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(9) “The bottom line is that the test-score gap is, at its heart, a knowledge gap.” (31) Does this core observation make sense to you and align with what you’ve seen in the classroom? How might a lack of knowledge hold students back on standardized tests? How do teachers try to compensate for gaps in their students’ background knowledge, and how effective do you think those efforts can be? What are the risks of either overestimating or underestimating what students are capable of understanding?

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(10) “Children of wealthier and more educated parents may not be gaining much knowledge of the world at school, but they typically acquire more of it outside school than their disadvantaged peers.” (31) While Ms. Arredondo and Ms. Bauer adopt similar approaches to teaching reading comprehension, do you think the long-term effects will be different because of their students’ different experiences outside of school? How does this relate to “the Matthew effect”? (35) How might a knowledge-building curriculum like the one used at Center City help to reverse that effect?

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(2) If you are a teacher or parent, do you see connections between your own experiences of the educational system and Ms. Arredondo’s, Ms. Bauer’s and/or Ms. Williams? Have you seen the curriculum narrowing to reading and math?  Do you believe that this focus is necessary to boost test scores or do you feel that too much time has been spent on test prep and testing?

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(1) What are the key differences between what cognitive scientists have discovered about the process of reading and the way most educators have been trained to view it? In what ways have the two groups come to “exactly the opposite conclusions” about what is involved? (47) How do these different perspectives lead to different conclusions about the best way to teach reading?

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(1) Why have proponents of “whole language” and its successor, “balanced literacy,” argued that drilling children in phonics isn’t necessary—and isn’t even part of teaching reading? Do you find the counterarguments made by scientists convincing? If you’re an educator, did you learn about the evidence supporting phonics instruction during your training? If you’re a parent, do you think your child was taught to read through systematic phonics instruction or some other approach? Do you think it’s possible that such instruction can “kill a child’s interest in reading”? How might that be avoided?

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(3) According to Daniel Willingham, problems in comprehension generally arise because “authors inevitably leave out information.” (52) In your own writing, how aware are you of the assumptions you’re making about the reader’s background knowledge? Do your assumptions vary depending on the intended audience? When you read, how aware are you of the background knowledge you’re using to make sense of the text? Does your comprehension vary depending on your familiarity with the topic?

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Plain text and editable.

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The Knowledge Gap Discussion Guide - Make a Copy

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Shanahan article re: Comp Skills vs. Strategies

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Shanahan article re: Comp Skills vs. Strategies

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This article does a great job walking you through the distinctions between comp skills and strategies.

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Blast from the Past: This blog first posted May 19. 2018 and was re-posted on February 19, 2022. These days arguments over reading comprehension tend to pose strategy teaching against developing world knowledge. Accordingly, this piece may appear to be outdated. It is nothing of the kind. A claim often made by knowledge advocates is that strategy teaching is ineffective. That isn't the case. The claim confuses strategies with skills. Strategies help, skills not so much. Strategy proponents shouldn't take solace in this. Though strategies can improve reading comprehension, it's important not to overdo it - don't spend too much time on strategy teaching. Also, no matter how much strategy teaching you provide, it's still smart to make sure students gain lasting knowledge of their world from the texts used for reading instruction. Knowledge and strategies, together, are a powerful combination. This blog entry should help schools to emphasize comprehension strategies rather than skills. Teacher question: What's the difference between comprehension skills and comprehension strategies? Are they synonyms or do we teach different things when we are teaching them?
Shanahan response:

I'm glad you asked.

Comprehension skills and comprehension strategies are very different things.

They are often confused; the terms are often used interchangeably by those who don't understand or appreciate the distinctions they carry.

And, most importantly, these concepts energize different kinds of teaching.

The older of the two terms is "reading comprehension skills." It was used occasionally throughout the Twentieth Century, but really took off in a big way in the 1950s. Professional development texts and basal readers were replete with the term and its use burgeoned for about 30 years before slackening a bit.

