Although there are lots of studies of time and its role in student learning — not just in reading, but in education generally — these studies aren’t always easy to find. If you look up time or amount of instruction in ERIC, there are studies, but you’ll miss out on some of the best examples. You probably won’t find the research on full-day kindergarten there, but are such studies about anything but amount of instruction (the kids either get 2½ or 5 hours per day of schooling)? You’ll probably miss out on the homework studies, too, but I would put them in the increased time basket as well. And where do the analyses of A Nation at Risk (1983) fit? That was the report that kicked off our seemingly permanent school reform efforts. They compared the lengths of school years across nations, and found that kids in the U.S. were getting less teaching than was available in many of the countries who outperform us academically (a more recent analysis was in my newspaper this week… only one country that is doing better than us has a comparable length school year (Finland); everyone else has more days of schooling. And there are studies of the time commitment required to develop genius (Walberg, 1981, Gifted Child Quarterly), or models of what works in school reform (e.g., Fuller & Clarke, Review of Educational Research, 1994). Most of those studies won’t show up in a literature search focused on time, but they are about time, just as are the studies of extended school years, extended school days, tardiness and absenteeism, afterschool programs, summer school programs, and efforts to use the school day better (and there are both correlational or experimental studies on all of those topics).
If you go back a ways, you can find really neat literature reviews showing that when students engage in generative activities (like writing summaries or answering questions after reading), they do better than when they just read. It became a standard rhetorical turn in such reviews to wonder if it was the activities that conferred the learning advantages or whether the readers in the experimental conditions were just spending more time on texts because of the activities. That was seen at the time as a research design problem, and reviews by Rothkopf, Wittrock, and A. Gagne (all appearing inReview of Educational Research in the 1970s) treated time as a confound that may have boosted the experimental groups performance, making it difficult to determine whether the reading comprehension interventions were really working. None of those studies would be considered to be time studies, but I would include them since their benefits came from adding time. Yes, getting students to spend more time on text helps them to comprehend more — as long as they are engaged in thinking about the meaning of the text. 

There are also “natural experiments” that are evident when a community begins sending kids to school (such as has happened recently in Egypt or as happened here in the U.S. since Brown v. Board of Education--African American school attendance climbed dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s and achievement climbed with it). During the 20th century, most U.S. states increased the length of the school year from about 100 days to the current 180: and there were gains in learning associated with that (by 1970 we were no longer increasing the school year or including new populations in schooling; 1970 is when our achievement gains leveled off to where it is now). One can look at education in South Korea over the past decade or so, to see what increasing a school year and enrollment percentages can do to achievement levels. (Is anyone surprised that the U.S. high schools with the highest dropout rates also have the highest absenteeism? Kids at those schools usually miss more than 30 days a year).
Herb Walberg once told me that there was something like 10,000 studies on the role of time or amount of teaching in education. That was years ago, and I suspect the number has grown quite a bit since then. I never checked Herb on this point (let me see the bibliography, Herb), but experience tells me that he is usually correct about such claims, so I trust it (especially when I can so easily find so many studies of time myself). Given that, I think it is pretty clear that amount of instruction matters.
But there is an important caveat, oft raised during these past few decades: there is a difference between allotted time and engaged time. That is, learning is going to come from how time is used and not just the how much time is available (Jane Stallings wrote a nifty article about this in the Educational Researcher in 1980, and Barack Rosenshine and David Berliner wrote similar pieces around the same time). I have seen schools hire teachers to deliver extra instruction to kids through afterschool programs: instruction that, ultimately, was not delivered (in some cases, because kids didn’t show up and in others because the teachers simply didn’t teach). Of course, if the teacher is presenting something or leading a discussion and the kids aren’t paying any attention (lots of allotted time, but no engaged time), no learning is going to happen. 
We need to make sure that our schools have enough time to teach reading effectively, and I suspect we will need longer school years and longer school days to accomplish that with all kids. But currently we are not using teaching time well, so simply expanding time availability is not a sufficient answer. Below I have listed some of the time studies that I use in my courses here at the university. The Smith paper is available online and it shows how teachers often fail to use the allotted time in the Chicago Public Schools (there are similar reports about teaching elsewhere, with sadly similar results). So, longer school years and school days yes! But let’s make darn sure that we provide the “bell to bell” teaching that Mel Riddle talks about (Mel was the principal who turned around a severely challenged high school in Fairfax Co., Virginia; one of the big tools he used to raise achievement there was getting teachers to use the instructional time for —you guessed it— teaching!).

American College Testing. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City: American College Testing.

Carroll, J.B. (1963). A model of school learning. Teachers College Record, 723–733.

Cooper, H. (2001). Summer school: Research-based recommendations for policy makers. Washington, DC: Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Cooper, H., Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., & Greathouse, S. (1996). The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review.Review of Educational Research, 66, 227–268. 

Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Pastall, C. A. (2006). Review of Educational Research,76, 1-62. 

Cooper, H. Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987-2003. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 1-62.

Filby, N.N., & Cahen, L.S. (1985). Teacher accessibility and student attention. In C.W. isher & D.C. Berliner (Eds.), Perspectives on instructional time (pp. 203–215). New York: Longman.

Frazier, J.A., & Morrison, F.J. (1998). The influence of extended-year schooling on growth of achievement and perceived competence in early elementary schooling. Child Development, 69, 495–517.

Frederick, W. C. The use of classroom time in high schools above or below the median reading score. Urban Education, 11(4), 459-464.

Fusaro, J. A. (1997). The effects of full-day kindergarten on student achievement: A meta-analysis. Child Study Journal, 27(4), 269-279.

Heyns, B. (1978). Summer learning and the effects of schooling. New York: Academic Press.

Smith, B.A. (1998). It’s about time: Opportunities to learn in Chicago’s elementary schools. Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Stallings, J.A., & Mohlmna, G.G. (1982). Effective use of time in secondary reading classrooms. ERIC Document 216 343.

If you want even more citations, go into Google Scholar and type: engaged time teaching reading. That’ll give you a half million choices! Or type in some of the names or articles above and see what else comes up. Happy hunting.

Some of these instruments are famous, like the CIERA one that Barbara Taylor and P. David Pearson made up awhile back. Others are the brainchildren of small companies or school districts. And t0hey all are supposed to be useful checklists for determining whether a classroom has what it takes.

Studies on such instruments suggest that they work—too some extent. What I mean is that many of the checklists are workable; a coach or other observer can see whether particular actions are taking place, and it may have reliability. So far, so good.

  Some of these forms even have a correlation with kids’ learning. But having a relationship and having a strong relationship is the difference between talking to the counterman at the local 7-11 and talking to my wife. The correlations that have emanated from these observation forms tend to be tiny, and experts like Steve Roudenbush now believe there is simply too much variation in the day-to-day activities of classes to allow such observations to reveal much that is worthwhile with regard to the relationship of teaching and learning.

  Reliability problems aside, most of the questions in these instruments get at the wrong things. They are simply too superficial to allow anything important to be determined.

  A simple example: many forms ask the observer to determine if there is vocabulary instruction. That’s easy enough to figure out, and observers should be able to check the right boxes. However, what do those observations tell us? Well, that almost all teachers deliver some vocabulary instruction, so we’ll check yes to such observation items, but this variable, even when added together with, doesn’t tell us what we want to know.

  I guess what I’m saying is that good teachers and poor teachers aren’t that different. In fact, it might be fair to say that many bad teachers look exactly like good teachers, but that the resemblance is superficial. You and I both might get checked off that we are teaching vocabulary, but which of us has selected words worth learning? Which is providing clear explanations of the word meanings? And which is being thorough enough and interactive enough and focused on meaning enough, to help the students to learn the words.

  Checklists for observing reading lessons, for the most part, do not require qualitative judgments of how well teachers are keeping kids focused on meaning or how coherent or intellectually demanding the atmosphere is. Two teachers may be asking questions, reading stories, and teaching strategies, but they are probably not doing those things in equally powerful ways. Unfortunately, our observation instruments rarely get at these quality issues (though when they do, it is those items that seem to work best).

That means that most reading coaches are probably looking at the wrong things when they observe, and quite often the prescriptions they develop on the basis of their observations are more aimed at changing the instructional activities, rather than trying to make the current activities more substantial in getting kids to zero in on meaning.

Mrs. Jones knows the National Reading Panel (NRP) found that teaching comprehension strategies give kids a benefit, so she wants to teach reading comprehension strategies.

However, Mrs. Jones also knows that the NRP was controversial and, and not being a researcher herself, she isn’t entirely sure that she should follow it. She has professional doubts.

And, yet, Mrs. Jones goes to a lot of conferences. She knows who is respectable in the field of reading, and few gurus impress her more than P. David Pearson, Nell Duke, and the late Michael Pressley. None of these experts were on NRP and all support comprehension strategies.

But she also respects another expert, Isabel Beck, who decries the teaching of comprehension strategies. Beck thinks strategies are beside the point. She and her colleagues stress the teaching of the texts themselves. So maybe Mrs. Jones won’t teach strategies after all.

But the district that Mrs. Jones teaches in bought the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill program (the one Tim Shanahan is an author of), and it stresses the teaching of strategies.

Have you ever wanted to just cry in such a situation? You want to get it right, but it is so hard with so many different experts and so many different opinions. What’s the right answer?

I’ve been trying to teach kids to read for 40 years, and I have read much of the reading comprehension literature, and have done some research myself. I have worked with and talked with all of the gurus noted above and scores of others. I have designed and redesigned programs of instruction and oversaw reading instruction in a major school district. And I can tell you that the biggest problem in reading comprehension instruction is a lack of depth.

Children and teens often come away from a text not getting what it was about, or only understanding the texts at a very superficial level. The whole idea of teaching strategies is to give kids ways of thinking that will help them to independently think about a text. Unfortunately, when some teachers teach strategies they make it all about the strategies and not the text.

Kids come away knowing what summarization is or how to visualize, but they learn nothing about the story or article they were reading. Instead of questioning becoming a tool that helps them to get at the meat of the chapter, it is something that they do instead of making sense of a text. Kids are perfectly willing to read a story without understanding it.

The same thing can happen no matter how you teach reading (I’ve watched Russ Stauffer, Taffy Raphael, Isabel Beck and several others come up with surefire ways to ensure that kids get the meaning, but these surefire methods have all become clunkers in classrooms where the teachers think these methods are the point).

Ultimately, kids have to get used to thinking about the ideas in texts, no matter how comprehension is taught. If they get used to making sense of ideas, they will become good comprehenders.

So, make the following New Year’s reading comprehension resolution. Pledge to do the following when you have students read (or when you read to them or even when you have them watch a video).

