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Why Content-Area Literacy Messages Do Not Speak to Mathematics Teachers: A Critical Content Analysis∗

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Much has been written to convince content-area teachers to include literacy instruction as part of their regular content instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine how the messages a…

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Developed by Hollis Scarborough in 2001 and explained in her paper titled "Connecting Early Language to Later Reading (Dis)Abilities", this helpful infographic , often called Scarborough's Rope or the Reading Rope, explains how essential language skills work together to develop skilled reading.

Similar to the equation in the Simple View of Reading R = D x LC (Reading comprehension = Decoding x Linguistic comprehension) , Scarborough's rope asserts that both language comprehension and word recognition are necessary for skilled reading or for "fluent execution and coordination of word recognition and text comprehension" (Scarborough, 2001, figure 8.1 p. 98).

She describes the importance of automatic word recognition skills (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of words) to ensure that the reader exerts minimal effort to decode text, saving important cognitive energy for comprehension (Scarborough, 2001, p. 98).

She also delineates that simply focusing on word recognition does not present a complete picture of all the language skills needed for reading and that language comprehension is equally important in reading development. She explains that children must also have background and vocabulary knowledge, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge, and an understanding of language structure to comprehend what they read.

Like the Simple View of Reading , Scarborough's rope can help educators understand what instruction is needed to develop students into skilled readers. The rope can also serve as a road map to help identify students' reading difficulties. Each strand of the reading rope intersects and weaves together, making skilled reading. Weakness in one strand can cause the rope to fray, causing a loss of essential strength in word recognition or language comprehension. Teachers can use these theoretical models to design curricula that target the origin of a student's reading difficulty. Although the original goal of this infographic was to call attention to all the skills needed for early literacy as a way to identify more children at risk for reading difficulty, the graphic has become a key part of the research in the science of reading, helping teachers support students in developing a strong, stable base for word recognition and language comprehension.

References

Scarborough's reading rope: A groundbreaking infographic . International Dyslexia Association. (2018, April 4). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://dyslexiaida.org/scarboroughs-reading-rope-a-groundbreaking-infographic/

Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97 - 110). New York: Guilford Press.

Stewart, L. (2020). The Science of Reading: Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction [White paper]. The Reading League.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope explains how language skills like phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, & background knowledge interweave for skilled reading.

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20 Free online platforms to create courses in 2025 | SC Training

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20 Free online platforms to create courses in 2025 | SC Training

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20 Free online platforms to create courses in 2025 | SC Training

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Explore different online course platforms with intuitive features and easily accessible learning resources that you can readily share with your team.

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New Book Says There’s More to Holding Students’ Attention Than Silencing Phones

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From the myth of multitasking to ‘attention contagion,’ high school teacher Blake Harvard hopes to arm educators with the tools of cognitive science.

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Take a Break from Reading and Test Yourself to Retain More Knowledge

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Take a Break from Reading and Test Yourself to Retain More Knowledge

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If you're killing yourself reading and writing up your notes, stop the madness. Practicing at what you're actually going to do at the end-namely, taking a test-can be much more effective at making information sink in, a new study shows.

Researchers, led by a Purdue University psychology professor, asked 200 students to read a few paragraphs about a scientific matter they likely didn't know beforehand, such as different types of muscle tissue. Everybody involved read the material for five minutes. One group then read the text again for four five-minute sessions, and another group was asked to map the information into a diagram of linked bubbles. One group did nothing more than the five-minute read, and the last was tested to write what they could remember in an essay for 10 minutes, then read the passage again and try to write a better version. That final method is called retrieval practice, and it's been studied as the "testing effect."

One week later, everyone was brought back in, and those who took the retrieval tests seemed to retain about 50 percent more knowledge than even their concept-mapping peers. As if to rub salt in the wound, they did better at mapping that science information than those who had already mapped it out before.

One more note from the testing that rings true, at least for anyone who's felt like they were mugged by a test for which they studied so hard. The students were polled after their initial exposure, and those who took the immediate tests were less confident in how they thought they'd perform a week later. As one psychologist explained, re-reading material gets your brain thinking "Yeah, yeah, I know this"; testing yourself provides a realistic, if less reassuring, view of what your brain still needs to get itself around.

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say [NYTimes.com]

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Take a Break from Reading and Test Yourself to Retain More Knowledge

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If you're killing yourself reading and writing up your notes, stop the madness. Practicing at what you're actually going to do at the end-namely, taki

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy - Educational Leadership

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy - Educational Leadership

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Vol. 74

No. 5

Abstract

Divergent Perspectives

Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts

Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices

General Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Use Multimodal Text Sets

Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do

Engagement in the Discipline

Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments

Teaching Disciplinary Literacies

Which approaches to literacy instruction are right for your content-area classroom?

Credit: Kevin Davis

Abstract

Divergent Perspectives

Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts

Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices

General Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Use Multimodal Text Sets

Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do

Engagement in the Discipline

Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments

Teaching Disciplinary Literacies

Over the last 10 years, federal reports, the standards of professional education organizations, and the Common Core State Standards have all called for a focus on literacy instruction in the content areas. Disciplinary literacy instruction has gained traction as an educational priority because of its potential to support adolescent literacy and increase students' access to deep content knowledge that engages them in school and prepares them for life after graduation.

At the same time, there have been multiple and at times conflicting messages about what disciplinary literacy instruction is and what it should look like in content-area classrooms. In our review of more than 200 articles describing literacy instruction in content-area classes, we identified a spectrum of approaches to disciplinary literacy instruction, each with its own set of instructional strategies. From these, we've singled out three specific perspectives that reflect the diverse purposes of disciplinary literacy.

Divergent Perspectives

Here is where most educators agree: The academic disciplines are communities that collaborate to produce knowledge about the world and human experiences. In these communities, there are agreed-upon conventions that guide the production, communication, and critique of disciplinary knowledge. The central goal of disciplinary literacy instruction is to help adolescents develop "insider status" in these communities. In that light, disciplinary literacy instruction can be viewed as an apprenticeship in which students are carefully guided as they engage in specialized ways of thinking, reading, writing, and talking (McConachie et al., 2006).

Learning the skills or habits of mind of a discipline allows adolescents to become smart consumers and critics of subject-area knowledge, rather than passive recipients (Fang &amp; Coatoam, 2013; Moje, 2007). Understanding how knowledge is created in the disciplines can help adolescents assess claims made in political discourse and act as informed citizens. They can apply these same skills to act for social justice by challenging accepted knowledge and generating new knowledge (Moje, 2007).

But perspectives on disciplinary literacy begin to diverge when it comes to what literacy instruction should look like in content-area classrooms, including whether educators should teach discipline-specific strategies, apply general reading strategies to content goals, or engage students in subject-specific experiences that involve reading and writing.

What follows are descriptions of three approaches that could support content and literacy goals for adolescents, including how and when each approach might be useful in the classroom. The approaches are not necessarily distinct, self-contained versions of disciplinary literacy instruction to be used separately. Rather, each is a valid mode of instruction that supports literacy in the disciplines in a different way; teachers can adopt practices related to each approach at different points of instruction, depending on their curricular goals and students' needs.

Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction

One approach is focused on the practices that disciplinary insiders use to read complex disciplinary texts (Fang &amp; Schleppegrell, 2010; Shanahan &amp; Shanahan, 2008; Shanahan, Shanahan, &amp; Misischia, 2011). This practice is guided by the understanding that disciplinary texts are unique and contain highly specialized language and text structures (Schleppegrell, 2004).

The challenge for adolescent readers is that they lack highly specialized skills and knowledge, which are a prerequisite for engaging with complex disciplinary concepts. This leaves many of them, even those who have developed general comprehension strategies, ill-equipped to read and learn from disciplinary texts independently. So, rather than drawing from a general toolbox of literacy skills to apply across disciplines, the goal of disciplinary literacy instruction from this perspective is for adolescents to develop multiple sets of highly specialized literacy tools that allow them to "read like a historian" or "write like a scientist."

Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts

If students are to develop discipline-specific skills, they need text types and purposes for reading and writing that provide opportunities to apply and refine specialized skills. Teachers working from this perspective are careful to choose texts that are specific to their discipline. This often means avoiding textbooks because they present knowledge as uncontroversial, obscuring the way experts use arguments to generate, critique, and refine knowledge. For students to learn about argumentation in the disciplines, they need to engage with texts that allow them to see how experts structure arguments, support their claims with evidence, and use technical language.

Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices

The discipline-specific skills needed to learn from these types of texts are best identified and taught by content-area teachers who know what it takes to read, write, and critique texts in their area of expertise. These teachers model the specialized practices they have developed as a result of participating in the discipline themselves, pointing out what makes the texts unique and providing strategies to address these features.

Teachers using this approach reflect on their own habits as expert readers so they can name and demonstrate these routines for students. These teachers explain why they do what they do, and then provide opportunities for students to practice those skills. A science teacher may model how to read charts and graphs to make inferences about data. A history teacher may demonstrate how to establish the provenance of a primary document. Helping students try out expert practices allows teachers to explain how the text or task shapes how they read.

General Strategy Instruction

A second approach is focused on efforts to extend or adapt general literacy skills to fit the reading and writing found in content-area classes. Because the texts found in content-area classrooms are often written at or above grade level, the primary reason adolescents struggle with them is that they need to be better readers and writers across the board. Therefore, the goal of instruction in the content areas is to support students' overall literacy proficiency by helping them develop general strategies they can use flexibly across the disciplines.

To plan instruction from this perspective, teachers try to find easier sets of texts to convey content so that students can read texts at or just above their level. Instead of reading a textbook chapter to learn about mitosis, students might read the chapter, watch a video clip, read a cartoon version, and use an interactive model of the process. This provides students who find the textbook difficult with other sources of information and allows them to consider a range of representations of the same information. Teachers often assign different texts to different groups of students or lead students through multiple representations of the same content.

Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do

In addition to providing text sets, teachers also try to make difficult texts more comprehensible by teaching general strategies (for instance, visualization, annotation, and summarization). For this reason, this approach often calls for collaborations between literacy specialists and content-area teachers-each drawing on their expertise to make general literacy skills relevant to disciplinary learning. To apprentice students into higher levels of reading ability, rather than into specialized types of reading practices, teachers might name and demonstrate a strategy that "good readers" use. Teachers who follow this approach are often found referring to a set of common strategies that students recognize from all of their classes.

Doing what good readers do isn't necessarily different from reading like a scientist, mathematician, or historian. In fact, some argue that the skills needed to engage in disciplinary inquiry are the same skills needed to be a critical reader in any content area and that students can learn to adapt those skills to fit many reading tasks (Nokes, 2011; Quinn &amp; Thomas, 2013; Gillis, 2014). From this perspective, well-developed general strategies should allow students to navigate a range of texts. When you believe that students lack adequate literacy abilities and need support for both content and literacy learning, strategies inspired by this perspective might be a good fit.

For example, a current events teacher might demonstrate setting a purpose for reading a newspaper on the basis of its features (headlines, photos, infographics, and so on). The teacher might also demonstrate how to make connections within an article, perhaps between paragraphs and data representations, by looking back and forth between the elements as new information is presented. Teaching generic strategies like these that can apply across content areas helps students learn important skills required for reading success.

Engagement in the Discipline

A third approach encourages full participation in the discipline, rather than only engaging students in the acquisition of content or literacy skills. Teachers working from this perspective don't ask students to do things "like a scientist"; they ask students to "do science." If scientists collect data, students don't just read about how data can be collected; they collect data themselves. "Doing" the discipline will inevitably require reading and writing of some kind, so the goal is to support students with the skills and strategies they will need to be "doers" as the needs arise.

Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments

With this approach, teachers frame questions and problems for students to investigate and "engineer teachable moments" (Cervetti &amp; Pearson, 2012) in which they can teach or support specific literacy skills. For instance, a 7th grade STEM teacher decides to start a community garden that will also be a site for students to conduct experiments with plants and soil. Students are engaged in all parts of the planning for this garden from design to building to evaluation. When preparing students to write e-mails to potential funders, the teachers use exemplar texts to show how expert fundraisers write to donors, and they provide a writing process for students to refer to. When students report the results of experiments conducted in the garden, teachers may provide discipline-specific models so that students can share their ideas with a scientific community.

The instructional practices might be similar to the first two perspectives (some discipline-specific, some general), but the reasons they are used are different. Students are not learning to write to become better writers or to learn how to "write like a scientist." They are doing so because such e-mails are central to the work of funding a community project and communicating scientific ideas is an essential part of doing science. In other words, it's the intentions behind text selection-not the texts-that differentiate this approach from the others.

These teachers are often found modeling literacy skills and strategies "at the point of need" during disciplinary inquiry (Cervetti &amp; Pearson, 2012). For this reason, a lesson objective might be task-oriented ("students will write compelling e-mails to funders") and the lessons, examples, and models would be literacy oriented (for example, revising and editing). The focus is not necessarily on what experts do or what good readers do, but on whatever it takes to accomplish the project. Therefore, teachers might demonstrate both general and specific strategies depending on what students need. You might see disciplinary texts and leveled texts in use, but they are selected and used in the service of some line of inquiry (not just because of their level or text features).

