Many years ago, when I was a primary grade teacher, I was struggling to teach reading. I knew I was supposed to have groups for different levels of kids, but in those days information about how to make those grouping decisions was not imparted to mere undergraduates. I knew I was supposed to figure out which books would provide the optimal learning experience, but I had no technology to do this.

  So, I enrolled in a master’s degree program and started studying to be a reading specialist. During that training I learned how to administer informal reading inventories (IRI) and cloze tests and what the criteria were for independent, instructional, and frustration levels. Consequently, I tested all my students, and matched books to IRI levels using the publisher’s readability levels. I had no doubt that it improved my teaching and students’ learning.

  I maintained my interest in this issue when I went off for my doctorate. I worked with Jack Pikulski. Jack had written about informal reading inventories (he’d studied with Johnson and Kress), and as a clinical psychologist he was interested in the validity of these measures. He even sent a bunch of grad students to an elementary school to test a bunch of kids, but nothing ever came of that study. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from Jack about that issue.

  He had (has) a great clinical sense and he was skeptical of my faith in the value of those instructional level results. He recognized that informal reading inventories were far from perfect instruments and that at best they had general accuracy. They might be able to specify a wide range of materials for a student (say from grade 2 to 4), but that they couldn’t do better than that. (Further complicating things were the readability estimates. These had about the same level of accuracy.)

  For Jack, the combination of two such rough guestimates was very iffy stuff. I liked the certainty of it though and clung to that for a while (until my own clinical sense grew more sophisticated).

  Early in my scholarly career, I tracked down the source of the idea of independent, instructional, and frustration levels. It came from Emmett Betts’ textbook. He attributed the scheme to a study conducted by one of his doctoral students. I tracked down that dissertation and to my dismay it was evident that they had just made up those designations without any empirical evidence, something I wrote about 30 years ago!

  Since then, readability measures have improved quite a bit, but our technologies for setting reading levels have not. Studies by William Powell in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s showed that the data that we were using did not result in an identification of optimum levels of student learning. He suggested more liberal placement criteria, particularly for younger students. More liberal criteria would mean that instead of accepting 95% word reading accuracy as Betts had suggested, Powell identified 85% as the better predictor of learning—which would mean putting kids in relatively more difficult books. 

  Consequently, I have sought studies that would support the original contention that we could facilitate student learning by placing kids in the right levels of text. Of course, guided reading and leveled books are so widely used it would make sense that there would be lots of evidence as to their efficacy. 

  Except that there is not. I keep looking and I keep finding studies that suggest that kids can learn from text written at very different levels (like the studies cited below by Morgan and O’Connor).

  How can that be? Well, basically we have put way too much confidence in an unproven theory. The model of learning underlying that theory is too simplistic. Learning to read is an interaction between a learner, a text, and a teacher. Instructional level theory posits that the text difficulty level relative to the student reading level is the important factor in learning. But that ignores the guidance, support, and scaffolding provided by the teacher.

  If the teacher is doing little to support the students’ transactions with text then I suspect more learning will accrue with somewhat easier texts. However, if reasonable levels of instructional support are available then students are likely to thrive when working with harder texts.

  The problem with guided reading and similar schemes is that they are focused on helping kids to learn with minimal amounts of teaching (something Pinnell and Fountas have stated explicitly in at least some editions of their textbooks). But that switches the criterion. Instead of trying to get kids to optimum levels, that is the levels that would allow them to learn most, they have striven to get kids to levels where they will likely learn best with minimal teacher support.

  The common core standards push back against the notion that students learn best when they receive the least teaching. The standards people want to know what it takes for kids to learn most, even if the teacher has to be deeply involved. For them, challenging text is the right ground to maximize learning… but the only way that will work is if kids are getting substantial teaching support in the context of that hard text.

  P.S. Although Lexiles have greatly improved readability assessment (shrinking standard errors of measurement and improving the amount of comprehension variance that can be explained by text difficulty), and yet we are in no better shape than before since there are no studies indicating that if you teach students at particular Lexile levels more learning will accrue. (I suspect that if future studies go down this road, they will still find that the answer to that issue is variable; it will depend on the amount and quality of instructional support).

References

Betts, E. A. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. New York: American Book Company. 

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B. R., & 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., Swanson, H. L., & Geraghty, C. (2010). Improvement in reading rate under independent and difficult text levels: Influences on word and comprehension skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 1–19.

Pinnell, G. S., & Fountas, I. C. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Powell, W. R. (1968). Reappraising the criteria for interpreting informal inventories. Washington, DC: ERIC 5194164.

Shanahan, T. (1983). The informal reading inventory and the instructional level: The study that never took place. In L. Gentile, M. L. Kamil, & J. Blanchard (Eds.), Reading research revisited, (pp. 577–580). Columbus, OH: Merrill.