1. I will read the selections before the students do and will think about what the texts mean (what they say, but also the underlying ideas the author hopes I’ll get). I will note what is hard about these texts so I can help students confront those barriers.
2. Prior to reading, I will help students to think about ideas that are relevant to what is important or challenging in a text. (For example, if we are reading Moby Dick, the preparation activities will not emphasize whales, but obsession. Prior knowledge matters, but it has to be the knowledge that is relevant to what is important, rather than background information that is only superficially connected to the ideas).
3. During reading, I will focus attention on the ideas in the text. If some words are difficult—to decode or to know the meanings of—I’ll just tell them to students so we can stay focused on the ideas. I’ll minimize “strategy teaching” distractions by introducing new strategies with particularly easy or known texts (and applying them to harder texts when the students know how to use them).
4. I will try not to tell the students what a text says. After reading, I’ll engage them in retelling, summarization, or paraphrasing, and I will, with my questions, lead them to think deeply about what an author had to say and how he or she said it.
5. I will get students to continue to think about previously read texts, by rereading and by going back to earlier ideas as we read new texts. Considering how a character differs from an earlier one, or how a historic event is the same as one already read about are good approaches to this.

 Keeping these resolutions will bear dividends in children’s lives; a truly happy new year for all.

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on November 29, 2009, and was reposted on May 30, 2020. These days there is a great deal of interest in the science of reading. That science certainly makes it clear that students need to learn to perceive sounds, decode words, and connect those orthographic-phonemic units with word meanings. While that might reassure teachers about what to teach, many are still uncertain as to the sequence of instruction recommended by a science of reading. Though this entry was published more than a decade ago, it is still up-to-date with regard to the science of reading.

This weekend I received an interesting question from a third-grade teacher in Frankfort, KY. She writes, “In my district we do not have a specific scope and sequence for teaching vocabulary, nor phonics. I have tried to find something that I feel is research-based and comprehensive. I want to help my strugglers and my above-level students. Can you help?” 

Those are two pretty important questions: What should the sequence of instruction be in phonics and vocabulary? And do you need a prescribed sequence to be successful? 

Let me answer the easier of the two questions, first. 

Yes, I think it is important to have a clearly established sequence of instruction in both phonics and vocabulary. In phonics, the question has been tested directly in several research studies, and always with the same result: teachers who were teaching a pre-established regimen of phonics were more successful than those who were winging it. I know of no direct tests of the question in the vocabulary literature, but all of the studies where success was accomplished in improving reading comprehension had a clear plan for the teacher.

So, what is the research-based comprehensive curriculum that teachers need to follow? Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know. When I look at phonics and vocabulary studies, it is clear that pretty much all sequences work. For example, the National Reading Panel looked at 38 studies on something like 19 different sequences of phonics instruction, and though those differed greatly in the inclusion and ordering of skills, all the approaches seemed to confer a learning advantage. The same kind of thing was true for vocabulary.

That doesn’t mean sequence doesn’t matter. Perhaps direct tests of different sequences could sort out some small learning differences. What I think it really means is that most of the schemes tested in research are pretty reasonable. Most try to teach the most important or largest skills first or have some kind of logic to their plan. Most don’t emphasize minor or later developing skills. But all provide sufficient coverage and structure to make sure the kids have a chance of succeeding.

Yes, indeed, your school or district should have an agreed upon systematic plan for what is to be taught in each grade level so that teachers will have a clear idea of what to do. This plan, whether purchased or developed internally, may be somewhat arbitrary but I bet it won’t be ridiculous. (In other words, you’ll probably spend more time on the m or s sounds than the z sound. Or, you’ll be more likely to teach vocabulary words like “contain” or “reluctant” rather than “quidnunc.” Without such a plan, important words or spelling patterns may not be taught at all, and some concepts or skills may be covered again and again. In such a case, the most successful kids may progress anyway, but this kind of laissez-faire curriculum plan is a disaster for the strugglers.

That there isn’t a single research-proven sequence gives your district latitude. They could buy one of the many commercial programs aimed at supporting systematic instruction or could convene a group of teachers to come up with a district plan. Apparently, within reason, it doesn’t matter that much what the exact plan is, just that there be one and that teachers follow it (we don’t teach alone – we build on what the previous teacher accomplished and prepare students for what is to follow). When a specific instructional sequence exists, you usually see more teaching than when it is left up to each teacher to work this out herself; and that is a big benefit for kids. Of course, if there is a plan, the teacher (and mom and dad) can tell how a child is doing—the instructional sequence becomes a point of comparison for determining who is not doing well.

Teachers there told me they were testing some kids weekly or biweekly. That is too much. How do I know it is too much?

The answer depends on two variables: the standard error of measurement of the test you are using and the student growth rate. The more certain of the scores (the lower the SEM that is), the more often you could profitably test... And the faster that students improve on the measure relative to the SEM of the test, the more often you can test.

On something like DIBELS, the standard errors are reasonably large compared to the actual student growth rate--thus, on that kind of measure it doesn't make sense to measure growth more than 2-3 times per year. Any more than that, and you won't find out anything about the child (just the test).

The example in my powerpoint below is based on the DIBELS oral reading fluency measure. For that test, kids read a couple of brief passages (1 minute each) and a score is obtained in words correct per minute. Kids in first and second grade make about 1 word improvement per week on that kind of measure.

However, studies reveal this test has a standard error of measurement of 4 to 18 words... that means, under the best circumstances, say the student scores 50 wcpm on the test, then we can be 68 percent certain that this score is someplace between 46 and 54 (under the best conditions when there is a small SEM). That means that it will be at least 4 weeks before we would be able to know whether the child was actually improving. Sooner than that, and any gains or losses that we see will likely be due to the standard error (the normal bouncing around of test scores).

And that is the best of circumstances. As kids grow older, their growth rates decline. Older kids usually improve 1 word every three or four weeks weeks on DIBELS. In those cases, you would not be able to discern anything new for several months. But remember, I'm giving this only 68 percent confidence, not 95 percent, and I am assuming that DIBELS has the smallest SEMs possible (not likely under normal school conditions). Two or three testings per year is all that will be useful under most circumstances.

More frequent testing might seem rigorous, but it is time wasting, misinformative, and simply cannot provide any useful information for monitoring kids learning. Let's not just look highly committed and ethical by testing frequently; let's be highly committed and ethical and avoid unnecessary and potentially damaging testing.

  There is a growing sense that if we adopt the right intervention program for them we'll catch them up, close the gap, solve the problem. High schools and middle schools just need to start programming special classes for these kids.

  This is a pipe dream.

  While I certainly support extra programming for older poor readers, my AMP program is a good example of what might be done. But let's not be too sanguine about that approach. Recent experiences with Striving Readers grants and some other investigations that have been undertaken by IES that say that such an approach will help close the gap--by about 1 month (and that is when the intervention is successful; they often are not). Perhaps this month can be improved upon by raising the quality of the teachers, selecting only programs that have been successful in past studies, and doing everything possible to get full implementation. But how much improvement will come from that... 2 months? Many of the students who enter high school are 2 or more years behind... closing the gap by or 1 or months per year will not solve the problem.

  There is a need for substantial increases in instructional time for these kids and that time should be devoted to teaching them how to read hard texts. Yes, set up a ninth-grade reading class to be taken in lieu of electives, but set up such classes in 7th and 8th grades (and in all the other high school grades as well). Then make sure these kids are in your afterschool programs so they can get extra reading hours then, and summer school is a great idea as well. Even all of that will not necessarily save these kids, so if you are really serious you'll make sure that reading and reading instruction is a big part of these kids' school days--in history, science, English, math, and any other text-oriented subjects.

  Setting up a special class for these strivers is a good idea, but it won't do much without the other investments.

  This week I got an angry email from a professor I do not know. He sent me a "how do you dare..." letter. He was angry. He had read about the standards project in the paper and decided he knew all about it, and was incensed that teachers weren't included in any of the panels, and wanted to know how I could take part in such a shameful exercise.

  I could have told him that decision was above my pay grade, but decided to have a bit of fun at his expense (I must admit I don't like angry letters questioning my motives from folks who don't know me). So, I questioned why he was so angry. Not surprising, he had no more self awareness than a rock. He wrote back, angrier still... How dare you question my motives, he queried, you don't even know me. And so it goes!

  This professor teaches teachers to teach reading, but apparently he had never heard of critical reading... you know, where you don't believe everything that you read, or don't assume you know the whole story because you saw it in Education Week.

  I try to take a different approach than this guy when I read a news story that gets my dander up... I wonder what the reporter left out... what he or she didn't bother to ask or to reveal. If I'm as chagrined as this fellow, I might even write a note to find out what I want to know (though, unlike him, I would write to the people in charge rather than the glittering consultants).

  In this case, I did just that. I wrote to the folks who are in charge of the standards project and asked about teacher involvement. They were taken aback... of course, there are teachers involved at every level of the process, was their response. They hadn't mentioned it to the press because, you guessed it, the press hadn't asked about it. And because no one asked, there are now folks out there spreading the word that there is no teacher involvement so you should oppose the standards... which just demonstrates how much we need reading standards!

Which ways of indicating book difficulty work best?

This question came up because the inquirer wondered if it mattered whether she used Lexiles, Reading Recovery, or Fountas and Pinnell levels. The various responses suggested a whiff of bias against Lexiles (or, actually, against traditional measures of readability including Lexiles).

  So are all the measures of book difficulty the same? Well, they are and they’re not. It is certainly true that historically most measures of readability (including Lexiles) come down to two measurements: word difficulty measure and sentence difficulty. These factors are weighted and combined to predict some criterion. Although Lexiles include the same components as traditional readability formulas, they predict different criteria. Lexiles are lined up with an extensive database of test performance, while most previous formulas predict the levels of subjectively sequenced passages. Also, Lexiles have been more recently normed. One person pointed out that Lexiles and other traditional measures of readability tend to come out the same (correlations of .77), which I think is correct, but because of the use of recent student reading as the criterion, I usually go with the Lexiles if there is much difference in an estimate.

  Over the years, researchers have challenged readability because it is such a gross index of difficulty (obviously there is more to difficulty than sentences and words), but theoretically sound descriptions of text difficulty (such as those of Walter Kintsch and Arthur Graesser) haven’t led to appreciably better text difficulty estimates. Readability usually explains about 50% of the variation in text difficulty, and these more thorough and cumbersome measures don’t do much better.

  One does see a lot of Fountas and Pinnell and Reading Recovery levels these days. Readability estimates are usually only accurate within about a year, and that is not precise enough to help a first-grade teacher to match her kids with books. So these schemes claim to make finer distinctions in text difficulty early on, but these levels of accuracy are open to question (I only know of one study of this and it was moderately positive), and there is no evidence that using such fine levels of distinction actually matter in student learning (there is some evidence of this with more traditional measures of readability).

  If anything, I think these new schemes tend to put kids into too many levels and more than necessary. They probably correlate reasonably well with readability estimates, and their finer-grained results probably are useful for early first grade, but I’d hard pressed to say they are better than Lexiles or other readability formulas even at these levels (and they probably lead to over grouping).

Why does readability work so poorly for this?

I’m not sure that it really does work poorly despite the bias evident in the discussion. If you buy the notion that reading comprehension is a product of the interaction between the reader and the text (as most reading scholars do), why would you expect text measures to measure much more than half the variance in comprehension? In the early days of readability formula design, lots of text measures were used, but those fell away as it became apparent that they were redundant and 2-3 measures would be sufficient. The rest of the variation is variation in children’s interests and knowledge of topics and the like (and in our ability to measure student reading levels).

Is the right level the one that students will comprehend best at?