Allowing for authentic engagement-and acknowledging that reading, writing, and talking will be required along the way-is what defines this approach to disciplinary literacy. When you believe your students need a compelling reason to engage in academics and reach content and literacy goals, this approach might be a good fit.

Teaching Disciplinary Literacies

Because there are multiple possible goals for disciplinary literacy instruction, there are also multiple approaches to planning and implementing disciplinary literacy instruction (see Figure 1, " Practices for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction "). Rather than allowing contrasting messages to overwhelm or stymie teachers' efforts, it's important to understand the breadth of possibilities, as well as when and how various approaches might apply. Each of the approaches exists on a continuum that spans different instructional goals, materials, and strategies, but they can be used in complementary ways within a single classroom, especially when teachers feel empowered to integrate them to meet the needs of their students.

Figure 1. Practices for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy

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Vol. 74 No. 5 Abstract Divergent Perspectives Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices General Strategy Instruction Instructional Practice: Use Multimodal Text Sets Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do Engagement in the Discipline Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments Teaching Disciplinary Literacies Which approaches to literacy instruction are right for your content-area classroom?

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Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics, and Chemistry - Cynthia Shanahan, Timothy Shanahan, Cynthia Misischia, 2011

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Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics, and Chemistry - Cynthia Shanahan, Timothy Shanahan, Cynthia Misischia, 2011

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Redalyc.The power of deep reading and mindful literacy: An innovative approach in contemporary education

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Redalyc.The power of deep reading and mindful literacy: An innovative approach in contemporary education

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Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics, and Chemistry - Cynthia Shanahan, Timothy Shanahan, Cynthia Misischia, 2011

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Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics, and Chemistry - Cynthia Shanahan, Timothy Shanahan, Cynthia Misischia, 2011

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[PDF] Teaching Reading in Mathematics and Science. | Semantic Scholar

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Of all the content-area texts that elementary and secondary school students read, mathematics and science are arguably the most difficult. Yet mathematics and science teachers often say that they feel the least prepared to teach students how to read to learn: "I'm a math [science] teacher. I wasn't trained to teach reading."

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[PDF] Teaching Reading in Mathematics and Science. | Semantic Scholar

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Of all the content-area texts that elementary and secondary school students read, mathematics and science are arguably the most difficult. Yet mathematics and science teachers often say that they feel the least prepared to teach students how to read to learn: "I'm a math [science] teacher. I wasn't trained to teach reading."

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Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems

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Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems

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INCORPORATING disciplinary literacy IN TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION - ProQuest

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INCORPORATING disciplinary literacy IN TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION - ProQuest

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INCORPORATING disciplinary literacy IN TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION

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This is a short preview of the document. Your library or institution may give you access to the complete full text for this document in ProQuest.

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The Literacy Component of Mathematical and Scientific Literacy | SpringerLink

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The Literacy Component of Mathematical and Scientific Literacy | SpringerLink

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Larry D. Yore

David Pimm

Hsiao-Lin Tuan

Abstract

This opening article of the Special Issue makes an argument for parallel definitions of scientific literacy and mathematical literacy that have shared features: importance of general cognitive and metacognitive abilities and reasoning/thinking and discipline-specific language, habits-of-mind/emotional dispositions, and information communication technology strategies to prepare people for adult life and democratic citizenship. These frameworks provide potential insights into research and pedagogy. Furthermore, they provide guidelines for second-generation standards, curriculum development and assessment so as not to overlook or underemphasize the fundamental literacy component of mathematical and scientific literacy for all students, which can result in fuller participation in the public debate about science, mathematics, technology, society, and environment issues.

Key words

educational reform literacy mathematical literacy scientific literacy

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References

1. British Columbia Ministry of Education (2007a). Foundation skills assessment. Retrieved 28 May 2007, from http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/assessment/fsa/ .

2. British Columbia Ministry of Education (2007b). FSA numeracy specifications. Retrieved 28 May 2007, from http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/assessment/fsa/specifications/numeracy_specs.pdf .

3. Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (1997). Common framework of science learning outcomes, K to 12. Toronto, ON: Author. Retrieved 21 June 2007, from http://www.cmec.ca/science/framework/ .

4. Fuson, K.C., Kalchman, M. & Bransford, J.D. (2005). Mathematics understanding: An introduction. In National Research Council, How students learn: Mathematics in the classroom. Committee on How People Learn, A Targeted Report for Teachers, M.S. Donovan & J.D. Bransford (Eds.). Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

5. National Research Council (2005a). How students learn: Mathematics in the classroom. Committee on How People Learn, A Targeted Report for Teachers, M.S. Donovan & J.D. Bransford (Eds.), Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

6. National Research Council (2005b). How students learn: Science in the classroom. Committee on How People Learn, A Targeted Report for Teachers, M.S. Donovan & J.D. Bransford (Eds.), Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

7. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (2000). Science and technology education: Philosophy of project 2000+. Retrieved 20 June 2007, http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/ste/projects/2000/meaning.htm .

8. Western and Northern Canadian Protocol (2006). Common curriculum framework for mathematics. Edmonton, AB: Alberta Education. Retrieved 18 June 2007, from .

© National Science Council, Taiwan 2007

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The Literacy Component of Mathematical and Scientific Literacy

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Larry D. Yore David Pimm Hsiao-Lin Tuan This opening article of the Special Issue makes an argument for parallel definitions of scientific literacy and mathematical literacy that have shared features: importance of general cognitive and metacognitive abilities and reasoning/thinking and discipline-specific language, habits-of-mind/emotional dispositions, and information communication technology strategies to prepare people for adult life and democratic citizenship.

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Disciplinary Literacy Through the Lens of the Next Generation Science Standards

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Disciplinary Literacy Through the Lens of the Next Generation Science Standards

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Disciplinary Literacy and Inquiry: Teaching for Deeper Content Learning

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Disciplinary Literacy and Inquiry: Teaching for Deeper Content Learning

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Formative and Summative Assessment in the Classroom

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Formative and Summative Assessment in the Classroom

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APA Headings and Subheadings | APA Format

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APA Headings and Subheadings | APA Format

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The use of headings and subheadings give the readers a general idea of what to expect from the paper and leads the flow of discussion. These elements divide and define each section of the paper. APA recommends five-level heading structure based on the level of subordination.

Levels indicate the hierarchy of importance and scope of each heading and subheading. The extent of using the different levels depends on the length and complexity of the paper. Usually, short papers or articles use two to three levels, but longer papers necessitate up to five levels. Level 1 encompasses a broader topic and levels 2 to 5 covers narrow to more detailed topics.

Level 1 Section heading

Level 2 Subsection heading

Level 3 Subsection of a subsection heading

Level 4 Subsection under a subsection of a subsection heading

Level 5 Subsection under the three subsections heading

1. No heading is needed for the first part of a paper as it is already assumed as the introduction.

2. Headings and subheadings are not accompanied by letters or numbers.

3. Use as many levels as required in your paper to present the most organized structure.

4. The same level of heading or subheading should be of equal importance regardless of the number of subsections under it.

5. Use at least two subheadings for each section and subsection, or use none.

6. Start with level 1 through 5.

7. Paragraph begins below levels 1 and 2, whereas for levels 3-5, the paragraph begins in line with the headings.

8. Capitalize each word for levels 1 and 2.

9. For levels 3-5, the headings are indented and end with a period.

10. Only the first word is capitalized for levels 3-5.

To give you a clearer picture, here is the recommended format and example for the heading levels.

Centered, Boldface, Uppercase and Lowercase Heading

Paragraph begins below with indention just like a regular paragraph.

Flush Left, Boldface, Uppercase, and Lowercase Heading
Paragraph begins below with indention just like a regular paragraph.

Indented, boldface, lowercase paragraph heading ending with a period. Paragraph begins in line with the headings.

Indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase paragraph heading ending with a period. Paragraph begins in line with the headings.

Indented, italicized, lowercase paragraph heading ending with a period. Paragraph begins in line with the headings.

Methods (Level 1)

Research Design (Level 2)

Paragraph begins here...

Study Site and Participant (Level 2)

Paragraph begins here...

Data Collection (Level 2)

Paragraph begins here...

Instruments. (Level 3) Paragraph begins here...

Procedures. (Level 3) Paragraph begins here...

Socio-demographic and medical history data gathering. (Level 4) Paragraph begins here...

Anthropometric and body composition assessment. (Level 4) Paragraph begins here...

Dietary assessment. (Level 4) Paragraph begins here...

Three-day food record. (Level 5) Paragraph begins here...

Semi-qualitative FFQ. (Level 5) Paragraph begins here...

A Couple of Writing Tips

Writing is meant to communicate ideas and get our points across as clearly and as effective as possible. But no matter how informative your writing is, it wouldn't be as valuable if it is incoherent. You have to write in such a way that every part of your paper will have a logical sequence and sound structure to make it comprehensive and easy to understand. There are certain ways in writing a clear and concise paper, and here are simple tips which are especially useful for scientific studies:

First, state your points clearly and precisely.

Second, integrate parts with relevant or similar information to avoid repetition.

Third, use an active voice.

And fourth, organize the structure of your paper.

As a writer, I think the most important among the aforementioned tips is the organization of structure. Once you have a complete picture of what you will include in your paper, everything else will follow.

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The use of headings and subheadings give the readers a general idea of what to expect from the paper and leads the flow of discussion. These elements divide and define each section of the paper. APA recommends five-level heading structure based on the level of subordination.

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(PDF) SOAR versus SQ3R: a test of two study systems

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(PDF) SOAR versus SQ3R: a test of two study systems

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Motivational Considerations in the Study of Instruction.

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Motivational Considerations in the Study of Instruction.

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The Effect of Metacognitive Instruction in Outlining and Graphic Organizer Construction on Students' Comprehension in a Tenth-Grade World History Class

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The Effect of Metacognitive Instruction in Outlining and Graphic Organizer Construction on Students' Comprehension in a Tenth-Grade World History Class

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Microsoft Word - get the gist comprehension strategy.docx

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Microsoft Word - get the gist comprehension strategy.docx

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The Effect of Three Forms of Summarization Instruction on Sixth Graders' Summary Writing and Comprehension

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The Effect of Three Forms of Summarization Instruction on Sixth Graders' Summary Writing and Comprehension

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The Effect of Three Forms of Summarization Instruction on Sixth Graders' Summary Writing and Comprehension

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The Effect of Three Forms of Summarization Instruction on Sixth Graders' Summary Writing and Comprehension

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Rethinking Engineering Education | SpringerLink

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Rethinking Engineering Education | SpringerLink

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This book describes an approach to engineering education that integrates a comprehensive set of personal, interpersonal, and professional engineering skills with engineering disciplinary knowledge in order to prepare innovative and entrepreneurial engineers. The education of engineers is set in the context of engineering practice, that is, Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, and Operating (CDIO) through the entire lifecycle of engineering processes, products, and systems. The book is both a description of the development and implementation of the CDIO model and a guide to engineering programs worldwide that seek to improve the education of young engineers.

Provides an overview of the CDIO approach, then chapters organized according to the CDIO Standards;

Includes in each chapter objectives, discussion questions, case studies and clear diagrams to support key concepts and processes;

Avoids the jargon of education specialists and clearly explains education terms in the context of their initial presentation.

CDIO CDIO Initiative CDIO Standards Engineering Education

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This book describes an approach to engineering education that integrates a comprehensive set of personal, interpersonal, and professional engineering skills with engineering disciplinary knowledge in order to prepare innovative and entrepreneurial engineers.

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Effects of connecting reading and writing and a checklist to guide the reading process on EFL learnersÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ learning about English writing

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Effects of connecting reading and writing and a checklist to guide the reading process on EFL learnersÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ learning about English writing

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Effects of connecting reading and writing and a checklist to guide the reading process on EFL learners' learning about English writing

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This paper reports a quasi-experiment investigating the effects of connecting reading and writing and a checklist to guide the reading process on EFL ...

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Beyond the Write Answer: Mathematical Connections on JSTOR

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Beyond the Write Answer: Mathematical Connections on JSTOR

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Align Assessments, Objectives, Instructional Strategies - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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Align Assessments, Objectives, Instructional Strategies - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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Assessments should reveal how well students have learned what we want them to learn while instruction ensures that they learn it. For this to occur, assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies need to be closely aligned so that they reinforce one another.

To ensure that these three components of your course are aligned, ask yourself the following questions:

Learning objectives: What do I want students to know how to do when they leave this course?

Assessments: What kinds of tasks will reveal whether students have achieved the learning objectives I have identified?

Instructional strategies: What kinds of activities in and out of class will reinforce my learning objectives and prepare students for assessments?