  Reading educators going back to the 1930s, including me, have championed the idea of there being an instructional level. That basically means that students would make the greatest learning gains if they are taught out of books that are at their “instructional” level – meaning that the text is neither so hard that the students can’t make sense of them or so easy that there is nothing in them left to learn.

  These days the biggest proponents of that idea have been Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, at Ohio State. Their “guided reading” notion has been widely adopted by teachers across the country. The basic premises of guided reading include the idea that children learn to read by reading, that they benefit from some guidance and support from a teacher during this reading, and, most fundamentally, that this reading has to take place in texts that are “just right” in difficulty level. A major concern of the guided-readingistas has been the fear that “children are reading texts that are too difficult for them.”

  That’s the basic idea, and then the different experts have proposed a plethora of methods for determining student reading levels, text difficulty levels, and for matching kids to books, and for guiding or scaffolding student learning. Schemes like Accelerated Reader, Read 180, informal reading inventories, leveled books, high readability textbooks, and most core or basal reading programs all adhere to these basic ideas, even though there are differences in how they go about it.

  The common core is based upon a somewhat different set of premises. They don’t buy that there is an optimum student-text match that facilitates learning. Nor are they as hopeful that students will learn to read from reading (with the slightest assists from a guide), but believe that real learning comes from engagement with very challenging text and a lot of scaffolding. The common core discourages lots of out-of-level teaching, and the use of particularly high readability texts. In other words, it champions approaches to teaching that run counter to current practice.

  How could the common core put forth such a radical plan that contradicts so much current practice?

  The next few entries in this blog will consider why common core is taking this provocative approach and why that might be a very good thing for children’s learning.

  Stay tuned.

  One of the most persuasive pieces of evidence they considered was a report, “Reading: Between the Lines,” published by American College Testing (ACT; 2006). This report shows the primacy of text in reading and the value of having students spend time reading challenging text in the upper grades.

  Virtually every reading comprehension test and instructional program makes a big deal out of the different kinds of questions that can be asked about text. You’d be hard pressed these days to find teachers or principals who don’t know that literal recall questions that require a reader to find or remember what an author wrote are supposed to be harder than inferential questions (the ones that require readers to make judgments and recognize the implications of what the author wrote).

  Similarly, in our fervor to use data and to facilitate better test performance, it has become common practice to analyze student test performance by question type, and then to try to teach the specific skills required by those questions. There are even commercial programs that you can buy that emphasize practice with main ideas, drawing conclusions, specific details, and the like.

  There is only one problem with these schemes, according to ACT: they don’t work. In Reading: Between the Lines, ACT demonstrates that student performance cannot be differentiated in any meaningful way by question type. Students do not perform differently if they are answering literal recall items or inferential items (or other question types like main idea or vocabulary, either). Test performance, according to ACT, is driven by text rather than questions. Thus, if students are asked to read a hard passage, they may only answer a few questions correctly, no matter what types of questions they may be. On the other hand, with an easy enough text, students may answer almost any questions right, again with no differences by question type.

  Thus, the ACT report shows that though different questions types make no difference in performance outcomes, but that text difficulty matters quite a bit (and this conclusion based on an analysis of data drawn from 563,000 students). One can ask any kind of question about any text — without regard to text difficulty.

  What are reading comprehension standards? They tend to be numbered lists of cognitive processes or question types. Standards require students “to quote accurately from text,” to “determine two or more main ideas of a text,” or to “explain how main ideas are supported by key details,” and so on. But if question types (or standards) don’t distinguish reading performance and text difficulty does, then standards should make the ability to interpret hard texts a central requirement.

  And, this is exactly what the common core standards have done. They make text difficulty a central feature of the standards. In the reading comprehension standards at every grade level and for every type of comprehension (literary, informational, social studies/history, science/technology), there is a standard that says something along the lines of, by the end of the year, students will be able to independently read and comprehend texts written in a specified text complexity band.

  The ACT report goes on to describe features that made some texts harder to understand, including the complexity of the relationships among characters and ideas, amount and sophistication of the information detailed in the text, how the information is organized, the author’s style and tone, the vocabulary, and the author purpose. ACT concluded that based on these data, “performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not” (p. 16-17).

  Last week, I explained the evidence about the importance of text difficulty that was provided by the ACT. This week, I want to expand upon that explanation to show some of the other evidence that the authors of the common core depended upon, evidence that has been persuasively described and summarized by Marilyn Jager Adams in an article published in the American Educator (2010-2011).