One of the listserv participants wrote that the only point to all of this leveling was to get students into texts that they could understand. I think that is a mistake. Often that may be the reason for using readability, but that isn’t what teachers need to do necessarily. What a teacher wants to know is “at what level will a child make optimum learning gains in my class?” If the child will learn better from something hard to comprehend, then, of course, we’d rather have them in that book.

  The studies on this are interesting in that they suggest that sometimes you want students practicing with challenging text that may seem too hard (like during oral reading fluency practice) and other times you want them practicing with materials that are somewhat easier (like when you are teaching reading comprehension). That means we don’t necessarily want kids only reading books at one level: we should do something very different with a guided reading group that will discuss a story, and a paired reading activity in which kids are doing repeated reading, and an independent reading recommendation for what a child might enjoy reading at home.

  But isn’t this just a waste of time if it is this complicated?

I don’t think it is a waste of time. The research certainly supports the idea that students do better with some adjustment and book matching than they do when they work whole class on the same level with everybody else.

  However, the limitations in testing kids and testing texts should give one pause. It is important to see such data as a starting point only. By all means, test kids and use measures like Lexiles to make the best matches that you can. But don’t end up with too many groups (meaning that some kids will intentionally be placed in harder or easier materials than you might prefer), move kids if a placement turns out to be easier or harder on a daily basis than the data predicted, and find ways to give kids experiences with varied levels of texts (from easy to challenging). Even when a student is well placed, there will still be selections that turn out to be too hard or too easy, and adjusting the amount of scaffolding and support needed is necessary. That means that teachers need to pay attention to how kids are doing, and responding to these needs to make sure the student makes progress (i.e., improves in what we are trying to teach).

  If you want to know more about this kind of thing, I have added a book to my recommended list (at the right here). It is a book by Heidi Mesmer on how to match texts with kids. Good luck.

Last week, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco upheld the right of California to administer achievement tests and high school exit exams in English to all students, no matter what their language background. Various education groups had challenged the practice of using English-only testing since federal law requires that second-language students “be assessed in a valid and reliable manner.”

  Last week, I was meeting with a group of school administrators with great expertise in the needs of English Language Learners. They thought testing and the use of data to be very important, but they were chagrined about state laws that required them to test kids in English. Their reasoning was pretty much the same as Rose's: since these kids don't know English yet, and we have been teaching them to read in Spanish, an English test won't tell us anything that will help us to deliver better reading programs, and such testing is only going to make these kids feel bad.

  Rose and my ELL colleagues are not crazy, but I hope they don't get what they want. The problem is that accountability tests have very different purposes than other kinds of educational measures. Teachers and adminstrators want insights about how to teach particular kids more effectively, but accountability tests can't help there. Such tests will tell you who can't read this well, but not why.

  Tests that will help diagnose kids' instructional needs aren't very good at doing the accountability work. My colleagues are right: there are times that I'd rather concede that my students won't yet do well on an English test, and give them the Spanish test that will help me to figure out what to do next. Rose is right that it can be useful to test kids out of level in some instances, but accountability wouldn't be the purpose:. Jimmy reads very well for a second grader, unfortunately he is in ninth. Obviously that kind of information will mislead everyone as to how well a school is doing.

  During the presidential campaign, then-candidate Obama, kept saying he was going to replace accountability tests with diagnostic tests, and I kept thinking, not a chance. Diagnostic testing takes awhile; I hope we can keep accountability brief, and then do whatever is necessary to figure out the teaching needs of those kids who are lagging behind. I hope that we get back to the idea that, for accountability purposes, we don't really need to test everyone. If I want to know how well kids in Montana read, or how well immigrant kids are doing in school, I can test random samples of such kids and get the information that I need. Which means less testing time and less time away from teaching.

  But what about how testing someone on a test that is clearly too hard or inappropriate? Won't that make them feel terrible? Motivation does matter, and frankly there is no reason to test a child in a case like that--as long as the teacher of the school will concede that the child does not meet the standards. Unfortunately, schools that want to opt some kids out of accountability, don't want them to count at all (a process we have seen in the National Assessment). That won't work (I remember a year when they allowed that in Detroit and something like 92% of kids met standards).

  No matter how concerned for the kids a teacher or principal might be, they have had a tendency to either keep low kids out of the testing pool altogether, so that the community cannot know the real percentage of low readers in a school or district. Or, if the data are going to count whether the child is tested or not, these same caring individuals tend to administer the test (hoping those kids do better than expected). We need to make it easier for a school to say, "Henry is a poor reader. There is no reason to test him on the fifth-grade test to prove that since we know that he cannot read that well. Our school district concedes that Henry is a poor reader, we'll take the adjustment to our scores, and Henry will not be subjected to this."

  Ain't gong to happen? Maybe not, but if last fall you had told me that 46 states would sign on to joint standards, I would have said you were crazy.

During the past few months, some amazing things have been happening in education policy. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt a single set of education standards in the English Language Arts and Mathematics. Arne Duncan ALSO pledged $350 million towards a new set of tests of those standards. Now that sounds like a national curriculum to me… and national tests to boot—though nobody is using those terms right now.

Of course, development efforts like these take years, so those who are philosophically offended by the idea of a national curriculum won’t have to worry, right? Not in this case. The design of standards is moving like a freight train. Not just any freight, but one of those supercharged, superfast trains. Even though the process seems like it just got started, it has made terrific progress so far, and they intend to have graduation standards by December.

So who are the winners and losers as this enterprise moves forward?

Not that I’m home, I’ve been going to meetings, reading emails and the latest journals, and maybe I was safer with the cheetahs! Just in the past few days I’ve been hearing over and over the kind of anti-research rhetoric that was popular back when the National Reading Panel report came out.

Ten things good writers do…

1. Good writers make a good first impression. They put extra effort into their introductions and first paragraphs because they want readers to read on. Consider this wonderful opener from E. B. White:”When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.” That simple sentence took a lot of work, but it sure makes you want to find out about Mrs. Little’s mouse-sized son.

  2. Good writers make their endings strong, too. No one wants to read a piece that doesn’t leave them feeling fulfilled and satisfied at the end, and good writers usually pull everything together with a rewarding climax or a thoughtful summary.

  3. Good writers organize their articles and stories so that readers can follow along without getting lost or confused. That might mean that a good writer writes stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends, or that they use an understandable logical plan in their science essays. For some kinds of writing it is a good idea to tell the reader right up front what is going to follow.

  4. Good writers rewrite. In fact, someone once even said that good writing is bad writing that has been rewritten. It is very difficult to write something that another person can understand and enjoy, so good writers make a real effort to polish their work. Once they have a draft of what they want to say, they go back several times to add, delete, or change it so that it will be just right. Rarely are good writers happy with the first words they come up with, so good writing is rewriting.

  5. Good writers don’t just tell something, they show it. A good writer doesn’t just state an opinion without real examples that reveal why he or she holds that opinion. Similarly, a good story writer doesn’t tell you that a character is unhappy, he/she shows it (maybe the character punches a pillow or kicks over a garbage can – anything that reveals the feeling without the writer just telling it).

  6. Good writers use sentences that are varied and interesting. No one wants to read a paper that says, “A nanotube is very small. A nanotube can be used to make a little radio. A nanotube uses carbon. A nanotube….” Boring! Repetition can be effective in some instances, but in this case it doesn’t work. This is better: “Nanotubes are so tiny they can’t be seen by the naked eye. And, yet, it is possible to make a radio from one. Imagine listening to hip-hop on a radio that no one can see!”

  7. Good writers write for the ear, not the eye. That is, a good writer tries to make sure the text would sound good if someone were to read it aloud (in fact, good writers often read their stuff aloud when they are revising just to make sure it sounds like it should).

  8. Good writers elaborate; they try to share a lot of information and detail. It helps to be analytical, to be able to break a topic into its parts and then to tell about the parts. In a science class that might mean writing about a structure of an organism and then connecting the structure to the processes that the organism is involved in. Or, in a social studies class it might mean describing an involved chain of events that led to a particular historical outcome.

  9. Good writers get their facts right, even when they are writing fiction. It isn’t enough to sound right, it has to be right. In a report, that means checking that your facts are correct (and, if facts are in dispute, that fact should end up in the report, too). Truth in fiction is a little trickier, but it matters as well; even in far out science-fiction writing the imaginary worlds have to make sense (if an imaginary universe has no gravity, it can’t just magically have gravity later in the story—maybe something changed it so that it did, but the change has to be plausible).

  10. Good writers should know when to quit. When you’ve said what you wanted to say it’s time to stop. And, since I set out to tell 10 things that good writers do, I think this would be a good place to end!

  The problem with comprehension instruction is twofold: on the one hand, teachers do not teach strategies very well and so lower readers tend to find independent reading difficult, even when they are receiving strategy teaching. Furthermore, most comprehension instruction (whether aimed at strategies or not) is pretty weak gruel. Students can escape with a pretty shallow processing of text as they may be guided by weak questions, superficial discussions, and no real engagement with the difficult or subtle aspects of the text.

  Good comprehension instruction should push kids to think more deeply about a text than they would if they were reading on their own. In stories, kids struggle with character motivation and psychological elements; these aspects of a story may not be stated explicitly and they require an understanding of how human behavior works. Kids tend to focus on behavior itself rather than thinking about underlying reasons for the behavior (they struggle with this in life, too). Good comprehension instruction leads kids to think about those aspects of a text that they might normally neglect.

  Good strategy instruction is tougher. It both has to lead kids to a deep processing of text (so the discussion of character motives had better take place even when you are teaching kids to summarize), but this teaching also needs to guide kids to develop intentionality, so they will try to think about the text even when they are reading on their own. If a teacher pushes strategy teaching too hard, kids won’t get much guided reading practice with the teacher. However, if a teacher pushes the story too hard, and ignores strategy teaching, then low readers will find it nearly impossible to read independently, and they will not be likely to progress in reading.

  If teachers can run a good discussion that guides kids to think about the important ideas in a text and to come away with a real understanding of what the author said and how he said it, then the students will have a real chance of becoming good comprehenders. But this will often be insufficient for poorer readers because they usually need more of this than the teacher can provide.

  Strategy teaching is meant to be a lifeline for such students. If a strategy gets kids to interact with a text more than they would on their own, then this could help strengthen them in the same way that participating in a discussion group with the teacher does. If we can afford to provide substantial doses of teacher guidance to reading comprehension, then strategy instruction won’t be necessary. If we can’t afford this, then providing what we can and supplementing it with strategy teaching is the way to go.

  A couple of other things:

  Last week, Drinda raised some questions about my reading comprehension column, her questions and my answers are below:

 1. Are the gains made by students who benefit from learning strategies sustained once they stop using the strategies?

  If the students engage in a sufficient amount of reading on their own in which they use these strategies, then they should read better even when they are no longer using the strategies. (That’s the theory anyway. We have no long-term studies of this.) The difficulty is to know how much meaningful, engaged reading (under the teacher’s supervision and on their own) that they must do to accomplish this goal.

 2. When they are using the strategies, do the use them with all reading for a while--or only when they specifically choose to use them (or are prompted by a teacher)?