What if the components of a course are misaligned?

If assessments are misaligned with learning objectives or instructional strategies, it can undermine both student motivation and learning. Consider these two scenarios:

Your objective is for students to learn to apply analytical skills, but your assessment measures only factual recall. Consequently, students hone their analytical skills and are frustrated that the exam does not measure what they learned.

Your assessment measures students' ability to compare and critique the arguments of different authors, but your instructional strategies focus entirely on summarizing the arguments of different authors. Consequently, students do not learn or practice the skills of comparison and evaluation that will be assessed.

What do well-aligned assessments look like?

This table presents examples of the kinds of activities that can be used to assess different types of learning objectives (adapted from the revised Bloom's Taxonomy).

Type of learning objective

Examples of appropriate assessments

Recall
Recognize
Identify

Objective test items such as fill-in-the-blank, matching, labeling, or multiple-choice questions that require students to:

recall or recognize terms, facts, and concepts

Interpret
Exemplify
Classify
Summarize
Infer
Compare
Explain

Activities such as papers, exams, problem sets, class discussions, or concept maps that require students to:

summarize readings, films, or speeches

compare and contrast two or more theories, events, or processes

classify or categorize cases, elements, or events using established criteria

paraphrase documents or speeches

find or identify examples or illustrations of a concept or principle

Apply
Execute
Implement

Activities such as problem sets, performances, labs, prototyping, or simulations that require students to:

use procedures to solve or complete familiar or unfamiliar tasks

determine which procedure(s) are most appropriate for a given task

Analyze
Differentiate
Organize
Attribute

Activities such as case studies, critiques, labs, papers, projects, debates, or concept maps that require students to:

discriminate or select relevant and irrelevant parts

determine how elements function together

determine bias, values, or underlying intent in presented material

Evaluate
Check
Critique
Assess

Activities such as journals, diaries, critiques, problem sets, product reviews, or studies that require students to:

test, monitor, judge, or critique readings, performances, or products against established criteria or standards

Create
Generate
Plan
Produce
Design

Activities such as research projects, musical compositions, performances, essays, business plans, website designs, or set designs that require students to:

make, build, design or generate something new

This table does not list all possible examples of appropriate assessments. You can develop and use other assessments - just make sure that they align with your learning objectives and instructional strategies!

CONTACT US to talk with an Eberly colleague in person!

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Align Assessments, Objectives, Instructional Strategies - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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Assessments should reveal how well students have learned what we want them to learn while instruction ensures that they learn it. For this to occur, assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies need to be closely aligned so that they reinforce one another.

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Microsoft Word - AERA2005Test Fatigue 041405 925 am.doc

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Microsoft Word - AERA2005Test Fatigue 041405 925 am.doc

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Introduction to Critical Reading | Basic Reading and Writing

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Introduction to Critical Reading | Basic Reading and Writing

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Why should we identify critical reading strategies?

" Reading is fundamental "-you may recall hearing this phrase as a child. A series of somewhat cheesy television ads emphasizes this point, such as this one featuring basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal:

However, as college students, reading can often seem less like fun and more like work. The purpose of it changes. Instead of reading for enjoyment, we read for information, for deeper understanding, and for challenging what we thought we knew.

"Reading" in this course doesn't only mean the act of putting letters together to make words, and words together to make sentences. "Reading," now, means a set of skills we can practice and deepen, to make our college experience both easier and more meaningful.

This module will help you become familiar with steps you can take to better understand any assigned college reading.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to

Identify and differentiate between different types of texts

Identify reading strategies for academic texts

Identify specialized reading strategies for specific types of texts, including content in disciplines and visual information

Identify techniques for strengthening vocabulary

Identify thesis statements in texts

Identify supporting claims in texts

Identify logic and structure in texts

Identify summary strategies for reading comprehension

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" Reading is fundamental "-you may recall hearing this phrase as a child. A series of somewhat cheesy television ads emphasizes this point, such as this one featuring basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal: However, as college students, reading can often seem less like fun and more like work. The purpose of it changes.

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Does It Make a Difference? Evaluating Professional Development

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Does It Make a Difference? Evaluating Professional Development

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Simple Ways to Integrate Four Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies | Edutopia

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Simple Ways to Integrate Four Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies | Edutopia

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When educators understand the science behind teaching practices they can more readily incorporate them into their daily instruction, says Cult of Pedagogy's Jennifer Gonzalez. In her podcast and accompanying post, Gonzalez highlights the four key teaching strategies researcher that Pooja Agarwal and K-12 teacher Patrice Bain feature in their new book, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. They explain the science behind the suggestions, many of which are familiar, as well as best practices and applications for each one.

Retrieval practice: The goal is for students to recall information from memory and reinforce learning through quick daily assessments. Evidence shows that actively accessing learned material-rather than merely reteaching it-boosts retention.

Bain decided that daily mini-quizzes were a better way than her regular homework assignments to engage students in retrieval practice. "So many students have absolutely mastered homework," Bain says. "They look at a question, they look up the answer, they write it down and repeat. They get good grades, but they can't retrieve the information; it's difficult to discuss the next day, a week later." The quick quiz assessments kept her finger on the pulse of what her students knew and where the gaps existed. The change not only increased students' ability to retain information but saved Bain time from grading stacks of homework.

Spaced practice: Spaced practice is the simple strategy of returning to learned material repeatedly over time. "You could call these throwback Thursdays or throwback Tuesdays or you just simply ask students, hey, what did we do last week?" says Agarwal, suggesting a variety of ways to frame the strategy for students.

Retrieval isn't just about things that have been covered recently. It's also important that teachers are "asking students to retrieve information a few days, weeks, or even months after they learned it," Gonzalez writes. "Because that information is harder to recall, it actually makes the learning that comes from it that much more durable." Half the battle is simply being intentional about the approach: Teachers can easily implement the practice by separating material into digestible bites and scheduling spaced instruction throughout the coming weeks and months.

Interleaving: Students learn better when they can't easily predict the answer to the next question. Interleaving is the practice of throwing curve balls, mixing up your lessons in ways that resist easy pattern recognition-and forcing students to adapt on the fly. Agarwal offers an example where students are learning to multiply and divide fractions: Presenting questions so that some are multiplication and some are division requires students to stop and think about which strategy to use.

Those moments of thoughtful reflection enhance learning, Agarwal says. Teachers can use the practice in any classroom by intentionally and regularly shifting between the types of material and topics they cover.

Feedback-driven metacognition: In this quick practice, students assess what they already know so they can focus their studying on what they have not yet learned. Bain uses her mini-quizzes for this strategy: once the quiz is over, she goes over the answers so students can immediately see where their strengths and weaknesses lie.

When she returns the graded quizzes the next day, she asks the students the same questions again-requiring them to recall and explain the answers and address their learning gaps. Sometimes Bain pairs students to discuss previous lessons referenced by the quiz to reinforce the learning.

None of the strategies are difficult or time-consuming-and many are already employed by teachers, Gonzalez writes. Understanding how they function in the classroom enhances the ability to use them more frequently and in a more integrated way.

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Simple Ways to Integrate Four Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies

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When educators understand the science behind teaching practices they can more readily incorporate them into their daily instruction, says Cult of Pedagogy's Jennifer Gonzalez. In her podcast and accompanying post, Gonzalez highlights the four key teaching strategies researcher that Pooja Agarwal and K-12 teacher Patrice Bain feature in their new book, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning .

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Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Areas: Supporting Secondary Reading Through Functional Language Analysis

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Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Areas: Supporting Secondary Reading Through Functional Language Analysis

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10 (More) Wonderful Short Stories to Read for Free Online

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10 (More) Wonderful Short Stories to Read for Free Online

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Around this time last year, we gave you a list of a few of our all-time favorite short stories that were available to read online for free. By now, we expect that you've read them all, so we thought it was high time to collect a few more. After the jump, ten more short stories that you can read for free - on your phone on the train, while pretending to work, printed out with a cup of tea on the couch - all of them guaranteed to be great (and a few that were suggested by readers on our first go-around). But of course, the Internet abounds with these, so if you've a generous spirit, you could even add to our list in the comments. Happy reading.
"Tenth of December," George Saunders
This is the title story from the collection that The New York Times called " The Best Book You'll Read This Year." It's also brilliant, obviously, a coming of age story cut two ways, about life and death and monsters and men. And hey, you can also read nine other stories by Saunders online for free. Weekend: planned.
"The Half-Skinned Steer," E. Annie Proulx
As in so many of Proulx's stories, this one slaps man up against his environment - but also against his memory, his fate, the inevitability of death. This darkly funny, chilly tale will dig around inside you until spring.
"The Library of Babel," Jorge Luis Borges
If you're reading this list, it's probably a no-brainer that you'd be interested in a story about an infinite library. It's also the story to choose if you only have ten minutes - a mini triumph by an undisputed master of the form.
"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," Amy Hempel
Here's another major classic, which also happens to be the first story Amy Hempel ever wrote (how does the first story you ever wrote stack up?), for a writing class prompt asking for a story about "the thing you will never live down." Funny, tragic, perfectly minimalist. What more could you ask for?
"Spring in Fialta," Vladimir Nabokov
"Spring in Fialta" may be Nabokov's most anthologized story, and for good reason - every sentence blooms with a wistful beauty, every scene will leave you staring out across the water.
"Mirrorball," Mary Gaitskill
This isn't our very favorite story of Gaitskill's - that dubious distinction probably goes to "A Romantic Weekend," but don't hold us to it - but the thing is, in our estimation, anything the woman writes is head and shoulders over anything just about anyone else writes. This one is full of lip-smacking language, dark corners, and all the strangeness that comes to pass when you accidentally lose your soul.
"The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis," Karen Russell
Here's another short story that was only recently released as part of a collection, to great acclaim. This story is majorly unsettling, a constant whispering in your ear, like all the legends about the woods behind your house you don't believe but can't quite shake.
"Catskin," Kelly Link
Almost every story we've ever read by Link is a jewel. Luckily, most of Magic for Beginners is available as a free download, so once you've soaked up this bit of magic, you can rest assured that there is much, much more to be had.
"Cathay," Steven Millhauser
If you, like one very chastened and regretful literary editor we know, pointedly ignored Steven Millhauser for years after hating Martin Dressler in school, we have news for you. His short stories are incredible. We know this now. This one is beautiful, as perfectly constructed and balanced as a magician's pocket watch.
"Emergency," Denis Johnson
You've probably read this one already, but if not, drop everything and do it now (don't worry, it's short). Brutal, beautiful, liable to leave you thinking about it for days, or years. Be warned: the copy linked to above is rather disjointed, so you may want to print out and rearrange. You can also listen to the audio file (with commentary by Tobias Wolff). If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you can read a cleaner version here.

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10 (More) Wonderful Short Stories to Read for Free Online

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Around this time last year, we gave you a list of a few of our all-time favorite short stories that were available to read online for free. By now, we expect that you've read them all, so we thought it was high time to collect a few more. After the...

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Multiple Perspectives: Building Critical Thinking Skills | OER Commons

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Multiple Perspectives: Building Critical Thinking Skills | OER Commons

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Multiple Perspectives: Building Critical Thinking Skills

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Students use critical literacy skills to understand the concept of perspective and to then create a diary for an animal they research with a partner.

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Latest Research — Literacy Matters Foundation

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Latest Research — Literacy Matters Foundation

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The majority of students using the Literacy Matters Foundation Learning Program - Mighty Doodle™ - made significant gains during the school year, with many demonstrating 4x greater progress on national standardized tests. If children can't learn the way we teach, we should teach the way they learn. Virtually all children can learn.

According to a recent American Public Media (APM) documentary and Minnesota Public Radio story on why American children can't learn to read, the basic assumption that underlies traditional reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is an intuitive process, much like learning to speak. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. A child must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters - phonemic awareness.

Based on the evidence-based Orton Gillingham approach (phonics) of teaching reading, the Literacy Matters Foundation Learning Program - Mighty Doodle™ - uses leading-edge technology to provide engaging, child-friendly literacy instruction in a gamified lesson format delivered on an iPad. Our system features real-time tracking and analytics to chart the progress of individual students and adapts the curricula to the individual student's needs. Learn More.

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Latest Research - Literacy Matters Foundation

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The majority of students using the Literacy Matters Foundation Learning Program - Mighty Doodle™ - made significant gains during the school year, with many demonstrating 4x greater progress on national standardized tests. If children can't learn the way we teach, we should teach the way they learn. Virtually all children can learn.

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5 Steps to Building a Better Word Wall | Edutopia

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5 Steps to Building a Better Word Wall | Edutopia

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Transferring ownership of the class word wall to the students can increase their engagement and learning.

Courtesy of Justine Marie Bruyère

It was raining again. My second-grade students were indoors for recess and enjoying free time when a student approached me and asked, "How do I spell because?" I responded, "That's a tricky one-have you checked the word wall?"

