Using scaffolding to foster middle school students' comprehension of and response to short storie

Two popular approaches to teaching literature to secondary students have been well-developed over the last thirty years. One, a reader-response approach, focuses more on students' individual responses to text, and the other, a cognitive-oriented approach, focuses more on students' understanding of text. This dissertation was designed to investigate how reader-response and cognitive-oriented activities affect students' learning from literature. It examined the results on 85 sixth-grade students' comprehension of and response to literature when they were led to read stories using a reader-response approach and when using a cognitive-oriented approach. In order to compare the two approaches, each was operationalized in a Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE), an instructional framework designed to foster students' understanding and engagement with individual texts.;The study used a pretest-posttest design and quantitative and qualitative research techniques. Cognitive-oriented SREs and reader-response SREs were created for three stories by acclaimed children's authors. Two experienced middle school teachers at a diverse urban school used the SREs with students. Results from pretest-posttest, comprehension, and response assessments were scored using pre-designed scoring rubrics, and the scores analyzed using ANCOVAs with a covariate of student reading ability. Results from field notes, teachers' journals, and teacher and student interviews were analyzed using the constant-comparative method.;Results showed that both the reader-response and cognitive-oriented SREs fostered students' comprehension of short stories. Results also indicated that using a reader-response approach resulted in students' achievement of reader-response tasks but not of more cognitive-oriented tasks, and that using a cognitive-oriented approach produced the opposite result. Qualitative results indicated that the teachers valued the SRE framework and thought both approaches useful for their students, and that students found both the activities and purposes of the SREs useful.;The evidence from this study suggests that teaching literature with a particular approach does affect students' comprehension and response to text. This knowledge may assist teachers in choosing the approach best suited to the outcomes they desire for the reading of a text, ultimately helping to increase students' deep and lasting understanding and appreciation of that text, and foster their understanding, learning from, and appreciating each text they read.