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Should we grade students on the individual reading standards? | Shanahan on Literacy

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Discover why grading students on individual reading standards may not be the best approach. Explore effective alternatives in this insightful blog post. Read here!

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I've attached a Student Work Analysis tool that we are using. I have read that you oppose attempts to grade students on the individual reading standards. Although this tool is not used for grading students, it is a standard-by-standard analysis of the students' work, and I wonder what you think of it? [The form that was included provided spaces for teachers to analyze student success with each of their state's math standards]. Shanahan response:
In the blog entry that you refer to, I spoke specifically about evaluating reading comprehension standards (not math or even the more foundational or skills-oriented decoding, vocabulary, or morphology).

A common error in reading education is to treat reading comprehension as if it were a skill or a collection of discrete skills.

Skills tend to be highly repeatable things...

Many of the items listed as comprehension skills are not particularly repeatable. All these standards or question types aimed at main idea, central message, key details, supporting details, inferencing, application, tone, comparison, purpose, etc. are fine, but none is repeatable in real reading situations.

Each of these actions is unique or at least high particularized. Each time these instances occur they are in completely different contexts. To execute them, it requires different steps from instance to instance.

Not only does each text have its own main ideas, but because the expression of each text is so different, what it takes to locate, identify, or construct a main idea will vary greatly from text to text. Contrast this with forming the appropriate phoneme for sh or ph, computing the product of 3 X 3, or defining photosynthesis.

Another problem is that these supposed comprehension skills aren't individually measurable.

My point isn't that teachers can't ask questions that would require students to figure out particular things about a text-of course they can-but performance on such questions is startlingly unreliable. Today, Johnny might answer the tone question like a champ, but tomorrow he won't-since that is a different story, and the author revealed tone in a totally different way.

Also, comprehension questions asked about a particular text aren't independent of each other (and item independence is imperative in assessment). The reason, little Johnny struggled with tone on the day after wasn't because he forgot what he knew about tone, nor even because tone was handled more subtly in text two... but because his reading was deeply affected by that text's more challenging vocabulary, complex sentences, or complicated time sequence-none of which are specifically tone issues.

That means that when teachers try to suss out how well Johnny can meet Standard 6 by asking tone questions, his answers will reveal how well he could make sense of tone in one particular text, but it won't likely be indicative of how well he'll handle tone on any other. (Not at all what one would expect to see with math, decoding, or vocabulary assessments).

Reading comprehension is so affected by the readers' prior knowledge of the subject matter being read about and the language used to express those ideas (e.g., vocabulary, sentence structure, cohesion, text organization, literary devices, graphics), that focusing one's attention on which kinds of question the kids could answer is a fool's errand.

If I were trying to assess reading comprehension information to determine who might need more help, the kind of help to provide, or who I should worry about concerning the end of year testing, then I wouldn't hesitate to ask questions that seemed to reflect the standards... but the information I'd use for assessment would ignore how well the kids could answer particular types of questions.

My interest would be in how well students did with particular types of texts.

Keep track of their overall comprehension with different types of text. I'd record the following information:

1. How the student did on each overall text (the percentage of questions answered correctly, or an estimate of the percentage of key information the student could include in a summary).

2. The topics of the texts (with, perhaps, some rating of each child's familiarity with those topics).

3. An estimate of the text difficulty (in terms of Lexiles or another readability estimate).

4. The lengths of the texts (in numbers of words, preferably).

5. Whether the text was Literary (narrative or poetry), or Informational (expository or argumentative).

Thus, a student record may look something like this:

Over time, you'll get some sense that junior does great with texts that are lower than 500L, but not so well with texts that are harder than 550L (unless they're about robots).

Or, perhaps over the report card marking period you may notice a difference in performance on the the literary or informational texts (which you can see in my example above). But you also need to notice that the informational texts were relatively harder here, so it isn't certain that the student would struggle more with content than literature (though one might make an effort to sort this out to see if there is a consistent pattern). Likewise the student seemed to be able to handle silent reading demands with the shorter texts, but comprehension tended to fall off with the longer texts. That may lead me to try to do more to build stamina with this student.