The student answered with a familiar tune, "Oh yeah! I forget about the wall sometimes, it's so high up." She waltzed over to the word wall and craned her neck to find the word because written at the top of the wall, in my handwriting.

A few moments later, "Mrs. Bruyère?" I looked up to see another student. He paused, then said, "T, e, n, i, s, e, e-how do I spell Tennessee again?"

For 13 years I fiddled with word wall systems, hoping to uncover one that worked for the learners in my class. When the word wall works, the classroom begins to move more fluidly, so it has always seemed worth the effort to improve it.

Taking Action

On a Monday morning soon after that rainy day, I called a class meeting to ask my students for their ideas on how to improve the word wall. A funny and bright student spoke first, "I sort of forget the wall is there most of the time." No one disagreed. Another student chimed in, "The wall doesn't have the words I need on it. I know how to spell all-OK, most-of those words already, but the words I need aren't there."

Another problem was placement. It was too high-in fact it was hard for some students to see the entire top row of words clearly.

My students shared many ideas during our class meeting that day. Eventually, they selected a section of wall for our words-a section that was accessible to them-and we affixed laminated sheets of white paper to the wall, one for each letter of the alphabet.

A 5-Step Process for Improving the Word Wall

1. Finding the right location: I started by asking my students to find the most accessible place in the room for a student-created word wall.

2. Establishing rules together: I asked my students how the wall should function. For example, would they like to draw pictures or tape pictures next to the words? My students decided not to use pictures, but many classes would make the opposite call.

How do students want to manage the wall? And who will write words on the wall-the teacher or the students? My students decided that they would be the ones to add words to the wall. First a student writes a "striving to spell" word on a recipe card, and a friend checks it. I complete an additional check to guide and nurture in-the-moment phonics and feature learning. This nurturing takes on different forms with each child. In one case, it might be stretching the child to notice digraphs or diphthongs, and in another instance it may look like asking a students to explain what they know about the sounds in the words son, done, and tone.

Once those steps are complete, the student who came up with the word records it on the word wall.

Do students want to use certain colors for certain types of words? Color-coding can be a very helpful clue, and my students decided that on their wall, Dolch or grade-level words would be written in blue, nouns in pink, action verbs in green, and adjectives in orange.
Courtesy of Justine Marie Bruyère

"Do you think that would be a good word to add to our word wall?"

"I wonder if we can make a list of words that would fit into this word family?"

"This week, I noticed that 'irr' makes the 'er' sound in squirrel. What new word surprised you this week?"

"If you need help with the word different, that's Kyle's word. He has offered to share his method!"

"What other words have a sneaky first letter?"

3. Igniting real conversations and connections to words: Try asking questions or offering tips. A few suggestions:

4. Conferring with students to heighten learning: Occasionally, students will spell a word on the word wall incorrectly. For these cases, I use one-to-one teacher time to do a quick activity, make reference to a text, or play a comparison game to draw the student's attention to common misspellings and the correct spelling of the word.

5. Celebrating the words: During share time, I encourage students to view the wall and share a reflection about a word that they added, used, or better understand now because it's on the wall. During this time, I also promote and support new additions to the wall.

After a few weeks of using our revamped word wall, a student asked how to spell Tennessee. The boy who had asked me originally jumped up and said, "That's my word!" He hopped over to his word and ran his finger along the letters, while explaining his method for remembering to add two S's.

What was the most important aspect of changing the wall? You might think it was spelling-related, but it wasn't. The most important aspect of the new word wall was that it was not created by me for them. This wall was created with their hands and held their words, and it provided evidence of their learning.

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Transferring ownership of the class word wall to the students can increase their engagement and learning.

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Effects of Interactive Vocabulary Instruction on the Vocabulary Learning and Reading Comprehension of Junior-High Learning Disabled Students on JSTOR

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Effects of Interactive Vocabulary Instruction on the Vocabulary Learning and Reading Comprehension of Junior-High Learning Disabled Students on JSTOR

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Effects of Interactive Vocabulary Instruction on the Vocabulary Learning and Reading Comprehension of Junior-High Learning Disabled Students

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Drawing upon theory-driven vocabulary instruction and the vocabulary-reading comprehension connection, this study compared the effectiveness of three interactiv...

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Why Students Forget—and What You Can Do About It | Edutopia

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Why Students Forget—and What You Can Do About It | Edutopia

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Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget-highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick.

In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss-the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to "optimize decision-making" in chaotic, quickly changing environments. In this model of cognition, forgetting is an evolutionary strategy, a purposeful process that runs in the background of memory, evaluating and discarding information that doesn't promote the survival of the species.

"From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory," explain Richards and Frankland in the study. "Rather, it may represent an investment in a more optimal mnemonic strategy."

The Forgetting Curve

We often think of memories as books in a library, filed away and accessed when needed. But they're actually more like spiderwebs, strands of recollection distributed across millions of connected neurons. When we learn something new-when a teacher delivers a fresh lesson to a student, for example-the material is encoded across these neural networks, converting the experience into a memory.

Forgetting is almost immediately the nemesis of memory, as psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in the 1880s. Ebbinghaus pioneered landmark research in the field of retention and learning, observing what he called the forgetting curve, a measure of how much we forget over time. In his experiments, he discovered that without any reinforcement or connections to prior knowledge, information is quickly forgotten-roughly 56 percent in one hour, 66 percent after a day, and 75 percent after six days.

So what can be done to preserve the hard work of teaching? After all, evolutionary imperatives-which prune our memories of extraneous information-don't always neatly align with the requirements of curriculum or the demands of the Information Age. Learning the times tables doesn't avail when running from lions, in other words, but in the modern world that knowledge has more than proved its mettle.

The Persistence of Memory

The same neural circuitry appears to be involved in forgetting and remembering. If that is properly understood, students and teachers can adopt strategies to reduce memory leaks and reinforce learning.

MIT neuroscientists, led by Richard Cho, explain the mechanisms for synaptic strengthening in a 2015 article, also published in Neuron. When neurons are frequently fired, synaptic connections are strengthened; the opposite is true for neurons that are rarely fired. Known as synaptic plasticity, this explains why some memories persist while others fade away. Repeatedly accessing a stored but fading memory-like a rule of geometry or a crucial historical fact-rekindles the neural network that contains the memory and encodes it more deeply.

Researchers have also learned that not all new memories are created equal. For example, here are two sets of letters to remember:

For readers of English, the second set of letters is more memorable-the more connections neurons have to other neurons, the stronger the memory. The seven letters in NPFXOSK appear random and disjointed, while ORANGES benefits from its existing, deeply encoded linguistic context. The word oranges also invokes sensory memory, from the image of an orange to its smell, and perhaps even conjures other memories of oranges in your kitchen or growing on a tree. You remember by layering new memories on the crumbling foundations of older ones.

5 Teacher Strategies

When students learn a new piece of information, they make new synaptic connections. Two scientifically based ways to help them retain learning is by making as many connections as possible-typically to other concepts, thus widening the "spiderweb" of neural connections-but also by accessing the memory repeatedly over time.

Which explains why the following learning strategies, all tied to research conducted within the past five years, are so effective:

1. Peer-to-peer explanations: When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016).

2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016).

3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Practice tests can be low stakes and ungraded, such as a quick pop quiz at the start of a lesson or a trivia quiz on Kahoot, a popular online game-based learning platform. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016).

4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015).

5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II with a map of German military expansion can reinforce that lesson. It's easier to remember what's been read and seen, instead of either one alone (Carney & Levin, 2002; Bui & McDaniel, 2015).

So even though forgetting starts as soon as learning happens-as Ebbinghaus's experiments demonstrate-research shows that there are simple and effective strategies to help make learning stick.

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Why Students Forget-and What You Can Do About It

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Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget-highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick.

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Richard Felder’s Legacy Website | College of Engineering | NC State University

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Richard Felder’s Legacy Website | College of Engineering | NC State University

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College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which no preparation or training is provided or required. You get a Ph.D., join a faculty, they show you your office, and then tell you "By the way, you're teaching 205 next semester. See you later." The result is the consistent use of teaching techniques that have repeatedly been shown to be ineffective at promoting learning.

Many professors are surprised to learn that . . .

There are well-defined instructional techniques that make teaching more effective.

These techniques can be introduced slowly and methodically, without compromising coverage of the syllabus. They do not require large expenditures of money, time and effort.

Most importantly, the techniques have been validated by careful, documented, repeatable research. Their effectiveness is not simply a matter of opinion. They work!

This site offers guidance on what those techniques are and tips and resources for using them.

The foundation of this website is a collection of resources compiled by Dr. Richard Felder, Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at NC State University, at his popular website, Resources in Science and Engineering Education. Many of the articles and columns it contains were coauthored by his colleague and frequent collaborator Dr. Rebecca Brent.

That website closed December 31, 2018, and content from it was moved to this site. Browse through the sections shown on the left.

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College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which no preparation or training is provided or required. You get a Ph.D., join a faculty, they show you your office, and then tell you "By the way, you're teaching 205 next semester. See you later."

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Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Strategies for Math/QR Courses

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Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Strategies for Math/QR Courses

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(5) (DOC) A pedagogy for teaching poetry. Four principles. An essay | Edwin Creely - Academia.edu

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(5) (DOC) A pedagogy for teaching poetry. Four principles. An essay | Edwin Creely - Academia.edu

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A pedagogy for teaching poetry. Four principles. An essay

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This paper explores flaws with current teaching of poetry and offers a new pedagogical platform for conceiving the teaching of poetry as part of literacy programs and across a range of subjects in primary and secondary schools.

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Introduction in: Poetry across the Curriculum

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Introduction in: Poetry across the Curriculum

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Poetry across the Curriculum - New Methods of Writing Intensive Pedagogy for U.S. Community College and Undergraduate Education | brill

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Poetry across the Curriculum - New Methods of Writing Intensive Pedagogy for U.S. Community College and Undergraduate Education | brill

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Arts Integrated Learning through Poetry in: Poetry across the Curriculum

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Arts Integrated Learning through Poetry in: Poetry across the Curriculum

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Arts Integrated Learning through Poetry in: Poetry across the Curriculum

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The present volume is the result of a pilot study and a workshop at Queensborough Community College that tried to integrate and discussed poetry as a new method of writing intensive pedagogy across the curriculum.

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Frontiers | Creative Expression of Science through Poetry and Other Media can Enrich Medical and Science Education | Neurology

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Frontiers | Creative Expression of Science through Poetry and Other Media can Enrich Medical and Science Education | Neurology

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Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

Introduction

Creative expression of scientific observations and principles through poetry and other media can enrich medical and science education. This debunks the expectation that science and poetry, for example, are mutually exclusive (Figure 1). Instead of coexisting as parallel lanes without interaction, poetry and science can cross over as one merges lanes. Kurtz and Loewenstein suggest that "spontaneous transfer of useful knowledge across domains is a powerful cognitive tool" ( 1), in this case, the domains of (i) science and medicine, and (ii) creative expression including poetry. Poetry hones critical skills in imagery, metaphor, analogy, analysis, observation, attentiveness, and clear communication. All of these are commonly useful in understanding, problem-solving, and decoding scientific and medical mysteries. Creative science expression facilitates this skills transfer, is not limited to poetry, and can include other media such as visual or performing arts. Active use of metaphors in this way helps learners understand science, and relies on their imagination to deconstruct and construct their perception of science. This serves as a vehicle for processing observations and assumptions, and can enrich education and facilitate learning. Jemison, a doctor, dancer, and astronaut embraces this kind of collaboration and teaches that science and arts are avatars or manifestations of the same human creativity ( 2).

Figure 1. Creative expression of science enriches learning. Creative, subjective, and diverse expression of science by elementary and middle school (*and presumably high school, which has not yet been reported) students, as well as undergraduate, graduate, medical, nursing, and paramedic trainees advances their education, based on the structural similarity of using analysis, observation, attentiveness, and clear communication in (i) science and medicine, and (ii) creative expression including poetry, at various stages. This sets up a continuum from elementary school to medical practice. Specifically, the attentive use of imagery, metaphors, and analogy in clearly communicated poetry, music, and visual and performing arts about science and medicine hones skills in analysis and observation. This helps to flesh out missing details and facilitate recall of scientific principles. It also leads to higher-order thinking and greater insight into the human dimensions of medical practice. This results in deeper understanding of science and medicine and improved patient-doctor relationships and communication. ¹( 3- 23). ²( 8, 11- 13, 16, 19, 20). ³( 5, 12, 18). ⁴( 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15, 17, 21, 23). ⁵( 22). ⁶( 19). ⁷( 18). ⁸( 18, 19). ⁹( 5). ¹⁰( 16). ¹¹( 14). ¹²( 11, 13, 19, 20). ¹³( 11, 12, 19). ¹⁴( 6, 9, 10, 15, 17, 21, 23).

