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HW-Vocabulary & Comprenhension with Students in the Primary Grades

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HW-Vocabulary & Comprenhension with Students in the Primary Grades

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by Tyran Wright Butler

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HW-A Problem Still In Search of a Solution

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HW-A Problem Still In Search of a Solution

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HW-Improving Reading Comprehension from K-3 Grades

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HW-Improving Reading Comprehension from K-3 Grades

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ies.ed.gov

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Education Resources Information Center

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HW-ExtendedLliteracy Routine to Support Struggling Third Grade Readers

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HW-ExtendedLliteracy Routine to Support Struggling Third Grade Readers

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by Jeani Z. Fullard, 2009

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HW-Adolescent Literacy & Content Area Reading

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HW-Adolescent Literacy & Content Area Reading

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by Karen Grady, 2002

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ERIC Identifier: Publication Date: Author:
Source:

Adolescent Literacy and Content Area Reading. ERIC Digest.

In 1999 the International Reading Association issued a position statement on adolescent literacy which called for a renewed interest in and dedication to the rights and needs of adolescent readers:

"Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. They will need literacy to feed their imaginations so they can create the world of the future. In a complex and sometimes even dangerous world, their ability to read will be crucial. Continual instruction beyond the early grades is needed" (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999, p. 99).

This Digest provides a brief summary of the development of content area reading; it discusses a reconceptualization of adolescent literacy and content learning; and it offers an example of a new model for both secondary classroom practice and teacher education.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

For several decades educators have been concerned about literacy development beyond the early grades. As early as the 1930's there was an emphasis on the different reading demands of various subjects and on improving the reading abilities of high school students (Moore, Readence, & Rickelman, 1986). The term "content reading" became prominent in the 1970's with the publication of Herber's (1970) book, Teaching Reading in the Content Areas where Herber distinguished between literacy development as reading instruction and literacy development to support subject matter learning (Alvermann & Phelps, 1994; Ruddell, 2001).

Much of the work in this area was based on developments in cognitive psychology in the 1970's and 1980's, which provided insight into the relationship between a reader's background knowledge (schema) of a topic and the reader's ability to make sense of a text addressing that topic. The term "schema" refers to a set of cognitive structures of interrelated ideas and concepts built from a person's experience (see the 1989 ERIC Digest "Schema Activation, Construction, and Application"). According to some views of schema theory, a reader's existing knowledge of the subject matter is the single most influential factor in what he or she will learn from reading a text about that subject matter (Anderson, 1984; Steffensen, Joag-Dev, & Anderson, 1979). Thus, theorizing and research in cognitive psychology led to the development of many instructional strategies that secondary teachers could use to increase students' comprehension of course materials. For example, the use of a pre-reading strategy such as an anticipation guide can serve to activate students' prior knowledge to improve comprehension. It can also enable students to confront misconceptions about the topic at hand, or to arrive at new understandings by revising or constructing new schema (Dufflemeyer, 1994). Numerous content area vocabulary development strategies focus on activating students' existing word/concept knowledge so that they may build on the schemata they have, or develop new schemata for new concepts (Alvermann & Phelps, 1994; Lenski, Wham, M. A. & Johns, 1999; Ruddell, 2001).

While the focus on the cognitive dimension of reading has helped some students become more proficient readers of content area texts (Ruddell, 2001), some assessment data indicates the need to reconsider adolescent literacy and content area learning. Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, and Mueller (2001) note that there are still persistent gaps in student achievement between students who are members of the dominant culture and those who are not. They also draw on data from the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress Reading Report Card. It indicates that although the percentages of eighth and twelfth graders scoring above the proficient level have increased (33% and 40% respectively), these percentages still suggest that high levels of literacy are not being attained by most secondary students. Some research indicates that an emphasis on reading solely as a cognitive process has not adequately addressed the needs of adolescent readers as they face learning from texts in the various subject areas at the secondary level.

RECONCEPTUALIZING ADOLESCENT LITERACY AND CONTENT READING

A number of reading researchers and theorists believe the reading process to be much more complex, including not only the cognitive dimension addressed by schema theory and many existing reading strategies, but including a social dimension as well (e.g., Bloome, 1986; Goodman, 1996; Greenleaf, et al., 2001; Harste, 1994). The extent to which readers are able to construct meaning with texts is also based on the personal, interpersonal, and institutional contexts in which reading events occur. The work of sociolinguists, cultural anthropologists, and critical theorists has shown that it is not possible to separate classroom practices such as strategies for activating background knowledge from the larger social and cultural contexts in which the practices are enacted (e.g., Heath, 1983; Gee, 1996).

