Literacy Blogs

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.” As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Marc Coleman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs complained that, “The court dodges the essential issue in the lawsuit, which is: What is the testing supposed to measure?” Mr. Coleman gets an A from ...

Rose Birkhead made a comment on my last post. She liked the idea of the states aiming at the same standards and giving the same reading tests, but she was concerned about testing kids on grade level. Say, I'm a teacher, and one of my students reads horribly, not even close to fourth-grade level. Rose's concern is that having that child take the fourth-grade test will tell me nothing of value about his reading (I won't get any useful insights about how to help him), and what it tells him he probably doesn't want to hear since he already knows ...

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 ...

Last week, I posted a blog that described how effective comprehension strategy instruction works. I said that students won’t use strategies forever and that I didn’t believe that strategies eventually morphed into skills (at least not skills that look anything like the strategy). I think strategies work more like true scaffolds; they operate as a temporary support that allows kids to read on their own more effectively, but not in the same way they will need to read on their own later. The problem is that strategies are cumbersome and no one will use them for long. Frankly, when a ...

There is no doubt research shows that reading comprehension strategy instruction works. The National Reading Panel said so. Although comprehension studies have been short-term, there are just so many of them (more than 200 such studies).   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 ...