monitor their understanding of text by engaging in retelling. Their retells may reveal to them the quantity and quality of their recollections and understandings of details and events from text.

4. Why use indexing? • Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich & Kaschak (2004) found that a reading strategy that provides hands-on manipulation of story-relevant objects can boost young children’s reading comprehension of short texts. • Indexing is based on the premise that comprehension has a motor base (Gunning, 2010).

5. What is indexing? • Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich & Kaschak (2004) found that even students who simply viewed the manipulations had improved comprehension. The researchers concluded: • “Meaning arises from stimulating the content of sentences. This simulation requires indexing words to the objects and actions those words represent, deriving affordances (how those objects can be manipulated), and meshing those affordances as directed by the syntax of the sentence. The manipulation condition required children to explicitly index the words to objects and to align the objects as directed by the syntax of the sentence. This, the manipulation condition guaranteed meaningful comprehension as described by the Indexical Hypothesis (Glenberg et al., p. 435).”

6. What is the purpose of this study? • The study focuses on the relationship between students’ use of indexing and retelling scores. • The goal was to determine if indexing positively impacted students’ retelling scores on Developmental Reading Assessment (Beaver, 1997) testing.

7. Method • Students are separated into groups according to their reading level. • During guided reading, students read a portion of text pre-selected by the teacher. • Upon finishing, students are given puppets to represent all of the characters in the text. • Students take turns retelling the text using the puppets. • As students move the puppets around, they must explain what the character was doing. • For example, students cannot just bounce the puppet. They must say that the character is jumping up and down. • If students need to refer to the text, they are able to.

8. Method (continued) • The following day, reading group begins with retelling the text read so far with the puppets. • Upon completion, students read the next selection of text and the cycle begins again.

9. Findings • Students felt more enthusiastic about coming to reading group. • Students look forward to retelling text. • More time was needed to see if indexing has an effect on retelling. • Students’ scores for the control groups and experimental groups stayed about the same.

10. Limitations • Materials • Limited time – due to unforeseen power outages / school closure • Partner for experimentation was not as consistent as originally stated • Took a few weeks to find a way to “index” that really worked

11. Conclusions • Indexing is highly motivational. • Students’ retelling during reading groups is much more detailed; transfer to the DRA assessment has not yet been seen. • More time is needed to see if indexing improves student retelling.

12. Future recommendations • Due to time constraints, researchers should conduct a longitudinal study that follows students who partake in indexing over time. • Not much research is shown utilizing indexing in small groups. Future research should show whether this technique is effective in groups, or is better 1 on 1.