And so on.

Basically, the information that you are collecting should describe how well the student does with particular types of texts (in terms of discourse types, length, topic familiarity, and difficulty), rather than trying to figure out which comprehension skills the individual question responses may reveal.

If a student does well with many of the passages, then he or she will likely do well with the comprehension standards-as long as these weekly dipsticks are reflective of the difficulty, lengths, and types of texts that will appear on the end-of-year tests.

And, If students perform poorly with many of the passages, then their performance on all question types will be affected.

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How to Analyze or Assess Reading Comprehension

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This blog explains how and how not to evaluate student reading comprehension. Rather than trying to determine how well students can answer questions.

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Listen to my interview with Mark Wise (transcript):
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In my 20-year career as an administrator, I've had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in hundreds of classrooms across grade levels and content areas. While much has changed in education over those years, one element has remained constant: the well-intentioned use of rubrics with varying levels of success.

Starting with their use as early as kindergarten and continuing through high school, rubrics are meant to clarify expectations, but poor design can make the experience anything but clear. Rows of criteria describe, often in 10-point font, how students will be graded for an upcoming project. Students attempt to decipher the details, review the exemplars provided, and note the corresponding due dates, but the information doesn't always translate into action.

This is unfortunate because a well-designed rubric can be more than just an evaluation tool. For the teacher, it can clarify expectations, which increases the likelihood that these traits will be attended to during instruction and as a result, can provide more targeted feedback. For the learner, knowing what is expected from the start along with clear indicators of progress provides an effective means to self-assess, make adjustments, and improve the quality of performance.

So how do we get there? How do we take our current rubrics and fine-tune them so they deliver on those promises? These five guidelines will help.

1. Measure What Really Matters

Teachers often include multiple criteria in their rubrics without adding the primary learning outcome they are most interested in: Did it persuade? Did it create an emotional connection? Did you win your argument? We tend to construct our rubrics with important but sometimes peripheral components of performance because they are easy to see, count, or score ( Wiggins and McTighe, p. 34). For example, if your students are writing an editorial, it could be stylistically sophisticated, well-organized, and meet the length requirement. However, an editorial, regardless of how well written, is wholly ineffective if it fails to persuade the reader.

Moreover, since students can become overwhelmed by the sheer number of criteria they are required to meet, less can be more. One way to accomplish this is to utilize a single-point rubric, which allows the student to focus on the stated expectations while receiving feedback on the degree to which they are meeting them. If you are using a more traditional 4-6 point rubric that details the continuum of performance, it is even more incumbent upon you to identify the main reason students are engaged in the task in the first place and edit down the criteria so it incentivizes students to focus on the most important aspects of the performance.

The "before" example below shows a rubric that measures a lot of things that don't have anything to do with whether a student understands the lunar phases: things like creativity, attractiveness, and whether the task is completed on time. If the purpose of the assignment is to assess whether students have really learned the lunar phases, the rubric should focus primarily on whether the content in the model is accurate and effective.

In the revised version below, all of the criteria is focused on the quality and accuracy of the information in the model and measures the desired scientific thinking from building the model in the first place.

2. Weigh the Criteria Appropriately

As designers of rubrics, we can signal to students that certain criteria matter more than others. Just because a rubric has four criteria, doesn't mean that each needs to be worth 25 percent of the score. With the weight of each criterion adjusted, the rubric itself guides students to focus on what is most important.

In the example below-which is the same revised rubric from above, but where the teacher wanted to include some accountability for mechanics-all four criteria are weighted exactly the same. This means a student who demonstrates a perfect understanding of the science behind lunar phases, but who struggles with spelling and punctuation, could end up with a C on the project. That would not be a true reflection of mastery.