Drawing from some recent studies, Moje, Young, Readence, & Moore (2000) call for a conception of adolescent literacy that includes adolescents' literacy practices beyond the secondary classroom, their expanded notion of text (i.e., the Internet, television, and magazines), and the relationship between literacy and the development of identity. But they also caution that the issues of teaching and learning in the context of secondary school content areas are still critical areas for research. For example, what constitutes best practices depends on many factors: how students perceive themselves as readers, what their interests are at the time, the interactions of teacher and student, of student and student, the classroom environment in which the strategy is being used, and how institutional structures shape daily events that occur in classrooms and schools. This fertile ground of literacy as a complex process and research about adolescent literacy and learning in secondary classrooms is providing a means for reinventing ways to develop students' academic literacies (Brynildssen, 2001).

A NEW MODEL FOR CLASSROOM PRACTICE AND TEACHER EDUCATION

One model developed from the reconceptualization of content reading is Reading Apprenticeship (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999). This instructional framework is based on the dual notions of literacy as a complex cognitive and social process and of teaching as cognitive apprenticeship. In order for adolescents to move from being novices to experts in specific content area practices, an expert practitioner (the subject matter teacher) guides, models, makes explicit, and supports the novice in his or her development. Indeed, because ways of thinking, speaking, reading, and writing vary from discipline to discipline, some believe the most appropriate place for students to learn these discipline-specific discourse practices is from teachers who are already experts in these fields.

Briefly summarized, Reading Apprenticeship involves teachers and their students as partners in a collaborative inquiry into reading and reading processes as they engage in subject-area texts. This instructional framework explicitly draws on students' strengths and abilities to provide crucial resources for the inquiry partnership... how we read and why we read in the ways we do become part of the curriculum, accompanying what we read in subject-matter classes [emphasis in original] (Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, & Mueller, 2001, p. 89).

The framework consists of four integrated dimensions of classroom life that teachers and students explore together: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building. The social dimension centers on building a community of readers who use literacy to make connections between their interests, each other, and the larger social world they are engaged in learning about. The personal dimension of Reading Apprenticeship develops students' awareness of themselves as readers, of their purposes in reading, and of their goals for improvement. Adolescents' resources and the multiple literacies that are part of their daily lives are part of the teaching and learning that occurs. The cognitive dimension is the part of the framework that incorporates instruction in and the use of comprehension strategies, providing tools for monitoring comprehension, for problem-solving to assist comprehension, and for developing flexibility in reading. The knowledge-building dimension focuses on such areas as developing content knowledge (building schemata), knowledge of the discipline-specific vocabulary, and text and language structures.

The four dimensions of classroom life are made visible to students through the metacognitive conversations that students and teachers engage in about the texts they are reading. Metacognitive conversations occur through class discussion, small group work, writing, and individual reflection. The model provides a framework and means for teachers to explicitly show students how to reflect on their own and each other's ways of using language and how to connect their knowledge and experiences to academic literacy practices. In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms, students work toward advanced levels of literacy by developing skills and strategies, as well as the necessary dispositions required for the challenge of achieving academic literacy. Students are able to move from novice to proficient performance in content area literacies by being engaged in complex academic literacy tasks with support from the teacher and peers and with the teacher making explicit the knowledge and problem-solving skills teachers call upon as readers in their disciplines.

Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, and Mueller (2001) report on the implementation of this framework in a course in academic literacy offered to ninth graders in one of the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco for the 1996-1997 school year. Assessments of student reading development on multiple measures were not only statistically significant, but impressive overall, as students made gains of two years in reading proficiency in seven months of instruction. Follow-up studies indicated that students maintained their reading development and continued their growth as readers.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement

http://cela.albany.edu/

WestEd-The Strategic Literacy Initiative

http://www.wested.org/stratlit/

National Institute for Literacy: Adolescent Literacy

http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/adolescent/

REFERENCES

Alvarez, Marino C. & Risko, Victoria J. (1989). Schema Activation, Construction, and Application. Bloomington, IN: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication. [ED 312 611]

