An analytic description of ProjectExpert: An instructional reading program for ninth grade vocational students

Abstract

A significant number of ninth-grade students still struggles with proficiently comprehending texts. Moreover, their increasingly lowering motivation to read is alarming. Various educational interventions de- signed to enhance reading comprehension and/or motivation are available in the scientific field. However, a detailed description of its underlying principles is frequently lacking. This detailed description could pro- vide genuine opportunities for replication, theory building, and dissemination into practice. Therefore, the main goal of the present study is to offer an analytic, rigorous, and detailed description of an instruc- tional program aimed at fostering ninth- grade vocational students’ reading comprehension, strategy use, and autonomous reading motivation, named ProjectExpert. The context, theoretical and/or empirical grounding, macro and micro-level design principles will be outlined, based on the framework of Bouwer and De Smedt (2018). ProjectExpert entails four design principles: (1) Text reading is goal-directed. (2) The instruction is embedded in a motivating learning environment rooted in the fulfilment of students’ basic psychological needs. (3) By means of explicit strategy instruction students are taught to use a repertoire of cognitive and metacognitive reading comprehension strategies. (4) Students practice reading and ap-plying reading strategies in heterogeneous pairs. Moreover, during the design, a stepwise procedure was adopted to guarantee the feasibility and usability of the design principles for this particular group of teachers and students. This stepwise procedure and the implications for the design of ProjectExpert are de- scribed in detail. Finally, the relational structure of the design principles and challenges related to implementing them into practice are discussed.