Joint PhD Program in Urban Systems

Franklin Dickerson Turner

Track
Urban Education

E-Mail
franklinturner@yahoo.com

Work Position
Assistant Professor

Date passed dissertation defense
December 2007

Biography

Franklin Dickerson Turner is an Assistant Professor of Education at Queens College, The City University of New York, Flushing, New York. He received his B.S. in African American History from Florida A&M University, M.A. in Educational Psychology from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and Ph.D. in Urban Systems. Dr. Turner was a middle school teacher in the Philadelphia School District. He has a strong record of community service, having worked as a volunteer writing coach in the Montclair, NJ public schools and has conducted teacher professional development training in the Paterson, NJ public schools. Dr. Turner has researched and published in the areas of reading fluency acquisition, teacher education, and feedback in the classroom. He is currently a consulting editor for The Journal of Educational Research and the Journal of Negro Education.

Title of the Dissertation

Racial Differences in Developing Fluency: The Effects of Two Fluency Oriented Reading Approaches

Dissertation Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the effectiveness of two fluency-oriented reading approaches that have been successfully utilized to improve the reading fluency of second-grade students. This research evaluates these approaches to see if they are equally beneficial for Asian, black, Latino, and white students. Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (Stahl & Heubach, 2005), the first approach examined, incorporates the repeated reading of a grade-level text over the course of an academic week. This approach to reading is scaffolded by expert readers. The second approach incorporates Wide-Reading Instruction (Kuhn, 2004/2005), which also utilizes scaffolding by expert readers, but three different grade-level texts are read each academic week. The results indicate that both Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) and Wide-Reading Instruction (WRI) are useful schemes for reading instruction with second-grade students in urban schools. This study found that black and Latino second-grade students in the FORI and control condition made significant improvements in word efficiency. The trend for Asian and whites second-grade students in the WRI condition and black and Latino second-grade students in the FORI condition was an increase in reading comprehension relative to the gains made by students in the control group classrooms.