Alvermann, D. & Phelps, S. (1998). Content reading and literacy. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Anderson, R. C. (1984). Role of the reader's schema in comprehension, learning, and memory. In R. C. Anderson, J. Osborn, & R. J. Tierney (Eds.), Learning to read in American schools: Basal readers and texts (pp. 243-257). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bloome, D. (1986). Reading as a social process in a middle school classroom. In D. Bloome (Ed.), Literacy and schooling (pp. 123-149). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. [ED 307 582]

Brynildssen, S. (2001). Highlights of reading research in the labs and centers of the U.S. Department of Education. Bloomington, IN: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication. [ED 459 425]

Dufflemeyer, F. (1994). Effective anticipation guide statements for learning from expository prose. Journal of Reading, 37(6), 452-457. [EJ 481 057]

Gee, J. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press.

Goodman, K. (1996) On reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. [ED 394 134]

Greenleaf, C., Schoenbach, R., Cziko, C., & Mueller, F. (2001). Apprenticing adolescent readers to academic literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 71 (1), pp. 79-129. [EJ 624 237]

Harste, J. (1994). Literacy about curriculum conversations about knowledge, inquiry, and morality. In R. Ruddell, M. Ruddell, & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed., pp. 1220-1242). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. [ED 379 626]

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Herber, H. L. (1970). Teaching reading in the content areas. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lenski, S., Wham, M.A., & Johns, J. (1999). Reading & learning strategies for middle & high school students. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. [ED 442 083]

Moje, E., Young, J. P., Readence, J., & Moore, D. (2000). Reinventing adolescent literacy for new times: Perennial and millennial issues. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43 (5), 400-410. [EJ 598 956]

Moore, D. W., Bean T. W., Birdyshaw, D., & Rycik, J. A. (1999). "Adolescent literacy: A position statement." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43, 97-112. [EJ 592 830]

Moore, D. W., Readence, J. E., & Rickelman, R. J. (1983). An historical exploration of content reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 18(4), 419-438. [EJ 285 210]

Ruddell, M. (2001). Teaching content reading and writing (3rd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ED 401 526]

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide to improving reading in middle and high school classrooms. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Steffensen, M. S., Joag-Dev, C., & Anderson, R. C. (1979). A cross-cultural perspective on reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 15(1), 10-29. [EJ 210 791]

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Adolescent Literacy and Content Area Reading. ERIC Digest.

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ERIC Identifier: Publication Date: Author: Source: In 1999 the International Reading Association issued a position statement on adolescent literacy which called for a renewed interest in and dedication to the rights and needs of adolescent readers: "Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history.

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Summary of literature pinned

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HW-Reading Literacy Lessons, Activities and Enrichment

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HW-Reading Literacy Lessons, Activities and Enrichment

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For Educators

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Curriculum and Instruction - Student Center Activities, Grades 2-3 - Student Center Activities, Grades 2-3

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The first two books contain Activity Plans and Activity Masters that are ready for immediate use in classrooms. The third book, the Teacher Resource Guide, is an informative guide offering important insight on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

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I plan to study reading literacy and the strategies associated with it to help close the achievement gap, as well as increase literacy across the curriculum with low achieving/low socioeconomic status students in my 3rd grade inclusion class. 

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I plan to study reading literacy and the strategies associated with it to help close the achievement gap, as well as increase literacy across the curriculum with low achieving/low socioeconomic status students in my 3rd grade inclusion class. 

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The Annie E. Casey Foundation

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Reading Rockets-Emily Stewart, M.Ed.,12/2012

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It's funny to be a teacher! When everyone else thinks of the "New Year" starting January 1st, teachers are getting ready to start their "third quarter."" Usually about our "half-time" (aka: Winter Vacation) I enjoy reflecting on our year so far, and how I can tweak my instruction to streamline our focus. So after the presents have been opened, traditions enjoyed, and champagne and poppers cleaned up, it's always a good opportunity to sit back, and begin deciding where instruction needs to be strengthened.

