Tag Archive for 'reading strategies'

Inferencing Test

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2009 in Assessment and Testing. 22 Comments

“After failing to move a runner past first base for the entire game, the Giants sent Davis to the plate with the potential tying and winning runs in scoring position.  Unfortunately, he hit into a 6-4-3 double play to end the game.”

  1.  How many outs were there when Davis came to bat?
  2. To whom did he hit the ball?
  3. Describe the kind ball he hit (pop up? Line drive? etc.)
  4. What was the final score of the game
  5. How many runners were on base?

If you are able to answer all five of these questions (#5 is tricky) is it because you have mastered the ”reading skill” of making inferences. Or because your knowledge of baseball fills in the gaps for you?

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 28, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports and Teaching. 29 Comments

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ’skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

Reading Strategies and Cargo Cult Science

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy and Literacy. 6 Comments

The idea that it’s enough to simply ”find what works, adopt it, and spread it around,” notes scientist/blogger Allison over at Kitchen Table Math is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science“:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

“Cargo Cult education seems to be all the rage in lots of communities,” Allison notes.  “Sure, districts could just start grabbing lessons from high performing schools but that won’t make the students suddenly read or write.  Unless they understand what’s underneath the ‘lessons of the high performing school’ then it won’t matter.”

I had never heard this Feyman anecdote but I may have to start calling our reliance on “reading strategies” instruction “Cargo Cult Reading.”  Its entire point  is to teach children “what good readers do” and the habits of mind that are reflexive to able readers.  It’s the exactly the same thing–you teach kids to mimic the behaviors that lead to comprehension–but without the background knowledge that actually makes it possible.  Indeed, a staple of strategy instruction is to teach children that good readers ”activate their prior knowledge to create mental images, ask questions, and make inferences.”  How exactly does that work in the absence of prior knowledge to activate? 

One of the things that more advantaged students typically bring to school is a lifetime of background knowledge (or “schema” as reading strategy enthusiasts prefer to call it) that makes comprehension possible.  Without it you’re sitting in the jungle waiting for the planes to land.

Whose Core Knowledge?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 11 Comments

The normally thoughtful and engaging Clay Burell swings and misses at E.D. Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed about reading tests, painting with an uncharacteristically broad brush.   Relying on the standard misperception of Hirsch and Core Knowledge as promoting ”the white male-privileged narrative of history,” Burell writes that such a curriculum is “unfair to those very disadvantaged students Hirsch claims will benefit from his model.”  This ignores the fact that the curriculum has had its greatest success with low-SES students.  Pay a visit to schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School in the South Bronx; P.S. 124 in Queens; Atlanta’s Capitol View Elementary; among others.  I don’t believe you’ll find much evidence of unfairness.

There are a couple of problems with Clay’s analysis of Hirsch’s piece.  First, the immediate benefit of teaching a broad, content-rich curriculum is not cultural (although no apologies need to be made for familiarizing students with the history and culture of their own country and the broader world) but structural.  Reading comprehension suffers in disadvantaged children exactly because they lack the background knowledge to make sense of what they read.  Indeed, Burell himself underscored the crucial role of content knowledge in creating strong readers in a post a few months ago praising Dan Willingham’s Teaching Content is Teaching Reading YouTube video.  Hirsch has been making the same argument for decades. 

Clay wants Hirsch’s essay to address critical thinking, but that wasn’t the point of the piece.  Hirsch’s singular service to education has been to attempt to define the broad body of background knowledge that speakers and writers assume their audience knows, and point out that literacy (as well as critical thinking and other so-called “21st Century” skills) depends on sharing it.  The curse of this contribution is that it is easy to dismiss it, as Alfie Kohn typically does (and I fear Burell does too) as “a bunch o’ facts” and “rote memorization” even though Hirsch has never even so much as hinted that kids should memorize lists of names and dates.  Clay wants the curriculum infused with critical thinking questions, but where is the disagreement?  There’s absolutely nothing in the Core Knowledge curriculum that suggests or implies it has come down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets and must be taught, unquestioned, in a specific way.  Good teachers like Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator, have always–will always–infuse their teaching with thoughtful perspectives and critical thinking.  How does a set curriculum prevent them from doing so?  How does defining what to teach determine how to teach it?  The answer is simple: it doesn’t.  