By contrast, in the revised rubric below, "Mechanics" is only assigned 10 percent of the overall grade, while the other three criteria make up 90 percent combined. This way, the final grade will be a much more reliable measure of student understanding of lunar phases.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each criterion doesn't have to be graded every time or the same way. Within the structure of the rubric, teachers have a great deal of flexibility. Although all of the criteria are important, we can use our discretion by grading only certain items, then attending to the others when those skills or concepts are formally taught and practiced. Likewise, since our expectations of what students can accomplish at the beginning of the year are quite different from what we expect at the end of the year, we can continue to adjust the grade or point values we assign to each column.

3. Check Your Math

Your point values for each column need to yield an accurate reflection of the student's performance. For example, if on a 4-point rubric the "3" is "meets expectations" most teachers believe the point value should reflect a range from A- to B+. This stands in contrast to a C (3 out of 4 points) which is what would be earned if a student met expectations for the criteria within that column. This can result in either the teacher giving an unfair grade or altering the feedback in order to generate the desired grade.Either result isn't helpful for the student.

A design tip is to look at each column vertically and choose a number or range that would be appropriate for a student scoring exclusively within that column. The corresponding grades don't have to reflect a neat 4, 3, 2 progression. Often using decimals or a range of numbers is necessary to align each column vertically to a grade that matches the column's descriptors.

4. Can Do Rubrics, Not Can't Do Rubrics

We need to consider the language we choose so that our rubrics encourage students to improve. Without realizing it, when teachers detail the levels of performance, we tend to use degrees of deficiency (e.g. mostly, somewhat, lacking) rather than affirmative non-judgmental statements as to what the students are capable of at each point along the continuum. If we are going to truly use the rubric as a tool to enhance students' ability to self-assess and thus enhance their performance, we must provide clear markers along the way for how students can improve and not unintentionally send the message that their ongoing work is insufficient rather than on a path of progress.

The examples below show two rows in a rubric for a research project. The first uses deficit language to describe the lower levels of performance, while the second describes each level in terms of what the student CAN do.

A real-world model that clearly illustrates a learner's progression toward achieving proficiency is the traditional swim chart which indicates where the swimmer is in on the path toward achieving independence in the deep end of the pool. The language of the swim chart describes traits-from treading water to extended front crawl-that are required for the learner to move from Tadpole (beginner) to Seal (advanced). The expectations are clear, measurable, and non-judgemental; it describes what swimmers can do rather than what they can't. We can view the transparency and progression of the swim chart as an aspirational goal for our rubric design, being mindful to choose language that states the desired outcome, rather than anticipated problems.

Educators are already working toward this in the area of world languages. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has performance descriptors that describe the learner's degree of communication fluency. ACTFL has also developed "Can Do" statements that describe what language learners can do consistently and independently. Like the swim chart, these indicators allow learners to use the statements for self-evaluation so they are more aware of what they know and can do in the target language. In turn, world language educators have developed rubrics that match those desired outcomes.

5. Models, Models, Models!

When we design rubrics, we tend to pore over their construction. We perseverate over the language we use ("should I say 'clearly.'.. or 'distinctly'?"), repeatedly delete rows or columns, and painstakingly choose fonts.

From the student perspective, they experience the rubric differently. After being introduced to the rubric at the start of the project, the next time students typically see it is when it is returned, replete with circled boxes, teacher comments, and a final grade attached. Understandably, many students suffer from "rubric fatigue," a condition caused by encountering a series of disconnected rubrics across subject areas on any given day.

What students really benefit from are actual models (both exemplars and non-exemplars) that link to descriptors on the rubric that illustrate the quality of work expected. For example, in the real world we typically have many models of the performance or product we are trying to create or implement-whether it is for how a game should be played, a song should be sung, or an editorial should be written. Similarly, when launching a project, showing students multiple examples of prior student work or appropriate real-world examples makes the rubric meaningful and brings these descriptors to life.

Another strategy is to have students sort the various models in order to determine the specific qualities that make some examples stronger than others. The teacher can then incorporate the students' language in their draft version of the rubric or highlight aspects the teacher may have initially overlooked before distributing the final rubric. This process allows the students themselves to generate the criteria and descriptive language of the desired performance which deepens their understanding and creates shared ownership of the expectations for quality work.

