2008 Woodie Awards
Professor's grant funds literacy tutoring program
By Courtney Houpt
Issue date: 1/17/08 Section: News
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The tutoring program is conducted by Warren-Kring and students from her class, Teaching Reading in the Secondary and Middle Schools.
The class emphasizes reading strategies that can be used by teachers of all content areas instead of those that are only useful teachers of reading classes.
"We now have a reliable and valid instrument to conduct our pre- and post- tutoring comprehension assessments, and we now have a comparison group as part of the study that we can compare results with," Warren-Kring said.
As a part of this class, student tutors are sent to Chattanooga area middle schools or high schools and have the opportunity to tutor in their chosen content area using the reading strategies learned in their class.
The tutored students take a pre-tutoring and a post-tutoring comprehension exam to determine if the tutoring process has been helpful to both the tutored student and the student from Warren-Kring's class doing the tutoring.
Although the program went into effect during the fall 2007 semester, Warren-Kring has only recently received the results of the students' pre- and post-tutoring tests.
The data collected by Warren-Kring and her students indicates a positive significant difference in the post-tutoring scores of the students who participate in tutoring as opposed to those who did not participate in tutoring sessions.
While the middle and high school students are tested on their reading comprehension, Warren-Kring's education students complete pre- and post- tutoring tests.
These tests are designed to gauge their attitudes towards using the literacy strategies they learned in their class and implemented in their tutoring sessions with middle and high school students.
