Running Head: THE EFFECTS OF THE SEGUIN THREE PERIOD LESSONThe Effects of the Seguin Three Period Lesson on Vocabulary RetentionLaura FrancoKennesaw State UniversityIntroductionBy third grade, students are required to participate in federally mandated standardized tests, state mandated tests, as well as those required by the specific school system, county, and local school that they attend. In addition to this mandated assessment, federal and state governments, as well as school systems and schools, are requiring certain durations for lessons in Reading, Writing, and Math. These subjects are perceived as being more important, and therefore should have more of the instructional day devoted to them. Because of this, the content areas of Science and Social Studies are suffering. From previous experience teaching third grade, the difficulty students seem to have with learning and retaining the information in the content areas is vocabulary retention. The information in elementary Social Studies is particularly rich in new vocabulary which is necessary to the curricula of the upper grades. The third grade curriculum in Georgia has just “rolled out” the new Georgia Performance Standards for Social Studies this year. The new curriculum is even more aligned with those of the upper grades and deals with the foundations of democracy in the United States. The majority of the curriculum focuses on three week units about famous Americans who in some way helped further, defend, or support democracy throughout the history of the country. Each of these mini-units contains many new vocabulary words that the students have only three weeks to master and remember for the remainder of their education. While studying the Montessori Method of teaching, it became obvious that the Seguin Three Period Lesson, which is used by Montessori educators when introducing new vocabulary, might be the best way to teach this vocabulary and ensure retention. Montessori teachers are trained to use the following series when teaching new vocabulary:“This is ______. Say ______.” While showing and allowing the child to manipulate a concrete example of the word.Mix up the objects being taught. “Please show me ______.”Put the objects back in the order taught and ask, “What is this?” while pointing to each object in order.The objects may be given names, like “cylinder,” or “cube,” or the material may be teaching a concept like, “broad,” or “narrow.” The purpose of presenting language this way is not only to assure that the student has a firm understanding of the terms, but that the student can also take the new words he or she has learned and apply them to future or past experiences to give them order. Recent research shows that students retain information better when it is applied to real life, or directly related to their own lives. By equipping them with the vocabulary they need at the beginning of a unit, students will be able to apply the vocabulary throughout the unit, and therefore have a better understanding of it and be better able to retain it and use it in the future.SignificanceStudents often struggle in school because they have limited vocabularies. Retaining learned vocabulary after decoding is essential to fluent reading. Reading fluency is directly related to reading comprehension, which is directly related to all other content learning, including math. Standardized math tests, such as the Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), require children to complete entire math sections containing nothing but word problems. If a child has not retained the math vocabulary, it will be impossible for him to show his true skills in computation. Word problems are traditionally a sticking point for young children, and having a command of the vocabulary will help assuage these fears and empower students in their mathematical problem solving skills. In the content areas of Social Studies and Science, vocabulary is absolutely necessary to comprehending the concepts being taught. Scientific language is often deemed too difficult for young students to learn, but the abstractness of the concepts becomes nearly debilitating when we use language other than those technical terms that best describe them. Social Studies is so wide sweeping in the elementary years, that students are apt to forget and confuse the language from one major concept area, like economics, with that of another, like geography. Particularly in the content areas, the curricula are so scattered, that the vocabulary must be retained explicitly or failure is nearly guaranteed. There are often months or years between the time when a child is introduced to the vocabulary of a content area, and when they will again be expected to use them fluently. This study has the potential to support a teaching style that will help build student vocabularies early in their educational careers and be better able to utilize them in higher education. If this teaching style is successful, students will also be better able to express themselves in writing and when speaking in intellectual conversation. On the individual school level, the students will be better prepared for state and federally mandated standardized tests (CRCT) in Science, Social Studies, Math, Reading, and Writing, through which students will continue to be more confident in their writing and speaking skills, and will possibly score better on sections of standardized tests that affect Adequate Yearly Progress, as determined by “No Child Let Behind.” Struggling schools would be able to implement the Seguin lesson to increase achievement in vocabulary, and consequently, the necessary areas of Reading and Math. On a grander