I am looking forward to sharing a three-part series focused on an instrumental shift in the Common Core: answering questions grounded in the text. What I am noticing in my students' responses is a lack of "proof" that supports their answers. We are just getting into an in-depth unit on inferring and character analysis. I enjoy pairing these two, back to back, because there is an abundant amount to discover about characters, theme, and plot development through evidence that the author provides. However, I typically find, that unless explicitly taught, even my above grade level readers have a hard time finding the evidence, understanding how it connects to their schema, and then processing it into a constructed response. So hopefully the next bits of information will give you some ideas of teaching your students how to make fictional inferences.
Schema
We, as educators, understand that schema is all of the knowledge we have, organized and connected to itself in our brains. We begin lessons with it, use it to ground our students' understanding, and help students to connect to new learning, we call it: prior knowledge. However, where we typically fall short, is teaching kiddos what schema is, and how they can use it in their own learning. A student's understanding of how his brain categorizes information is a new awakening for most of my third graders. So you can bet that when I'm teaching my kiddos how to infer, they are going to struggle, because half the battle of learning how to make an inference is the understanding of, WHY we understand.

One of the first lessons I teach in third grade is about schema. We open the filing cabinet and pull out file folders and discuss how our brain organizes information in a similar fashion. Following that, we discuss how life experiences, school, reading, our families, and interests help build a larger cabinet the longer we are alive. This discussion helps students to see how their connections and familiarities to things in life, stems from their schema and experiences. For example, when I taught in Arizona, many of my students didn't have a ton of schema about snow, or the beach, but could go on for days about cacti and scorpions in their backyard. Whereas, in Washington DC my students have trekked through inches of powder, just to get to school, and opened up newly caught crabs off the bay in Maryland, but hardly know anything about the desert. This is their schema ... TEACH THEM THAT!
Finding the Evidence
When students are reading, everything looks the same. The font's the same size and color, the text is endless, and finding evidence can be like looking for a needle in a haystack ....especially to a below grade level reader. So our job is to give our students strategies to FIND the evidence. Here are a few I have come across over the years, and find to be very helpful for my students.

Reading with a "Pen in Hand"
(Preface: I am not claiming this strategy - this is all Mike Schmoker!)
Imagine you're at a staff meeting, your principal hands you this FABULOUS article that you can't wait to dig into! The first thing you do is grab a pen, pencil, highlighter, or anything that will help you extract important info that you want to remember! So why, when we give students a text, do we go out of our way to make sure there aren't any pens around to write in the books. Schmoker explains, that we, as educators, keep this very influential strategy from students, and it is IMPERATIVE that they use a writing tool when they are extracting information from text! I know, I know ... you HATE it when students write in their books! But take a moment and think about what must be going through a student's mind when he has to extract information, and everything looks the same! How are students going find, decipher, and eliminate information without a tool to help? I understand that copying the text, or dealing with writing in novels is sometimes not an option, but Post-its™ and pencils work just as well!

Coding
A couple weeks ago, my students and I were reading a Washington Post article on Kepler 22B, a planet that has a few similarities to Earth. I knew that finding similarities and differences would be tricky, given the level of text and comparing paired with contrasting. So I just quickly discussed, prior to the read, that when we find a similarity to Earth, we write an "S" and when we find a difference we can mark a "D." Do I need to tell you how easy it was for my students to write their compare-and-contrast constructed response? (That's probably one of those pesky rhetorical questions!) I know this example was related to an informational text, but it can work the same with a literary novel! Students just need to know HOW to label their evidence, and they'll go at it like gangbusters! Let's imagine you're teaching kiddos elements of a story, you can easily provide codes such as:

S - Setting
T - Talking Characters
O - Oops! A Problem!
R - Attempts to Resolve the Problem
Y - Yes, the Problem is Solved!

Something as simple as having students draw a star where they might find evidence of an action that shows a character being vain, or brave when you teach character traits, will help students to extract information, and draw their eye to it later in order to use it in their constructed response.
The Inferring Begins!
So now comes the fun part! We have to teach our students to pair the schema with the evidence. Let me give you an example. There's a book called The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg. The book provides a GREAT way to teach how to make inferences. The gist of the story is this: there is a man, and he represents winter. The man visits a farm, and as he's visiting there are clues in the story: the thermometer mercury drops to the bottom, when he blows on his soup there is a rush of cold air, etc. This is the evidence. Where we must connect students' schema is their understanding that cold air is a sign of winter, a thermometer dropping means that it's getting colder. This is their schema.

