Tag Archive for 'reading'

“Reverse Engineering Academic Upbringing”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 19, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Higher Education and accountability. 1 Comment

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is launching an ambitious research project to figure out why so many of its freshmen need remediation in reading and math.  Every incoming student will be evaluated “to reverse-engineer his academic upbringing,” UNLV president Neal Smatresk tells the Las Vegas Sun.  Since eighty percent of UNLV’s undergrads come from a single source, the state’s own Clark County School District, Smatresk hopes to gain particularly vivid insights.

Data gathered from the academic assessments would be shared with school districts and could help educators identify and correct patterns of weakness, whether it be general flaws in teaching philosophies or student study habits.  Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said the research findings could offer important insight into the root causes of the problems requiring remediation.

“The possibility that the district will be able to identify clusters of underachieving students, and trace them to not only individual campuses but individual classrooms, has Clark County’s teachers union on edge,” the paper notes. 

Last year, more than a third of Nevada’s high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million.

Parents Read More, Praise More, But Keep Kids on a Short Leash

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 19, 2009 in Parents and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Children today have fewer chores around the house and greater autonomy than previous generations, but they’re kept on a shorter leash outside the home.  That’s the takeaway from a novel study that analyzed 300 advice columns and editorials from randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine from 1929 to 2006.  Dr. Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College was studying changes in the portrayals of parental authority and children’s autonomy over time, Science Daily reports:  

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

“Today’s parents face demands that require near-constant surveillance of their children,” says Rutherford.  “Allowing children more autonomy to express themselves and their disagreements at home may well be a response to the loss of more substantial forms of children’s autonomy to move through and participate in their communities on their own.”

Meanwhile an Ohio State study tracked parenting patterns over two generations and found ”great increases” in the amount of reading and affection shown to children today–and reductions in the amount of spanking.

In general, the amount of affection parents show their children increased significantly over the generations. Sixty percent of fathers and 73 percent of mothers in the second generation reported showing their children physical affection and praising them within the last week. But only about 40 percent of their parents showed open affection on a weekly basis.  Reading to children also showed a generational shift. Nearly three times more mothers in the second generation reported reading to their children daily compared to their own parents.

New NAEP Numbers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 28, 2009 in No category. 2 Comments

NAEP long-term trend numbers are out.  Headlines and links:

Improvements seen in reading and mathematics

Black students make greater gains from early 1970s than White students

Most racial/ethnic score gaps narrow compared to first assessment

For students whose parents did not finish high school, mathematics scores increase compared to 1978

Percentages of students taking higher-level mathematics increasing

USA Today’s Greg Toppo highlights sharp increases in math and reading among many of the nation’s lowest-performing students. especially in the past four years, but notes “the stubborn, decades-long achievement gap between white and minority students shrank between the 1970s and the first part of this decade, but has barely budged since 2002, when the federal government compelled public schools to address it through No Child Left Behind (NCLB).” 

Over at Curriculum Matters, Mary Ann Zehr notes average scores have remained flat for 17-year-olds both in reading and math since the early 1970s.  “The scores for 17-year-olds in reading, however, did increase by three points, to 286, from 2004 to 2008, which is considered significant. But the same was not true for 17-year-olds in math. The scores remained stagnant for that age group in math during that same period,” she notes.

A Call for Direct Instruction

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 16, 2009 in Education News, Opinion and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

A solution for the achievement gap was discovered four decades ago, writes John McWhorter in The New Republic, and it has nothing to do with raising low expectations, improving parental involvement, or demanding accountability.  Starting in the late 1960s, he writes, Project Follow Through compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results in more than 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade:

It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading was vastly more effective than any of the others for (drum roll, please) poor kids, including black ones. DI isn’t exactly complicated: Students are taught to sound out words rather than told to get the hang of recognizing words whole, and they are taught according to scripted drills that emphasize repetition and frequent student participation.

Subsequent studies found similar results, says McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Indeed, he notes, ”a search for an occasion where DI was instituted and failed to improve students’ reading performance would be distinctly frustrating.”  So why no discussion of Direct Instruction as a means of addressing the achievement gap?

Schools of education have long been caught up in an idea that teaching poor kids to read requires something more than, well, teaching them how to sound out words. The poor child, the good-thinking wisdom tells us, needs tutti-frutti approaches bringing in music, rhythm, narrative, Ebonics, and so on. Distracted by the hardships in their home lives, surely they cannot be reached by just laying out the facts. That can only work for coddled children of doctors and lawyers. But the simple fact of how well DI has worked shows that “creativity” is not what poor kids need.

Matthew Yglesias describes McWhorter’s piece as “somewhat overblown but essentially correct” and nails an even larger issue:

It’s both strange and unfortunate that the education system is so unresponsive to this research and also strange and unfortunate that “education reform” efforts have so much focus on administrative structure of school systems and so little on these kinds of curriculum issues.”

McWhorter meanwhile urges Arne Duncan, the next Ed Secretary to consider “taking the blinders off and forcing America’s urban school districts to teach poor kids to read with tools that we have known to work since the Nixon Administration.”