Similarly, the rubric can become more user-friendly if we make the criteria more visible to students. This can be done by adding hyperlinks of models tied to the descriptors so students can access a range of examples to inform where they are along the continuum and show them exactly how they can improve.

Better Rubrics Support Student-Centered Learning

As educators, we are rightfully drawn to the goal of establishing a classroom where students have opportunities to engage in complex problem solving, participate more actively in dialogue and debate, design their own experiments, or research topics that interest them. These types of experiences-ones that do not result in a single "correct" answer or follow a formulaic procedure-require more of an open-ended assessment tool with clear guidelines for success that students can use to guide, self-assess, and ultimately improve their learning. Hopefully by following these five suggestions, your rubrics will help clarify what you really want students to take away from the experience, provide your learners with the means to get there, and allow you to fairly and honestly assess their performance. ♦

Reference

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2012). The understanding by design guide to advanced concepts in creating and reviewing units. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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Rubric Repair: 5 Changes that Get Results

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Rubrics are meant to clarify expectations, but poor design can make the experience anything but clear. These five guidelines will help.

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics - with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels - offers a whole host of benefits:

Teachers find them easier and faster to create, because they no longer have to spend precious time thinking up all the different ways students could fail to meet expectations.

Students find them easier to read when preparing an assignment. With only the target expectations to focus on, they are more likely to read those expectations.

They allow for higher-quality feedback, because teachers must specify key problem areas and notable areas of excellence for that particular student, rather than choosing from a list of generic descriptions.

Want to Learn More?

I first talked about this type of rubric in an earlier post ( Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics). If this is the first time you've encountered this type of rubric, reading this will give you some background knowledge on all the different types of rubrics and why the single-point deserves world domination.

To give credit where it's due, I did not come up with the name single point rubric. Although the idea for a simplified rubric with a single set of criteria came to me independently, when I went looking for academic support for its use, I found that the type of rubric I had in mind was given the name "Single Point Rubric" in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger's paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

Show Us Your Rubrics!

I urge you to take one of your most convoluted rubrics and make a single-point version of it. Then show it to the world, so other teachers can learn: Take a screenshot of it and post the picture on Twitter with the hashtag #singlepointrubric. If you aren't on Twitter or don't feel like doing this, just put a link to your rubric in the comments below. Help us start a movement to rid the world of ineffective rubrics!

Another Variation (Added in 2017)

After considering some of the limitations of this format, I played around with the rubric a bit more and came up with this variation:

The original version of the single point rubric allowed no space for actually pointing out when the student hit the standard, apart from maybe circling or highlighting the middle column. With this format, teachers can pinpoint where the student is on each descriptor, then offer feedback, either constructive, positive, or both.

To grab a copy of this for your own modification, click here.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you just don't know their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.
So let's talk about rubrics for a few minutes. What we're going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics, holistic and analytic, plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record). For each one, we'll look at an example and explore its pros and cons.

Off we go!

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labeled with numbers (such as 1 through 4), letters (such as A through F) or words (such as Beginning through Exemplary). What each level is called isn't what makes the rubric holistic - it's the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

Suppose you're an unusually demanding person. You want your loved ones to know what you expect if they should ever make you breakfast in bed. So you give them this holistic rubric:

When your breakfast is done, you simply gather your loved ones and say, "I'm sorry my darlings, but that breakfast was just a 2. Try harder next time."

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it's easy on the teacher - in the short run, anyway. Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn't provide targeted feedback to students, which means they're unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to approach the teacher and ask, "Why did you give me a 2?" If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few minutes breaking down the score. If not, he'll say something like, "Read the rubric." Then the student has to guess which factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she's doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there's no time (or need, though that's hard to imagine) for specific feedback. You see them in standardized testing - the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a holistic rubric comes in handy.