  Adams synthesized the information from various studies of textbook difficulty and learning, to demonstrate that textbook readabilities for Grades 4–12 have significantly and steadily grown easier since 1919; the difficulty of what adults are expected to read increased during that same time; and there is a relationship between the easing of text difficulty and students’ lower performance on the SAT. Obviously, if these things are true, one would want to ratchet (as the common core does) the difficulty of textbooks back up so that students would be better prepared for the actual reading demands beyond school.

  Chall and her colleagues (Chall, Conard, & Harris, 1991) found that despite the fact that SAT passages had been getting easier, scores were declining anyway. Nevertheless, they found that textbooks were getting easier even faster than the SAT, and that reading these easier books appeared to provide poor preparation for dealing with the SAT. Even more convincing was a much larger study (Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996) that examined the readabilities of 800 elementary, middle school, and high school textbooks published between 1919–1991. Hayes and his team correlated the trends in text simplification with student performance on the SAT and found a good fit, concluding that “Long-term exposure to simpler texts may induce a cumulating deficit in the breadth and depth of domain-specific knowledge, lowering reading comprehension and verbal achievement.” Also, the texts used in high school have been found to be significantly easier than the texts students confront after they leave high school; in fact, young people make bigger reading gains during the years following high school than during it (Kirsch & Jungeblut, 1991).

  Thus, these correlational data suggest that students will learn more from working with challenging texts than from the so-called “low readability, high interest” books that have become an educational staple. This approach is similar to that taken by athletes: To get stronger, you need to use more physical resistance than your muscles are used to; the more you do, the more you will be capable of doing, so it is essential to increase the workload.

  The counter-argument to this heavier-books approach is the widespread belief that there is an optimum difficulty level for texts used to teach students to read. According to instructional level theory, if a text is written at a level that is too difficult for students, then they will become frustrated and discouraged and will not learn. Instructional level theory not only doesn't agree with the idea that learning comes from working with hard books, but claims that little or no learning would accrue if the books are too hard relative to student performance levels.

  The evidence that supports the challenging-text approach obviously has some research support, but this is correlational in nature. Students seem to do better when they get a steady diet of more challenging text, but I would feel much better about this evidence if it were experimental and if there wasn't such a long-cherished counterargument. Given that, the next installment will weigh the evidence that supports the idea of there being an optimum level of text difficulty that fosters learning.

  The study looked at how students thought about and reasoned about the complex information that they were asked to read. The scholar had challenged the kids with a collection of complex texts and videos.

  The reason for my chagrin was not the design or results of the study, but the reaction of the researcher. The kids had evidenced examples of sophisticated and complex reading/thinking behaviors, without instruction. The researcher wanted to celebrate the fact that these kids had exhibited sophisticated reasoning as they read.

  I was disappointed with my friend’s willingness (remember this is a good teacher) to accept what kids could do without any evident dissatisfaction. I’m certainly not suggesting that my young friend should have ignored the strengths these kids brought to the table (and kids have wonderful strengths), but I am perplexed at how easily satisfied teachers have become.

  My take on the study was that the measurement scale had to be screwy. If the instrument used to evaluate student thinking showed that kids could already interpret challenging texts at high levels without much instructional support, then we needed a more sensitive scale capable of showing what these students could still not do. Instead of doing a victory dance in the end zone, we ought to be trying to figure out what instruction could add to the picture.

  My hunch is that an errant measurement scale led the researcher to accept average levels of functioning (which most people could accomplish without schooling) as being the peak of performance, and I suspect such errors are common in American education. We have lost our sense of the power of teaching.

  When we see a youngster with an ACT of 18, we interpret it as both a statement of what he can do, and a prognosis of what he will ever be able to do. The test score becomes both thermometer and barometer, reading the current temperature and predicting future rain. But tests don’t have that power; they are like Scrooge’s Ghost of the Things to Come. The future of what any of us will be able to know or do is not in our past test results, but those things lie in the teaching and learning opportunities that will be available to us.

  Sadly, I can think of a lot of examples of teachers backing away from teaching when they see that kids may struggle: a book is hard, so we use an easier book or no book at all; kids are challenged by reading, so use video; kids have trouble interpreting character's emotional states in stories, so stop asking questions about why the characters are making the choices that they do; a student stops believing in himself or has no aspirations, then accept the status quo and neither push nor entice.

  All teachers need a sense of what the top of the scale looks like. They may need time working with struggling learners (something we make sure reading specialists do), but also with students who perform exceedingly well, who really do get to the top of the scale. Knowledge of what levels of performance are possible is something that can be taught.

  But this knowledge ultimately must be bolstered with something that cannot be taught so easily: teachers must believe in the power of teaching, too. Teachers have to know that teaching can reduce the distance between what students can do now and the achievements that we aspire for them. Our job, ultimately, is to aspire high for our students and then to use our teaching abilities to help kids negotiate those distances.

