Using Graphic Organizers and Notable Trade Books
to Increase Students’ Reading Comprehension
Terry L. Lovelace
Northwest Missouri State University
In order to ensure their students perform well on standardized tests, some 33% of school districts examined by the Center on Education Policy (2006) reported a significant cutback in social studies instruction, despite evidence suggesting that critical thinking, decision making, and problem solving, that can be acquired while learning social studies content (Ferretti & Okolo, 1996). Despite the increase time allotted to reading instruction, students rarely read expository text. According to Williams (2005), “Until two or three years ago, there was a dearth of instruction focused on expositorytext in the early grades” (p. 6). Basal readers typically include little expository text (Hoffman et al., 1994), though basal reading series remain the most common way to provide reading instruction in America. Duke (2000), who examined 20 first-grade classrooms across 10 school districts, found few informational texts in any of the classrooms. Chall, Jacobs, and Balwin (1990) documented the decline in reading achievement of fourth-grade students, and Williams (2005) speculates that the lack of experience with expository text may contribute to the problem. In addition, many teachers have recently increased the pace of instruction as a consequence of the pressures of end-of-school-year high-stakes testing (Frase-Blunt, 2000).
Reading educators might want to incorporate more expository tradebooks during reading instruction in order to teach students how to read expository text. The use of graphic organizers in combination with social studies tradebooks might help students develop the comprehension strategies necessary for reading expository text.
A graphic organizer (GO) is a visual representation of knowledge on a concept or topic (Bromley, Irwin-DeVitis, & Modlo, 1999). These visual and spatial displays are designed to facilitate the teaching and learning of textual material through the "a spatial arrangement that describe text content, structure, and key conceptual relationships" (Darch & Eaves, 1986, p. 310). The process of developing a graphic organizer is helpful for continued processing of the concepts themselves and the interrelations among them (Armbruster & Anderson, 1984).
Graphic organizers require students to arrange information within a visual framework so that relationships between ideas can be assessed as a glance. GOs can be used as formative assessment instruments to measure students’ prior knowledge and, incorporated with cooperative learning strategies, can promote active learning that facilitates comprehension (Kirylo & Millet, 2000). GOs typically fall into four categories: conceptual, hierarchical, cyclical, and sequential. Students provide supporting details (facts, characteristics, or descriptions) when completing conceptual graphic organizers; they break a concept down when completing hierarchical GOs, ranking subconcepts or levels by relevance or relationship to the main idea. Cyclical GOs assess students' comprehension of natural cycles, such as the Water Cycle, while sequential GOs assess students’ understanding of a sequence of events.
Duplass (2008) emphasizes the importance of choosing the correct GO, determining the type of information to be recorded by the students, and selecting the organizational format for the information students are expected to learn. Teacher decision-making in these three areas determines the efficacy of the GO in terms of student learning (see examples presented by Zarnowski, 2006).
Students who completed partially complete graphic organizers (GOs) or studied complete GOs that covered course content while listening to lectures increased their overall examination performance (Robinson, Katayama, Odom, Hsieh, & Vanderveen, 2006). Simply telling students to take notes and then review them has been found ineffective since most students are poor note takers and typically record less than half of the critical ideas presented in lectures (Hartley & Cameron, 1967).The kinds of complete notes that have received the strongest empirical support are spatial, rather than linear, forms (Robinson, 1998). GOs are a type of spatial display of text information that have been shown to help students perform better on tests that measure knowledge of concept relations and application because they help students notice important across-concept relations that are not as apparent when viewing linear forms of notes.
Student-constructed GO frameworks for note taking have been proven more effective than self-study for learning-disabled (LD), remedial, and regular education students, according to the meta-analysis conducted by Moore and Readance (1984), who found that student-constructed GOs had an effect size of .38 standard deviations (SDs) compared with .15 SD for teacher-constructed GOs. In addition, the authors indicated that the results of their study “suggest that GOs tend to produce the most learning when they follow the presentation of content and when vocabulary is the criterion variable” (p. 16).
Another review of the literature reveals a somewhat limited value of using GOs to promote comprehension (Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, & Wei, 2004). However, some students do benefit from using GOs that are constructed by students, positioned after the text, and used for a longer time (Dunston, 1992; Moore & Readence, 1984). In a meta-analysis measuring the effect of the use of GOs by students with learning disabilities, Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, and Wei (2004) concluded that visual displays of information such as those provided by GOs do enhance the reading comprehension of these students, possibly by helping these students organize the verbal information and thereby improving their recall of it.