Learning through Creative Expression of Science Involves Synergy

The intermingling of creative imagery, metaphor, and analogy with the expression of science can lead to novel outcomes that are more than the sum of its parts (Figure 1). To illustrate, writing scientific thoughts in the form of poems means that ideas cannot exist merely as a milieu in one's mind. One has to communicate these true ideas in a way that others would understand. With such reasoning, one more deeply examines literature searches, broadening the scope of research findings and expanding the context for interpretation of results, more than would likely occur in the absence of creative expression. Thus, the process of writing good poetry that truly reflects good science leads to a fuller inquiry, interpretation, and appreciation of science. Several examples are provided as evidence for the impact of creative expression on science learners at various stages, from elementary school to graduate and health care education. Incorporating hands-on poetry and artistic expression of science from early stages in education may prime learners for further creative expression integration in advanced science and medical education.

Undergraduate and Graduate Education Pertinent to Neurology and Neuroscience

One example involves undergraduate students in Massachusetts, USA and undergraduate and graduate students in New York, USA. Students were instructed to write haikus to learn and accurately convey complex neurological concepts ( 19). Numerous haikus were written about the symptoms, genetics, and underlying pathology of Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's diseases, among others. Student comments on the exercises' outcome indicated deep understanding of the neurodegenerative and addiction disorders. Profound learning resulted from internalizing the scientific information, while constructing coherent, impactful, and efficient haikus. Students concisely expressed neurobiological concepts, by emphasizing salient features. Learners were then required to provide written and oral deconstruction of their haikus to walk peers through their evidence-based thought process. The exercises encouraged higher-order thinking to forge a bridge between the arts and sciences and facilitated comprehension and propagation of complex ideas. Writing and sharing haikus helped with recall of the material and fleshing out missing parts. Educators noted that haiku-prose paired responses were the most scientifically accurate and well-written of all the students' homework assignments.

An unrelated author Chudler compiled "The Little Book of Neuroscience Haiku," which includes explanations of topics for use in neurology and neuroscience education ( 24). Using such a model could potentially be a powerful impetus for undergraduate, graduate, medical, and younger learners of neurobiology. Walders supports this concept and suggests that poetry can braid curriculum areas by weaving concepts together ( 25).

Embracing the diversity of creative science expression, Gurnon et al. suggest that visual arts can help hone creativity, objectivity, perseverance, spatial reasoning, and observational acuity ( 18). These authors reported on collaboration among faculty and undergraduate students in chemistry and sculpture to produce visual artwork inspired by protein-folding research ( 18). Their students performed literature searches to learn more about Villin, a calcium-dependent actin-binding protein. Results of the art-science collaboration were presented, using metaphors to help make the science of protein structure and folding more intuitive and meaningful to peer learners. Felton et al. support this form of creative expression and indicate that carefully producing artistic images can lead researchers to thoughtfully examine and clarify concepts behind a scientific topic ( 5). In this way, metaphoric analysis can help elucidate difficult topics in science.

Taken together, these examples are evidence that creative science expression can enrich undergraduate and graduate education relevant to neurology and neuroscience.

Medical and Nursing Education Pertinent to Neurology

Morris argues that developing writing skills creates better communicators, which equals better doctors ( 4). Demonstrating this, programs developed for medical residents, with expressive writing focused on difficult patients, cross-cultural medicine, stroke, and caregivers, among others, have led to improved interpersonal relationships and communication ( 3, 6, 7). Programs for various groups of medical (and premedical) students that enhance observation, interpretation, and imagination skills through creating poetry as well as visual and performing arts, have also improved patient-doctor relationships and communication ( 6, 9, 10, 15, 17, 21, 23). These studies' authors concluded that various forms of creative reflection should be encouraged in medical schools and residencies, with extension to practicing health professionals. This is in keeping with Rowe's analysis of the positive instructive role that writing poetry played in the lives and careers of several physicians and scientists ( 26). Similar results have been observed for paramedic students, who felt their created works gave great insight into the deeper human dimensions of their practice, inspiring intellectual transformations ( 14).

Raingruber also wrote poetry about patient experiences in mental health and trained nursing students in this medium ( 8). She concluded that poems teach students to think holistically and should be more avidly incorporated into education and practice. Webster too incorporated poetry-writing and other creative expression into education of nursing students in psychiatry, with exercises leading to a positive trend in learners' relationships with patients, expectations, perceptions, understanding, and empathy ( 16). Foureur et al. also contributed to the training of nurse graduates, by giving them a voice to express the complexity of patient outcomes ( 27).

These cases are supportive evidence for creative science expression in health professional education.

Elementary and Middle School Science Education

A number of authors have also used these interdisciplinary methods in elementary and middle school science education. Frazier et al. used science poetry among elementary school students in Virginia, USA ( 13). In pairs, students created poems about results of their scientific investigations, leading to data-driven consensus about the nature of science. Barbosa et al. also integrated poetry about science among more than one hundred elementary and middle school students in southern Brazil ( 20). Teachers and students wrote poems about scientific concepts in physics, chemistry, and biology. The interdisciplinary method resulted in stimulating students' imagination and science knowledge integration. Similarly, Cabrera studied incorporation of science poetry among middle school students in Northern California, USA ( 11). In the small sample of students, pre- and post-science quiz results showed improvement of up to 13% in overall score. Cabrera concluded that poetry sessions were effective as a tool for science education.

Osborn's SAW workshops used creative science expression to encourage students' imagination and exploration of chemical pigment science ( 12). They helped students learn to correctly identify plant extract pigments by creation of "rainbow tubes" when a variety of acids and alkalis were added to samples. Students' output reflected the rich contributions of poetry-writing, and working with pigments in class, to their understanding of science. Watts catalogs a number of other settings, in which creative expression of science can or has been used as an innovative tool in science education ( 28). He considers that school science can be a scientific and literary experience - an esthetic poetic experience.

These examples provide evidence for creative expression of science in enriching elementary and middle school education, which are precursors for medical education.

Science Expression through Poetry and Other Media is Creative, Subjective, and Diverse

Because science and poetry share creativity, analogy, discipline, knowledge, and imagination in common, Bono recommends convergence between science and literature as interdependent fields ( 29). This can be captured in creative expression of science (Figure 1).

To demonstrate, the creativity of a scientist draws on imagination, originality, and ingenuity, emerging from a poetic sense of freedom ( 30). Boxenbaum mentions "creative worrying," in which the scientist carries around thoughts of his research in the conscious and unconscious realms until a uniquely gratifying association is realized and is communicated to others in the form of new insight. Another way of conceiving this is as if one's thoughts are a bus driver that stops at several locations, picking up and letting off passenger ideas. The ideas interact with each other in the creativity bus, while being thoughtfully transported to their final destination. An esthetic overlap results that informs and mediates a creative understanding of the science.

In addition to creativity, Uri Alon's discussion of How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem asserts that (choosing questions to study in) science has subjective and emotional aspects (as humans interacting with nature) and that recognizing this can enrich our science and our well-being ( 31). Anne Osbourn, in her essay The Poetry of Science, observes too that scientists like artists (as humans interacting with the world around us) are subjective ( 32). Accordingly, Raquell Holmes introduces Improvisational Theater for Computing Scientists, designed to develop awareness of the creative and subjective capacity of individuals and groups in science education and research ( 33). In some sense, the message from these and other artist scientists is that subjectivity and creativity can shake hands with each other and nod at science. Science then smiles back, having found deeper meaning and perspective.

The creativity and subjectivity of creative science expression can be encountered in diverse forms. The Smith College Museum of Art displayed Daniel Kelm's compilation entitled "Poetic Science," featuring tooled leather and other inventive forms presenting science mixed with poetry and philosophy ( 34). The Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico exhibited video, sculpture, and performance from The Wilderness Science and Art Collaboration entitled "Poetic Science" ( 35). Websites display art, songs, and poems to encourage creative science learning ( 36, 37). These provide visual and auditory access to creative expression and train science learners to pursue metaphor and imagination. Some K-12 curricula boast methods to encourage such interdisciplinary partnerships in science education. For example, the Waldorf method used widely in various schools formalizes these partnerships ( 22). The method uses poetry, music, and physical movement to conceptualize mathematics and to help develop spatial and scientific intelligence. Fuglei and others support these partnerships, and also encourage assisting students to use art, pigments, and light to create visual representations of scientific principles ( 38), to expand the diversity of science expression to enrich learning.

Collaborative Teams and Resources

Interdisciplinary teams of scientists, poets, and artists ( 12), and also teachers and physicians, could become the norm. Scientists and poets can become poised to join these teams by accepting Stewart's proposal of poetry as a means of forging the connection between literacy and science teaching ( 39). Stewart encourages scientists to consistently incorporate poetry into communicating science. Timpane exhorts scientists to read poetry and poets to read science lifelong ( 40). Perhaps by doing so, these teams can be effectively incorporated into science education from elementary school through undergraduate, graduate, medical, postgraduate, and continuing education.

Resources are available for developing curricula for creative science expression ( 41, 42, 43). These may be of particular utility for embracing the arts, including poetry, as a component of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) ( 2, 44, 45) education.

Author Contributions

Sherry-Ann Brown conceived, analyzed, designed, drafted, critically revised, approved, and agreed to be accountable for this submitted work.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Dr. Raquell Holmes, Dr. Anne Osbourn, and Dr. Uri Alon for reading an initial version of this manuscript.

References

24. Chudler E. The Little Book of Neuroscience Haiku'. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company (2013).

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25. Walders D. Poetry and Science Education. Columbus, OH: ERIC Digests (2000).

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28. Watts M. Science and poetry: passion v. prescription in school science? Int J Sci Educ (2001) 23(2) 23(2):197-208. doi:10.1080/09500690120685

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33. Holmes R. Improvisational theater for computing scientists. In: C&C '11 Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition. New York: Association for Computing Machinery (2011). p. 347-8. doi:10.1145/2069618.2069689

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42. Colfax E, Gorrel N. Writing Poetry through the Eyes of Science: A Teacher's Guide to Scientific Literacy and Poetic Response (FRAMEWORKS FOR WRITING). Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing (2012).

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Creative Expression of Science through Poetry and Other Media can Enrich Medical and Science Education

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1 IntroductionCreative expression of scientific observations and principles through poetry and other media can enrich medical and science education. This debunks the expectation that science and poetry, for example, are mutually exclusive (Figure 1). Instead of coexisting as parallel lanes without interaction, poetry and science can cross over as one merges lanes.

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Align Assessments, Objectives, Instructional Strategies - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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Align Assessments, Objectives, Instructional Strategies - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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Assessments should reveal how well students have learned what we want them to learn while instruction ensures that they learn it. For this to occur, assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies need to be closely aligned so that they reinforce one another.

To ensure that these three components of your course are aligned, ask yourself the following questions:

Learning objectives: What do I want students to know how to do when they leave this course?

Assessments: What kinds of tasks will reveal whether students have achieved the learning objectives I have identified?

Instructional strategies: What kinds of activities in and out of class will reinforce my learning objectives and prepare students for assessments?

What if the components of a course are misaligned?

If assessments are misaligned with learning objectives or instructional strategies, it can undermine both student motivation and learning. Consider these two scenarios:

Your objective is for students to learn to apply analytical skills, but your assessment measures only factual recall. Consequently, students hone their analytical skills and are frustrated that the exam does not measure what they learned.

Your assessment measures students' ability to compare and critique the arguments of different authors, but your instructional strategies focus entirely on summarizing the arguments of different authors. Consequently, students do not learn or practice the skills of comparison and evaluation that will be assessed.

What do well-aligned assessments look like?

This table presents examples of the kinds of activities that can be used to assess different types of learning objectives (adapted from the revised Bloom's Taxonomy).

Type of learning objective

Examples of appropriate assessments

Recall
Recognize
Identify

Objective test items such as fill-in-the-blank, matching, labeling, or multiple-choice questions that require students to:

recall or recognize terms, facts, and concepts

Interpret
Exemplify
Classify
Summarize
Infer
Compare
Explain

Activities such as papers, exams, problem sets, class discussions, or concept maps that require students to:

summarize readings, films, or speeches

compare and contrast two or more theories, events, or processes

classify or categorize cases, elements, or events using established criteria

paraphrase documents or speeches

find or identify examples or illustrations of a concept or principle

Apply
Execute
Implement

Activities such as problem sets, performances, labs, prototyping, or simulations that require students to:

use procedures to solve or complete familiar or unfamiliar tasks

determine which procedure(s) are most appropriate for a given task

Analyze
Differentiate
Organize
Attribute

Activities such as case studies, critiques, labs, papers, projects, debates, or concept maps that require students to:

discriminate or select relevant and irrelevant parts

determine how elements function together

determine bias, values, or underlying intent in presented material

Evaluate
Check
Critique
Assess

Activities such as journals, diaries, critiques, problem sets, product reviews, or studies that require students to:

test, monitor, judge, or critique readings, performances, or products against established criteria or standards

Create
Generate
Plan
Produce
Design

Activities such as research projects, musical compositions, performances, essays, business plans, website designs, or set designs that require students to:

make, build, design or generate something new

This table does not list all possible examples of appropriate assessments. You can develop and use other assessments - just make sure that they align with your learning objectives and instructional strategies!

