The Word Identification Strategy

Resources:

• Research Information for The Word Identification Strategy (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 7, No. 3: Prefix Power Game - Marsha Pearsaul and John Pfeifer (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 7, No. 5: The DISSECT Rap by Lauren Henry (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 8, No. 1: The Suffix Slide Activity - Janet Tate and John Pfeifer (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 11, No. 3: Games, activities, handouts and song: Strategic teachers share classroom ideas (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 12, No. 3: A Sweet Activity for Practicing DISSECT - Karen Koskovich, Word ID Cue Card for High School Students - Sue Woodruff (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 14, No. 3: Recommended reading: Passages for Paraphrasing and Word ID (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 18, No. 3: Tips and Activities for Word ID (pdf)
• Strategram Vol. 19, No. 3: Word ID Tic Tac Toe (pdf)

Research Articles

• Schumaker, J.B., Deshler, D.D., Woodruff, S.K., Hock, M.F., Bulgren, J.A., & Lenz, B.K. (2006). Reading strategy interventions: Can literacy outcomes be enhanced for at-risk adolescents? Teaching Exceptional Children, 38 (3), 64-68. In two studies, students who learned reading strategies outperformed students who did not.
• Woodruff, S., Schumaker, J. B., & Deshler, D. D. (2002). The effects of an intensive reading intervention on the decoding skills of high school students with reading deficits. (Research Report No. 15). Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning.
• Lenz, B.K., & Hughes, C.A. (1990). A word identification strategy for adolescents with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 23 (3), 149-158, 163. A multiple baseline across subjects design was implemented using five measures on the Word Identification Strategy with adolescents who have learning disabilities.

The Story Behind the Word Identification Strategy from author Keith Lenz:
The basic steps of the Word Identification Strategy were originally developed as part of a student project that I completed for a class that I was taking as part of my doctoral studies taught by Dr. Don Deshler. The assignment was to develop a learning strategy that might be taught to students to help them meet a demand that they faced in a secondary school setting. At that time, most of the learning strategies being designed by researchers at the University of Kansas focused on teaching reading comprehension and study strategies. However, my recent experience in the classroom made me wonder what kinds of strategies might be needed to help adolescents who struggled with identifying words in text. The question that nagged me was, “What do you do when you are reading along and you come to a word that you don’t know?”

I began studying the literature that had been written about ways to help students meet this demand, and I began to blend steps and tactics that had been proposed by different educators. After I had finished my project, Don approached me and asked if I would be interested in conducting a study of the effects of instruction in the strategy on students with learning disabilities enrolled in a summer-school program. Over the summer, I worked with Vicky Beals, another doctoral student who was a teacher in the summer school program, to collect data on the strategy with the ongoing support of Jean Schumaker and Don Deshler. Finally, Jean Schumaker took the completed work, developed the DISSECT mnemonic device and drafted the first version of the manual, which was to become one of the first learning strategies manuals to be published as part of the Learning Strategies Curriculum.

Author's thoughts About Learning Strategies Instruction:
I believe that learning strategy instruction is one of the most powerful tools that a teacher can learn about, adopt, and use to improve student learning. Research on strategy instruction continues to demonstrate that significant gains that can be achieved when learning strategies are taught to students. However, since I have also seen learning strategies taught very poorly, I must add that the explicit instruction that is captured by the stages of strategy acquisition and generalization are just as important in defining the effectiveness of these interventions as the steps of each learning strategy. The combination of good learning strategy steps captured in an effective remembering system and then taught explicitly in stages to mastery and for generalization makes these interventions the best tools to improve student learning.

Teacher Feedback on the Word Identification Strategy:
Teachers have long reported to me that the Word Identification Strategy is one of their favorite strategies in the Learning Strategies Curriculum. It is often one of the first strategies taught to middle-school students who have developed basic decoding skills but who stall on difficult words as they complete reading assignments. Teachers have reported tremendous growth in reading achievement and in reading confidence as a result of student use of this strategy. In addition, teacher reports continue to support the classroom power and social efficacy of the strategy in the same way that ongoing empirical studies continue to show the benefits of this strategy on student reading scores. Based on the numbers of teachers who have participated in professional development experiences, many thousands of students have benefitted from instruction in this strategy internationally. While a few changes have been made in this strategy and the manual over the years as result of teacher comments and ongoing research, the basic elements associated with the strategy are the same as they were thirty years ago.