In younger grades, picture clues can draw inferences better than anything! The characters' faces, body language, and actions are all clues - for example, are the people/animals in the picture running from a situation (scary/danger), or are they coming towards the event (happy/intriguing). You can use pictures to begin inferring in upper grades as well. Pictures such as those in Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick help to pose questions, draw upon schema, and extract evidence from text. If you have ever read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, there are incredible pictures to use to draw inferences. The key is to pull evidence by asking the beginning questions, and then leading to deeper Bloom's-based questions. How do you know? What tells you he represents winter? Explain why he doesn't represent fall or snow? My favorite two words to use with my kiddos are: PROVE IT! It's a challenge! Find the information, highlight it, dig deep in that text!

Asking questions that are grounded in evidence and expecting that your students answer questions that way, is a best practice. Hold your students to this expectation and challenge them to TRULY understand their schema and the way inferring connects with it in literary text.

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Grounded in evidence. Part 1: Fiction | Reading Rockets

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It's funny to be a teacher! When everyone else thinks of the "New Year" starting January 1st, teachers are getting ready to start their "third quarter."" Usually about our "half-time" (aka: Winter Vacation) I enjoy reflecting on our year so far, and how I can tweak my instruction to streamline our focus.

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1996–2013 International Reading Association

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HW-The Impact of  Professional Developmet

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HW-The Impact of  Professional Developmet

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By Michael S. Garet, Stephanie Cronen, Marian Eaton, Anja Kurki, Meredith Ludwig, Wehmah Jones, Kazuaki Uekawa, Audrey Falk, Howard Bloom, Fred Doolittle, Pei Zhu, Laura Sztejnberg, 9/2008

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| Michael S. Garet, Stephanie Cronen, Marian Eaton, Anja Kurki, Meredith Ludwig, Wehmah Jones, Kazuaki Uekawa, Audrey Falk, Howard Bloom, Fred Doolittle, Pei Zhu, Laura Sztejnberg

Recent research and practitioner experience highlight the vital role of teacher knowledge and skills in preparing young children academically. Professional development (PD) of teachers is viewed as a vital tool in school improvement efforts, and its importance is underscored in several major federal education initiatives, including the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) statute and numerous state and local initiatives. With the recognition that children who do not master core reading skills by the end of third grade are seriously hampered throughout their remaining academic careers, reading instruction - and the PD to support it - are increasingly a focus of districts and schools. Though there is a growing body research identifying effective (sometimes called "scientifically-based") instructional practices, many teachers have not yet been trained on and adopted them. A national study of state and local NCLB implementation indicated that 80 percent of elementary school teachers reported participating in 24 hours or less of PD on reading instruction during a recent school year and summer. Reading and PD experts have raised a concern that this level of PD is not intensive enough to be effective and that most current PD programs do not focus enough on knowledge of key elements of reading and how children learn to read. Unfortunately, districts and schools can consult only a very limited base of rigorous scientific evidence on the effectiveness of different PD strategies.

To help states and districts make better-informed decisions about PD related to reading instruction, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned the Early Reading PD Interventions Study. It examines the impact of two research-based PD interventions for reading instruction: (1) a teacher institute series focused on reading principles and how children learn to read that began in the summer and continued through much of the school year and (2) the same institute series plus in-school coaching that focused more on how to integrate this knowledge into teaching. The PD focused specifically on second-grade reading because (1) second grade is when school districts typically administer the standardized reading tests that are needed to assess student reading skills for the evaluation and (2) later grades generally involve supplementary (pull-out) reading instruction, and the goal of the project was to improve the core reading program in participating schools. MDRC, the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and REDA International, Inc., conducted the evaluation of these PD activities.

The study used a random assignment design to test the effectiveness of the two different year-long PD interventions in improving teacher knowledge of reading principles, reading instruction, and student reading achievement in high-poverty schools. The study was implemented in 90 schools in six districts (a total of 270 second-grade teachers), with equal numbers of schools randomly assigned in each district to receive the teacher institute series, the institute series plus in-school coaching, or a "business as usual" group, which participated only in the usual PD offered by the district. This design allowed the study team to determine the impact of each of the two PD interventions by comparing teacher and student outcomes in each PD group with those of the business-as-usual group - and also to determine the impact of the coaching above and beyond the institute series by comparing outcomes in schools receiving only the institutes with those also receiving the coaching.

