Welcome to the Reading Research Recap!
I am Dr. Neena Saha, Research Advisor at MetaMetrics. My focus is bridging the research-practice gap so that you can access useful resources that support reading success, expand awareness of the latest reading research, and inform your teaching and learning strategies. This monthly compendium offers the most relevant and must-read research impacting the reading and learning landscape, including easy-to-view digestible highlights. We want the data and findings to be as useful to you as possible, so please do connect with me with any ideas and comments for next month. Enjoy the latest Reading Research Recap!
Deep dive: Teacher Exhaustion and Student Reading Comprehension
Hi all!
It’s nearing the end of the school year and teachers are burned out! That is why I chose this new article about teachers’ emotional exhaustion and its influence on students’ reading comprehension. I’m glad that there is a growing body of research on this topic and that this work is being taken seriously (and being published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals like SSR).
Background
Emotional exhaustion is defined as “…feelings of emotional overstrain and reduced emotional resources.” It is a core dimension of teacher burnout and a primary factor associated with teacher’s intentions to quit their jobs.
Furthermore, there is initial evidence that teachers’ emotional exhaustion impacts student outcomes (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, 2016):
“…teacher burnout (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization) was related to increased students’ morning cortisol levels, an indicator of stress.”
Rationale
This team of researchers wanted to replicate the above findings and try and figure out how teacher emotions influence students, so they posed the question: do teacher emotions impact student reading comprehension by influencing student achievement emotions like hopelessness, boredom, and anxiety?
Measures & population
This study examined self-reports of teacher emotional exhaustion, student academic emotions and student comprehension scores across 63 teachers and 1,319 4th and 5th grade students (ages 9-11) in Israel.
Results
They found that high levels of teachers’ emotional exhaustion was related to lower reading comprehension abilities.
They also found that students’ feelings of hopelessness mediates the relationship with teachers’ emotional exhaustion, and suggest a possible mechanism for how teacher emotions impact student performance:
“For example, emotionally exhausted teachers may struggle to provide adequate scaffolding in the learning process, offer less emotional support when students face difficulties, or provide less frequent and less constructive feedback. These behaviors could lead students to feel that their efforts are futile, fostering a sense of hopelessness specifically related to reading tasks. Importantly, our findings hold even after controlling for reading fluency, suggesting that the effect is not simply due to overall reading ability.”
Limitations
There are a few limitations of the study but perhaps the most important limitation to convey is that this study cannot tell us whether teacher emotions cause low reading comprehension or, if it is the reverse:
“As an example, a class of low-achieving students who feel hopeless about their ability to learn to read can increase the teacher’s emotional exhaustion in the classroom, because the teacher is exhausted by the struggle to help them comprehend more effectively. This context-specific experience can negatively impact a teacher’s global experience at school, especially if she or he does not have support from peers or supervisors to overcome the challenges of teaching these students.”
A cross-sectional study cannot determine which direction of causality is most likely and therefore future longitudinal research is needed.
Take-home message
We should be monitoring teachers’ emotional states and burnout:
“Collectively, the findings indicate that teacher burnout, specifically emotional exhaustion, poses a significant threat to education.”
Related research
Ok, that’s all that I have for May!
Additional Research of Interest
Teacher professional development, training, education policy
- Translating Reading Science into Practice—Foundational Reading Instruction in Public Elementary Schools
- How Have Teacher Candidates Learned to Use Evidence? A Systematic Review of Research
- Structured Reporting Guidelines for Classroom Intervention Research
- Science and Practice of Identifying Specific Learning Disabilities: Kind Conversations About a Wicked Problem
- The Association Between Classroom Dialogic Interaction and Student Reading Performance: A Mixed Methods Study of Teacher Stance, Discourse Moves, and Reading Achievement
- Kindergarten Through Third-Grade Teachers’ Understanding of Dyslexia and Their Preparedness to Teach Students With Potential Dyslexia, Including English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Students (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practice Regarding Evidence-Based Reading Instruction Among Certified Primary Teachers Teaching in Florida’s Public Schools (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
Word recognition, decoding, morphology, foundational skills, etc.
- Decoding Strategies in Spanish First-Grade Students at Risk of Reading Difficulties
- Development of reading attitudes in preschool children: Trajectories, antecedents and consequences
- Playful reading with my infant: A thematic analysis of parents’ experiences of an interactive shared reading intervention (Open Access)
- The relationship of students’ classroom behaviour and word reading—The role of on-task behaviour as a mediator (Open Access)
- Assessing Reading Fluency in Elementary Grades: A Machine Learning Approach
Dyslexia, struggling readers, etc.
- Flipping the “Struggling Reader” Narrative: Leveraging Classroom Interaction to Center Student Affect
- Identifying Emergent Bilinguals at Risk for Reading Difficulties: A Systematic Review of Criterion-Validity of Existing Assessments (Open Access)
- Parental stress, quality of life, and behavioral alterations in children with dyslexia
- Investigating the Contribution of Spelling Practice to the Multisyllabic Word Reading Skills of Upper Elementary Students With Dyslexia (Open Access)
- Understanding the Landscape of Dyslexia Screening in the United States: Practitioners’ Perceptions, Training, and Implementation Practices (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
Engagement, motivation
- Did screen reading steal children’s focus? Longitudinal associations between reading habits, selective attention and text comprehension
- Examining Adolescent Reading Engagement: Design and Validation of the Teacher-Reported Reading Engagement Survey (TRRES)
- The importance of intrinsic reading motivation goes beyond the reading domain: Relations to school performance and motivation in the language domain (Open Access)
Neuroscience
Text creation
Language comprehension, reading comprehension
- Unpacking heterogeneity: Executive function and reading development in U.S. multilingual children from kindergarten to third grade
- The research‐to‐practice gap in teaching reading with digital texts: Results from a survey of US elementary teachers (Open Access)
- Getting at How: Testing Mediating Factors in the Relation Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension in Grade 1
- Diagnostic and Instructionally Relevant Measurement of Reading Comprehension
- Integrating Executive Function Activities Into a Computerized Cognitive Training to Enhance Reading Comprehension in Primary Students
- Unpacking the Relation Between Oral Language and Written Composition: A Meta-Analysis
- Working memory growth and early Spanish reading interact to shape reading and math gains for Spanish-English emergent bilinguals
- Prosodic Reading in Students with Specific Comprehension Difficulties
- Enhancing Narrative Writing Abilities by Practicing Mentalization Skills
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