  Ideally, we would want kids to use strategies a lot, so I’d say all the time. But research indicates that kids don’t use strategies much. That is partly due to the low quality of much strategy teaching and partly because it is hard for poor reader to sustain a reading conversation in their heads when they are new to this. We’d like kids to use the strategies especially when they are reading without the teacher.

 3. If these are of most benefit to low-performing students, should they only be taught for small groups?

  The benefit of strategies is mainly for low readers. They don’t hurt the high readers, but they don’t help much either. Grouping for comprehension instruction tends to be a good idea (both because it allows you to vary text difficulty based on student needs). However, whether strategies are part of the mix or not, it is still important to engage kids in meaningful reading with interactions with others.

  Finally, I will be posting no new info here for the next two weeks. Cyndie and I are off on vacation. I'll put some new material up in mid-July when we return. Enjoy your summer.

  That doesn’t mean everybody agrees with strategy teaching. Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown have argued strenuously against such teaching. They claim teachers would be better off having kids read text and engaging in a deep discussion of the ideas.

  I respect Isabel and Moddy, but how can you ignore so much research? I think the disagreement lies in a basic misconception about the purpose of strategy instruction.

  There are three ways to think about strategies—but only one of them can be right.

  One view is that strategy teaching leads kids to actually use the strategies while they read. And that they'll then use them for the rest of their lives—reading better right into the grave. This simplistic notion is not held by any researchers I know, but some teachers buy it. This is part of what gets a negative response from Isabel and Moddy (let’s face it: good readers know they don’t usually use strategies).

  A more widely held view is the one most research big-shots accept. David Pearson, Scott Paris and Peter Afflerbach claim strategies are just a stage of learning. Their idea is that strategies eventually morph into skills. They are kind of phonics of ideas. You learn phonics, but decoding eventually gets so skilled that you read without thinking about decoding. So, the idea is that comprehension strategies do continue to be used by students, but without conscious awareness.

  I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to believe that I’m predicting, questioning, and visualizing away, and not even knowing it.

  And yet, unlike the strategy critics, I teach comprehension strategies.

  Strategy teaching works… but mainly with low readers. Consequently, I think of it as a kind of “pay-attention-and-think-about-the-text” instruction. It helps poor readers to do something with their minds during reading, which is incredibly important. Isabel and Moddy are right about teachers guiding kids to think deeply about text. Strategy teaching, when it is good, just provides a kind of scaffolding that allows kids who have trouble thinking while reading to do so, even when they read on their own. Strategies are temporary, but not because they become automatic skills, but because they are too cumbersome to sustain. The benefits of strategy teaching decline once reading is able to stimulate normal language processing responses.

  If the “Shanahan surmise” is correct (that strategy teaching is beneficial because it provides a temporary scaffold supporting independent thinking during reading for kids who can’t do such thinking automatically), there are implications for teaching reading comprehension. I’ll deal with that in my next column.

  But even though I like RtI, I have problems with it (as do others, perhaps most notably, Dick Allington--however, his problems emanate from concerns about who will deliver the prevention services). My concern is that RtI is often so mechanistic that nothing good is happening for the children. Schools buy an instructional program and/or a regimen of professional development and they think they have a good Tier 1 response... they set up a reading class a couple of times a week for groups of struggling students and you can check off Tier 2 as well. That won't work and so if RtI is going to cut the caseload in special education schools are going to have to be real aggressive about meeting students' learning needs in reading.

  This weekend I met with a group of educators from across the country in Santa Fe and I told them about my 9-Tier Model. The first reaction was 9 tiers instead of 3, is this guy crazy? However, once they saw what has been missing from their 3-tier plans, they were more than willing to consider building up their efforts (not by going to 9 tiers, but by implementing a richer set of responses across the three tiers they have been doing). Good for them--and, more importantly, good for the kids whom they are responsible for. 

Check out my powerpoint on RtI that introduces these 9 tiers here on my website.

May 29, 2009 updated June 26, 2021

This is the time of the year when schools often try to reach out to parents to encourage their kids to continue to read over the summer. Not a bad idea--reading is a lot of fun and keeping in practice can mean a faster start to next school year. Here are some suggestions for parents that you might want to pass on (or to use with your own kids)....

            Summertime and the readin' is easy, fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high....

Dear Parents:

Another school year has ended, but that shouldn’t mean that your kids can stop reading and writing. Research shows bad outcomes for kids who don’t read (their reading test scores decline). A summer away from school should not be a summer away from reading. Encourage your children (teens, too) to read over the summer. It’s one of the most loving things you can do for them!

            Here are some suggestions that might help:

1. Summer usually allows families to spend more time together. This can be a great opportunity to read with your kids. Children can learn a lot from being read to, and it is a lot of fun, too. Even if they can read by themselves, take turns reading to each other, and be sure to talk about what you are reading. Ask questions, answer questions, explore the ideas together, but read.
2. As kids get older, help them find books, magazines, or newspaper articles that they would enjoy reading, and you read to them, too (trips to the library together are a great idea for finding such material). Or read the same book they are reading for class over the summer so you can discuss it. The point is to share the reading experience.
3. Even if you are not reading the same books that they are, talk to your children about what they are reading. Ask them questions such as what happened in the story or what might happen next, who is their favorite character, or who is the villain. This builds summarization and recall skills, and your interest can help increase their interest.
4. Create a summer reading nook or spot in your home. Make sure there is good light and comfortable seating and try to set aside one TV/video-game-free night per week for family reading. Reading night can be a special snack night, too. There is nothing better than reading with a big bowl of popcorn or cookies and milk.
5. If your children’s school program provides materials for home activities, absolutely use them.
6. If you are taking a trip this summer, send for brochures and maps and have your children read them aloud with you.
7. Don’t ignore the value of graphic novels or a popular book series like the Twilight books. These are great ways to encourage adolescents to read more. If you are having trouble finding books that your kids want to read try these resources from the International Literacy Association:   

Children's Reading Choices     

Young Adult Reading Choices

1. Whether you are reading to your children, or they are reading themselves, plan an outcome event or activity based on the reading. For instance, if the book has been made into a movie, watch the DVD together after reading the book. Book reading can lead to picnics, museum and zoo visits, ballgames, or even family vacations (we took our kids to Chincoteague Island and Hannibal, Missouri as a result of reading Misty of Chincoteague and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with them).
2. Write notes or letters to your children. What a great opportunity to remind them of experiences that they had when they were younger or to tell them about the lives of older people in the family, like their grandparents. Kids love getting letters and sometimes they’ll even write back. Other writing activities make sense, too.

https://www.startwithabook.org/summer-writing

1. Don’t just focus on storybooks. Kids often prefer to read about fact rather than fiction, including books and articles about the environment, animals, current events, sports, and other factual topics. Talk to them about what they like and help them find reading materials that match those interests.

https://www.science-sparks.com/summer-science/

https://lemonlimeadventures.com/must-try-summer-science-activities-for-kids/

1. Consider taking on a family cultural study… reading some books about or from a particular country and then supplementing this reading with examinations of relevant art, visits to museums, meals at ethnic restaurants (or cooking experiments at home, etc.
2. Take on a genealogical study. Kids love finding out about their families and there is a lot of reading and writing involved in that kind thing (there is a link below on that).

https://www.genealogy.com/articles/research/67_taylor.html

These days most communities provide activities aimed at promoting reading. Check with your local library, park district, museums, zoos, churches, and the like. However, just in case those resources aren’t available or for some reason you can’t take advantage of them, there are many available through the Internet. You can find free books resources in the Resources section of my website and here are a slew of summer supports and activities.

https://www.scholastic.com/site/summer/home.html

https://kids.scholastic.com/kids/games/homebase/

https://www.nea.org/resource-library/get-serious-about-summer-reading

https://www.weareteachers.com/10-summer-reading-programs-for-kids/

https://www.ala.org/alsc/publications-resources/book-lists/2021-summer-reading-list

https://www.science-sparks.com/summer-science/ 

https://lemonlimeadventures.com/must-try-summer-science-activities-for-kids/

  As in major cities all over the U.S., the kids who live in economically-challenged neighborhoods (with the worst housing, the most serious health problems including drug abuse, etc.) do worst in school. Some Irish areas manage remarkably to avoid this unfortunate pattern, but not Ballymun.

  Consequently, Atlantic Philanthropies has teamed up with the Irish government to provide support to make things go better in such neighborhoods. The team in Ballymun is working closely with the schools to get improvements there, but they are also expanding preschool, afterschool, and health care opportunities, and doing everything they can to try to make it possible for more kids to do well in this changing neighborhood.

  The current environment there reminds me of Chicago when they were tearing down the Robert Taylor homes--the high rise public housing projects that didn't work well for the residents in Chicago. Right now in Ballymun the ever-changing landscape is punctuated by abandoned high rises, piles of rubble from the demolition, and hopeful new housing. But while changing the physical environment is a good idea, that alone will not likely lead to improved achievement without real changes in these children's educational lives.

  That was why they brought me over. I visited all the schools, attended a plethora of meetings, shared my framework with everybody who would listen, and kept up the mantra that it is the children's experience that matters: amount of teaching, curriculum focus, and quality of delivery are what improve literacy--everything else is just commentary. I look forward to continuing to work with this vibrant and commited group, and will keep you posted on their progress. For more on the youngballymun project go to http://www.youngballymun.org/

Blast from the past July 20, 2017

Here we are at the height of summer... I just got back from the International Literacy Association conference and I was hearing about teachers already preparing to start back to school this month! Summers used to mean baseball--not the school year. This blog might remind everyone of a key characteristic of effective of reading teachers.

Teaching should follow research, and teachers ought to use the kinds of tools and routines that have been found to be effective in the past. In the Chicago schools, I imposed time standards to make sure kids got enough teaching of the essential parts of the curriculum. Unfortunately, this emphasis on effective practice and amount of instruction is sometimes misunderstood. It may be interpreted as a kind of mindless recipe-following in which teachers ignore the kids, hurrying to get through a too-full curriculum.

      But, to draw a sports analogy, teaching is not a game that can be played well with clenched teeth.

    Think of this contrast: pro-football teams play once a week for an hour (and they only do this 18 times a year). And each player plays less than that, as they aren’t always on the field. In contrast, baseball players play 162 games a season, and each game can go on for several hours. A star baseballer plays for nearly 500 hours a season, while a pro football player plays only about 9 hours.

      Because of the episodic nature of football, there is a lot of emphasis on intense motivation. Football it seems is best played with clenched teeth. But baseball requires a more quiet and controlled kind of intensity: the players have to play within themselves and not get too excited. Football is played in a hurried and emotional way; baseball is more cunning and careful. There is a serenity to it.

      Teaching is much more like baseball than football. Teachers have to be more planful. They can’t get too excited, getting depressed and angry when things don’t go well or exuberant when they do. It is a long season, and the game has to be played on an even keel if success is to be accomplished. Teachers definitely should not hurry and they cannot afford to feel pressure like they could if they only taught 9 hours a year.

      Reading and writing instruction should be delivered for two to three hours a day (almost as much time as a major league baseball game). During that time, teachers have to switch gears frequently: sometimes teaching decoding (if she is a primary grade teacher) and vocabulary and reading comprehension and reading fluency and writing. Each of these parts of the game have their own tenor; some require speed, others reflection.