  And who can disagree? Poverty is horrible, and children in poverty should be an affront to our sensibilities. The correlations are clear: poverty kids are less safe, less secure, less healthy, and, yes, indeed, they do less well in school.

  But while I don’t disagree with either the claim that poverty matters in children’s education and that children’s poverty needs to be alleviated, I also don’t think poverty gives us any respite from our responsibilities as educators.

  The Bush administration emphasized schools only (as opposed to parents) in its educational policies, in an effort to make sure that educators grasped their responsibility for increasing learning. I think that approach goes too far, as there are many ways that parents and communities can help support kids’ learning and we ought to take advantage of every lever that we have.

  Likewise, however, we cannot afford to give into the kind of fatalism that afflicts too many of our colleagues. There is plenty that can be done to improve the education of poverty children beyond the things that the housing community, health community, economic development community, and others are doing; they are the ones who fight for lead abatement, nutrition programs, and jobs (of course, we can support those efforts politically and through our own charitable giving and volunteer work). But we are the ones who fight illiteracy and our professional emphasis should be on trying to increase students’ learning no matter how bad their life situations may be.

  Educators should focus their attention on making sure that teachers are well-prepared to serve the children in high poverty schools; and that the certification, hiring practices, and economic supports are arrayed in ways that will attract and keep good teachers in such schools. We need to be the proponents of longer school days and school years. We need to be the ones who argue for policies that encourage the thoughtful application of research findings to practice; for intensive and extensive professional development for teachers; for a sufficiency of high quality materials and programs (no, teachers should not be expected to teach without such support); for research dollars targeted on solving real problems.

  Poverty is terrible and it impacts children’s ability to learn. But anyone who spends much time observing teaching in high poverty schools knows that poverty is often a lousy excuse for not giving these children the teaching they deserve.

  Recently, I received a letter: “I am writing to you because members of our state’s Department of Education believe that there is no alignment between the Common Core Standards and Reading First. Do you know of any document that aligns these two approaches for the early grades?” Clearly, the writer is concerned that the gains and improvements made through Reading First may be lost as attention shifts to the new common core, a fair point.

  Unfortunately, I am not aware of any document that provides such a comparison, so I wrote my own. And here it is:

  There are continuities, contrasts, and clear disagreements across the federally-supported Reading First (RF) effort and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I have tried to detail these below.

 Continuities. Both CCSS and RF require(d) the teaching of:

1) Phonological awareness in K-1;

2) Phonics in K-3;

3) Oral reading fluency in grades 1-3;

4) Vocabulary (word meaning) K-3.

  Anyone who may have anticipated a retreat from the curricular focus of Reading First will likely be disappointed. The key pillars of RF are still intact — now in the form of specific curricular goals that are to be accomplished at particular grade levels.

Discontinuities. But there are several key differences between CCSS and RF as well.

1) RF required the teaching of reading comprehension strategies; CCSS, on the other hand, does not require such teaching and emphasizes greater attention to the meaning of texts (in other words, less strategy teaching and more focus on the text content).

2) RF required that the approaches used to teach reading be proven to work through research; CCSS is, generally, silent about HOW the teaching is to proceed (instruction is treated as a matter of state/local/individual choice).

3) RF required the adoption of a core program (CCSS is silent as to how to teach or what materials to use).

4) RF required the use of screening and monitoring tests, particularly with regard to phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency, while CCSS is silent about the use of such assessments (though they encourage formative testing of reading comprehension with older kids—3rd grade and up).

5) RF required that interventions be available for children who were not making sufficient learning progress; CCSS is silent on that issue.

6) RF required extensive professional development for teachers and principals (through various state and local mechanisms, including reading coaches); CCSS is silent on the value of professional development of any kind.

7) RF was silent about the difficulty of the text that children were to work with; CCSS is quite prescriptive about the readability levels of the texts that teachers must use.

8) RF was silent about the content of the texts that children were to read; CCSS is somewhat prescriptive in encouraging greater attention to canonical literature and the classics, and to the inclusion of informational text.

9) RF was silent about technology, while CCSS requires that students be taught to use technology.

10) RF only focused on reading, but required teachers/schools to follow their state’s English language arts requirements (for writing, spelling, oral language, etc.), while CCSS specifies instructional goals for these other areas of language teaching.

  Given these differences, it could mean that, under the common core, a state/district/teacher could simply do their own thing, and stop paying attention to the research, stop monitoring student learning, stop offering professional development for teachers and principals, stop using core materials, and stop their intervention programs… Although these items were required under RF, they clearly are not being emphasized in CCSS.

