Sociocultural Variables in Children's Sequencing of Stories - Reading Response

Authors: Erica McClure, Jana Mason, and Janet Williams

This article covered a study about how sociocultural variables could affect students' sequencing of stories. Did an Anglo student correctly sequence a story more times than a Black student? Did a Black student outperfom a Hispanic student? The findings, surprisingly, displayed a result different than what stereotypes would say.

The study had students sequence six sentence stories in the correct order, but the catch was it was done three differen ways: question, setting, and conclusion. The setting stories had the setting of the story come first and then follow the nomal chain of events. Question stories posed a question at the beginning of the story and then the sequence of the events set out to answer it. Conclusion stories, the hardest stories to sequence as told by the results of the study, began with the conclusion of the story and then went through the setting and event statements, and even the character's end state. The study had 500 third, sixth, and ninth grade students for testing, but ended up with only 455 able to complete the test. Students were scored on a variety of variables within the test. These are the three focused upon:

- complete correct order

- any two sentences numbered in consecutive order

- initial sequence.

The results of the study were both expected and unexpected. As excepted:

- the better readers scored higher on the task.

- "[o]n the total order measure, the setting version was ordered correctly in 29% of the cases, the question version in 17%, and the conclusion version in 14%" (p. 12).

- Anglos made a greater improvement on the six stories than the Blacks and Hispanics.

Unexpectedly:

- "...sociocultural variables make only small contributions to explaining variability. In the analyses of the inner city data there were no significant effects of either sex or socioeconomic status" (p. 13)

- In comparison to the predominantly middle class suburban and predominantly working class inner city Anglos had only one to three percentage points "with no consistency in which group's score is higher" (p. 13).

- Ethnicity is a significant variable in inner city data.

I also found it interesting that Hispanics outperformed Blacks on the question and setting versions, but the Blacks outperformed the Hispanics on the conclusion versions of the stories. The article highlights that this could be a cultural thing: blacks begin telling stories by throwing out a small "abstract" while Hispanics don't follow that kind of sequencing in their culture at all. In fact, the Blacks outperformed the Anglos and Hisanics in conclusion stories in grade three, but Anglos eventually outperformed them past that age. These variables could show that culture plays a large part in the understanding of how a story is sequenced and how to interpret it. The study goes on to analyze the rest of the data in the same way as the conclusion stories.

Reflection:

I found this article really intriguing and helpful in giving me background knowledge about how certain ethnicities may learn. The difference between the ethnicities within their grades is a great way to demonstrate how differentiated instruction is needed to teach every child. If a child of Hispanic descent is unable to follow the sequence of a story because it is in conclusion format, that would be a good tidbit of information to have. This article brings to light that it's important to go over the scores of your students, but it is also important to factor in other variables as well. How is a child supposed to learn if they cannot understand what they are learning? I found in the article that many students had trouble sequencing the question and conclusion versions of the stories. This caught my attention not because of this result, but because of why the authors thought this could be. The Blacks and Hispanic groups had trouble with these versions more than the Anglos because of their cultural background. Many teachers do not think about how home life and the culture of the student can impact their learing style. Anglo children will grow up with more opportunities to learn like the school system functions, but the Blacks and Hispanics have unique and different cultures. Sometimes these cultures even speak different languages, which form their language and sentences differently. This goes to show that it will take more than looking at a score sheet and basic info sheet to learn how to teach a student with different cultural norms than you.

This article will definitely help my future career. While I was always interested in different languages and cultures of possible students in my classrooms, it taught me that I can't just expect for every child to understand what I'm teaching them. And this won't always be because they are "low-level" students, but because they may have grown up learning how to interpret the world differently than I did. It will be difficult to adjust my teaching to a culture that is different than mine, but I think I can do it if my students can go to school in a different culture than the one they are growing up in at home.

#sociocultural #readingresponse #sequencing