Retelling maps (Research Article 4)

As I am becoming familiar with using retelling maps and coding charts while working with young readers in the classroom I found this article to be particularly relevant to my experiences. In the article What retelling can tell us about the nature of reading comprehension in school children by Stephen B. Kucer, research investigates the nature of reading comprehension through elementary school readers.
Before going into the research of the article, it does a great job explaining why educators use retelling maps. The main idea is that these maps put the reader in control and lets the reader "tap into what he or she has independently constructed from transacting with the text". It is a system of assessment and can suggest what the students are understanding from a combination of their previous knowledge and new knowledge.
In this study a group of proficient 4th grade students were assessed in reading four different books. The students read orally and then were asked to retell what they remembered. As a result, there were differences and similarities among the strongest and weakest retellings. With the stronger retelling group of students they had "longer retellings, only 17% of the retold clauses did not match those found in the text as compared to 63% for the weaker comprehenders". However interestingly, for the "stronger comprehension students one fifth of the content in their retellings did not match the content of the text". Some of the stronger retelling students actually contradicted what the text said while they were retelling. While we assume that stronger comprehension readers are retelling the story as it is, it is interesting that stronger comprehension readers can add detail different from the text. So when looking at strong and weaker comprehension readers, they are both building meaning through ideas that are not directly represented through the text. In conclusion to this research article, an important idea to walk away with is that "teachers cannot assume that the effective and efficient use various text cues- graphophonemic, syntactic, semantic- will necessarily lead to comprehension...Instructional interventions and mediations may be necessary to help readers construct ideas from the words they read". While retelling maps are helpful and useful for teachers to determine where a students reading level is at, there is more to helping students with reading comprehension. Learning a new skill and perfecting it, such as reading comprehension, can be very complex when trying to understand how the brain works in a student. Each student is different and as teachers we have to be aware of how assessments can only go so far when telling us what is going on inside a students head.



Source

Kucer, B. Stephen. What retellings can tell us about teh nature of reading comprehension in school children. Washington State Univeristy, Vancouver. Austrailian Journal of Language and Literacy , Vol.37, No.1, 2014.