Action Research: Literacy Strategies for Reading Comprehension

My action research project was on reading comprehension in the classroom. I enjoy having students read and understand the information that I thought was really neat! I try to find articles or readings that best emulate what I want to teach in class and keep in mind things such as length, interest levels, reading levels, and relevance to the topic I am teaching about. However, I still notice that many students appear to skim the readings. When we do popcorn reading as a class, some tend to read the information really quickly as if they want to finish reading as soon as possible. So I have to ask myself: how much are they really retaining?

In addition, I've noticed many students whose spelling, grammar, and sentence structure during writing contains many errors. This trend has spanned several of my classes in each grade level. Even when students are given a word bank or when they've seen the word on multiple occasions (say, our unit topic??) they still spell the word wrong. Even with a word bank! 

While I am not equipped to know exactly what students should and should not be able to perform at the high school level, I am led to believe based on my own experiences and that which I have gathered through observations, that these students are not writing, spelling, and reading at the level appropriate to their grade. They are very motivated students and they do well generally on assessments, but an area of improvement would certainly be on those literacy skills. 

Spelling and grammar take time and practice, so for my action research, I focused on the reading comprehension. Check out my infographic for more information on my research!

I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't be afraid to share below in the comments section!