  However, there are some pretty good reasons not to retreat from those RF staples:

a). CCSS may not have many implementation requirements, but that doesn’t mean such requirements are gone. Both IDEA and Title I funding, for example, require several of these items be address including research-based teaching and formative assessment.

b). There is going to be increased pressure to succeed and several of the RF requirements tend to help schools to succeed. States and schools are now going to be compared on the same metrics going forward, which means that there will be even greater accountability pressure on teachers, principals, state superintendents, and now even on the governors themselves (letting everybody do their own thing, no matter how greatly such practices may deviate from research findings may not be something that those being evaluated will be willing to accept.

c). Most state data showed Reading First was supporting better reading achievement for the kids served, so why not build on existing knowledge and tools already available rather than starting all over again?

  I was asked recently by a reader of this blog what questions I would ask a prospective principal to make sure that I made the right hire. It’s a great query and I wasn’t ready for it. I rarely interview principals, so I wasn’t sitting on a bank of questions that would get at the key features of successful school leadership (though, I must admit asking a principal what kind of a golf club he or she would be looks like a lot of fun).

  My counsel to these teachers was that they should lean heavily on a meta-analysis of 27 studies of principal impact on academic achievement by Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe (Impact of Leadership on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Differential Effects of Leadership Types, Educational Administration Quarterly, 2008). It is an article that I use with my students as it is the most up-to-date and complete look at the impact of principal leadership on learning that I know.

  This study found that, indeed, principals could raise achievement, and that they were more likely to the more linked to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development issues that they were. Many principals try to be great managers (with spic and span floors, clean desks) or charismatic leaders (high on personality and motivation), but the research doesn’t suggest those to be the good hires.

  So, if I were conducting the interview and trying to find an effective leader for my school, a leader capable of raising reading achievement, I would ask the following research-based questions:

 Tim Shanahan's Patented Whiz-Bang Interview Questions for Prospective Principals (Sure to Identify Men and Women Able to Lead a School to Raise Reading Achievement)

1. What goals/expectations would you set for this school and how would you ensure consensus?

 2. What role would you play in the planning and coordinating of teaching and curriculum?

3. What role would you play in teacher learning and development?

4. How would you ensure an orderly and supportive learning environment?

5. How would you evaluate teaching effectiveness?

6. How would you evaluate the adequacy and appropriateness of the curriculum?

7. What would you look for in the hiring and assignment of teachers?

8. What would you prioritize in the resourcing of the school to ensure and support learning?

9. What would you look for in classroom visits, evaluations, and walk-throughs?

10. How would you communicate with teachers to help them improve their performance?

  And, of course, you could ask them, "Are you more like an oak tree or a weeping willow?"

  It makes logical sense. If text is too easy, there is nothing to be learned from it, and if it is too hard, it would be like trying to catch knives.

  And yet, I was surprised to find that text difficulty is hard to measure exactly (our measures have improved a bit since I was in grad school), and that readers’ levels of proficiency were pretty approximate too (this hasn’t improved much). The biggest surprise was the lack of clear research evidence showing the benefits of matching texts to kids (Jack tried such a study when I was there, but it fell apart over reliability issues and never was published).

  As a young professor, I wrote about how instructional level theory had entered the field seemingly through research (at least that was the claim), but I revealed that research base to be a chimera.

  In the 1980s, whole language influenced school books emerged. The state of California required the use of previously published literature as the basis of reading instruction (no research supporting that idea either) and banned any adaptation of such literature. So, publishers couldn’t adjust the readabilities of reading books, like they had with high school text books, and text levels got hard for a while. So hard in fact, that kids had trouble learning to read; especially first-graders. Teachers met the challenge by reading the books to the kids rather than having them do the reading themselves. Parents and grandparents rebelled. Their older children could read books that hadn’t already been read to them already, why couldn’t this younger group?

  One offshoot of this debacle was the growth of “guided reading” as an approach to teaching. Teachers certainly have preferred it to throwing kids in the deep end while fervently hoping mom and dad had already taught them to swim (a pretty good summary of the whole language ideology of that time). Fountas and Pinnell came up with a weakly validated measure of text difficulty and claimed that kids had to be matched to it to succeed. They counseled the minimization of explicit teaching and encouraged teachers to simply have children read texts at the correct level and that learning would simply happen for most as they read those matched books (to their credit they did support providing explicit help when progress did not ensue automatically).

  Given how widely used guided reading is, and how much sense it makes, particularly for beginning readers, one would think we have many studies showing the benefits of such an approach. In fact, the data are murkier than when I was in graduate school. It is not that various studies (such as those by Alissa Morgan, Renata O’Connor, and William Powell) haven’t pointed to optimum book-student matches, but that they have all pointed in different directions.

