Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Group SERT Practice
After completing the video and discussion from the demonstration session, students
are separated into pairs and are asked to practice using the strategies within their
dyads. One student within each pair takes a turn self-explaining all of the sentences
within a paragraph and the other student then gives a summary of the paragraph.
Then, the students switch roles and swap who self-explains and who summarizes
the paragraph. The summarization task is included to ensure that both students
are attending to the text while also promoting further comprehension of the text.
Although the student who is listening to the self-explanation is also asked to give
feedback on the quality of the self-explanations, this rarely occurs.
Evaluation of Group SERT
There have been several evaluations of SERT delivered in classroom settings, both
with college students and high school students. For example, Magliano et al. (2005)
conducted a pretest-posttest study with 29 college students. They found that the stu-
dents improved in their ability to answer true/false questions about science texts,
and this gain was most apparent on the more difficult questions that required infer-
ences to correctly answer the question. McNamara (2009,
Self-explanation and
reading strategy training (SERT) improves low-knowledge students' science course
performance
. Unpublished manuscript) compared the effects of SERT to a con-
trol condition on course exams with 265 college students enrolled in Introductory
Biology (see also McNamara, 2004a; McNamara & Shapiro, 2005). The results
showed that SERT had the largest benefit for the low-knowledge students. Moreover,
the low-knowledge students who received SERT performed as well on the exams as
did high-knowledge students who did not receive training.
SERT is also effective for high school students. O'Reilly et al. (2006) reported a
study conducted with 465 students in grades 9-12 in rural, inner-city (urban), and
suburban schools. They found that students who were provided with SERT in the
classroom in comparison to a control condition improved in their ability to compre-
hend science text; however, the effects of training were significant only for students
in the rural school. Students in the suburban school may have already been suf-
ficiently familiar with the strategies before training, and the students in the urban
school may not have possessed sufficient basic reading skills to gain from the train-
ing. The environmental conditions and prior skills of the students in the rural school,
by contrast, were just right to gain from SERT.
O'Reilly, Best, and McNamara (2004) compared the effectiveness of SERT to a
control condition and another commonly used training technique called
previewing
(or K-W-L). Previewing teaches students to preview specific parts of a chapter and
then write what they know, want to know, and what they learned. The participants
were 136 9th and 10th grade students in biology courses in an inner-city school. The
students' ability to understand a science text was examined one week after training
was administered. The results showed that low-knowledge students gained from
SERT training in comparison to both the previewing and the control conditions,