He also takes issue with Hirsch’s criticism of reading strategy instruction.  Allowing for Clay’s personal experience, I think he underestimates the damage done to children by a heavy over-reliance on such instruction in the elementary grades.  In many disadvantaged schools, strategy instruction IS reading instruction, at the expense of science, history, art and music.   The result is a vicious circle where kids robotically search for the main idea or “question the author.”  But their lack of content knowledge prevents them from meaningfully answering the ”metacognitive” questions they are trained (speaking of rote memorization) to pose. 

We’re never going to get away from the rhetorical questions with which Burell challenges Core Knowledge (”Knowledge of what? From whose perspective? In whose interests?”) nor should we.  But it’s dispiriting that smart educators like Burell are chary about a specific curriculum out of some misperception of balance, fairness or perpective.  If you want students to be critical thinkers–and to his credit Burell clearly does–what better way than to give them the background knowledge they need to grapple with precisely the questions he suggests?

Clay is on more solid ground, I think when he suggests “If we can talk leaving high school content under the control of local teachers, not dictated by national content tests, then maybe  – high school teachers could fill in the silences left by the national(istic) 3-8 standards, teach race, gender, and class-based perspectives in history that almost surely wouldn’t be covered earlier.”   Not a bad idea, that.  If every kid comes to high school with a shared body of knowledge that is both strong and subtle, then those high school classes could be rich in critical thinking and challenging perspectives.  Without it, we’re frozen forever at the starting line, searching for some shared subject or common ground to engage with and argue about. 

Email me your address, Clay (Seriously).  I’ve got a copy of the Core Knowledge Sequence with your name on it.  See what’s in it, and see how pedagogically prescriptive it’s not, and ask yourself which students would get the most out of your high school humanities class: those who walked in with a firm grasp of the content it describes?  Or those whose sense of history, science and the arts was left to chance?

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 22, 2009 in Humor. 2 Comments

A government ministry in England has been called on the carpet for the “impenetrable language peppered with jargon” in its reports.  OK class, let’s use our reading strategies to make sense of this passage, shall we?

An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology. The capital investment strategy will continue to renew and modernise further education establishments to create state of the art facilities.”

Turn and talk to your neighbor and see if you can find the main idea.  No?  Hmmm.  Let’s use context clues, then.  The agency that wrote the passage in question is the “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.” 

They’re responsible for courses in basic literacy for adults.

Reading War II: Content Knowledge vs. Reading Strategies

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 19, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy, Literacy, Research and Reports and accountability. 11 Comments

If phonics vs. whole language was Round One of the reading wars, the new battle is shaping up to be reading strategies vs. content knowledge, says Dan Willingham at Britannica Blog.  “Like Round 1 of the battle, one side is mostly right (content knowledge) but there is some merit on the other side,” says Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Most of us think about reading in a way that is fundamentally incorrect. We think of it as transferable, meaning that once you acquire the ability to read, you can read anything. That is true for only part of what it takes to read. It’s true for decoding—the ability to translate written symbols into sounds….But being able to decode letter strings fluently is only half of reading. In order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. And that doesn’t just mean that you need to know the vocabulary—you need to have the right knowledge of the world.

Willingham produced a YouTube video that underscores the connections between content knowledge and comprehension.  His blog post points out what virtually every elementary school teacher knows: once children learn to decode, reading instruction is almost exclusively focused on comprehension “strategies”–asking students to find the main idea of passage, identify the author’s purpose, etc.  Reading strategies work “but it’s a one-time boost,” he notes.  “Fifty sessions of practice is no better than five sessions of practice” since strategies serve mainly to give students a better idea of what reading is for.