  Now, the common core standards are insisting that text difficulties be stiffened and that teachers not just move kids to easier books when the going gets tough. My fear, of course, is that such a fiat could simply lead us back to the 1980s, with teachers reading hard books to kids (guided reading is obviously preferable to that).

  First, the common core is probably setting levels that are too hard for beginners. There is a lot to be figured out by those kids with regard to decoding, and overwhelming them with really hard books is not going to facilitate their phonics progress. I hope we can persuade publishers and school districts to allow the path to be smoothed a bit for the little ones (I think they’ll progress faster under those circumstances). Second, for older students, the common core highlights some pretty important ideas: (1) that there is no particular level of text difficulty that has been consistently identified by research as being optimum; (2) that always having students reading text on their so-called reading level is like relegating them to training wheels forever; and (3) that most teachers don’t have a clue as to how to scaffold children’s learning from hard books. Mandate whatever you want, it won’t make teachers know how to implement any better.

  Later entries to this blog will pursue this idea, as teachers are going to have to grow new wings if they are going to make this flight successfully.

  I was asked if I would answer questions mailed in by the audience. I agreed, and below have included my answers. Thought they might be interesting to a larger audience, so here they are:

1. In our preschool classrooms, what are the top 5 techniques we should being using?

  Staying very close to the findings I would say: (a) definitely teach the alphabetic code; that means working with phonological awareness, letter names, and letter sounds (such teaching was found to be beneficial with kids in this age group and the teaching seemed to have long-lasting value); (b) also, it is a good idea to read books to children daily and to talk to them about what you are reading (ask them questions about it, explain the vocabulary, listen to their ideas, make connections to what they know)--reading to children in this way helps build their language; (c) involve children in writing (pretend writing, writing their names, dictating words/stories/ideas to you); (d) build the children’s language (use interesting and complex language yourself, engage children in activities that raise ideas and that give the opportunity for using language (e.g., cooking, measuring, science activities, arts and crafts), don’t accept vague or weak language from the children, but elaborate on it and get them to speak in complete thoughts, using the right words; and (e) get moms and dads helping in the process, they can help with many of the items above.


RELATED: What Do We Do With Above Grade Readers?

2. Is there a literacy readiness test that is highly correlated with actual readiness that you can recommend?

  Get Ready to Read! which is made available by the National Center for Learning Disabilities is a good predictor and its design is consistent with the research findings on early literacy.

3. Did the survey find any longitudinal studies of very early decoding? What I have in mind is children who learn to decode at age two, say--how do they do later on?

  No, and there are very few studies of younger children (none of 2 year olds, and only a handful with 3 year olds). Generally, we found that the children younger than 5 (meaning the 3s and 4s) who did well with decoding, also did well with later reading (both decoding and comprehension). It is clearly valuable to get them started early, but no info on the 2s.

4. Does RAN (rapid naming) correlate to the use of flash cards? Are you recommending flash cards, and if so, at what age levels? What is your opinion about using flash cards with very young children?

  I know of no studies connecting RAN to flash card use, and I do not believe that the evidence in any way suggests that you should even try to teach RAN. (Flash cards with words or pictures or letters are okay to use with young children at any age, BUT if you spend a couple of hours a day engaged in the types of activities noted in item 1 above, proportionally it would make sense to work with flashcards only for a few minutes of that time (in other words, it wouldn’t even get 5% of your literacy time). Flashcards can be a useful tool for memorization (I use them myself when I am trying to learn this kind of information), but their use has to be lively, quick, and brief to have much value.

5. What are the most important early childhood teaching implications for this research?

  That you can provide young children with supports for their literacy learning from the very beginning. I vividly remember when “experts” (without data) were claiming that either young children would not be ready to benefit from such teaching or that such teaching would do harm. What the research overwhelmingly shows is that young children clearly benefit from such teaching and the benefits can be long lasting (if the schools build on these children’s early learning). A second important idea is that there is not one thing that has to be done (different activities had different outcomes and young readers need support in various literacy-related outcomes to be successful).

6. What are the teaching implications for older students who may not have these pre-requisite skills to be able to use reading for learning? grades 4-8?

  There were no implications for those kids at all from this analysis. However, the National Reading Panel (NRP) looked at such issues (there is a link to that report on the right as well) and they found that teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, and oral reading fluency to struggling readers in those age ranges resulted in improvement. However, in all cases, the NRP concluded that such learning was slower and more difficult (so definitely try to accomplish it early) and some of this teaching (such as phonics) didn’t have the same impact on other aspects of reading that it did when children were younger (again, it is critical that these skills get accomplished as early as possible, but when that has not happened it is important to try to build that foundation later on--though that effort will likely be difficult).