An analytic rubric breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

So for the breakfast in bed example, an analytic rubric would look like this:

In this case, you'd give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation, but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort. To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, "the recipient is crowded during the meal" to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work - completing the "3" column in this rubric, for example - is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won't necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won't clearly understand what's expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you're willing to put in the time to really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.

A single-point rubric for breakfast in bed would look like this:

Notice that the language in the "Criteria" column is exactly the same as the "3" column in the analytic rubric. When your loved ones receive this rubric, it will include your written comments on one or both sides of each category, telling them exactly how they fell short ("runny eggs," for example) and how they excelled ("vase of flowers"). Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met, you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

If you've never used a single-point rubric, it's worth a try. In 2010, Jarene Fluckiger studied a collection of teacher action research studies on the use of single-point rubrics. She found that student achievement increased with the use of these rubrics, especially when students helped create them and used them to self-assess their work.

The single-point rubric has several advantages: (1) It contains far less language than the analytic rubric, which means students are more likely to read it and it will take less time to create, while still providing rich detail about what's expected. (2) Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended. When using full analytic rubrics, I often find that students do things that are not described on the rubric, but still depart from expectations. Because I can't find the right language to highlight, I find myself hand-writing justifications for a score in whatever space I can find. This is frustrating, time-consuming and messy. With a single-point rubric, there's no attempt to predict all the ways a student might go wrong. Similarly, the undefined "Advanced" column places no limits on how students might stretch themselves. "If the highest level is already prescribed then creativity may be limited to that pre-determined level," says Fluckiger. "Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended."

The main disadvantage of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher's part. If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Sources:

Fluckiger, J. (2010). Single point rubric: A tool for responsible student self-assessment. Teacher Education Faculty Publications. Paper 5. Retrieved April 25, 2014 from http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/tedfacpub/5.

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25.
Know Your Terms is my effort to build a user-friendly knowledge base of terms every educator should know. New items will be added on an ongoing basis. If you heard some term at a PD and didn't want to admit you didn't know what it meant, send it to me via the contact form and I'll research it for you.

Keep in touch.
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Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you've used them for years without knowing their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.

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COP26: Emissions of Rich Put Climate Goals at Risk - Study

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What is Justice? Sources (EKC Summer Course)

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Tools from The Art of Coaching Teams Welcome to the downloadable tools for Art of Coaching Teams. Here you will find worksheets, checklists, and other documents to augment and enhance the material available in Elena's Art of Coaching Teams. Chapter 1 Exhibit 1.1 - Dimensions of a Great Team - A Tool for Reflection Exhibit [...]Read More...

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Are we supposed to teach reading strategies or not? I keep coming across contradictory information. Some writers say the research supports strategy teaching and some say that we should teach background information instead. I respect your opinion. What do you think?

RELATED: Can we really teach prosody and why would we want to? Shanahan response:
Many studies - hundreds actually - have shown that teaching comprehension strategies can improve reading comprehension (Filderman, Austin, Boucher, O'Donnell, & Swanson, 2022; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). That's a pretty strong argument for teaching strategies.

That's why I've taught them to students myself.

That's why I sometimes use them when I'm reading.

The first question to ask ourselves, it seems to me, is why do strategies help? How do they make someone a better reader?

I remember Dick Venezky telling me that one of the big benefits of phonics instruction was that it got kids to look at the words, to look at all the letters in the words. At the time, I thought that was glib. But over time, I've come to appreciate the wisdom in that explanation.

My answer for why and how strategies work is as glib as that.

Strategies do two things for readers.

First, they require readers to think about a text more than they would if they just read it.

If readers think more about the ideas in a text, they are more likely to remember them later. Strategies slow you down. It takes more time to read a text and implement a strategy than to only read the text.

Too many readers are satisfied with comprehending a text. They may understand it as they read, but they don't retain the information. We use the term "reading comprehension" too generally. When we use it, we usually intend more than just understanding.

No, it often includes the idea that readers should remember what they read so that they can successfully answer questions, participate in discussions, or use the information in some other way.

