THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511100171
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 22 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HOLLY WESTER, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
SOME GRADUATE STUDENTS in the education program at Old Dominion University are seeing their class instruction come to life because of a handful of fifth-graders at Cooke Elementary School.
Ten students from assistant professor Ken Karloff's Diagnostic Teaching of Reading in the Classroom class are currently working with 20 volunteer youngsters to learn the basics of assessment.
However, this interactive learning activity doesn't only help ODU students put faces on abstract concepts, it benefits the Cooke students as well by providing fifth-grade teachers with the feedback they need to teach their students how to read their textbooks.
``It's something they need to be taught,'' said Cooke reading resource teacher Beth Lantz, who co-sponsors the program with Karloff. ``They're so used to reading fiction that they don't know how to read fact.'' Because fiction has no fact-base, when they get to textbooks, they don't know how to pick out facts.
``It hits them like a hammer in fourth grade. It really throws them for a loop,'' Lantz said.
She and Karloff have recognized this as an ongoing concern and formed the partnership last year to work on it.
Each semester, elementary school students are paired with the college students and are given an informal reading inventory, which pinpoints their approximate reading level. With that basis, the ODU students pick one of the fifth-grade science or social studies textbooks and examine and assess it.
``It's pretty demanding,'' said 24-year-old Sally Gillespie of Norfolk. ``You have to look at every single page.''
After the graduate students write up these assessments - which ask questions about the effectiveness of study aides such as word banks, comprehension questions and graphics - they administer these questions to students and find out if they are profiting from their reading.
Some of the questions are basic and the elementary students can point right to the answer. Others are more complex and require higher-level thinking skills, such as synthesizing ideas.
``Instead of being a fact you can look up - such as when the Declaration of Independence was written - synthesizing involves the why and how,'' Lantz said. ``It's like answering an essay question - pulling information together, instead of regurgitating facts. It's where you have to understand cause and effect.''
The results are given to Lantz, who then informs teachers of what students are getting from their textbook reading.
``What they're finding is that students don't know where to go to find answers to their questions,'' Lantz said. ``They don't have any idea that the bold face print and comprehension questions at the end of the chapter will help them.
``The title of a chapter may be `1776,' but they don't think about what that means.''
The partnership between the schools is working to ``teach students to think while they read,'' Lantz said.
Karloff added: ``The goal is that the student is going to create a purpose for reading the chapter. Ultimately, the emphasis is on the student.''
The graduate students who have begun their research said they are already learning from the activity. ``This has made me look at my textbooks differently,'' said Kim Kelly, 24, of Norfolk. ``I wish I would have had somebody help me with my reading when I was younger. Then maybe I wouldn't have struggled like I did.''
The research results also get teachers thinking along the lines of asking the more interpretive, cause and effect questions. ``The facts will always be there - we have to teach people how to think,'' Lantz said. ``They need to know how to put information together, make new information and apply it.''
``I guess that's what you would call a lifelong learner,'' Karloff added.
Since the ODU students are all focusing on middle school education, their advice has the extra edge fifth-graders need. ``They're helping the students prepare for middle school,'' Lantz added.
Tutoring opportunities are an extra benefit of the partnership, and Marie Fine, 37, of Chesapeake, visits Cooke twice a week, even though she took the course this summer.
``(Our professors) teach us all the theories,'' she said. ``It's nice to be able to come out here and make them work.''
Lantz, a 1992 graduate of ODU who is a former student of Karloff's, plans to keep the door open for her alma mater. ``This is great,'' she said. ``The (Cooke) students love the attention. They enjoy the activity and they're not afraid of it.''
Karloff's bunch is equally as enthusiastic. ``It gives them an opportunity to see how powerful a good teacher is - how you can change someone's life,'' he said. ``I think that's the important thing.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos by HOLLY WESTER
ODU graduate student Liz Vansickle, 45, of Suffolk works with
10-year-old Tiara Dorsey, a fifth-grader at Cooke Elementary
School.
LEFT: Beth Lantz, a reading resource teacher at Cooke Elementary,
and Ken Karloff, an assistant professor at ODU, are co-sponsors of
the partnership.
RIGHT: ODU grad student Kim Kelly, 24, of Norfolk tutors Bert
Wilson, 11.
by CNB