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

  The good Dr. Adams documents how American textbooks have grown simpler over time. I’ve long believed that the measurement of text difficulty was a great scientific advance, but as useful as that tool can be, it has been a weapon of mass destruction when it comes to supporting students’ reading achievement. You see, teachers and publishers have been hyper-aware there always seems to be someone who will have difficulty with some text or other, and so they have striven to provide easier texts (texts that will leave no one behind). Their solution means that kids get a steady stream of texts with easier words and less complex sentences and text structure.

  I have no doubt that the textbooks for older kids have gotten easier and easier, but there is more to it than that. While the books themselves have been providing less mental exercise, I believe (and this is not well documented) that many middle school and secondary teachers are less likely to have students reading those texts than was true a generation ago (or if they are read, it is done using round robin or some variant which usually means that most of the kids do little reading or thinking).

  Awhile back, Achieve asked me to help draft a statement that they were using with various state standards. The statement often served as a preamble to grade level standards, and it indicated that text difficulty was important. (For example, students might be able to draw great inferences with a third grade text, but not with a fifth grade one. Just working on inferencing makes no sense unless the text is hard enough).

  As terrific as I thought that preamble was, it was generally ignored by teachers and testers. The reason? It wasn’t one of the standards. (People love those numbered lists).

As a result of such experiences, the common core standards includes both a huge appendix about text difficulty, and a numbered item about text difficulty in every set of reading standards. People might ignore the appendix, but they can’t miss that text difficulty item. That means that textbooks are likely to start getting harder again.

  However, just throwing kids into harder text won’t solve the problem, especially if teachers simply skip those books when they are difficult.

  When I was in Ireland last fall, I was working with a group of teachers and elementary students. When I finished up the lesson and the children were trooped out, one of the teachers pointed out that I handled the hard text issue differently than they did. “When we find that the children struggle with a text, we put them in something easier [a la guided reading]. But you taught the students how to handle the harder material.”

  This idea of using challenging (not impossible texts) is important. Students do need texts that they can read, but they also need to stretch. Towards that end, I suggest the following:

  1. Students should get daily experience in school in reading something hard and something relatively easy. The hard material really should be a challenge—even a year or two beyond their reading level! The easy stuff needs to be something that is intellectually challenging, but with easy enough language that they are not struggling with the words much (in fact, it can even be something that they are rereading).

  2. The difficult reading materials should be heavily scaffolded. That means the teacher must provide lots of instructional support to help the kids succeed with the material that is supposedly “too hard” for them.

  3. In full agreement, with Marilyn A., one of those scaffolds should be direct instruction in vocabulary. That can mean substantial lessons in particular word meanings and it might mean that the teacher just tells the students meanings as needed as well.

  4. Another scaffold should be oral reading fluency work. It is easier to untangle complex sentences when you are working on the prosody of such sentences. That means students should be spending some time reading these texts aloud with feedback (supervised paired reading). This work could also include listening to the teacher (or an audio recording) and then trying it themselves.

  5. A third scaffold should be some kind of productive work with the text. This might include participating in a discussion or writing about the text or trying to develop a chart or some other visual representation of the ideas. The key point is to get the meaning.

  6. Yet another way to explore a hard text is to build up to it, by reading more than one text on the same subject (maybe an easier, less detailed or thorough version can help kids to bootstrap to the more difficult one). In any event, these kinds of easier “mentor texts” should not replace the reading of the challenging text.

  7. And, finally, as this hard text becomes easier for the students –and with such scaffolding, such texts do become easier -- this text can be used as an easier text that might be worth rereading again later.

 http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1011/Adams.pdf

Are American kids such poor readers that they'll believe anything they read? I don't think so, but a recent news report based on the work of Donald Leu at the University of Connecticut is suggesting just that.

  Don studies the so-called "new literacies," like reading through technology. He conducted an interesting investigation in which he turned kids loose on an Internet website that had information about the tree octopus--yes, an octopus that lives in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, complete with pictures of the 8-legged rascal in a pine tree.

  Kids were overwhelmingly fooled by the site and afterward even argued when told the animal was a hoax. Is this a reading comprehension problem and would better literacy instruction help? Or is the problem of another species altogether (neither literacy nor tree octopus)?

  I actually think the kids could have bought into the idea of a tree climbing octopus without being poor comprehenders, dumb, or even too gullible. It was a pretty convincing hoax (I've included a link to the website at the end of this blog). In fact, I'd be more surprised if kids had not been tripped up by this.

  This year, in fact, a new species of octopus was discovered in that part of the world (this one a purple octopus--the pictures of which are no less implausible than the ones on Don's website).

Gullibility is an issue of age and experience, and so kids are usually a pretty gullible audience (that's probably why they find it so easy to suspend disbelief for cartoons, puppet shows, and the like).

