Quantität und Qualität des Strategieeinsatzes von Grundschülerinnen und Grundschülern in reziproken Lesegruppen

To promote students’ reading achievement, national and international experts recommend programs in which children collaborate on reading tasks and learn various reading strategies. The results of evaluation studies show the effectiveness of such programs for the development of individual reading performance of students, but do not contain any information on how the joint strategy application takes place in the small groups. Using video data at three measurement time points, this paper examines whether and how 3rd grade students cooperatively apply the strategies of clarifying, questioning and predicting to nonfiction texts. Therefore, an intervention group that participated in peer-supported strategy-based reading instruction was compared to a control group that received regular German lessons without explicit strategy support. Both the quantity and quality of strategy use in the reading groups was coded using a deductively developed scheme. Results show that at all three measurement time points (pre-test, post-test, and follow-up), less than 50% of the students used reading strategies. Overall, the strategy most frequently used was questioning. A moderate positive training effect was particularly evident for predicting. What needs to be discussed is why students did not use more strategies at a higher level of elaboration and whether additional skills are needed for effective strategy use in small groups. The study underscores the importance of process-based data collection for the continued development of remedial approaches in research and practice.