CONTACT US to talk with an Eberly colleague in person!

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Align Assessments, Objectives, Instructional Strategies - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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Assessments should reveal how well students have learned what we want them to learn while instruction ensures that they learn it. For this to occur, assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies need to be closely aligned so that they reinforce one another.

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Promoting studentsâ€™ note-taking skills through task-based learning

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Promoting studentsâ€™ note-taking skills through task-based learning

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Science and engineering students’ use of diagrams during note taking versus explanation

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Science and engineering students’ use of diagrams during note taking versus explanation

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Meeting the Literacy Development Needs of Adolescent English Language Learners Through Content-Area Learning - PART TWO: Focus on Classroom Teaching and Learning Strategies

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Meeting the Literacy Development Needs of Adolescent English Language Learners Through Content-Area Learning - PART TWO: Focus on Classroom Teaching and Learning Strategies

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Decoding the Disciplines: An Approach to Scientific Thinking

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Decoding the Disciplines: An Approach to Scientific Thinking

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Microsoft Word - Author guidelines final

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Microsoft Word - Author guidelines final

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Guidelines for writing a literature review

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Guidelines for writing a literature review

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Guidelines for writing a literature review

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In addition to using the step-by-step guide that I have provided below, I also recommend that you (a) locate examples of literature reviews in your field of study and skim over these to get a feel for what a literature review is and how these are written (I have also provided links to a couple of examples at the end of these guidelines (b) read over other guides to writing literature reviews so that you see different perspectives and approaches: Some examples are:

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Gabriel & Wenz (2017) Three directions for DL

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Gabriel & Wenz (2017) Three directions for DL

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Developing Students’ Disciplinary Literacy? The Case of University Physics | SpringerLink

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Developing Students’ Disciplinary Literacy? The Case of University Physics | SpringerLink

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John Airey

Johanna Larsson

Keywords

Disciplinary literacy undergraduate physics knowledge structures singulars versus regions comparative education

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

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Developing Students' Disciplinary Literacy? The Case of University Physics

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In this chapter we use the concept of disciplinary literacy(Airey, 2011a, 2013) to analyze the goals of university physics lecturers. Disciplinary literacy refers to a particular mix of...

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The relationships and impact of teachers' metacognitive knowledge and pedagogical understandings of metacognition - Semantic Scholar

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We know that metacognitive students are successful in school (Sternberg Instructional Science 26:127-140, 1998). However, despite the recognition of the role of metacognition in student success, limited research has been done to explore teachers' explicit awareness of their metacognition and their ability to think about, talk about, and write about their thinking (Zohar Teaching and Teacher Education 15:413-429, 1999).

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Ten Metacognitive Teaching Strategies | Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning

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Ten Metacognitive Teaching Strategies | Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning

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Why aren't kids being taught to read? | Hard Words | APM Reports

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Why aren't kids being taught to read? | Hard Words | APM Reports

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READ THIS STORY IN SPANISH

Lea esta historia en español.

It was 2015 and Jack Silva, the chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a problem: Only 56 percent of third-graders in his district had scored proficient on the state reading test.

Reading scores had been low for a while, but for most of the five years that Silva had been chief academic officer, he and other school leaders had been consumed with a severe budget crisis. By 2015, the district had turned the corner financially, and Silva was wondering why the reading scores were so terrible. "It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which four in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?'" he said.

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it's been that way since testing began in the 1990s.
Percentage of U.S. students proficient in reading
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress ( Grade 4 | Grade 8). *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America's poor reading performance is poverty. There is plenty of poverty in Bethlehem, a small city in eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town. But there are fancy homes here, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many kids at the wealthier schools weren't reading very well either. This was not just poverty. In fact, by some estimates, one-third of America's struggling readers are from college-educated families.

Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read or how they should be taught, so he started searching online. As he soon discovered, virtually all kids can learn to read - if they are taught the right way. The problem is that many American elementary schools aren't doing that.

"We never looked at brain research. We had never, ever looked at it. Never."
- Jodi Frankelli

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters - phonics.

"There are thousands of studies," said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. "This is the most studied aspect of human learning."

But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail.

The problem in Bethlehem

Even though Silva had known little about how children learn to read or how reading should be taught, he'd long been aware that some older students were struggling too. He'd been a middle school and high school teacher for years, and he had students who came across words they'd never seen before and had no idea how to sound them out.

Kim Harper, the district's supervisor of literacy, noticed the same thing. She'd been a high school English teacher in Bethlehem and said that a disturbing number of her students, even students in honors classes, weren't very good readers. "They didn't like to read," she said. "They avoided reading. They would tell me it was too hard."

She didn't know what to do about it either, so she more or less shrugged it off. "I think it became easy to say, 'Well that's just the way it is. You know, we're always going to have X percent of kids who it's just going to be a struggle for,'" she said.

Even the school board president, Mike Faccinetto, said it was pretty much accepted that a lot of kids in the district would never be very good readers. "It was always, 'Well, that's not a reflection of Bethlehem,'" he said, referring to the reading scores. The kids who weren't doing well, "'Ah, well, you know those kids, their parents aren't around, or maybe they don't have two parents. And that's the best they're going to do.'"

Silva wanted to figure out what was going on. So in 2015, he assigned Harper to visit all of Bethlehem's elementary schools and find out how children were being taught to read.

Harper went to a professional development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how kids should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word he didn't know, the teacher would tell him to look at the picture and guess. The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word "horse" and said "house," the teacher would say it's wrong. But, Harper said, "if the kid said 'pony,' it'd be right because pony and horse mean the same thing."

Harper was shocked. First of all, pony and horse don't mean the same thing. Second, the idea that you look at pictures and guess when you don't know a word seemed odd to her. "I wouldn't have been able to use that strategy at the secondary level," she said. There were no pictures in the books her high school students read.

The teachers described their approach to reading instruction as "balanced literacy." Harper didn't quite know what that meant, but her colleague Jodi Frankelli had heard lots about balanced literacy. Frankelli was the district's new supervisor of early learning. Though her teaching experience and training were in the upper grades, too, she'd been a principal at one of Bethlehem's elementary schools. She said it hadn't been completely clear to her what balanced literacy was. The main idea seemed to be: Give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers. "We never looked at brain research," she said. "We had never, ever looked at it. Never."

We are not born wired to read

The scientific research on reading goes back decades, from work psychologists were doing in the 1960s to more recent discoveries by neuroscientists using brain imaging technology.

Researchers have been doing their work in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education, but reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes; they go to different conferences, publish in different journals. The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read.

"Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading. It succeeded in keeping the science at bay and it allowed things to continue as before."
- Mark Seidenberg

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.

But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

Children don't crack the code naturally. They need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds. But by the time scientists had done all the studies to conclude this for sure, a different set of beliefs about reading was already deeply entrenched in many American schools and colleges of education.

Balanced literacy

Debates about reading go back centuries. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the father of the public-school movement in the United States, railed against the idea of teaching children that letters represent sounds. He referred to letters of the alphabet as "bloodless, ghastly apparitions" and argued that children would be distracted from comprehending the meaning of what they were reading if they focused too much on letters. He believed children should be taught to read whole words.

On the other side of the debate were people who believed in phonics. That means teaching children that words are made up of parts and showing them how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words.

No one really knew how children actually learned to read, or how they should be taught. "It was more debates among people who had philosophies," Moats said. By the 1980s, the debate was so intense that people began referring to it as "the reading war." It was phonics versus what had come to be known as "whole language."

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn't necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.

By the early 1990s, the idea that kids didn't need phonics had taken hold in many schools and teacher preparation programs, and was even a guiding principle behind reading instruction across the entire state of California. But the phonics folks kept pushing back.

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

After the National Reading Panel report, whole language proponents could no longer deny the importance of phonics. But they didn't give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process, and they didn't give up the reading programs they were selling, either. Instead they advocated for doing both, a balance. So, whole language didn't disappear; it just got repackaged as balanced literacy. And in balanced literacy, phonics is treated a bit like salt on a meal: a little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you.

"Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading," said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the book "Language at the Speed of Sight." "It succeeded in keeping the science at bay, and it allowed things to continue as before."

He says the reading wars are over, and science lost.

Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor. "The tutor taught her some of the basic skills that the child wasn't getting in her whole language classroom," he said. "At the end of the school year the teacher was proud that the child had made so much progress, and the parent said, 'Well, why didn't you teach phonics and other basic skills related to print in class?' And the teacher said 'Oh, I did. Your child was absent that day.'"

For scientists like Seidenberg, the problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read. Surrounding kids with good books is a great idea, but it's not the same as teaching children to read.

Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction. But without explicit and systematic phonics instruction, many children won't ever learn to read very well.

'When we know better, we do better'

By the end of 2015, Silva and other district leaders in Bethlehem had figured out that balanced literacy didn't line up with the science.

Now they had to figure out what to do about it. They decided the first step would be a series of training sessions over the course of a school year for all the principals at the district's 16 elementary schools. The district leaders reasoned that the principals needed to be convinced of the science if they were going to convince their teachers to change the way they taught reading.

If there was one principal who was sure to resist, it was Kathy Bast, the principal of Calypso Elementary School. She was known as the district's No. 1 balanced literacy champion. "Decoding was never part of anything I ever did," Bast said. She happened to be out on medical leave when the training began, but her colleagues warned her she wouldn't like it. "They said to me, 'Kathy, we know you. You're not going to take well to this training.'"

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence.

But Bast had a secret. Before becoming a principal, she'd been a reading specialist. It was her job to help struggling readers. In her training to become a reading specialist, she learned a lot about how to identify children with reading problems, but she learned nothing about how to help those children learn to read. "I didn't know what to do, except just give them more books," she said. "And it wasn't working."

With time on her hands while she was on medical leave, Bast began poking around online and discovered the vast scientific literature on reading. It wasn't being published in a lot of the journals and newsletters she got as a school principal, but as her boss, Silva, had discovered, all it takes is a Google search to find it. When Bast returned to work from medical leave and joined her fellow principals in the training on reading science, she was ready to hear what the trainer had to say. And it kind of blew her mind. "Wow!" she thought. "OK, let's go get at this."

The training used a curriculum written by Moats called "Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling" or LETRS. The principals went through the training in the 2015-16 school year, the kindergarten teachers went through it the next year, and then first- and second-grade teachers did it, too.

For many teachers, the science of reading training was overwhelming at first. "I remember sitting there and my head was throbbing 'cause it was like, 'How can I take all this in?'" said Adrienne Ibarra, a reading specialist at Bethlehem's Lincoln Elementary School. She hadn't learned much about phonics when she was in college studying to be a teacher. Neither had Michelle Bosak, an English as a second language teacher at Lincoln. "It was very broad classes, vague classes and like a children's literature class," Bosak said. "But not actually teaching phonics."

Candy Maldonado, a first-grade teacher at Lincoln, described the district's old approach to reading instruction this way: "We did like a letter a week. So, if the letter was 'A,' we read books about 'A,' we ate things with 'A,' we found things with 'A,'" she said. "All we did was learn 'A' said 'ah.' And then there's apples, and we tasted apples."

The teachers had no idea how kids actually learned to read. "It was just that they do," Ibarra said.

"Almost like it's automatic," Maldonado added.

After learning about the reading science, these teachers were full of regret. "I feel horrible guilt," said Ibarra, who's been a teacher for 15 years.

"I thought, 'All these years, all these students,'" said Bosak, who's been teaching for 26 years.

To help assuage that guilt, the Bethlehem school district has adopted a motto: "When we know better, we do better." And soon, they were doing much better.

'My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves'

The Bethlehem schools now use a curriculum in the early elementary grades that mixes teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read. At first, some of the teachers recoiled a bit at the scripted nature of the lessons; the curriculum is explicit and systematic, with every teacher on the same page each day. If the curriculum says today's the day for kindergarteners to learn words that begin with the sounds "wuh" and "guh," you can walk into any kindergarten classroom in the district and see the teacher doing that lesson.

Lynn Venable, a kindergarten teacher at Calypso who has been teaching elementary school for 21 years, said she used to think reading would just kind of "fall together" for kids if they were exposed to enough print. Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better. She said her current class of kindergartners had progressed more quickly in reading than any class she'd ever had. "My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves," she said. "I don't have a single child in my room that has that look on their face like, 'I can't do this.'"

At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills. In 2015, before the science of reading training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the principals and kindergarten teachers were trained in the reading science, 84 percent of kindergarteners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.
Kindergarten reading performance before and after the science of reading training
SOURCE: Bethlehem Area School District. *Low-income is defined as the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 2017-18.