 

Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education Practice and Research and Reports. 8 Comments

A little over a year ago, I saw Dan Willingham give a talk at the Education Trust conference in Washington, DC titled “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading.” He demonstrated convincingly why background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension–and why broad, content-rich education is the best way to ensure kids can understand what they read.  Having been force-fed the idea that all kids needed is the ability to decode, vocabulary and “reading strategies” in order to comprehend, I thought – I still do — the phrase “teaching content is teaching reading” ought to be on the lips of every elementary educator in America.  

Dan has made an intriguing video on the main ideas of his presentation and posted it on YouTube. It’s terrific. 

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc">http://youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc</a>

Great work, Dr. Willingham.  If you know an elementary school teacher, forward the link to Dan’s video.

Classic Fairytales “Too Dark” For Today’s Toddlers?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 9, 2009 in Education News and Parents. 3 Comments

A British website surveyed 3,000 parents to find out what mom and dad are reading to their children before bed.  It turns out one-fourth of “mums” have put aside dark, scary and non-PC traditional tales like Snow White and Rapunzel in favor of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Gruffalo.  According to TheBabyWebsite.com:

  • Snow White seems to have fallen by the wayside because the Wicked Witch was deemed too frightening – but a handful won’t read it because they feel the dwarf reference is not PC.
  • Rapunzel is considered ‘too dark’ and Cinderella has been dumped because she is forced to do the housework and sit on cinders.
  • A third of parents won’t read ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ because she walks alone through woods and finds her grandmother has been eaten by a wolf.
  • A fifth of parents don’t like to tell their children about ‘The Gingerbread Man’ as he gets eaten by a fox.

However two out of three parents in the survey believe “traditional fairy tales have stronger morality messages than many of today’s popular bedtime stories.”  They’re just too scary to read before bed. 

The top ten bedtime stories of 2008 were The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Mr Men by Roger Hargreaves, The Gruffalo, Winnie the Pooh, Aliens Love Underpants by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort, Thomas and Friends from The Railway Series, The Wind in the Willows, What a Noisy Pinky Ponk! by Andrew Davenport, Charlie and Lola by Lauren Child and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

The site also offers a list of top ten most neglected fairytales.  It includes Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk.

When Homework is a Headache — Literally

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 31, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Children who develop headaches while reading or who struggle to complete their homework may be sufferring from an under-diagnosed vision problem. As many as one of every 20 students have some degree of “CI” or  “convergence insufficiency,” the AP reports. Standard vision screenings administered by schools won’t catch it, since such exams stress distance vision.

To bring print or other close-in work into focus, both eyes must turn slightly inward, or converge. Convergence insufficiency means the eyes aren’t doing that properly. Words may appear blurry or double, or disappear as readers lose their place.  “Complaints are rare in very young children because pictures and large type don’t require as much convergence,” the AP notes.  “Parents tend to start noticing a problem once homework and deeper reading begins.”

Poor Speller? Blame Your G-E-N-E-S

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 28, 2008 in Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Some people have a way with words.  Othurs not weigh haf.  According to the Times of London, it could just be your genes. 

In the past, poor spelling was attributed to all manner of things, from bad schooling to a lack of moral fibre. But science is offering a new explanation. A difficulty with spelling could be rooted in your genes and in the way that your brain is wired. These findings stem from research into the language disorder dyslexia, but they are proving important for the wider population. Biology, it seems, not only influences those with dyslexia but also people without the syndrome. If you are a bad speller you can blame your grey matter.

Simply deciphering the written word is the most complex task your brain will face says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University Medical School, who notes that written language is a relatively recent invention.  “It was invented only 5,000 years ago, notes Stein.  “It is piggybacked on to our linguistic ability, which was invented 30,000-40,000 years ago.  The consequence is that many people fail to read or spell.”

Boom Times for Libraries

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 21, 2008 in Education News. 0 Comments

Economic uncertainty has proven to be great for business at local libraries.  In Haverhill, Massachusetts “usage is through the roof,” reports the assistant library director.  The Boston Globe finds similar trends in libraries throughout its region.

People don’t have as much disposable income, so the library provides an easier resource for books,” says North of Boston Library Exchange executive director Ronald Gagnon, noting other materials, such as DVDs and CDs, that libraries offer. “It just flies in the face of people who say, ‘Who needs libraries anymore?’  Book prices are $25, $30 for hard covers nowadays, and people just can’t afford it.  So it’s not that the library ever went anywhere, but people are rediscovering the services provided.”

Not everyone is weathering hard times by curling up with a good book, however.  A recent NPR piece notes video games continue to increase in popularity since they offer more bang for the entertainment buck.  “Though video games initially earned a bad rap for being something of a loner activity, gaming has become an increasingly sociable event,” notes NPR.

“Days of Children Reading Books Are Numbered”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 9, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

The days of children reading traditional books are numbered, says the man in charge of a campaign to improve literacy in Britain’s schools.  Jonathan Douglas, the director of the National Literacy Trust says publishers must adapt titles for readers who spend more time on the internet if they want future generations to read.

Britain’s Independent points to new research that shows reading drops dramatically as children get older. “The typical eight-year-old reads nearly 16 books a year but, by the time they reach 15 or 16, this has dwindled to just over three books per year,” the paper notes. “The study, based on interviews with nearly 30,000 pupils aged seven to 16, also shows a growing trend towards reading comics, magazines, newspapers and online articles, and playing computer games, after the first year at secondary school.”

What this means, says Douglas, is that publishers must “reinvent the book.”