subject: Summary of Findings about the QAR Strategy II [print this page] The findings are significant because as reading professionals we know the following:
Students need models of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge of strategies (Schraw, 2001).
Helping students to become metacognitive with content area material will improve academic performance (Hartman, 2001).
Content area teachers have difficulty implementing the instruction of reading strategies (Fisher & Ivey, 2005).
The results highlight that to achieve the desired results, teachers must first become increasingly metacognitive when problem solving with content area materials prior to helping students to become metacognitive.
The study was limited by several conditions that apply to educational research. First, although the professional development was both intensive and distributed (National Staff Development Council, 2001), which helps ensure Tag Heuer Replica that learning will be deeper, researchers were unable to observe teachers in the classroom to determine the actual application of the QAR strategy to content teaching. Second, this study was a small, exploratory study, similar to many in teacher education research.
Findings in this study are promisingfor example, secondary teachers across the disciplines did employ a literacy strategy to assist their students to understand content area reading. The implementation led to a deeper use of cognitive strategies by teachers and students rather than simple teaching activities aimed at a generalist approach to instruction (Conley, 2008). This is similar to recent findings that have appeared elsewhere. For example, Fleming and her colleagues (Fleming, Merrill, & Grisham, in press) conducted Reading Institutes for Academic Preparation (RIAP) with secondary teachers across the content areas and an independent evaluation of the Institutes showed gains for high school students in reading Tag Heuer Carrera Replica comprehension. In another study, Wozniak (2008) demonstrated that secondary teacher candidates showed little or no resistance to the idea of using literacy strategies to assess students' reading and plan differentiated content instruction. Perhaps, the real lesson to be learned here is that secondary content teachers may learn to welcome effective teaching strategies provided they see that the learning of content, so important to middle and high school teachers, is the central notion of such teacher preparation and professional development, not merely "reading."