Silva is thrilled with the results, but cautious. He's eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to the state reading test in third grade. "We may have hit a home run in the first inning," he said. "But there's a lot of game left here."

It's impossible to know if the science of reading training is what led to the test score gains. Some of the schools in the district moved from half-day to full-day kindergarten the same year the training began, so that could have been a factor. But Bast, the principal at Calypso, thinks if her teachers had continued with the old approach to reading instruction, she'd still have a lot of struggling readers in her school. "We're actually teaching," she said. "We're doing our jobs."

The teacher prep problem

You can find schools and school districts across the United States that are trying to change reading instruction the way Bethlehem has, but according to Moats, ill-informed, ineffective reading instruction is the norm. "The gap between science-based ideas and practices and those most often used in our classrooms remains very wide and persistent," she wrote in a recent article.

A big part of the problem is at the university level, in schools of education, according to the authors of a 2016 article in the Journal of Childhood & Developmental Disorders. "Faculty have ignored the scientific knowledge that informs reading acquisition," the authors wrote. "As a result, the pre-service teachers who are being educated at these institutions fail to receive the necessary training."

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reviewed the syllabi of teacher preparation programs across the country and found that only 39 percent of them appeared to be teaching the components of effective reading instruction.

Seidenberg says the scientific research has had relatively little impact on what happens in classrooms because the science isn't very highly valued in schools of education. "Prospective teachers aren't exposed to it or they're led to believe that it's only one of several perspectives," he said. "In a class on reading, prospective teachers will be exposed to a menu in which they have 10 or 12 different approaches to reading, and they're encouraged to pick the one that will fit their personal teaching style best."

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. "We have to change the culture of education from one based on beliefs to one based on facts."

Kelly Butler has been trying to do just that for nearly two decades in Mississippi.

'Is this your science or my science?'

Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Butler works for the Barksdale Reading Institute, an organization founded with a $100-million gift from the former CEO of Netscape to help Mississippi children improve their reading skills. Back in the early 2000s, after the panel convened by Congress released its report, Butler and her colleagues wanted to know: Were teacher preparation programs in Mississippi instructing teachers to teach reading in ways backed up by the science?

So they did a study of the teacher preparation programs at the state's eight publicly funded universities. The institute reviewed syllabi and textbooks, surveyed the students in the classes, observed some of the classes, and interviewed the deans and faculty. The study found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics over their entire two-year teacher preparation program. Kelly Butler was alarmed. She and her colleagues went to state education officials and pleaded with them to take action.

In 2003, in a rather extraordinary move, the state Department of Education mandated that every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report. It was extraordinary because even though states have the authority to regulate teacher preparation programs, only a handful of states have specific requirements about what prospective teachers learn about reading. Colleges and universities generally don't like state officials telling them what to do. "Professors pretty much have academic freedom to construct learning in the way they think best," Butler said.

Angela Rutherford, who works with Butler and is a professor in the school of education at the University of Mississippi, put it more bluntly. "Faculty members close the door and do whatever the heck they want to," she said.

Rutherford wasn't sure the state mandate would make a big difference because many of her colleagues in teacher preparation didn't know the science themselves or didn't believe in it. She said many of them have long believed in whole language. "I had a colleague challenge me back in the fall," she said. "And her question was, 'What do you believe?' I said, 'I believe what I see in research.'"

Butler says the resistance to the science among college faculty and administrators baffles her, but it runs deep. Once, when she was talking to an education school dean about the reading science, the dean said to her, "Is this your science or my science?"

It was not clear how much impact the state mandate to teach reading science was having. Then in 2015, the Mississippi legislature passed a law called the "Literacy-Based Promotion Act." The law says that kids who aren't reading on grade level by the end of third grade cannot be promoted to fourth grade. The legislature appropriated millions of dollars to pay for training in the science of reading for all of the state's elementary school teachers.

However, if new teachers coming out of teacher prep programs didn't know reading science, the state would be spending money perpetually retraining teachers. At this point, no one really knew what prospective teachers were learning in those early literacy classes required by the state.

"I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we're here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot."

So in 2015, Butler and her colleagues decided to repeat the study they'd done in 2003. This time they looked at private colleges in Mississippi, too. They examined the early literacy courses at 15 teacher prep programs. They found, with one exception, that all the state's teacher prep programs appeared to be teaching the components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel report. But when Butler interviewed deans and faculty, most of them admitted they'd never actually read the report. And when she asked them basic questions about the science of reading, most of them didn't know the answers. The schools of education were complying with the letter of the law, but many faculty members didn't really understand the science themselves.

The professors needed training.

Changing the way teachers are taught

Teachers in the K-12 education system are used to professional development. College professors are not.

A Mississippi governor's task force decided the professors would benefit from the same training that the state's elementary school teachers were getting. The teacher training used LETRS, the curriculum the teachers in Bethlehem went through. No one was going to require college instructors to do the training, but state legislators had passed a measure to encourage it. Since 2016, teacher candidates in Mississippi have been required to pass a test on reading science. If you don't pass what's known as the Foundations of Reading test, you don't get licensed to teach elementary school in Mississippi. It's now in the best interest of faculty to teach the science, because if they don't, their students won't get jobs.

In a session of LETRS training for faculty in Jackson, Mississippi, in March 2018, the trainer, Antonio Fierro, passed out a quiz. The first question was: "True or false? Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not." The answer is "true," but the question was being asked because it's not a given that the 37 people in this training, a mix of mostly tenured faculty and adjuncts, would know that.

Roshunda Harris-Allen, a professor in the teacher preparation program at Tougaloo College, said she wasn't taught reading science in college or as part of her doctorate. And she didn't learn phonics as a kid. "We were just taught - here are your sight words, you need to memorize them," she said. She said that she struggled with reading when she was a child.

Trashonda Dixon, a literacy instructor at Tougaloo, says she did get phonics instruction when she was young, but she never learned how to teach phonics. "I think we did have issues with a lack of knowledge initially," Dixon said, referring to herself and her fellow faculty members in LETRS training. "But I think we're making great strides here to correct that."

The Mississippi faculty came together for training several times over the course of a year, and some even received mentoring as they were teaching reading science to their college students. Moats said she once did some LETRS workshops for college faculty in Colorado many years ago and one of her colleagues did abbreviated training for faculty in Maryland, but Mississippi is the only place she knows of where college faculty are going through an extended course.

"I feel blessed to be part of this change," said Barbara Bowen, an instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi who went through the training. "I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we're here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot."

The whole language hold-outs

The faculty who most resist reading science weren't in the LETRS training. Two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi agreed to be interviewed about why they didn't want to attend.

"I am philosophically opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the next great thing that's going to teach every child how to learn to read," said Stacy Reeves, an associate professor of literacy. "Phonics for me is not that answer."

Reeves said she knows this from her own experience. In the early 1990s, before she started her Ph.D., she was an elementary school teacher. Her students did phonics worksheets and then got little books called decodable readers that contained words with the letter patterns they'd been practicing. She said the books were boring and repetitive. "But as soon as I sat down with my first-graders and read a book, like 'Frog and Toad Are Friends,' they were instantly engaged in the story," she said.

She ditched the phonics workbooks and the decodable readers. "And once I started teaching in a more whole way, a more encompassing way of the whole child - What does this child need? What does that child need? Let's read more real books," she explained, "my teaching improved, the students learned more. I feel they came out the other side much better." She admitted she had no evidence her students were learning more, but she said they seemed more engaged.

One of the central tenets of whole language is that teachers are best able to judge whether their students are learning, not standardized tests. Another key idea is that all children learn to read differently and need to be taught in different ways. But research has shown that's not true.

Our brains are much more similar than they are different, and all children need to learn basically the same things to change their nonreading brains into reading brains. "Cultural, economic, and educational circumstances obviously affect children's progress," Seidenberg wrote in his book. "But what they need to learn does not change." One of the most consistent findings in all of education research is that children become better readers when they get explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

The students who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters.

Mary Ariail, former chair of the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education at the University of Southern Mississippi, remains opposed to explicit phonics instruction. She thinks it can be helpful to do some phonics with kids as they're reading books, maybe prompt a child to sound something out or to notice a letter pattern in a word. But she believes kids will be distracted from understanding the meaning of what they're reading if teachers focus too much on how words are made up of letters. "One of the ideas behind whole language is that when [reading] is meaningful, it's easy," she said. "And when it's broken down into little parts, it makes it harder."

Despite research to the contrary, Ariail and Reeves said they believe learning to read is a natural process.

"I believe children learn to read as soon as they start learning to hear," Reeves said. "Being surrounded by books, being read to often."

"It's like learning to talk," Ariail said. "A lot of children come to school already reading because they have been immersed in print-rich environments from the time they were born."

It's not clear how much they had read about reading science, but they said they do not agree with it. "One of the bones of contention is that the phonics-based approach is the scientific approach," Ariail said. "It's their science."

Ariail left her job and returned to her home state of Georgia at the end of the 2018 academic year, in part because of her frustration with the effort to change reading instruction in Mississippi. She sees it as an example of lawmakers telling educators what to do, and she doesn't like it.

Phonics isn't enough

When you talk to whole language proponents, it's clear pretty quickly that the distrust of phonics instruction is motivated by a fear that reading will be reduced to rote and boring phonics drills. One of the reasons whole language flourished in the 1970s and '80s is that it rejected the idea that children should sit quietly in rows listening to a teacher direct a lesson. "In whole language, the battle was seen as, 'Are you in favor of literacy or are you in favor of skills?'" Seidenberg said.

He said no one is advocating for rote and boring lessons. But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own.

What's also clear in the research is that phonics isn't enough. Children can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean. To comprehend what they're reading, kids need a good vocabulary, too. That's why reading to kids and surrounding them with quality books is a good idea. The whole language proponents are right about that.

There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, but some public schools are denying children proper treatment and failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place. Read more and listen.

But, according to the research, kids who can't decode will never be good readers. Some children learn decoding quickly with minimal instruction. Others need a lot more help. But good phonics instruction is beneficial for all kids, even those who learn to decode easily; research shows they become better spellers.

The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there's no science to back it up. It's a problem because it assumes the primary responsibility for teaching children to read lies with families, not schools. If you're not fortunate enough to grow up in a household where there are lots of books and adults who read to you, you may be out of luck.

There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

"It's so accepted in the scientific world that if you just write another paper about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal they won't accept it because it's considered settled science," Moats said.

According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. In fact, it's the opposite. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start. "And they accelerate their progress faster and read more and like it better and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle," Moats said. "Whereas the converse is true. When you don't give kids insight into the code and don't arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written, what happens is, 'This is a mystery. I'm not sure I'm getting what these words really say. Therefore, I'm uncomfortable. And therefore, I don't really like it.'"

The students who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters. If you're a child with dyslexia from an upper-income family, someone is probably going to notice that you're struggling and pay for you to get the help you need. But kids from poor families often get left behind, and there's evidence that a disproportionate number of them eventually end up in the criminal justice system. American prisons are full of people who grew up in poor families, and according to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia. They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed.

For Butler, the main problem at this point is ignorance. Too many teachers, school administrators and college professors don't know the science. She's betting that teaching them the science is the answer. "Part of my optimism about this is it's not like we're setting out to try to figure out how to teach reading so we can then teach everybody how to do it," she said. "We know how to do it."

Seidenberg is less optimistic. He makes a comparison to climate change research. "One thing that we've learned from climate change and the other issues over which we have polarization in this country is that facts aren't the thing that change people's beliefs," he said. "In fact, confronted with data that contradict deeply held beliefs, instead of bringing people closer together, it can have the paradoxical effects of entrenching them further."

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Emily Hanford

Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

Resources

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Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

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Teachers Criticize Their Colleges of Ed. for Not Preparing Them to Teach Reading - Teacher Beat - Education Week

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Teachers Criticize Their Colleges of Ed. for Not Preparing Them to Teach Reading - Teacher Beat - Education Week

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Last month, an audio documentary and article provocatively titled " Why Aren't Kids Being Taught to Read?" sent shockwaves through the education community.

The premise of the story, reported by American Public Media's Emily Hanford, is that scientific research has shown how children learn to read. But many teachers either don't know that science or resist it.

"Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher-preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it," Hanford writes. "As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail."

Research shows that to learn how to read, children first need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds. But in many classrooms, teachers don't spend enough time on phonics, preferring to let students guess words from context clues and develop a love of reading through practice, rather than rote instruction, Hanford reported.

The "whole language versus phonics" reading wars have been raging for decades: Do we need to explicitly teach students how to read, or will they pick it up through enough exposure to good books? Studies have "failed to find a positive relationship between encouraging reading and either the amount of reading or reading achievement," states a 2000 report from the National Reading Panel. On the other hand, the federally funded report concluded that phonics lessons do help students become better readers. (There has been limited widescale research on the subject since then.)

Now, many educators advocate for balanced literacy, an approach to reading instruction that emphasizes student choice of texts, independent reading (also known as sustained silent reading), and group discussions. The approach includes some phonics, but does not make that a focus.