"Comprehension strategies" were rarely heard of until the 1970s. The term had wide use throughout the 1980s, both because of the extensive strategy research and because those promoting comprehension skills appropriated the newer, trendier label-old wine in new bottles. (Some of this due to honest ignorance and some to the frequent but idiotic claim of educators that any new practice is "what we were already doing.")

Use of the term strategies finally overtook skills in 2000, but not necessarily because the practices of teachers actually had changed.

Basically, the term comprehension skills tend to refer to the abilities required to answer particular kinds of comprehension questions. Skills would include things like identifying the main idea, recognizing supporting details, drawing conclusions, inferencing, comparing and contrasting, evaluating critically, knowing vocabulary meaning, and sequencing events.

The old basal readers would make sure kids got plenty of practice with particular comprehension skills by making sure they practiced answering particular kinds of questions.

These days, the core reading programs do pretty much the same thing with the educational standards, with each standard being translated into a question type in lessons and assessments.

For most of these skills, there are no studies showing that they can be taught in a way that leads to higher comprehension, and even in those few instances where there is such evidence, the effects are quite small (and probably due to greater attention to reading the text than to practicing the so-called "skills.")

In fact, there have been a number of studies and logical analyses showing that these skills lack any kind of psychological reality... they are indistinguishable from one another in test performance, though that hasn't stopped instructional designers from trying to come up with programs that would teach these skills in a way that would benefit achievement (e.g., Wisconsin Design).

There has been a lot of research into question types over the past 50-60 years. Despite the claims, this body of research is a morass. There are so many variables that may be affecting any of these results, that it would be impossible to know what it all means.

Here are just a few of the variables found to affect how readers answer questions: poor/good readers; low/high knowledge readers; story/information text; the centrality of the information queried; verbatim vs. paraphrase; open-ended versus close-ended questions; reading or re-reading; text available or unavailable during answering; amount of text; factual vs. inferential; immediate recall vs. delay; and so on. (Of course, it is this complexity that undermines any possibility that one can teach question answering as a skill).

Reading has much more to do with being able to read particular kinds of texts and to deal with particular kinds of text features than to answer particular kinds of questions. The ACT (2006) concluded, for example, that if texts were easy, students could answer any kinds of question about them, while with sufficiently complex texts, they couldn't answer any question types, no matter how simple.

An odd kind of skill the performance of which is totally dependent on the contexts in which it is used. Each text presents information in its own way, and reading comprehension is heavily bound up in the readers' knowledge of the topic covered by the text. As such reading comprehension (different than decoding) is not a skilled activity, per se.

If comprehension is not a skill, then why has that been such a popular way to teach it? Initially, the concept fit the times. In the late 1950s when it "broke out," B.F. Skinner's version of behavioral psychology (e.g., stimulus-response, programmed learning) was in vogue. The idea that learning would result if we could simply induce particular responses to questions and then reward kids for their answers-rinse and repeat-seemed very convincing.

It has been harder to eradicate than a fungus, I assume, because it appears to map onto educational standards and the high-stakes tests. Principals and teachers assume it makes sense to practice the "comprehension skills" that tripped the kids up on the tests. So, they "use their data": combing through test results to identify the kinds of questions that students failed on and then practicing those supposed skills over and over in the hopes the kids will be enabled to answer such questions on the next test. That it hasn't actually worked doesn't seem to dissuade them at all.

The idea of comprehension strategies is more recent, and it has a substantial body of research behind it. If the notion of comprehension skills emerged from behaviorism, then comprehension strategies is the child of cognitive psychology. Instead of repetition and automaticity as the watchwords to learning, intention and decision-making and thinking move to the forefront with strategies.

The basic premise of strategies is that readers need to actively think about the ideas in text if they are going to understand. And, since determining how to think about a text involves choices, strategies are tied up in meta-cognition (that is, thinking about thinking).

Comprehension strategies are not about coming up with answers to particular kinds of questions, but they describe actions that may help a reader to figure out and remember the information from a text.