Strategies arm readers with purposeful actions they can take before, during, and after reading. Basically, they get readers to think about the ideas more than once. They facilitate learning from text. (That's why Ron Carver used to argue that the term comprehension strategies was a misnomer; he thought a more apt label was study skills, skills one would use to study a text or learn from it.)

The idea of strategies is to provide readers with the tools that will allow them to accomplish purposeful learning - and the tools work by slowing us down and getting us to think more than once about the ideas in the text. A rather blunt tool admittedly, but, according to the empirical studies, an effective one.

As such, strategies play a very different role in the reading process than knowledge.

It should not be a choice between the two.

Second, strategies may also play a useful role in guiding student attention to key information in a text. (I tend to think of most strategies as "paying attention strategies.")

When I'm reading something that is very hard for me, I write down the most important idea from each paragraph or section. That ensures that I pay attention to all the key ideas, without the details distracting me.

Other strategies encourage readers to depend on the author's organizational scheme. Doing so focuses attention on certain key information that they may neglect without that strategy.

Further distinguishing knowledge and strategies in reading are those strategies that emphasize making connections between the text and the knowledge that we bring to the text.

Prediction, for instance, is a strategy that leads readers to anticipate what the author will reveal. Predictions require that readers combine information from the text with the knowledge they bring to the text. Predicting is a tool readers can apply in certain reading situations, but it can only work if there is relevant knowledge available.

Inferencing is another such strategy. Readers can be sensitized to the concept that texts won't provide explicitly all the needed information so readers must draw inferences to fill in the blanks and make connections. But the inferencing strategy only works to the extent that there is background knowledge available from which to generate those inferences.

A third strategy that depends on knowledge and encourages readers to connect knowledge to text is comprehension monitoring. With this one, students are taught to pay attention to whether they are understanding a text or if it is making sense. Determining whether something makes sense means that you can compare it with some standard and that standard for this is the knowledge that you bring to the text.

In all these examples, the strategy gives the reader some insights about text (e.g., it has a structure, the text should make sense, text sometimes implies rather than states information) and some action steps that if taken will improve understanding and memory for what is read.

But none of these strategies pays off unless the reader possesses sufficient topical knowledge to make them work.

As such strategies are useful and knowledge is essential.

That sounds like reading lessons would be better off emphasizing the learning of content, rather than developing insights about text and reading and developing actions students can use in a purposeful way to think more about the text.

But that is not necessarily the case. Our emphasis on knowledge should not be the central goal of reading instruction. It should be the central goal of schooling. Yes, kids should read texts worth knowing in their reading lessons and they should be held accountable for the content learning that can be gained from such texts. But learning also needs to come from social studies, science, and the arts, as well as from all the other sources of information that children confront in the media, in their play activities and social interactions, and so on.

Reading strategies are something students are likely to learn only in a reading lesson. As such, they deserve special attention in those lessons.

I don't accept the premise of what you are hearing - that reading lessons should either teach strategies or knowledge. They need to accomplish the former and contribute to the latter.

Although I didn't cite many specific studies in this blog entry, it heavily benefited from the brilliant contributions of the late Ernst Z. Rothkopf, whose pioneering work on "mathemagenic activities" presaged all the strategy research in reading.

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References
Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O'Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12 th grades. Exceptional Children, 88( 2), 163-184. doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups (00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (1970). The concept of mathemagenic activities. Review of Educational Research, 40(3), 325-336.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (2008). Reflections on the field: Aspirations of learning science and the practical logic of instructional enterprises. Educational Psychology Review, 20(3), 351-368. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-008-9076-5

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Knowledge or Comprehension Strategies | Shanahan on Literacy

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Learn how to strike the perfect balance between teaching knowledge and comprehension strategies, guided by Shanahan’s expertise in literacy. Read here!

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Email: jenny@erinkentconsulting.com

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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EKC provides literacy consultants, consulting services, and literacy professional learning for schools.

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KIS MS Virtual Session 4 Reading Rubrics - April 2024