In early grades, there is tremendous emphasis on decoding, and there must be. But this emphasis leads kids to feel that if they’ve decoded a passage, then they have read it, whereas teachers want them to have the idea that they shouldn’t be satisfied with decoding—they need to understand. Reading strategies help drive home this new notion of reading—that it’s about communication. Small wonder that practicing reading strategies gives no added benefit. Reading strategies are an easily-learned trick, like checking your work in math. Useful, to be sure, but not something that needs to be practiced.  I’ve discussed this matter in more detail here.

This is important stuff, dimly appreciated inside schools and as a practical matter, not at all in the education policy and advocacy communities.  The message needs to be delivered early, often and loud: boosting class time spent on reading instruction is of little use, and could actively be damaging kids if that time is coming at the expense of a well-rounded curriculum.  The title of Dan’s video says it best:  teaching content IS teaching reading.

“The tragic irony is that schools desperately trying to meet AYP are reportedly cutting time from subjects like social studies and science to devote more and more time to reading. Unless they are using content-rich reading materials, that strategy not only won’t work, it will actually backfire,” Willingham writes.

Willingham is not sanguine about that “people will be persuaded by what is truly a mountain of data,” but if it takes Round Two of the reading wars to drive this point into the consciousness of parents, policymakers and educators, the fight will be well worth it.

Reading Strategies: A Little Goes a Long Way

Published by Dan Willingham on August 28, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Literacy. 11 Comments

Yesterday I argued that the knowledge readers bring to a text is essential to reading comprehension. But does even a knowledgeable reader comprehend automatically? Mustn’t the reader apply comprehension strategies to extract meaning from the text? The short answer is that teaching students comprehension strategies does help, but too much time is currently devoted to them.

Reading comprehension strategies include things like question generation (students are taught to generate questions about a text and then answer them) comprehension monitoring (students are taught to become aware of when they do not understand), and summarization (students are taught techniques to summarize meaning). Often, multiple strategies are taught.

The National Reading Panel  reviewed 205 studies examining the effectiveness of teaching students reading strategies, and there is little doubt that they help, and that the effect is sizable.

There are two aspects of the data which deserve special attention because they hold implications for classroom application. First, the effects of teaching students reading strategies are weak or absent before the third grade.  This finding is readily understandable—students are still learning to decode, and simply can’t juggle in mind the tasks of decoding, comprehending, and trying to implement a strategy. It’s only when decoding has become fluid so that the reader doesn’t need to think about it much that enough mental space is free to accommodate a strategy.

Second, when it comes to teaching students to use reading strategies, shorter programs seem just as effective as longer programs. This finding is crucial, because it ought to make us think differently about what reading strategies actually do. It’s natural to think that strategies improve the reader’s skill in extracting meaning from a text. But if that were true then more practice ought to make you better at it. Instead, comprehension strategies feel less like a skill and more like a trick—something like “check your work” in mathematics. It’s a very smart thing to do, and students should be explicitly taught to do it, but it doesn’t require extensive practice.

What might the trick of comprehension strategies be? A good guess is that they encourage students to think differently about reading. There is so much emphasis on decoding in early reading instruction (as there must be) that it is understandable that a student might think “If I’ve decoded, then I’ve read it.” But an adult knows that if you get to the bottom of a page and don’t know what you’ve read, you haven’t really read it, even if you’ve decoded everything. That conception of reading—that the point is communication—must click for students, and comprehension strategies may have most of their impact in getting students to think about reading as something they do to understand. Once they understand that, most of what comprehension strategies advise is something that students will do naturally: try to find the main idea, check your own comprehension, and so on.

The bottom line is that teaching comprehension strategies is a good idea, but it appears to be a one-time boost. There is no evidence that more practice yields more benefit. More information on this subject can be found here: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter06-07/CogSci.pdf