Perception of Secondary Teachers on Teaching Reading Skills in the Content Area

Perception of Secondary Teachers on Teaching Reading Skills in the Content Area

Chapter No. 4

Introduction

Reading skills have been ignored immensely in the past few years in US, which has caused problems in learning of students. Reading has been the key for the new technological innovations throughout the world, but with increase in the new technology this asset has been ignored to a great extent. My research study is to analyze the importance of reading skills and for which I have used mix method research. The purpose of this mixed methods concurrent research study is to examine the perceptions of secondary school teachers on teaching with different methods and strategies for e.g. KWL, summarization, vocabulary, and SQ3R resulting in enhancing the reading abilities in the content area. In addition, this study explores the perceptions of those secondary school teachers on five research based reading strategies for secondary schools. This section consists of a summary of the procedures used to collect the data and presents the data used to answer the survey questions.

Reliability and Validity of Research Instrument

The mixed research method is used in this analysis which includes the qualitative analysis. The most important advantage of such analysis is that they are reliable for the reason that questionnaires were filled by existing secondary teachers and not our hypothetical view points and probabilities are involved. Another reliability factor is the experience of all the teachers within their content area. The reason of including all the secondary teachers because they are rich in experience and also the reading abilities/ skills cannot be improved at the primary education level. Therefore, the experience of the teachers and the selection of secondary education level make our research instrument more valid as well. Moreover, the research questionnaire contains all the questions that were prescribed in the WALDEN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD criteria.

The determination of validity of any research study is that at least some previous research has been done on it. This will make a study reliable and valid at least for the researcher because the primary research on that particular study will certainly help the researcher to move forward and conclude results more confidently. Validity of results is also concerned with the accuracy of the calculated determinants in the research and itself is a vital determinant in the design of the used instrument. The questions included in the survey questionnaire of this study were constructed from the Review board of the university which certainly makes the study precise and targeted. This helped in keeping the survey simple and understandable to the respondents so as to extract comprehensive results out of the collected data.

Data Collection Process

The research questionnaires were distributed in a faculty meeting to all teachers at a system. Secondary school teachers were asked to complete and return the survey instrument in seven days. To maintain anonymity, all teachers who attended the faculty meeting were issued the survey instrument. The teachers anonymously returned the survey instrument to ...