    Teachers have to switch gears in other ways too: sometimes telling kids what to do, other times showing them, and still others, assigning practice and sitting back to watch, providing guidance and support as needed.

    Of course, things don’t always go right: you thought an explanation would be enough, but the kids weren’t getting it, so you stopped to show them how. Or you thought three examples would be enough, but it wasn’t and you had to slow down to provide even more practice. Or, the text being read turned out to be a richer experience than you had guessed, so now you want to finish only half of the article today, so that it can be covered in greater, and more profitable, depth. (And, yes, there are those times, when everything seems to go right and you complete a lesson in half the time expected and need to stay on your game, getting a head start on the next lesson since you can’t afford to waste a valuable minute).

    Teaching literacy effectively requires a kind of serenity… a big picture understanding of what is going on, and of what has to happen, and an ability to speed up, slow down, push, stop, and stand back and watch. Teaching reading cannot be done with clenched teeth.

  A quick pre-2000 history lesson: At the federal level, Republican and Democratic views of education had evolved into an unfortunate stalemate. Republicans usually opposed federal education spending for Constitutional and budgetary reasons. Their argument was that education was the responsibility of the states and that Uncle Sam should stay out of the local business of local schools. That approach often meant that the Republican answer to educational programs was no, but it also meant that they worked hard to protect local control, to ensure that federal educational initiatives didn’t get very specific about curriculum, teacher preparation, or assessment and that there could be nothing like national standards.

  The Democrats, on the other hand, have been very pro-education spending. They Democrats have usually pushed for increased funding for Head Start, Title I, IDEA, and so on.

  Sounds like the donkeys and the elephants’ positions were pretty antithetical. But that really wasn’t the case. The Democrats, despite their support for education dollars, were not particularly committed to trying to improve education. That’s why they weren’t worried about the constitutional problems: Democrats didn’t seek to fix schools as much as to use schools as a reason for moving federal bucks to local communities and to increase educational opportunity (more slots and more stuff) but within the existing universe of education.

  What that meant until 2000 was that the Democrats and Republicans “conspired” to make sure that federal dollars wouldn’t affect educational quality. NCLB was remarkable because it broke that stalemate and increased funding towards improving educational quality. I might not agree with all of the NCLB specifics, but I strongly support the principle.

  Back in the 1940s when the GI bill paid tuitions for soldiers to go to college, the quality of the colleges was not the issue (just the access). In the 1960s, when Head Start was set up, the idea was to get kids from low-income families into preschools and to provide them with meals and health care, and the assumption was that any preschool would be okay. The problem, in 2009, is that increasing access is insufficient. Making sure that more African American boys have the money to go to college is a great idea, except that most will flunk out during freshman year because of their inadequate elementary and high school preparation.

  Change NCLB by all means, but keep trying to use that federal increment to boost quality and effectiveness. Candidate Obama campaigned on increasing educational access. Let’s hope that President Obama changes that emphasis to trying to increase quality, too. Our kids need to read better than they do now; more access alone won’t solve that.

  The independent/instructional/frustration level scheme has now been around for about 60 years (since Emmett Betts described these levels in his landmark textbook). Frustration level is the point at which books are too hard to learn from, the independent level is the level when books are too easy to be used as instructional texts, and the instructional level is in the space in between.

  So, in guided reading, teachers place children into books that are arrayed across difficulty levels. This is a really terrific plan when kids start out because beginning readers are a bit fragile (they get overwhelmed by too much new stuff). It is also a reasonable idea overall, even with much older readers—as no matter how well you read, it would be possible to come up with a text that would simply be too darn hard.

  The theory may be good, but it’s execution in guided reading leaves much to be desired. First, the book leveling schemes that are being used are pretty dubious. I’m not talking about Lexiles or other well-validated readability schemes, but the book leveling schemes for guided reading are pretty shaky.

  However, that isn’t really the big problem… the real problem is the theory itself since the notion that kids have to be matched to the right book for them to learn is not consistent with actual data (at least once you get beyond the very early levels of reading achievement). The basic problem is that there are too many levels and that there is apparently too much overlap in the levels. Teachers sacrifice way too much instructional time trying to provide kids teaching at their exact level. So, you’ll see teachers spending 15-20 minutes each with groups at level “L” and “M” that frankly aren’t different. In such cases, the teacher would be better off spending 30-40 minutes with the two combined groups.

  Research shows that matching kids to books does not guarantee big learning gains. In fact, in the two best and most recent studies on the topic, one study found minor benefits of a good book match on one measure only, and the other study actually found that kids made better progress in the frustration level books! My point isn’t that we shouldn’t group kids by book levels; but that when we do this there is a tendency to overdo it (to make these levels a kind of fetish). I certainly don’t want to see a fifth-grader who reads at a second-grade level trying to negotiate the fifth-grade reading textbook on his own, but I likewise don’t like seeing children getting much less interaction time with a teacher simply because they know a few more or fewer words than the other kids (it just doesn’t make that much difference).

  Certainly, I would place kids in different levels of books when it is inexpensive of teacher time (such as paired reading or independent reading). And I would place kids in different books when their reading levels lag far behind (in grades 2-3, I’d strive for placements within a half-grade level of the child’s reading level, in grades 4-5, within a year, and above that, I’d aim for within two years). And, finally, make sure you don’t fractionate your class with so many different levels of placement that you can’t provide much instruction. Groups are necessary perhaps, but the fewer groups the better.

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B. R., and Eldredge, J. L. (2000). Effect of difficulty levels on second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Educational Research, 94, 113-119.

O’Connor, R.E., Bell, K.M., Harty, K.R., Larkin, L.K., Sackor, S.M., and; Zigmond, N. (2002). Teaching reading to poor readers in the intermediate grades: A comparison of text difficulty. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 474-485.

  Last week, I heard from the Education Writers Association requesting information about what happens to children who don’t learn to read well by third grade… Do they drop out of high school? End up in jail? Become wards of the state? Go into politics? (Okay, they didn’t really ask that last one, I was just checking to see if you were paying attention.) The Writers had checked NAEP reports and the Department of Education but found no help there. So what really happen to kids who don’t read well early?

            Longitudinal studies show that early learning problems tend to be persistent. There are strong correlations between early reading skills and later academic attainment. That means that the kids who are learning well in grades 1 and 2, tend to continue to well right into high school. The studies have been done over various time points, but generally, they find a very strong consistency from grade 1 through about grade 11 (see citations below for the evidence).

            It shouldn’t be surprising that the past is prolog. Scientists who study children’s learning tend to be naturists or nurturists, but either way, the story comes out the same. The naturists claim that learning is governed mainly by genetically-inherited brain functioning (IQ, intelligence, ability, etc.). They would conclude that children who have strong ability to learn early on will continue to exhibit such ability as they get older as long as nothing physiologically goes wrong the brain will keep learning well.

            The nurturists tell a very similar story. Some children live in supportive environments with parents who talk with them, read to them, send them to good schools with other nurturing adults, etc. Of course, if kids are in stimulating and supportive environments early on they tend to stay there (the rich kid thrown into poverty without the benefit of parents is a staple of Dickensian fiction, but a rather rare event in real life in 21st century America). Kids who start out in lousy schools, tend to stay in lousy schools.

            The things that make learning work early on are the same things that make learning work later and so kids who do well early on tend to continue to learn (and, of course, this means that the kids who start out having a hard time continuing to have difficulty). With reading, the successful kids get the added benefit of being able to read well, which has a functional benefit later on (so even if they have a bad high school teacher, these students can sometimes even read around this temporary impediment).

            However, though early reading success or failure translates into later school success or failure is the pattern more than 80% of the time, there are always a few outliers who manage to overcome their initial limitations (again, because they are really smart or live in really smart environments that are arrayed to address the problem). This last point is really important because it says that redemption is possible. Just because your child is having trouble with reading does not mean this problem has to persist. Good teaching (in big doses) can solve this problem for most kids. Redemption is possible.

            So, what of the more dramatic claims? High school dropouts do tend to have somewhat lower reading scores than other kids, but the correlation between dropping out and reading level is pretty limited. That means, for the most parts, kids leave high school for lots of reasons, low reading scores being only one of the explanations (good readers drop out too—I did, for instance—and poor readers often stick around and graduate—just because they can’t read well doesn’t mean they’re stupid). I’m aware of no studies that look at high school graduation longitudinally so can’t say directly whether early low readers are more likely to drop out (they probably are, but how much the chance of this is increased is unknown—I suspect the increase would be rather small given the low relationship between reading and graduation).

            The idea that early reading problems translate into prison terms is an urban myth. No such studies exist. Data do show that incarcerated youth suffer startlingly high rates of reading disability (something like 5 times the normal incidence), but most kids with reading problems DO NOT end up in jail, so a strong relationship between early reading difficulty and later criminal activity is not likely (and people like Bernie Madoff can read very well). Despite the claims that school achievement levels are taken into account by those who plan the building of prisons (they do not), the relationship between prison time and literacy is rather murky.

References 

Fletcher, J., & Satz, P. (1982). Kindergarten prediction of reading achievement: A seven-year longitudinal follow up. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 42, 681-685.

Cunningham, A. E., &; Stanovich, K. E. (1999). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Journal of Educational Psychology, 33, 934-945.

Entwistle, D. R., &; Hayduk, L. A. (1988). Lasting effects of elementary school. Sociology of Education, 61, 147-159.

Jacobson, C. (1999). How persistent is reading disability? Individual growth curves in reading. Dyslexia, 5, 78-93.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children with reading disabilities. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 24-53.

Shaywitz, S. E., Fletcher, J. M., Holahan, A. E., Schneider, K. E., Marchione, K. K., Stuebing, D. J., Francis, D. J., & Shaywitz, B. A. (1999). Persistence of dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at adolescence. Pediatrics, 104, 1351-1359.

  The problem is that the authors, M. D. Applegate, A. J. Applegate, and V. B. Modla, have made up a straw man (um, straw person) argument implying that someone out there supposes oral reading fluency alone is the necessary and sufficient condition for high-level reading comprehension. Their contention is that there is this (apparently stupid) group of teachers or scholars who believe that if kids can read text aloud quickly, accurately, and with proper expression, then they’ll comprehend anything no matter what their knowledge of vocabulary or the world or their other intellectual skills and predilections.

  Surprise, surprise, the authors manage to show that oral reading fluency alone is insufficient to guarantee reading comprehension. This isn’t especially difficult to show, but this study is poorly reported so the findings aren’t particularly persuasive or informative.

  One big problem with the data analysis: student selection is poorly executed, leading to some rather circular analysis (I got dizzy anyway). They only included students with a score of 16 or higher on their fluency rubric, but provided no information on the reliability or validity of this, and they didn’t indicate who administered the test and how inter-rater reliability was handled, nor did they provide any information about why 16 is a good level of fluency to select. Reliability and validity data for setting a specific cut score on a test are different than the reliability and validity of an overall test—this is particularly true in an instance like this where the authors tried to identify students with a narrow range of test performance. Why should we think that a 16 on this rubric is the level of fluency that students should attain?