For example, the idea of the summarization strategy is that readers should stop occasionally during reading to sum up what an author has said up to that point. Doing that throughout a reading and at the end has been found to increase recall... recall in general, not of any particular type of information.

Another frequently studied comprehension strategy is questioning. Students read, stopping throughout to quiz themselves on what the text says (and going back and rereading if one's questions can't be answered). The point isn't to ask particular kinds of questions, so much as to think about the content more thoroughly, more actively than one would do if they just read from the first word to the last.

The same can be said about monitoring, visualizing, thinking about the way the text is structured or organized, rereading, and connecting the content with one's prior knowledge.

These kinds of actions-these strategies-are used intentionally by readers to increase the chances of understanding or remembering what one has read.

Comprehension strategies need to be practiced too; however, they aren't learned by repetition and reinforcement, but by gradual release of responsibility (including modeling, explanation, guided practice).

If you are serious about raising reading achievement, there is no point to teaching most comprehension skills. (Note: vocabulary is often listed as a comprehension skill and there are benefits to teaching that.).

On the other hand, there are very good reasons for teaching comprehension strategies, but there are at least three big problems with that kind of teaching.

First, studies of comprehension strategies have tended to be brief, usually about 6 weeks in duration (there are exceptions). Somehow that has been translated into substantial amounts of strategy teaching across students' school lives. To be perfectly honest, no one, including me, knows how much strategy instruction is needed. But there is certainly no evidence that there are benefits to be derived from 8 to 10 years of 30-35 weeks of strategy teaching.

Second, the only point to using strategies is to make sense of texts that couldn't be grasped without that effort. Many texts are easy enough that a reader would not need to expend that amount of energy in comprehending. Unfortunately, most strategy instruction that I have seen takes place in texts that frankly are relatively easy for the kids to read. That means they have to pretend to apply those strategies in situations that wouldn't benefit from such effort. If kids ever do apply these strategies to complex text, they are usually on their own. Most skip the effort since what such teaching conveys is that you don't need strategies.

Finally, even major proponents of explicit comprehension strategy instruction (like the late Michael Pressley, for instance) argued that as important as it was to teach strategies, teachers needed-even when teaching them-to make sure the kids were actually learning the text content and not just the strategies they were using to think about that content. That principle largely has been ignored by teachers and publishers.

More on the teaching of comprehension skills and strategies next week; should we guide students' reading?

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Comprehension Skills or Strategies | Shanahan on Literacy

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Blast from the Past: This blog first posted May 19. 2018 and was re-posted on February 19, 2022. These days arguments over reading comprehension tend to pose strategy teaching against developing world knowledge. Accordingly, this piece may appear to be outdated. It is nothing of the kind.

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Free resources, and perhaps an answer to the question, what about science and social studies?

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Language Arts - Core Knowledge Foundation

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The Core Knowledge Language Arts program offers free resources for PreK-Grade 5 for reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Download materials today!

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In our area (in the 1990s), the schools were uncomfortable with the low levels of incoming kindergarteners. They organized a non-profit that taught parents how to read to their children ("The most important 20 minutes of your day!") and track their progress developmentally from birth to age five. It has empowered parents and has continued to make an impact in our schools.

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The Best 20 Minutes of Your Day

When you read together every day, you nurture a child's early learning skills.

Reading Skills = Success

One of the most important predictors of school success is reading proficiently by the end of third grade.

From the moment a child is born, every day matters to ensure they develop the literacy and learning skills required for success in school and life. Families, schools, communities, together we can raise a nation of readers and prepare every child for kindergarten.

For more than two decades, the research, advocacy, and early learning and literacy programs of The Children's Reading Foundation ® have vastly improved literacy and school readiness skills of children across the country and in Canada. The foundation's multifaceted approach engages families, caregivers, schools, and communities during children's vital early learning years of birth through third grade.

National, state and local partners strengthen our efforts by forming reading foundation chapters and providing our literacy and school readiness programs to help young children succeed.