scale, the education system would begin to produce students with strong vocabularies and understandings of the English language in general, as well as strong basic understandings of the content areas and the vocabularies to discuss them accurately. Students will be better able to communicate with others, and will be better able to function as informed, intelligent, capable members of society.SettingThe school where the study took place serves about 420 students from middle to low income families in a generally suburban atmosphere. The ethnic composition of my school is 36% African-American, 33% Caucasian, 21.5% Hispanic, 8% Multi-racial, and 1.5% Asian, as reported by the school’s school improvement plan for the 2007-2008 academic year. Many of the Hispanic students speak Spanish only at home, and most parent-teacher communication is sent home in both English and Spanish. The classroom involved in the study is a co-teaching setting with two full rosters in one classroom with two general education teachers. There are twenty-four students in the class ranging from all socio-economic statuses. Of the twenty-four students, fifteen are male and nine are female, seven are African-American, eight are Hispanic and speak Spanish at home, and nine are Caucasian. The co-teaching model includes on self-contained Early Intervention Program (EIP) class roster, and one general education roster, including no EIP students whatsoever. The Self-Contained EIP class includes eleven of the total students in the class. All of these students are performing below grade level standards. The remaining thirteen students are performing either on or above grade level expectations. The teachers in this class teach both whole group and small group instruction, and teach all the students in the class. Research Problem and QuestionsThe purpose of this study is to discover the effectiveness of the Seguin Three Period Lesson on vocabulary retention in third grade Social Studies students. The specific research questions are as follows:Does teaching Social Studies vocabulary through the Sequin three period lesson increase retention of word definitions?Does teaching Social Studies vocabulary through the Sequin three period lesson increase the students’ ability to use the word in context?The hypothesis for this study is that using the Seguin Three Period Lesson when teaching Social Studies vocabulary in three week units will increase students’ abilities to use words in context, but will have no change in the students’ abilities to retain word definitions.Literature ReviewStudents in third grade are making the transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Up to this point, the “children’s vocabulary knowledge is largely determined by informal factors such as parental interaction and other incidental sources such as the TV” (Biemiller, 2004). In the primary grades, the focus is on reading words that are already present in the child’s life. Once students reach the intermediate grades, they are expected to gain knowledge and understanding from everything they read. A small vocabulary at this point becomes a significant deficit. In 2004, Hiebert, Lehr, and Osborn addressed the difficulty facing students with small vocabularies by stating, ““Given that students’ success in school and beyond depends in great measure upon their ability to read with comprehension, there is an urgency to providing instruction that equips students with the skills and strategies necessary for lifelong vocabulary development” (p. 3). “In addition, learners need to have a broad base of background knowledge available to them to be able to figure out new learning. This skill is essential to improving vocabulary acquisition. Students need to be able to develop this background knowledge so they have this connection to new learning and thus be able to access and maintain that new learning (Marzano, 2004). Unfortunately, “there are too many words in the language to be dealt with one at a time in any form of vocabulary instruction” (McKeown & Curtis, 1987). In fact, Nagy and Anderson (1984) found that printed school English contains about 88, 500 distinct word families, with upwards of 100,000 distinct meanings.Before addressing which teaching methods are the most effective, it is necessary to understand how children develop their vocabularies. Overwhelmingly, research suggests that for vocabulary to be fully retained and usable by the child, it must move into the long term, or permanent, memory. Sprenger (1999) suggests that, “contrary to earlier beliefs, memory is not confined to one area of the brain, but the process of creating and maintaining memory activates multiple areas of the brain.” Because of this, it is necessary that vocabulary take more than one path into the brain and be rehearsed repeatedly in order to move from the working memory into the permanent memory. Misulis (1999) states that “In order for words to be truly learned, that is, to be used and committed to long-term memory, they must be reinforced many times in meaningful ways” (p. 25), and Juel and Deffes (2004) reinforce that “exposing a child to an unknown word multiple times reinforces the word and its meaning and helps move it from short to long-term memory.” In short, the “secret” to vocabulary retention appears to repetition or rehearsal. Jensen (1998) states that "The greater the number of links and associations that your brain creates, the more neural territories involved and the more firmly the information is woven in neurologically” (p. 92), and continues stating, “Unless connections and rehearsal take place, working memory prunes out certain information as unimportant; thus