This report describes the implementation of the PD interventions and examines their impacts at the end of the year that the PD was delivered. In addition, the study investigates the possible lagged effect of the interventions, based on outcomes data collected the year after the PD interventions concluded.

Key Findings

Both PD interventions produced positive impacts on teachers' knowledge of scientifically-based reading instruction.

They both produced positive impacts on one of the three instructional practices promoted by the PD: explicit instruction in reading. But neither increased the use of guided student practice in reading or led teachers to move away from whole class to differentiated instruction to address students' diverse needs.

The impact on explicit instruction was somewhat bigger for those offered the institute plus coaching, but this difference could be due to chance (as it was not statistically significant).

Neither PD intervention produced significantly higher student reading test scores than the business-as-usual schools at the end of the one-year treatment.

At the end of the year following the PD interventions, there were no statistically significant impacts on teacher knowledge or instructional practice or on student reading test scores.

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The Impact of Two Professional Development Interventions on Early Reading Instruction and Achievement

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Recent research and practitioner experience highlight the vital role of teacher knowledge and skills in preparing young children academically. Professional development (PD) of teachers is viewed as a vital tool in school improvement efforts, and its importance is underscored in several major federal education initiatives, including the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) statute and numerous state and local initiatives.

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By Corinne Herlihy, James Kemple, Howard Bloom, Pei Zhu, and Gordon Berlin, 2009

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In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education published research findings on Reading First, a centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act that provided $1 billion per year to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The findings were interpreted by many in the media and the policy community as saying that Reading First did not work. Although the story is more nuanced than that, funding for the program was eliminated in the fiscal 2009 spending bill that was signed by President Obama in March. NCLB is up for reauthorization in 2009. In the meantime, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides tens of billions of dollars to states and localities for spending on education, meaning that federal, state, and local policymakers face critical choices today about how best to use this money to support early reading instruction and achievement.

This policy brief describes what Reading First was, sets the context in which it was implemented and the studies were conducted, summarizes the findings, and discusses the implications both for federal and state policy and for future research in the teaching of early reading.

The bottom line is that Reading First did increase the provision of professional development for teachers and of reading coaches and supports for struggling readers in schools that received funding. The program did influence how teachers taught - in ways that are aligned with scientifically based reading research (as summarized by the National Reading Panel in 2000), a key goal of the legislation. Unfortunately, these improvements did not produce higher reading comprehension scores on average among students in the Reading First schools. Nonetheless, there is some suggestive evidence that Reading First funding may have improved comprehension in schools in which the effects on teacher instruction were larger.

Reading First's lack of impact on overall reading comprehension test scores may be related to two connected issues. First, the type of reading instruction that was promoted by Reading First was already in wide use when the program came on line in 2002 - in part due to the influence of the National Reading Panel recommendations and an earlier National Research Council report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, as well as the availability of funding from the Reading Excellence Act of 1998, the predecessor to Reading First. As a result, the IES studies found that teachers in schools that did not receive Reading First funding - that is, the schools that formed the comparison group in the evaluations - also spent the majority of their class time for reading focusing on the core components of scientifically based reading instruction recommended by the National Reading Panel and supported by Reading First.

Second, the increase that Reading First produced in instructional time devoted to the core elements of scientifically based reading instruction - about 7-10 additional minutes a day on top of the 50 minutes already devoted to teaching in this way - may have been too small, at least on average, to induce improvements in students' reading comprehension. Intriguingly, however, Reading First did appear to produce improvements in reading comprehension in schools where it produced larger increases in the recommended instructional practice. These schools tended to be ones that (1) served more educationally disadvantaged children, (2) spent less time using scientifically based methods of instruction in the absence of Reading First funding, and (3) received larger grants. But because the impact study was not explicitly designed to answer questions about the magnitude and determinants of variation in program effects, these findings are only exploratory and suggestive.

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In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education published research findings on Reading First, a centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act that provided $1 billion per year to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade.

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Reading is fundamental and is the flower of literacy! Retrieved from:http://wzpo1.ask.com/r?t=a&d=mys&s=ads&c=p&app=aoth&ti=1&ai=30752&l=dis&o=2159cr&sv=0a5c4104&ip=d0365781&cu.wz=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Firvingamen.com%2Fimages%2FchildrenReadingOilbig.jpg