*Needs Assessment

Needs Assessment:

Intent:

Too often in educational settings educators and support personnel assume that students are actively engaging and interacting with a text when reading. When educators search further into student understanding, however, many have concluded that students do not understand the text that they read. Students who may be able to read on, or even above grade level still may be missing the entire point of the text they read simply because they are not able to connect with it enough to transfer information into their own minds. It is believed that incorporating practice reading and reading strategies into everyday curriculum in would result in an improvement of understanding in nearly every academic discipline. By completing regular practice reading exercises from a variety of disciplines and applying active reading strategies to each problem, students will be able to better solve problems involving written text.

Information Gathering:

Several educators have been surveyed to gain insight into their student’s success with written text based problems or information. Observation was also used to test a controlled group of grade level reader’s success with finding meaning in written text. Based on the researcher’s observations, many students had substantial difficulty finding pertinent information in written text.

Goals:

To gather information on a controlled group of students and discover what they are missing in regards to making meaning out of written text.
To discover specific deficits in the process of meaning making.
To incorporate active reading strategies into the students’ common reading practices.
To show students how to make meaning from written word.
Incorporating written text from every academic discipline to aid students in meaning making and problem solving.

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