learning never does reach permanent memory where it can be accessed and used.”Fishback (1998) and Sprenger (1999) both support the use of vocabulary teaching techniques that appeal to multiple senses, include repetition or rehearsal, and engage positive emotions from the students. First of all, auditory strategies are recommended, especially for English Language Learners (ELLs), as well as native speakers by Hiebert, Lehr, and Osborn (2004). They assert that students need to hear the oral English that will be seen in the texts they will read so that they will have had previous experiences of hearing the word before they encounter it on their own in the text. Once the word or words are introduced, they need to be frequently rehearsed in order to be usable in academic discussion and reading. Bryant, ET al. (2003) support this by stating that “vocabulary instruction should occur on a regular, frequent basis for optimal student retention of the words.” While the methods of rehearsal are many, Misulis (1999) and Rosenbaum (2001) suggest activities such as matching, multiple choice, word puzzles like crosswords, writing activities utilizing the vocabulary words, classification or categorizing activities, analogies, and review games of other sorts. These are all strategies that are used, at one point or another, in the general education classroom. Gershman (1970) and Seibert (1927) assert, however, that silent repetition and writing activities are less effective than repeating the words aloud and Oxford and Scarcella (1994) suggest the vocabulary be taught through “fully contextualized activities,” or in short, through reading. They suggest cloze activities and insist that words be taught in their context. However, all the researchers quoted above insist that incidental acquisition of vocabulary through reading should not be emphasized until a base vocabulary has been built in the academic area being taught. In this light, Misulis (1999) reminds vocabulary teachers that “words should be selected that are important to developing an understanding of the content and its related information and concepts” (p. 25). As stated above, it is impossible to expect students to learn the meanings of every word in the English language, as the time required to teach such understanding would be countless.Based upon the research of how students learn vocabulary best, and the current suggested teaching strategies, it is obvious that the Montessori Method of teaching new language, or vocabulary, fits into this mold. Dr. Montessori wanted originally to be an engineer, and studied mathematics, but then moved on to study medicine (Standing, 1957, p. 23). After she graduated from medical school, she worked as an assistant doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic in the University of Rome. Part of her job was to visit local asylums to select subjects for the clinic. She saw the children and wanted to help them, as they were in an empty room with no means of stimulation or learning. Through her experience with these children, she came to think that “mental deficiency was a pedagogical problem, rather than a medical one” (Standing, 1957, p. 28). She was strongly influenced by the work of Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin with defective children (Standing, 1957, p. 29), and drew many of her techniques from their research.Dr. Montessori stated, “I have found that Seguin’s method for obtaining an association between an object and its corresponding term in teaching defective children is also very useful for those who are normal” (1967, p. 156). The Seguin Three Period, or Three Stage, Lesson is described by Dr. Montessori (1957) as follows. The first stage, or period, focuses on the association of the sense perceptions with the names. The teacher shows the object, or the written word, and states the word clearly and precisely, and asks the child to repeat it. This period is repeated, or rehearsed, until the teacher is convinced that the child knows the names of the objects or words being taught. The second stage then focuses on the recognition of the object corresponding to the name. This stage is the first assessment of understanding. The objects or words are mixed up and the teacher asks for the child to identify each word in the order that they were presented. If this assessment is failed, the teacher returns the objects to the order they were presented and repeats the first period. If it is a success, the teacher moves to the final stage, or the final assessment. The third and final stage deals with the remembrance of the name corresponding to the object. The teacher puts the words or objects back in order, and asks the child to name them in order. Again, if this assessment is failed, the teacher returns seamlessly to the first period and repeats the lessons until comprehension is reached (Montessori, 1967, p. 156-159).Dr. Montessori believed that we must “teach, teaching, not correcting” (Standing, 1957, p. 219), and this is evident in her use of Seguin’s three period lesson. Never is the child corrected, but is continually taught the correct terms and pronunciations. She insists that her practices “had nothing in them particularly limited to the instruction of idiots” (Standing, 1957, p. 30), and while her students were reading and writing as successfully as normal students in public schools, she “was searching for the reasons which could keep back the healthy and happy children of the ordinary schools on so low a plane that they could be equaled in tests of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils” (Standing, 1957, p. 30). 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