That approach is still the norm in many classrooms and teacher-preparation programs, Hanford reports. For instance, in 2014, the former New York City schools chancellor pushed for schools to reinstate independent reading time.)

While Hanford's piece has received some criticism, it has struck a chord among teachers and other education advocates online. Some have begun sending open letters to the deans of their schools of education, complaining that they were not adequately taught how to teach reading.

Patricia James, a teacher who majored in elementary and special education at Arkansas State University, published an open letter to the school's dean on Arkansas' Decoding Dyslexia Facebook page.

"While I feel like most of my teacher preparation was very good, I can say I was totally unprepared to teach reading, especially to the struggling readers that I had at the beginning of my career in my resource classroom," she wrote.

Reading, James said, should not be a guessing game, and it becomes one with the balanced literacy approach. She concluded: "I find it disheartening and sad that teachers in the field are more knowledgeable about current research and practices than your professors."

After that, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, followed suit, penning an open letter to the current dean of Mercy College, where he received his teaching credential.

"To earn my degree, I had to demonstrate my 'passionate commitment to learning' and show proof that I was a 'reflective practitioner,'" he wrote. "[T]here's no visible evidence, in my portfolio or in my memory, that suggests any attention to psychology, cognitive science, language development, or the rich body of research in those fields that might shape our views of teaching and learning."

On Twitter, teachers shared similar stories with Hanford:

I find this so interesting that almost all of us were not taught to teach reading in our programs. I thought it was just me. We learned about read-alouds and vocabulary strategies, but were pretty much told if we get the child to enjoy reading, they will read.
-- J.D. Ramsey (@writerramsey) October 14, 2018

I was taught almost nothing of any real use about how to teach reading. Most of what I've learned was PD I paid to take or self-taught. I teach 2nd now and I'm a firm believer in a balanced literacy program. And yes, my 2nd graders still need systematic, explicit phonics.
-- Vix in NV (@vix_cee) October 14, 2018

It was a sad mix of "history of literacy the wars"...followed by extensive focus on how to do a good "read aloud"....and finally how to use a writers notebook. In short, we were told many things theoretically about reading but never once looked at explicit phonics instruction.
-- Mr. G (@MrGmpls) October 14, 2018

According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, only 37 percent of elementary and special education programs appear to be teaching scientifically based reading methods to preservice teachers.

Teachers, do you feel like your college of education adequately prepared you to teach reading? Did you learn phonics instruction? Let us know in the comments.
Image via Getty

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Teachers Criticize Their Colleges of Ed. for Not Preparing Them to Teach Reading

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Last month, an audio documentary and article provocatively titled " Why Aren't Kids Being Taught to Read?" sent shockwaves through the education community. The premise of the story, reported by American Public Media's Emily Hanford, is that scientific research has shown how children learn to read.

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Supporting All Learners with Complex Texts - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

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Supporting All Learners with Complex Texts - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

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Does this sound familiar? You design an exciting lesson to tackle rich and engaging complex texts with your students, then a voice in your head stops you in your tracks. The voice asks "but what about ____________?"

You can fill in the blank with any of your struggling students. Perhaps it's a 6 th grader reading at a 3 rd grade level, who refuses to read aloud the texts in the sixth grade curriculum due to her frustrations with her reading fluency. Perhaps it's a group of English Language Learners without the vocabulary exposure and knowledge needed to make sense of the topic-specific unit you are about to launch. Or perhaps it's three of your IEP students who were traditionally pulled out of whole class instruction for leveled reading work during your full-class reading instruction.

The temptation may be to dismiss this nagging voice that is getting you down: to tell it to be quiet and accuse it of having low expectations; to push forward and just hand the passage out or to hand out an easier text. Don't! Putting texts that are too hard in front of students with individualized needs, with no scaffolds or supports, will not miraculously make these students great readers. Instead, consider how support might enable them to engage more fully with a new rich text. What actions might make the text more accessible? Below is a partial list of adaptable scaffolding ideas to support all students:
Support Vocabulary:
Provide student-friendly glossaries and/or re-format the text to include visual cues for key academic vocabulary that may prevent students from understanding what they are reading. This can be done as a full-class support for students, but also on a more individualized level for students for whom vocabulary deficits may be the missing piece of the puzzle. Picture cues can also be used to support text-dependent questions students are answering during subsequent re-reads.
Use Deliberate Annotation: Google's "Fluency Tutor" has a picture dictionary feature that allows students to select words to provide picture cues. Here, students can actually highlight the words and access the picture dictionary. Use Questions as Planned Scaffolds: In this example, the teacher has numbered the lines of the text to help students navigate. This example also shows annotations that help call out key ideas in the text. Text is from ReadWorks.org; line numbers and annotations added subsequently as a scaffold. Allow Time for Reflection and Discussion: Example of how a question can support students by directing them to the part of the text to re-read. This example shows how you can reformat the text to include visual cues. The text is from Expeditionary Learning Grade 5, Module 2A, Unit 1, Lesson 2: "Interview with Sloth Canopy Researcher: Bryson Voirin." Images added subsequently as a scaffold.
Number the lines of the text whenever possible to help students navigate the text when searching for evidence. Consider when to pre-annotate texts with a defined purpose for reading. Pre-annotating is especially helpful in blended texts when two or more genres are combined. While reading, support students in annotating for key ideas, which may involve providing structured overviews. After reading once for meaning, chunk the text into sections when re-reading and allow time for students to annotate the sections or discuss with their peers.

A strong series of questions supports all students and focuses reading comprehension for higher-needs students. Pre-plan questions systematically, so that they build from basic comprehension to a more abstract or inferential interpretation. Providing "hint cards" to direct students to specific portions of the text to answer questions can help them learn to use the text and re-read for meaning. Building questions that use paragraph or line numbers, section headings, and other cues to support use of the text in the wording of the question itself can further support this work.

Balance the group discussion time by giving students time to write quietly to prepare for oral discussion or provide time to talk things out with their peers to prepare for writing. Ensure that all students are participating by providing time for partners or small groups to talk and write together.

Want more ideas? Strategies for Supporting Struggling Readers (attached) includes the suggestions above and more concrete teacher moves that can support all learners in your classroom.

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Supporting All Learners with Complex Texts - Peers and Pedagogy

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Does this sound familiar? You design an exciting lesson to tackle rich and engaging complex texts with your students, then a voice in your head stops you in your tracks. The voice asks "but what about ____________?" You can fill in the blank with any of your struggling students.

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We Have a National Reading Crisis - Education Week

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We Have a National Reading Crisis - Education Week

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Opinion

What are the reading research insights that every educator should know?

If your district isn't having an "uh oh" moment around reading instruction, it probably should be. Educators across the country are experiencing a collective awakening about literacy instruction, thanks to a recent tsunami of national media attention. Alarm bells are ringing-as they should be-because we've gotten some big things wrong: Research has documented what works to get kids to read, yet those evidence-based reading practices appear to be missing from most classrooms.

Systemic failures have left educators overwhelmingly unaware of the research on how kids learn to read. Many teacher-preparation programs lack effective reading training, something educators rightly lament once they get to the classroom. On personal blogs and social media, teachers often write of learning essential reading research years into their careers, with powerful expressions of dismay and betrayal that they weren't taught sooner. Others express anger.

The lack of knowledge about the science of reading doesn't just affect teachers. It's perfectly possible to become a principal or even a district curriculum leader without first learning the key research. In fact, this was true for us.

We each learned critical reading research only after entering district leadership. Jared learned during school improvement work for a nonprofit, while between district leadership positions. When already a district leader, Brian learned from reading specialists when his district received grant-funded literacy support. Robin learned in her fourth year as a district leader, while doing research to prepare for a curriculum adoption.

Understanding the research has been crucial to our ability to lead districts to improved reading outcomes. Yet each of us could easily have missed out on that critical professional learning. If not for those unplanned learning experiences, we'd probably still be ignorant about how kids learn to read.

There's no finishing school for chief academic officers, nor is there certification on literacy know-how for district and school leaders. Literacy experts have been recommending the same research-based approaches since the 2000 National Reading Panel report, yet there still aren't systemic mechanisms for ensuring this information reaches the educators who set instructional directions and professional-development agendas. Why should we be surprised to find pervasive misunderstandings?

Here are five essential insights supported by reading research that educators should know-but all too often don't:

Grouping students by reading level is poorly supported by research, yet pervasive. For example, 9 out of 10 U.S. 15-year-olds attend schools that use the practice.

Many teachers overspend instructional time on "skills and strategies" instruction, an emphasis that offers diminishing returns for student learning, according to a Learning First and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy report this year.

Students' background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Curricula should help students build content knowledge in history and science, in order to empower reading success.

Daily, systematic phonics instruction in early grades is recommended by the National Institute for Literacy, based on extensive evidence from the National Reading Panel.

Proven strategies for getting all kids-including English-language learners, students with IEPs, and struggling readers-working with grade-level texts must be employed to ensure equitable literacy work.

Educator friends, if any of these statements make you scratch your head, you probably have some unfinished learning.

Educators urgently need a national movement for professional learning about reading. We should declare a No Shame Zone for this work-to make it safe for all educators to say, "I have unfinished learning around literacy."

Superintendents should ask their literacy leaders if research insights are understood and implemented in their classrooms. They must be prepared to invest in the unfinished learning of their team, from teachers to cabinet. Surely some educators will defend misguided approaches; we all tend to believe we are doing the right thing, until research shows us otherwise. On this point, we speak from experience. We encourage superintendents to lean into the national conversation about literacy, in order to ask the right questions.

Some may characterize this national dialogue as reopening the "reading wars," which pitted phonics against whole language. Frankly, we don't see it. We don't frequently hear educators in our districts vigorously defending whole language, as such. More often, they're simply doing what they believe to work, without knowing better. Instead, we primarily face a battle against misunderstanding and lack of awareness.

For example, some express fears that phonics instruction comes at the expense of students engaging with rich texts, yet every good curriculum we know incorporates strong foundational skills and daily work with high-quality texts. The National Reading Panel got it right: Literacy work is a both/and, not either/or.

The battle against misunderstanding can be won by pairing professional learning with improved curriculum. Quality curriculum that is tailor-built to the research makes good practice tangible and achievable for teachers. Professional development around implementation of such high-quality curriculum is where it all comes together: Teachers are given the what to use, and professional learning explains the why and the how of those materials.

Districts today have many choices among research-aligned, excellent curricula, which was not the case even two years ago. These new curriculum options may be the catalyst we need to improve reading instruction. In each of our districts, we have implemented one of the newly available curricula that earned the highest possible rating by EdReports, a curriculum review nonprofit. Districtwide reading improvement followed.

The gap between good and mediocre curricula is vast. And district teams need a collective understanding of how kids learn to read before selecting new materials. The advances we have personally seen from high-quality curricula have led us to call for a national professional-learning network around curricula to foster cross-district collaboration.

We dream of the potential for children if we embrace this moment of unfinished learning.

Published in Print: March 13, 2019, as We Have a National Reading Crisis

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Jared Myracle, Brian Kingsley, & Robin McClellan

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Opinion If your district isn't having an "uh oh" moment around reading instruction, it probably should be. Educators across the country are experiencing a collective awakening about literacy instruction, thanks to a recent tsunami of national media attention.

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Cognition and the question of test item format: Educational Psychologist: Vol 34, No 4

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Cognition and the question of test item format: Educational Psychologist: Vol 34, No 4

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The effects of testing on cognition bear not only on the meaning of what is measured, but also its consequences. Test item formats vary in their typical cognitive demand and in the range of cognitions they sample. Multiple-choice items, in particular, often elicit low-level cognitive processing whereas constructed-response items more often evoke complex thinking. However, the typical cognitions elicited by differing response formats are less a reflection of the limitations of those formats than they are of typical use. Even when research demonstrates that item response formats vary in cognitive features, psychometric characteristics, and costs of administration and scoring, policy implications remain ambiguous because of tradeoffs along these dimensions. No one format is appropriate for all purposes and on all occasions. This article presents the state of the cumulative research bearing on the differential cognitive demand of item formats, and explores implications of the extant research for testing practice.

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Cognition and the question of test item format

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The effects of testing on cognition bear not only on the meaning of what is measured, but also its consequences. Test item formats vary in their typical cognitive demand and in the range of cognitions they sample. Multiple-choice items, in particular, often elicit low-level cognitive processing whereas constructed-response items more often evoke complex thinking.

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Constructed-Response Test Questions: Why We Use Them; How We Score Them

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Constructed-Response Test Questions: Why We Use Them; How We Score Them

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ADDIE Model: Instructional Design - Educational Technology

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ADDIE Model: Instructional Design - Educational Technology

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ADDIE Model: Instructional Design - Educational Technology

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The ADDIE Model is an instructional design framework that training developers use. ADDIE stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate.