Frank Views on Literacy Learning and the Common Core

1992

This 1992 yearbook presents the following 26 articles: "Tensions between Numbers and Knowing: A Study of Changes in Assessment during Implementation of Literature-Based Reading Instruction" (P. L. Scharer); "Story Reading in Daycare: A Help or a x LITERACY RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE YEAR 2000 study to help inform and improve instruction or to help us better understand how readers learn to read. Research questions should go beyond confirming the obvious or near obvious. Researchers need to ask themselves, "Is this question one that has been answered before?" We advocate using the "So what?" test. After forming a research question, ask "So what?...Of what importance is this question?" "How will answering this question affect literacy instruction?" "What difference will this study ma e?" If the study passes the "So what?" test, then it may be worth pursuing. The z-.pent by researchers thinking through their questions is worth every minute. APPROPRIATE RESEARCH PROCEDURES Research procedures should be clear and to the point. Procedures should be described in enough detail to allow for easy replication. Moreover, the procedures should be dependent upon the question that is asked; that is, the procedures employed for addressing the question should seem appropriate to the reader. The method should not get so bogged down in elaborate designs and methodologies that the reader wonders how the procedures are connected to the questicns at hand. Instructional research should take place in authentic settings, and the treatment should be of reasonable length so that students can become familiar with it. A one-week treatment may result in a significant effect, but we may wonder if that effect is due to the novelty of the instruction rather than its substance. Control group treatments, too, should be reasonable and authentic to the instructional context, and the amount of instructional time and resources given to all treatments should be comparable. Measures of significant variables should be appropriate for the variables. Comprehension, for example, should be assessed by some method or instrument that is meant to measure comprehension. Conversely, when overall reading performance is measured only by word list recognition, we are led to wonder about the appropriateness of the measure and the procedures employed in the study. DATA ANALYSIS Again, the keys to good data analysis are appropriateness and clarity. Data analysis should go far enough only to answer the research questions. Analyses that go beyond the original question or continue to confirm what was found in a previous analysis tend to overwhelm the reader and draw the reader's attention away from the important findings and toward the researcher's prowess in statistical analysis. A factor analysis, although sophisticated, is not impressive when a t-test would have sufficed. Research reports are meant to inform those who read them. Appropriate analyses are essential to a good study, but excessive and unneeded analysis tends to weaken an otherwise informative report. 6 L17ER4CY RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE YEAR 2000 in assessment tools during the school year will then be discussed, and the difficulties experienced as teachers attempted to use new documentation techniques will be described. Finally, patterns of change in four of the five teachers will be illustrated using data from the experiences of two focus teachers. August Assessment Concerns District course of study. During August interviews, teachers expressed concerns about how to satisfy the district's course of study without using basal worksheets and tests. Andrea (grade 6), for example, concluded: It [literature-based read.. istruction] is not good for upper grades. It does not lend itself for teaching the objectives and course of study. I am not sure I am picking the right reading selections to develop the skills they need. Similarly, Nadine (LD) explained that general comprehension objectives could be more easily satisfied than specific phonics goals. You can always reach the goals of main idea, appreciation of literature and things like that but the more specific goals, the phonics types of goals, I find harder to reach through literature and substantiate what I am doing. Grading policies. Nancy (grade 1) was less concerned about grades than the other focus teachers since she was not required to use letter grades (A, B, C, Tensions Between Numbers and Knowing: A Study of Changes in Assessment 9 Andrea decided to eliminate the chapter question sheets and provide her students with choices in not only what they read, but how they would respond to what they were reading. She obtained a collection of biographies from the public library and prepared brief minitalks about each of the books. Since she had not read most of the books, she focused her "p.tches" on what she knew about the life of each person. Students chose books and generated sharing ideas such as making dioramas, documenting the person's life through a time line, or writing a biographical sketch. Andrea noted a change in her students as readers: "With the biographies, they were bubbling about what they were reading. They wanted to share with each other. This [question sheets] was old, boring class work. There was no discussionjust what did you get for question 4?" She reflected on her observations and was pleased with the changes in her students and also the changes in her role as a teacher. The kids were into the reading and they used their time very well. They wanted to read. They did not have to be forced to do it. It was more efficient for me because I was not making up question sheets for one biography to go over with the class. I was involved with them. I was conferencing one on one. It was more personal attention for them. Andrea began to question what she valued in her students as readers and how she might better translate her observations into grades: "Well, what is assessment of reading? Is it their ability to decode or all the little pieces that K: Structuredfollowing a set of questions. R: What are some of the things we've learned about her? K: She does like to read some. Ju: She is very interested in basketball. R: What else does she like? Ju: Comics. J: She Ramona Quimby. R: Time after school. Ju: Nintendo. K: Likes TV three hours a daycould be worse. Ju: Could she be spending some time playing Nintendo? J: She sounds like a latchkey child so TV could be used for companionship. [Goes on to describe her own experiences as a latchkey child growing up with a mother who is a teacher. Talked about watching television after school as a "time filler" until her mother came home.] A: There is not much reading in the home. R: She did mention a few magazines, like Jet and Sprint that she reads. K: I thought her reading was a lot more hopeful than I expected. A: I think she is clever, bright in general and kind of "with it." R: Where do we put that? J: Under hypotheses about Emma's abilities. K: Social studies is not activity based at all. R: It does sound like a text-based program [based on Emma's description]. K: Emma is pretty confident during the interview. R: Good observation. What are her goals? K: She wants to be a librarian. R: What about the interview itselfas an instrument for assessment? What did you notice? Kt: The teacher was very confident. She used open-ended questions. This made Emma feel comfortable. A: After she [teacher] asked a question, she then asked follow-up questions. R: The teacher did take time to explore interests. What else did you notice? Mc:This was more like conversation. Ju: The questions flowed.