  On other tests, fluency criteria are usually set against some outcome measures—typically reading comprehension. Here’s where it gets circular: a level of fluency on a test is usually set to make it possible to determine if, for most kids, fluency will be sufficient to allow reading comprehension success. That fluency cut is never set at a point where 100% of the kids at that level comprehend well (test data are too messy for that). So the authors have set a cut score that does not match with all kids being able to comprehend, and then they set out to prove that not all kids who reach this cut score can comprehend.

  The study divides students into three levels of comprehension but not in any clear way (and neither standard deviations nor standard errors of measurement for their tests are provided), so it is impossible to know how different these groups really are or whether other ways of dividing the data would help us to understand things any better. The study tries to analyze different question types, but without any discussion of the reliability or validity of these parts of the tests (you cannot simply divide up a test into parts and assume that the parts remain valid and reliable).

  Not surprisingly, they found that students who were fluent could for the most part answer questions accurately about text if the answers to the questions had been explicitly stated in text (for 143 of the 171 kids tested). They even found that more than two-thirds of these fluent kids could do high level comprehension tasks such as interpretation and critical response, but that the rest struggled with these aspects of higher-order thinking despite their fluency.

  In other words, for the most part, fluent readers were able to accomplish average levels of reading comprehension when the focus was on remembering or interpreting information in the text, but about 15% of these students had difficulty when asked to use the information in text to do other things. The accuracy of these figures is impossible to verify given the reporting flaws, but whether these numbers are accurate or not the authors are correct: fluency alone will not guarantee comprehension.

  The highest correlation I’ve seen between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension is about .85 (which is very high), but the correlations vary a bit and probably average a bit lower than that. But even a correlation that high only indicates that oral reading fluency predicts about 72% of the variance in reading comprehension scores. In the simplest theory possible, the one that claims that oral reading fluency simply and directly causes reading comprehension, that still leaves more than a quarter of the variation in reading comprehension performance to other variables. The imperfect correlation of fluency and comprehension alone tells me that some fluent readers will not comprehend very well—and that some disfluent ones will manage to understand text anyway. The high correlation on the other hand (especially from experimental studies in which children’s fluency is improved through some kind of intervention that leads to improved reading comprehension) indicates the importance of teaching fluency.

  The National Reading Panel reviewed the experimental studies on fluency instruction and found that, in 15 of 16 studies, fluency instruction led to improved reading comprehension. The one study that did not find comprehension gains from fluency instruction is the one that proves that fluency alone does not guarantee comprehension improvement. The other 15 studies are the ones that suggest it would be wise to make sure that kids are fluent.

  While teachers should know fluency instruction alone will not guarantee comprehension gains (nor will instruction in any other aspect of reading), these authors might want to spend some time in middle schools and high schools in cities like Cleveland and Chicago where large numbers and percentages of students lack the fluency levels commensurate with being able to get an author’s message or to do text level interpretation of text successfully. Teach fluency, but by all means, don’t just teach fluency.

  I was speaking with a teacher who was not a big fan of phonics instruction. It was not that she was totally against it, in fact, her concerns had arisen from observing the children who she was teaching phonics too. She was concerned because, often, when she introduced new skills, the kids seemed more awkward and more confused than when she started.

    Of course, it could be that she was just a bad teacher and was just doing a bad job of explaining and modeling the decoding skills. Bad teaching can certainly confuse more than it clarifies. However, she didn’t seem like a bad teacher—too smart, too serious, too caring for that to be likely.

  Maybe she was just a poor observer… but I doubt that was the case, as research has often found that new instruction can hurt performance—at least in the short run, and my own recent experiences with trying to learn ballroom dancing has been consistent with this, too.

I've worked hard to learn to dance and have been a real challenge to my teacher (she is often even more frustrated than me). She teaches some new step or styling and I struggle to get it. I go home and my wife helps me practice and we spend long hours mastering the new step. I eventually get it, and am thrilled when I go back to show Jelena, my teacher, what I’ve accomplished.

Her response is always the same: “Great. Now let’s try something new.” In other words, my reward for learning was to be taught something else. If I know how to do a basic step, she would add a turn… and I would struggle again… not just with the turn, but with the basic step that I already could do. The problem is that the new turn would overload my circuits. I could do the basic step, but not while I was anticipating the turn. Of course, as we would practice together initially, it tended to get worse—my brain would get more and more confused.

The introduction of a new skill can pull down the performance on other skills—temporarily. New information changes the context, and it can be hard to apply any new skill in a new context.

Neuroscience helps explain this odd short-term outcome of teaching. Think of pathways as the neural metaphor for learning. Learners, for instance, have to learn to think of a particular sound or pronunciation when they see a particular letter or combination of letters (or connecting a set of dance steps so that they take place in the right time and the right sequence). Initially, making those kinds of connections are haphazard. We may manage to make the connection, but it is slow and the paths that we take vary a bit. What's going on is lots of dendrites are firing so this association is a noisy and confusing event in the brain. However, as teaching guides you to make the connection more often, your brain starts trimming away that excess noise. What started out as a bunch of approximate paths ends up being a much quieter simple path (sort of how a path is worn into a lawn when someone cuts across too often). Good teaching makes sure that the path gets developed--and that the confusing brain signals don't become overwhelming.

To reduce the negative impact of new teaching, try teaching skills or information more thoroughly with applications in a lot of different contexts—including some in which cognitive overload or distraction will occur. Jelena would try to get me to dance with her, but then she would insist that we talk about me while we danced. What a distraction. But the point was that I wouldn't really know how to execute those steps if I had to think about them when I danced.

If kids seem overwhelmed by a lesson (e.g., you added some sight words to the practice deck and all of sudden, Henry is "forgetting" words that he seemed to know yesterday)--then just back off temporarily. Put it away and come back to it later. This rest essentially allows all those competing electric signals in the brain to quiet down. (That feeling that your head can't hold any more information, that it might explode at any minute, is just an overload of neurological electrical activity--an overload that the brain is struggling to sort out, struggling, that is, to find the right pathways.) 

Also, don’t allow the seeming temporary reduction in success to throw you or to throw your students: stay with it, and provide a lot of encouragement. I even learned to dance--eventually.

Teaching can appear to lower skills, but this seeming confusion is just a temporary state. It will get better over time.

  The report is important because it tests the impact of young teachers who complete traditional teacher preparation programs and those who complete alternative certification programs that require a lot fewer hours of training. Sadly, it finds that the “alt-cert” teachers do as well as the traditional certification teachers in terms of children’s learning. That finding represents a serious challenge to Colleges of Education.

  As with any study, this one has problems, but it appears to be the most rigorous look at this issue so far and its findings are troubling and won’t be easy to explain away. One minor concern is that the programs considered were so diverse: some traditional certification programs had fewer hours than the alternative programs, though usually, the traditional programs required a lot more. Lumping all programs together no matter how much they required may be misleading, and yet, overall, they found the extensive of the requirements were not correlated to kids’ learning.

  Another serious issue, that could not be addressed in this analysis, has to do with whether there might be longer-term differences: I wonder if alternative certification teachers will be less likely to stay more than two or three years (many alt-cert teachers are seeking an experience, not a career). This is an issue of kids’ learning since more experienced teachers typically outperform our beginners. If the traditional certification teachers eventually outperform the alt-cert teachers, then traditional certification eventually should win out. It will take a future study to determine if that is true.

  Or, perhaps, the study is revealing what beginning teachers face in the schools. If teaching is so constrained or pressured in various ways, perhaps it becomes impossible for a new teacher to show what he or she knows. Maybe primary teachers learn to teach phonics thoroughly in one preparation program and not the other, but this might not matter if these teachers go to schools that either doesn't teach phonics or that have such comprehensive phonics programs that little knowledge is needed to deliver the program. Either way, it would seem like there were no differences when there were really large ones that just turned out not to matter in a particular context.

  I fear the response from college’s of education will be to denounce this study and go blithely on, instead of rolling up their sleeves and trying to get more selective in their recruitments, more research-based in their course content, and more rigorous in their delivery of programs. This study can be considered evidence that we don’t need colleges of education or that teacher preparation can be slimmed down dramatically with no loss. However, another possibility would be to conclude that neither approach to teaching teachers is doing what we want it to, and we need to upgrade dramatically if we want kids to do well. Traditional certification programs are better positioned to make such changes, but they also have a greater commitment to the status quo and to teaching lots of stuff that apparently matters little in teacher effectiveness.

  With regard to reading, my question is how well prepared were either group of teachers to teach phonological awareness, oral language, writing, phonics, reading comprehension, vocabulary, or oral reading fluency? Perhaps neither group of teachers is doing well enough by our children. Making teacher preparation programs more rigorous in terms of teaching how to teach essential skills and abilities is the best way to proceed, though I wonder if the Obama administration will give colleges a chance to experiment with such approaches as the president and secretary of education are fans of alternative certification.

  Of course, those of us in education should be pleased as this new money should mean fewer layoffs for teachers. However, I suspect there will be a couple of problems with these dollars. The first is that I doubt that this assistance will do much for kids. The money isn’t targeted on any improvements, so there probably won’t be any. Schools will be tripping over themselves to push these bucks out the door, and that is not exactly the scenario for quality improvement.

  The other big concern is that I will be surprised if this money really represents more dollars for the schools. I think states and cities will reduce the amount of tax support that they are now providing to these institutions and will use the savings to pay for their other responsibilities. In other words, I think the schools will still get cut, but the new arrangement will mean that a larger proportion of school budgets will be coming from the feds. In cities like Chicago, most of the money that they spend already comes from the U.S. government, and this will increase that imbalance.

  Two things about federal funding for education: down the road, it will likely mean more federal regulations for schools, something that has been a big point of contention under NCLB, and local governments tend to worry less about quality when it comes to programs funded by the feds. Transferring the responsibility for funding schools to the U.S. government means local school systems will worry less about quality control than they do when using local money (that’s part of the reason large urban districts are often of lower quality than suburban schools—on average school systems get about 9% of their support from the feds, while in places like NYC, Chicago, and Los Angeles, the federal portion is well over half).

  We’re not talking about small amounts of money either. When I was director of reading in Chicago, the school budget was $3.5 billion for 437,000 kids; the Bush administration pumped lots of new federal money into the schools, so now Chicago gets about $5 billion for 430,000 kids. And that staggering figure could go up dramatically if the stimulus plan was additional money. What will happen instead will be that the city and state will try to anticipate the amount that the feds are about to add to the mix (and then, they’ll cut their contributions by at least that amount—allowing them to protect their other construction, health, and welfare programs).

  This will be like the bankers last fall. They got the new money but didn't increase their lending. The school systems will get this new money, but they're not likely to be in any better position to educate children. Just pumping money into the system won't protect education; you have to have some rules about how that money has to be spent--something that the leadership apparently won't provide.

