Philosophy for Reading: to what extent can Philosophy for Children improve the way lower-attaining Year 3 readers answer inferential and evaluative questions?

Thesis

My research aimed to assess whether the philosophy for children (P4C) programme could help to improve the ways in which a two lower-attaining Year 3 readers answered inferential and evaluative comprehension questions. Additionally, my review of the literature on P4C and reading comprehension revealed that most of the studies tended to focus on quantitative measures and were devoid of qualitive analysis which could have illuminated how P4C could have helped readers to develop their higher-level comprehension skills. In light of this, I wanted to address this qualitative deficit by focusing on a small number of pupils and analysing the potential impact of the intervention from multiple angles. Consequently, I present my finding using the case study approach, which allows me to shed some light on how the pedagogy could help to improve readers’ higher-level reading comprehension.

To monitor the impact of P4C on the pupils’ responses to higher-level questions, I conducted two semi-structured group interviews and constructed a repeated measures design proposed by Thomas (2016). This involved setting three assessments which were initially intended to have been taken in two 10-week intervals: during the first, no intervention would be run; in the second the P4C sessions would have taken place. However, school closures, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, reduced the intervention period by three weeks (which could have reduced its impact) and prevented me from collecting enough data on two pupils from the initial group of four: they had to self-isolate for two weeks prior to schools closing.

Despite this, the test results from the two remaining participants (to whom I allocated the pseudonyms Jade and Ben) indicated that the intervention appeared to help each of them to develop their ability to answer evaluative questions. In addition, the data suggested that the intervention might have had an impact on Ben’s inferential answers but perhaps had little impact on the Jade’s. In addition, my analyses of the pupils’ responses to inferential and evaluative questions, in conjunction with interview data, suggested that the P4C intervention might have helped the pupils to respond to higher-level questions by cultivating key critical thinking skills such as being able to present a line of reasoning which states and justifies a point of view. Moreover, Ben stated that the intervention had inspired him to use questioning to monitor his understanding of what he read more effectively. Using Kintsch and Rawson (2005)’ model of comprehension, I suggested that this could have given Ben the chance develop a more accurate text-base and situation model; thus making it easier for him to answer more challenging comprehension questions. Additionally, my discussion evaluates the likelihood of a number of alternative explanations before concluding.

Authors: Fletcher, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-wxv5eyp64
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: MLT 2020; MLT
• Subjects: Education