2004

The parameters of print literacy must be expanded and reshaped to address new features of digital age communication. A theory may be built to reconcile these perspectives by focusing on core human goals and responses. Renovating practice in schools and literacy programs will expand emphasis on listening and speaking for virtual settings, add visual and interactive elements to texts, and address issues of precision, privacy and publicity.

Text Matters, 2012

For a long time, educators have asked questions about what makes a text complex. Why is it harder for students to read some books than others? How are we to help students select texts that will challenge them without frustrating them? What type of texts will increase their reading achievement most effectively? By adding text complexity as a dimension of literacy, the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA; Common Core State Standards Initiative , 2010) bring these questions to the fore. To establish text complexity , the standards propose a three-pronged system: 1. qualitative analyses of features such as levels of meaning (e.g., readers need to make inferences to understand a character's motive); 2. reader-task variables such as readers' background knowledge of a text's topic and ways in which teachers and situations influence readers' interactions with a text (e.g., an audio of a book or the level of teacher guidance); and 3. quantitative i...

The annual What's Hot, What's Not in Literacy survey has served to highlight topics receiving attention in the field over the last 15 years. What we know as literacy has drastically shifted alongside advances in legislation, policy, and curriculum. As a result, what was once hot may subsequently receive less attention or even fall of the list entirely. So what happens to those topics that were once hot? Are they still valued enough by classroom teachers to warrant attention within their literacy programs? This article examines the context around previously hot topics and characterizes current teacher sentiments towards these topics to characterize how the field of literacy has changed over the last 15 years.

Educational Leadership, 2004

What skills and abilities do young children require to help them grow into successful readers and writers? How can we prevent reading difficulties? What roles do school and home play in young children's literacy development? The National Early Literacy Panel, in its ongoing synthesis of early literacy education research, hopes to provide some answers. In 2002, the National Reading Panel released its influential report, Teaching Children to Read, which synthesized some of the scientifically based reading research on students in kindergarten through 12th grade. But no similar research synthesis existed on the topic of early literacy development in children from birth through age 5. Research dealing with early childhood development (Bowman et al., 2000; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000) did not focus on either literacy preparation or evaluating the specific factors that contribute to successful literacy development (Barnett,

Reading & Writing Quarterly, 2016

This study explored print-processing and vocabulary differences among a group of 5th-and 6th-grade students who had scored below the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test. Guided by the simple view of reading, we applied cut scores (low/high) to the students' performance on print-processing and vocabulary tasks. The design allowed for the placement of students in 1 of 4 reader profiles: (a) high print processing/low vocabulary (25%), (b) high print processing/high vocabulary (14%), (c) low print processing/high vocabulary (14%), or (d) low print processing/low vocabulary (48%). An important finding was that 62% of the students could not read grade-level text with adequate accuracy and rate. In fact, many could not read comfortably a full level below their grade placement. We consider instructional implications. Most reading educators would agree that if a child does not learn to read at or near grade level by the end of third grade, then his or her educational future is at risk . The reason for this bleak prediction is clear enough: From fourth grade on, schools emphasize the reading of grade-level texts (narrative and expository). If a fifth-or sixth-grade student has serious difficulty reading these assigned texts-difficulty decoding the words, reading the sentences fluently, or understanding the message-then frustration and confusion set in. Over several years, feelings of failure can accrue, sometimes resulting in a defensive withdrawal from the very act of reading . How big is this problem? The biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports three achievement levels for reading: basic, proficient, and advanced. The basic level involves being able to locate relevant details; make simple inferences; and, at eighth grade, identify a main idea or theme. The most recent NAEP results showed that 31% of fourth-grade students and 24% of eighth-grade students performed below the basic level (NAEP, 2015). And note that these percentages were even larger for children attending high-poverty urban and rural schools. In the mid-1990s, most states began mandating end-of-grade (EOG) reading comprehension tests starting at third or fourth grade. These standardized tests serve a dipstick function, measuring the percentage of students in a school, county, or state who can achieve a passing score on a grade-level reading comprehension test. However, the tests say little about why some children perform poorly. Is it because they are deficient in print-processing skill, vocabulary, background knowledge, verbal reasoning ability, or some combination of these? With this question in mind, several researchers have examined characteristics of upper elementary and middle school readers who score low on EOG standardized tests. , for example, administered a battery of reading and reading-related tasks to fourth graders (N ¼ 108) who had scored below proficient on an EOG standardized test. The tasks CONTACT Darrell Morris

Moving Critical Literacies Forward: A New Look at Praxis Across Contexts, 2013