1. Glenn says the National Reading Panel (NRP) promoted “a more skills-based approach to reading rather than a meaning-based approach focusing on comprehension” (p. 5). In fact, NRP looked at 205 studies on the teaching of reading comprehension, all with reading comprehension as the outcome. NRP considered 45 studies on vocabulary teaching and 16 on oral reading fluency, all with comprehension outcomes. Even 18 of the 52 phonemic awareness studies and 35 of the 38 phonics studies focused on reading comprehension. Maybe the complaint isn’t that NRP failed to focus on comprehension outcomes, but that we dared to consider a broader set of outcomes (like spelling, fluency, and word recognition).
2. He also claims NRP “missed some well-designed studies supporting the use of” sustained silent reading (SSR), the Book Flood studies of Warwick Elley. NRP did not ignore those studies. It searched for them systematically as described in the report, examined them, and set them aside because they only included second-language learners (beyond NRP’s scope). We were concerned about differences between first- and second-language learners, and, we were not willing to generalize from one group to the other given that their learning situations are so different. Later the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth (NLP), a panel devoted to synthesizing research on second-language learners, examined the Elley studies. Glenn claims the Elley studies were well-designed, but the NLP scientists were troubled by the lack of either random assignment or any kind of pretesting. The supposed “gains” from Book Flood may have been pre-existing differences. One book flood study had a sounder design and a positive result, and it was included in NLP. A provocative pattern emerged from that analysis. Three studies, including book flood, showed positive benefits for encouraging reading and three did not. The three that did had second-language learners reading independently in English, and the three negatives had the kids reading in their home languages. The English learners in the positive studies were very isolated from English and had little opportunity to hear it, see it, or use it beyond their school lessons, and this might have been why this treatment was successful. It’s funny that having kids read in their home language had no impact on their reading skills, sort of like the SSR studies with native English speakers.
3. Glenn repeats the incorrect claim that the NRP set aside studies of SSR that did not include oral reading fluency outcomes. That is not the case. That was claimed many years ago by Jim Cunningham whose critique was rife with that kind of misinformation. Glenn apparently believed the critic but failed to check this out himself. Nope, NRP did not miss some big group of SSR studies that focused on comprehension. Didn’t happen. Those studies were ALL included.
4. Glenn confuses the effects of independent reading with the effectiveness of the methods used to get kids to read more. That is a huge interpretive problem. That reading CAN have positive effects is not proof that particular ways of encouraging kids to read more will be effective (maybe not all approaches for encouraging kids to read work). I remember when Newt Gingrich set up a program to pay kids to read during the summer. Lots of school people set up a howl that claimed to pay kids to read would be ineffective. The assumption behind such complaints is that the Gingrich approach is a bad one, not that reading is bad for kids. The fact that SSR has almost no impact on kids learning (average effect sizes are a negligible .05 to .10) should bother people who want to encourage kids to read since if it doesn’t work, something else should be tried. (Since NRP various researchers, such as James Kim, have been conducting studies where they try to get a learning effect from encouraging reading. They are having a heck of a time of it, because it turns out it is not that easy to get kids to increase their reading enough to make a difference, but we are certainly learning important things from their efforts—more than we are the folks who are clinging to the failed SSR methodology).
5. Glenn attributed causality to studies that show a correlation between the amount of reading and reading quality. Doing that opens the door to lots of quack remedies to reading problems like eye movement training, learning styles, balance beam exercises, etc.—all of which claim effectiveness on the basis of such correlations. A bigger problem with correlations is the fact that the relationship between two variables can be due to their relationship with an intervening variable. I’m surprised those who push these correlations as evidence don’t bother to control for the effects of parent’s socioeconomic status. When you do that, the correlation between the amount of reading and reading ability drops dramatically. Kids whose parents have high incomes and high education read more than kids who don’t. (Shhh! Don’t tell the teachers: they might not use SSR if they knew that was the evidence on which it was based). Glenn expresses concern that teachers have stopped using SSR because of the NRP finding that it had insufficient evidence showing it works. He apparently thinks it is bad that teachers have dropped this ineffective approach. Interestingly, Glenn suggests some ways to improve SSR—and all of his recommendations make it more like instruction, very different from the SSR designs recommended in textbooks or evaluated by research or that one commonly sees practiced in actual classrooms (but more like the reading comprehension interventions that have been found to be so effective). That’s good advice in my opinion, but it makes me wonder why such a smart man is insistent that teachers continue to use such problematic approaches instead of pushing hard for alternative procedures like the ones he notes.
6. Another area I talked of in my article was the findings being reported for studies of reading to children. It turns out that almost none of those studies have reading outcomes, and that the oral language measure used to evaluate the effectiveness of these procedures (simple receptive vocabulary) has a very low relationship with later reading achievement. Glenn’s response is that reading to children has been shown to have a close connection to pre-reading skills… in other words, he takes a “skills-based approach to reading rather than a meaning-based approach focused on comprehension.” Wow, that is a very different standard than the one he had a page or two earlier for the NRP. It is those inconsistencies that undermine his arguments: he wants to be able to cherry-pick the evidence that supports his case, no matter what measures were used or how badly the studies were executed, and he wants to be able to ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit with what he wants teachers to do.

  Ultimately, that’s why these large public syntheses of research studies by scientists are so important. They are an antidote to the priesthood of professors who claim to be the ones who know best what needs to be done in schools, even as they obscure their claims in mysterious evidentiary standards and inconsistent logic.

Here’s a big idea that can save your school district a lot of money and teachers and kids a lot of time: reading comprehension tests cannot be used to diagnose reading problems.

This isn’t a traditional educator complaint about reading tests; I’m pro reading test. The typical reading comprehension test (e.g, Gates-MacGinitie, Stanford, Metropolitan, Iowa, state accountability assessment) is valid, reliable, reasonably respectful of students from varied cultures… and, yet, those tests cannot be used diagnostically.

The problem isn’t with the tests, it’s just a fact based on the nature of reading ability. Reading is complicated. It involves a bunch of skills that need to be used either simultaneously or in amazingly rapid sequence. Reading comprehension tests do a great job of identifying who has trouble with reading, but they can’t sort out why students struggle. Is it a comprehension problem or did the student fail to decode? Maybe the youngster decoded the words, just fine, but didn’t know the word meanings. Or could she read the text fluently, with the pauses in the right places within sentences? Of course, none of those might be problems: maybe the student really had trouble thinking about the ideas.

Because reading is a hierarchy of skills that must be used simultaneously, failures with low-level skills necessarily undermine higher level ones (like interpreting ideas in the text). Because every comprehension question has to be answered on the basis of decoding, interpretations of word meanings, use of prior knowledge, analysis of sentence syntax, etc., it is impossible to find patterns of student performance on a typical reading comprehension test that can tell you anything.

That is also a reason why items are so highly intercorrelated in reading comprehension tests.

The companies that offer to analyze kids test results to provide you with an instructional map of their comprehension needs are offering something of no value. If a main idea question is hard, all your kids will need help with main ideas. If several inferential questions are bunched at the end of the test and some of your kids don’t finish all the items, you’ll find out that most of your kids need help with inferencing.

No scheme for analyzing item responses on comprehension tests is reliable and none has been validated empirically. Those schemes simply don’t work, except to separate schools from their money.

  For the past 25 years, NEA has periodically surveyed American adults to find out about their literary reading habits (literary referring to fiction, poetry, drama, and the like). In 2002, they indicated that there were nearly 7.5 percent fewer adults reading literature than in any past survey and it wouldn't be too much to say that the NEA thought that signaled the end of Western civilization as we know it.

  Some observers, me included, pointed out that such a big drop in such a short period was puzzling and improbable, and that perhaps people were reading just as much, just not fiction.

  I know in my own personal life, I mix my reading up pretty good. I just read several novels in a row, so to keep fresh, I have started in on Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, a history (albeit with a somewhat literary bent in its styling).

  The new NEA census indicates that since 2002 the readership of literature has climbed by 3.5% and that more American adults read literature than at any time since they started their studies.

  Not surprisingly, NEA couldn't pin this great success on anything. It is totally unclear what might have changed these habits so quickly and what it means (except maybe that Western civilization has been saved after all).

  I think the biggest problem in this discussion is the conflating of literacy with literary reading. The NEA has chosen to use its past reports to expound on the idea that young people are lost because they aren't partaking in literary pursuits and that this means they can't read and can't think as well as their predecessors.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, that is bunk!

  Young people are increasingly doing their reading in electronic forms and using their reading for purposes other than literary. That neither means that they have stopped reading nor stopped thinking.

  Here's a new hypothesis on what happened in 2002: America was wracked by the terrorism that hit near the end of 2001, and we plunged into a very difficult war (while debating entering another potentially devastating war in Iraq). Those terrible public events increased interest in understanding terrorism, Middle Eastern politics, war, public events, and religion (Koran sales rose, for instance). Yes, readers could have turned to literature to explore their feelings of anger and impotence, rage and retaliation. Instead, maybe what they did was turned to reading to feed their more rational impulses. Maybe we weren't as concerned about how we felt about things as about what we needed to know to take appropriate action.

  The NEA survey treats the reading of history, world culture, public affairs, religion, and current events as being non-literary, and by implication of their argument, non-literate. The literacy that we need must be broader than that, however: our reading ability needs to allow us to make sense of a chemistry text, a Time magazine article, a biography of Osama Bin Laden, the manifesto from the Unabomber, or the President's most recent speech... not just Vanity Fair, The Pickwick Papers, or even The Kite Runner.

  Fiction and poetry do fulfill very real human needs, but most adults do not seek to fulfill those particular needs 24/7. Other reading experiences can enable other worthwhile human pursuits. And, sometimes reading isn't even the best place to turn (surveys suggest people sought more family time, for instance, after 9/11--maybe that, too, is where some of the literary reading was shed temporarily).

  The implication of NEA's previous reports is that schools must do more to encourage literary reading. The swings in the amount of literary reading from period to period, suggest that the type of reading one engages in is due more to contemporary needs than education. People use reading to fulfill their needs. Schools should redouble their efforts to increase the depth and quality of the reading that its students can engage in, and expose students to a wide range of texts and uses of reading. That way, whether the individual is trying to improve their sexual prowess (The Joy of Sex), enhance their ability to be a citizen (Dreams of My Father), or trying to find out how to cope emotionally with the death of a spouse (The Sea),  they will have a book (or a website) to turn to.

  For example, in an article by Kathleen Manzo:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/01/08/18read.h28.html

  former Assistant Education Secretary Susan B. Neuman, is quoted as saying, “The report is all about code because code is what has been studied, but what we know is that code alone is not going to solve our educational problems.” She goes on to complain that the qualitative studies "on effective instruction" were not included.

  But the NELP report is a seven-chapter book with only one chapter about teaching the code. The rest of it is about oral language development, reading to children, parent programs, and so on. In other words, Susan either didn't read the report before weighing in on its deficiencies or she missed 80 percent of the document in that reading. Oops.

  I was puzzled at how qualitative studies could possibly prove instruction to be effective... that's not the kind of mistake Susan makes as an editor or scholar. She knows better.

  Stephen Krashen, the linguist, weighed in, too, with a letter to Kathleen's blog. Krashen complains the panel "did not consider" most of the important outcomes of reading to children that Jim Trelease has proposed. In fact, the panel examined ALL of the outcomes that have been studied in research and that have been linked with children's literacy learning.

  Instead of being upset about Jim Trelease's unsubstantiated claims, Krashen's complaint is with the researchers for not substantiating them without data!

