The effectiveness of a lesson series on deep reading An intervention study among Dutch tenth grade pre-university pupils

In the Netherlands, text comprehension instruction often takes a traditional form: students study texts and subsequently answer text-dependent questions. Currently, it is deba-ted whether and how text comprehension instruction in secondary education should be revised. In this study, we therefore tested an alternative approach to reading lessons.Based on recent scientific insights, we developed a digital lesson series consisting of six lessons focused on deep reading of expository texts. It features a goal-directed, process-oriented approach to text comprehension, by means of observational learning. Independent study of the texts also takes a prominent place.The lesson series was tested in 27 10th- grade pre-university classes, distributed over two conditions: in the independent learning condition (n = 329) students worked individually, and in the teacher-guided learning condition (n = 372) students additionally participated in class discussions.Self-reports show that students in both conditions displayed more reading behavior characteristic of deep reading. Furthermore, students in the teacher-guided learning condition obtained better text comprehension results. In both conditions, the students' quality of execution determined learning gains. The lesson series therefore seems an effective contemporary alternative to current Dutch reading lessons.