Encourage and educate families about their important role in raising a reader and preparing their child for kindergarten.

Support schools in ensuring students read on grade level by the end of third grade.

Facilitate community involvement in helping young readers be successful.

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When you read together every day, you nurture a child's early learning skills. One of the most important predictors of school success is reading proficiently by the end of third grade. From the moment a child is born, every day matters to ensure they develop the literacy and learning skills required for success in school and life.

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I love this podcast episode because it focuses on the importance of de-implementation.

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As an educator, researcher, author, and leadership consultant-there is little within the education world that Doug Reeves has not done. Twice named to the Harvard University Distinguished Authors Series, Doug has written more than forty books and joins Susan to discuss one in particular-Building to Impact. Together they dive into what evidence-based implementation looks like including the importance of de-implementation. Doug provides tangible advice for educators on what success looks like, how to define it for your school, and the ways to make it happen by focusing on one thing at a time until it becomes part of your school's culture.
Show Notes:

Join us for our webinar series all about building a Science of Reading ecosystem. At our next session on Oct. 10, Dr. Jan Hasbrouck will join us for a webinar on Dyslexia Awareness Month.

Additional resources:
Building to Impact: The 5D Implementation Playbook for EducatorsFearless Schools: Building Trust and Resilience for Learning, Teaching, and Leading100-Day Leaders: Turning Short-Term Wins Into Long-Term Success in SchoolsDoug Reeves - HomepageCreative Leadership - WebsiteDoug Reeves - Twitter"The Engagement Illusion" by Doug ReevesWebinar: "Fearless Schools"Quotes:
"When was the last time in education, anybody heard of de-implementation? All we do is pile one thing on top of another, on top of another, and then we don't then, then we wonder why it didn't work." -Doug Reeves
"If you're not gonna have deep implementation, which requires a level of focus and allocation of time and resources, then don't bother." -Doug Reeves
"You have to have a singular focus and, and it's gotta be sustained year after year after year until it becomes part of your culture." -Doug Reeves
"You have to distinguish between an initiative, something that is new, and culture, something that's part of what we do every day and that is embedded. That is more important." -Doug Reeves
"The problem is this. If you only look at the results, then you don't know what caused it. Somebody has to look at underlying causes." -Doug Reeves
"It's really important for administrators to say, hey, I can deal with some chaos. I can deal with students making mistakes. That's real learning." -Doug Reeves

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s6 e3: focused implementation: doing less to do more with dr. doug reeves

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‎Science of Reading: The Podcast: S6 E3: Focused implementation: Doing less to do more with Dr. Doug Reeves on Apple Podcasts

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As an educator, researcher, author, and leadership consultant-there is little within the education world that Doug Reeves has not done. Twice named to the Harvard University Distinguished Authors Series, Doug has written more than forty books and joins Susan to discuss one in particular-Building to...

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Collaboration Power Hour, Jan. 25th @ 7 PM PST

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Collaboration Power Hour, Jan. 25th @ 7 PM PST

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Extend the conversation around advocacy at the next Collaboration Power Hour meeting! What about content? How can we integrate more content instruction into schools? What's working? Is CKLA the answer, and it's free?!

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Collaboration Power Hour Meeting Registration

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I created this to explain how the structured literacy approach to comprehension is different -- you're welcome to share with folks who are curious.

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Why do you think the whole-language movement spread so quickly among teachers in the 1980’s and why do you think many teachers have continued to embrace its tenants in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary?

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How is the lack of content in the elementary curriculum connected to other issues that educational reformers have focused on, like teacher quality and school choice?  How might it relate to newer initiatives such as personalized learning, social-emotional learning and project-based learning?

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Many education reformers have pinned their hopes on national or state standards.  What does the experience of Massachusetts suggest about the limits of standards-based reform?  Are standards necessary or helpful, or would it make sense to focus reform efforts on the curriculum instead?  How much difference does it make if the standards specify content?