  Krashen finds the oral language findings of NELP to be sound and the code findings to be terrible, even though they are based on the same kinds of data, data analysis, and logic (code studies are bad, according to Krashen, because they are linked only to primary grade reading comprehension tests and the language studies are good because they are linked only to primary grade reading comprehension tests). Oh well, I guess foolish consistency must be the hobgoblin of small minds.

Reading all of this made me wonder if the real complaints aren't that this report might undercut the critics' credibility with the public. After all, the critics have often claimed that their prescriptions follow the research (albeit based on pretty flimsy evidence). Of course, that's the reason the government has supported these research syntheses -- to let the public know which sales routines are based on facts and which ones are, well, just sales routines.

  The federal government invests a whole lot more in “kid literacy” than in teen literacy (we invest nearly $20 billion per year on Head Start, Reading First, and Title I reading programs, and about $30 million on Striving Readers). The same pattern is true in the states as well, and if you look at school standards, accountability monitoring, and the professional development of teachers, you see a definite tilt towards younger kids when it comes to reading.

  It’s not just the inputs that differ either. National Assessment data show that kids are improving more in reading early on than the upper grades. The pattern is slow growth versus early on followed by stagnation. Our young kids do well in international comparisons, while our older kids get creamed.

  Part of the problem is that the idea that learning to read is something accomplished by the time kids are in third grade. That reading development can extend through a lifetime is not widely recognized. Older kids could do better if we are willing to teach them longer than we have traditionally. We need more explicit learning standards for older students, better preparation for their teachers, curricula, instructional materials, and programs for those who fall behind if we are going to get kids to higher levels of achievement.

  The problem isn’t entirely due to official neglect and lack of funding. Another problem is that the field has been distracted; those who should be figuring out how to most effectively extend instruction up the grades have been exploring youth culture instead.

  The theory is that youth now confronts many literacies in their daily lives, that these literacies are cognitively demanding, and multimodal (including reading film, television, Gangsta Rap, web pages, and other non-reading literacy). It is often claimed that these literacies are cognitively more demanding than the ones taught in school. So if kids are learning and using these challenging literacies on their own, why so much trouble advancing academically in school? This problem is attributed to the cultural mismatch between school literacy and the literacy of youth culture that has alienated kids from the mainstream. In other words, kids come to value the literacy they have learned on their own because it buys them entrée into the real world, and so they reject and refuse to learn the literacy of school. Some scholars want to celebrate these new literacies (go video games), while others hope to turn these insights into teaching nostrums: such as the idea that we should teach popular culture; the more we focus on Hip Hop the better the kids will recognize the relevance of school literacy.

  There are some problems with these theories, though I certainly think it is a good idea to monitor the use of literacy in society, including within youth culture. One basic flaw is the claim that the skills students use when playing videograms are commensurate with those evident in reading. We don’t have good measures of cognitive equivalence across tasks, so there just isn’t convincing support for the idea that understanding the conflict in a video war is equal to understanding the conflicts in a novel like, The Scarlet Letter.

  Even more flawed is the idea of the prevalence of these new literacy practices among youth. The researchers seem to be trying to “prove” that such literacy practices are widespread through case study examples. But looks at normative practices of IM-ing and the like do not reveal that all youth are so engaged. In fact, such practices tend to be highly skewed towards particular economic levels (at which school literacy attainment tends to be high anyway). Hollywood loves to feature teen whiz kids who sneak into the Pentagon computers and access the missile launch codes or straighten out the credit crisis for our banks. The image is cute, but not very accurate.

  The reason that a lot of kids can use literacy in these new ways is most likely because they are appropriating the literacy taught them at school for their own purposes (as has been done by literacy users since scribes began incising characters on clay tablets). A nationwide study of literacy practices among teens and young adults would be informative, and I suspect they would show that the kids who were doing well with traditional literacy were the ones most likely to explore new literacies.

  Ultimately, these ideas foundered on the premise that we should teach popular culture and the literacy practices of youth in school. If you want to kill youth culture, then try to appropriate it. Instead of romanticizing the use of these non-school literacies, we need to recognize their limitations. As Don Leu and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut have been showing, teens may be using the Internet, but they are not sophisticated users by any means. School needs to stay to the business of teaching kids to read a demanding and difficult text and to be thoughtful and critical in those readings. My observations tell me that the reading of youth culture tends to be relatively simple, derivative of school practices, and not very deep or critical. Sometimes it is best to tend to your own knitting, and I suspect that is the case here. We need a lot more attention on school literacy all the way up through Grade 12; let’s trust that kids will figure out Hip Hop and Xbox for themselves.

Do all students need work with fluency?

No, not all students need work with fluency, but most elementary students do. Some students are so good with fluency that they apparently can read almost any book so well that it sounds like they can understand it. As a population of students goes through school, an increasingly large proportion of them will be fluent at the highest levels. This means that fewer students will need fluency work as time goes on.

Our students are getting low scores in reading comprehension. Why aren’t we focusing on that instead of fluency?

Low comprehension scores can mean many things. They might mean that your students have poor knowledge of word meanings or that their fluency is limited, or that they lack strategies for making sense of a text. We need to address all areas of reading progress; fluency is just one of them.

How much fluency teaching are we expected to provide?

Schools should provide students with up to 30 minutes a day of fluency instruction or more if more than 2 hours of reading instruction is provided. But remember, this is across all classes. If every class did 10 minutes of fluency work once or twice each week, that would be sufficient.

What do you mean “up to 30 minutes a day?”

If a student is fluent with the course materials and the teacher checks on this regularly, then there is nothing more to do with fluency. However, if a student is not fluent, then the school should find ways to provide 30 minutes per day of this kind of instruction. That could mean that some students do very little direct work with fluency, while others spend a full quarter time of the framework on fluency.

How do I keep from embarrassing my low readers?

Fluency work is a practice activity, not much different from Michael Jordan shooting free throws to get ready for the big game. Practice usually isn’t embarrassing, as long as everyone sees it as practice.  Most students enjoy fluency work as it is involving and they can see their own improvement. Don’t do much round robin reading, where one student reads and everyone else follows along; paired situations are much better as long as they don’t single anyone out. Talk to the class at the very beginning to make sure that they understand the purpose of this practice, and what to expect.

How do I pair the kids?

Don’t make a big deal out of pairing up, as this can be a real time waster. One rule is to make sure that the students who are working together on a given day are using the same book. That’s easy in most classrooms. A second rule is not to pair up the same kids all the time; they differ in their ability to give feedback, so share the wealth.

What kind of texts should we use for fluency?

Many teachers like to select special texts for this work, such as poetry. However, we really want students to become fluent with prose, so practice with prose materials is essential. Any material that you are using in class for reading comprehension or in a content subject such as social studies or science are ideal.

I've been told the texts should be easy for kids to read?

Actually, research says the opposite. In repeated oral reading activities, it is more productive to work with texts that are challenging--even frustration level. It takes more rereading, of course, but kids learn more from such practice.

Doesn’t silent reading improve fluency?

Of course, silent reading can help fluency. Kids who read a lot will usually be pretty fluent. Unfortunately, teachers can only be sure if their students are fluent if they listen to them read. Paired reading becomes a great opportunity for this. Silent reading only works when the students are actually reading, and not just looking at pictures or turning pages.

How do I know that fluency activities such as paired reading or chunking actually work?

Nothing works automatically, you have to make them work. However, research indicates that the various techniques that are being recommended have worked successfully in other schools with students at a variety of age levels. Over time, fluency ability transfers to other texts.

I work with very young children. Do you recommend fluency work for them?

When children are first getting started with real reading, you actually want them to be somewhat disfluent. That is, you want the reading to go slowly enough that each word stands out on its own. Fingerpoint reading is the starting point. However, once students begin to read, the fluency goal is the same as with older children.

When you observe in classes, what are the biggest problems that you see with fluency instruction?

The biggest problem is teachers often fail to teach fluency at all, and students fall further and further behind as the texts get harder. Another problem is the reliance on round robin reading, which is a real time waster compared with paired reading. Finally, even when teachers do have students work on fluency, there often is little or no repetition, so the students do not necessarily become fluent (they just read the material aloud and then move on).

I visited schools yesterday that used to DIBEL. You know what I mean, the teachers used to give kids the DIBELS assessments to determine how they were doing in fluency, decoding, and phonemic awareness. DIBELS has been controversial among some reading experts, but I’ve always been supportive of such measures (including PALS, TPRI, Ames-web, etc.). I like that they can be given quickly to provide a snapshot of where kids are.

I was disappointed that they dropped the tests and asked why. “Too much time,” they told me, and when I heard their story I could see why. This was a district that like the idea of such testing, but their consultants had pressured them into repeating it every week for at-risk kids. I guess the consultants were trying to be rigorous, but eventually, the schools gave up on it altogether.

The problem isn’t the test, but the silly testing policies. Too many schools are doing weekly or biweekly testing and it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s as foolish as checking your stock portfolio every day or climbing on the scale daily during a diet. Experts in those fields understand that too much assessment can do harm, so they advise against it.

Frequent testing is misleading and it leads to bad decisions. Investment gurus, for example, suggest that you look at your portfolio only every few months. Too many investors look at a day’s stock losses and sell in a panic because they don’t understand that such losses happen often—and that long term such losses mean nothing. 

The same kind of thing happens with dieting. You weigh yourself and see that you’re down 2 pounds, so what the heck, you can afford to eat that slice of chocolate cake. But your weight varies through the day as you work through the nutrition cycle (you don’t weigh 130, but someplace between 127 and 133). So, when your weight jumps from 130 to 128, you think “bring on the desert” when you real weight hasn't actually changed since yesterday.

And the same kind of thing happens with DIBELS. Researchers investigated the standard error of measurement (SEM) of tests like DIBELS (Poncy, Skinner, & Axtell, 2005 in the Journal of Psychoeducational Measurement) and found standard errors of 4 to 18 points with oral reading fluency. That’s the amount that the test scores jump around. 

They found that you could reduce the standard error by testing with multiple passages (something that DIBELS recommends, but most schools ignore). But, testing with multiple passages only got the SEM down to 4 to 12 points.

 What does that mean? Well, for example, second graders improve in words correct per minute (WCPM) in oral reading about 1 word per week. That means it would take 4 to 12 weeks of average growth for the youngster to improve more than a standard error of measurement.

If you test Bobby at the beginning of second grade and he gets a 65 wcpm in oral reading, then you test him a week later and he has a 70, has his score improved? That looks like a lot of growth, but it is within a standard error so it may just be test noise. If you test him again in week 3, he might get a 68, and week 4 he could reach 70 again, and so on. Has his reading improved, declined, or stagnated? Frankly, you can’t tell in this time frame because on average a second grader will improve about 3 words in that time, but the test doesn’t have the precision to identify reliably a 3-point gain. The scores could be changing because of Bobby’s learning, or because of the imprecision of the measurement. You simply can't tell.

Stop the madness. Let’s wait 3 or 4 months, still a little quick, perhaps, but since we use multiple passages to estimate reading levels it is probably is okay. In that time frame, Bobby should gain about 12-16 words correct per minute if everything is on track. If the new testing reveals gains that are much lower than that, then we can be sure there is a problem, and we can make some adjustment to instruction. Testing more often can’t help, but it might hurt!