Students learn the most concept relations and apply that knowledge when presented with partially-completed GOs, rather than skeletal or complete GOs, according to Katayama and Robinson (2000). The authors speculate that partial GOs may be the optimal study notes for two reasons: spatial format rather than linear format and active involvement on the part of students in note-taking using scaffolding that is not too difficult to complete. The authors suggest that,
for the first few partial GO tasks, about half of the cells should be empty. Students should be allowed to view the partial GO before they complete the online assignment to encourage them to take their own paper-based GO notes. Then, armed with a complete GO, students can perform the computer-based partial task quickly and accurately. In all, that is a fairly easy task for K-12 teachers to create. The task simply involves having students search their textbooks for missing information in the notes; while doing so, students learn about text structure--an important component in text comprehension.
Partial GO tasks are modifications that can be used to control both the language and conceptual difficulty of academic tasks, allowing teachers to meet the needs of students with special needs. For example, partial GO could make help English language learners focus on skills that will lead to English proficiency as they acquire social studies content knowledge.
Williams (1998) found that using an instructional model based on the Hunter Lesson Plan (explanation, modeling, guided and independent practice) to teach students to use clue words, compare-contrast questions, and graphic organizers improved students’ comprehension of expository text written in a cause-effect pattern.
Results of a follow-up study (Williams, Nubla-Kung, Pollini, Brooke, Garcia, & Snyder, 2007) strengthened the conclusion that explicit text structure instruction (cause-effect structure) within the framework of content area instruction can be effective at the primary-grade level without a loss in the amount of content acquired. The authors concluded that “this type of instruction has the potential for improving comprehension on both oral and written tasks, at the same time that it gives students the opportunity to acquire basic knowledge of social studies” (p. 120).
The use of graphic organizers is not sufficient for ensuring that students will obtain acceptable levels of understanding, according to Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, and Wei (2004). Also, while high effect sizes were found on posttests and follow-up tests, these same effects were not found on transfer tests. While the use of graphic organizers was an effective instructional tool for teaching the content of specific passages, students did not transfer their skills, i.e., using graphic organizers, to new reading situations.
Though researchers agree GOs facilitate memory for text in a wide variety of settings, presently there is no consensus among researchers as to which types of GOs are most effective (Dunston, 1992). The true purpose of GOs is to organize, rather than to simply list concept information. Materials that help to more clearly communicate the organizing principles in the "big ideas" do in fact help students to acquire significantly more knowledge of history in general (Crawford & Carnine, 2000).
In order for the use of GOs to result in increased learning, Baxendell (2003), suggests that teachers “Be consistent, make the graphic organizers coherent, and find creative ways to integrate them into lessons” (p. 46). When teachers incorporate graphic organizers in similar situations across subject areas, students are more likely to begin using this comprehension strategy independently. Teachers should work together to create a series of GOs to ensure consistency across grade levels so educators would spend less time teaching the GOs.
Since graphic organizers are not effective instructional tools unless they are clear and straightforward, relationships shown in graphic organizers must be obvious and easily understandable, or instructional benefits will be limited. Be creative; for instance, encourage students to enhance their graphic organizers with illustrations. Use jig-saw cooperative learning groups to add social interaction as a component of GOs. Students enjoy working in groups or with partners where each person is responsible for creating or compiling information for one aspect of the graphic organizer. Members then put all of the pieces together and present their display to the whole class.
In self-evaluations of their teaching methods, teachers acknowledged that they rarely engaged in activities designed to commit to memory the critical information that students had previously covered (Crawford and Carnine, 2000). Merely showing students a graphic organizer on an overhead projector without the accompanying teacher modeling, guided practice, and review on subsequent days is not likely to achieve the results observed in a study by DiCecco and Gleason (2002) which demonstrates the efficacy of GOs for students with LD within the context of intensive instruction. Instruction in summary writing might be a necessary component to ensure GO efficacy. According to the authors, the study clearly demonstrates that students with LD benefited from the combination of graphic organizers, intensive instruction, and summary writing. Meta-analysis of studies investigating graphic organizers and comprehension reveals a small, consistent effect that might be increased by using social studies tradebooks such as those found in the lists of Notable Trade Books for YoungPeople (National Council of Social Studies, n.d.).
In terms of classroom instruction at the elementary level, GOs are viable tools for the following reasons (Duplass, 2008, p. 311):
- They are appropriate for almost all grade levels.
- They visually enhance learning.
- They accommodate different learning styles.
- They are easy to teach from and use.
- They include both Information Knowledge and Procedural Knowledge.
- They allow teacher to model how to construct knowledge.
- When students make or use them, they must reconstruct knowledge.
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