  However, it is also an issue of relevance/importance. I hear news reports all the time about new species being found (or other species disappearing) and I don't question those reports very much--there is just no reason for me to bother (the cost of believing them seems pretty low). Kids might feel the same way. If the info was connected to a request to donate money or to vote for a candidate, it might be worth my time to consider it more critically. Maybe some naturalist or environmentalist wants to manipulate opinion with such information, but that seems pretty unlikely and the cost of believing is so low, why bother trying to challenge it?

  This is further complicated by the underlying source of the information: if your teacher or some university professor tells you to go to this website, that alone may be enough to lower your "crap detectors." That's why many scientists do not want science instruction time wasted on teaching kids to think critically about the textbook (because those books should be close enough to authoritative that kids should be able to trust them--so such teaching would be out of place).

  So, I don't think the kids' lack of critical response to this material in this situation is any big deal. But that doesn't mean that it has no implications for reading instruction.

  It does highlight the value of teaching kids to consider sources of information when evaluating a text (or a website). The pictures of the purple octopus were on the National Geographic website, Don's amazing creature was documented on a site that I'd never heard of and couldn't find any info on. However, what if Don had used his university website to house the errant info? That would have made me more susceptible to the hoax. (Of course, if I were going to school and someone put me onto a website, I might assume it to be authoritative simply because of the underlying source--the school or the teacher. You have to trust someone, ultimately.

  Corroboration matters in this kind of analysis as well, and there were other scientific notes to be found on the purple octopus (though admittedly I had to dig on this one, because being a new research finding, there wasn't much out there yet--so limited info could just be due to the recentness of the discovery, not because it is a hoax). Perhaps Don could have set up multiple sites so that I would have been tripped up here as well.

  In any event, kids will develop a more suspicious nature as they get older (and as the stakes get higher). Sourcing and corroboration would be good tools for them to have so that they could exercise their suspicions.

  But maturity, wisdom, and even a well developed critical sense will not make them impervious to hoaxes and misinformation. Remember when Pierre Salinger was tripped up, a man who had been an award-winning investigative reporter, press secretary to two presidents, a U.S. Senator, and at the time he fell prey to an Internet hoax, a major world correspondent for ABC News. His failure to figure out the misinformation ended his long career on an embarrassing note.

  I don't see the kids' gullibility as a big reading comprehension problem, but I do think that we should teach kids some critical reading tools for interpreting such info (to be used when they believe that it matters).

  http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/sightings.html/

  Since I published that piece, I have come across two recent reports that provide a wonderful counterpoint to what I complained about. Two independent groups examined the recent international comparison data (Finland is no longer first in reading by the way), and they tried to identify patterns that are consistent across the high achievers or high gainers. These reports are interesting and useful because what they identify are patterns that transcend the situational differences.

  How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better was produced by McKinsey & Co., a London-based think tank, and the other report, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States produced the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The reports differ methodologically, but they both tried to make sense of patterns across countries, rather than highlighting their favorite variables.

  One thing they agreed upon was that what it takes to raise achievement is probably not the same at all points of development. It might, for example, make sense to spend a lot of time adopting a common curriculum and agreed upon standards early in the improvement process, but if you keep futzing with that and don’t get to the implementation issues (like teacher and principal quality or parent support), you probably won’t succeed, standards or none. Accountability efforts seem to matter early (to get things moving), but their importance appears to wane as the reform takes hold.

  These reports also agreed that there were different ways to solve problems, and that the value of particular choices of strategies would be determined partly by culture and local circumstances, and partly where you were in the school reform process. How do you get instruction of a common core to all students? In some cases, adopting a prescriptive curriculum and scripted materials might be an effective strategy. A lot of my colleagues hate that idea, but with highly transient teachers, poor teacher preparation, and poor supervision, such approaches have been successful in a world context. In other cases, increased professional development might be a better way to accomplish the same goal. (In the U.S., Reading First invested heavily in the professional development of inner city teachers… and yet, within two years, more than half of these teachers had moved on. You can’t raise achievement through professional development if you can’t retain the teachers).

  These reports aren’t easily compared, but it is clear that they agree on one especially important point: success is possible.

  Both reports document countries that recently weren’t doing so well in education—Korea, Finland, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Hong Kong and Shanghai in China, but that have succeeded in making things excellent for their children (and in passing the U.S.). In fact, the OECD report stresses the belief that success is possible as a critical dimension of success: you can’t make things better wringing your hands and bemoaning all the reasons that you can’t succeed. They also agree that a focus on improving the quality of teaching is needed (through better recruitment, teacher preparation programs, professional development, efforts to raise teacher status, reward systems for teachers, improved principal preparation and support, and focused attention on the quality implementation of effective teaching practices).

How the Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better

 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/50/46623978.pdf/