This week’s article summary is Why Deeply Diving Into Content Could Be The Key to Reading Comprehension.
Let’s put the phonics versus whole language battle to bed.
As Rhonda frequently points out, phonics and the ability to decode words are essential to learning to read, and the ability to read is the basis requirement—but as the article below attests not the only—for reading comprehension. Expecting kids to learn to read naturally and organically by providing loads of engaging books will work for some kids but not for the vast majority who need direct instruction as learning to read is not innate and instinctual in humans; we have been reading and writing for only 5000 years, which is less than a millisecond in our evolution.
So while formal reading instruction is critical in elementary schools, the point of today’s article is reading comprehension skills are also supported through exposure to rich, varied, and wide content. We all better comprehend what we read when we have familiarity with and background knowledge of the topic. (The study from the 1980s mentioned in the article is one example of many.)
The two books referenced in the article--The Knowledge Gap and Why Knowledge Matters—do espouse a more traditional view of education: kids as empty vessels that need to be filled with gobs of content to thrive as learners. (While I am more of a progressive-leaning educational moderate who believes kids are naturally inquisitive learners, I did agree with macro point of both books about the importance of content and background knowledge.)
So, while we need to teach phonics and decoding, we also need to ensure our students have ample opportunities to deepen their knowledge base of varied topics in many disciplines. Natalie Wexler, the author of The Knowledge Gap, points out that schools can fall into the trap of focusing so much on reading skills that reading assignments act more as vehicles for reading skill development rather than as a means to also strengthen students’ knowledge base.
So while in particular, E.D. Hirsch, the author of Why Educational Matters, has a negative reputation among many educators (his book Cultural Literacy remembered in infamy), I agree with him in that we need to make sure our kids are exposed to rich, deep content so that their strong knowledge base can support them to further learn and comprehend.
Joe
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A lot of people are concerned that American kids aren't learning to read.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows only about a third of fourth-graders are proficient in reading. Much of the recent debate has been a return to an old battle between advocates of phonics instruction versus those who favor a whole-language approach to teaching the building blocks of reading. Education journalist Natalie Wexler has a whole different argument to make that on why kids often don’t comprehend what they read.
“There are really two different aspects to reading,” said Wexler. "One is decoding, just matching sounds to letters. That really is a set of skills that you need to be taught directly. But reading comprehension skills are different."
Wexler contends that most elementary schools teach reading comprehension as free-floating skills, detached from the content a child is reading. The teacher is focused on teaching students how to make inferences or find the main idea, regardless of the topic.
For her book The Knowledge Gap Wexler dove deeply into the cognitive science of reading. She found that the most important element of reading comprehension is knowledge and vocabulary about the topic.
There’s an iconic experiment researchers like to cite from the 1980s about baseball. Researchers chose baseball because it’s the type of topic that kids who might not be all-around good readers would know something about. The goal of the study was to figure out what was more important to reading comprehension: general reading skills or knowledge of the topic. “What they found was the kids who knew about baseball did very well, regardless of whether they tested as good or poor readers,” Wexler said. And even more telling, the kids who knew more about baseball, but had been identified as “poor” readers, performed better on the baseball-focused reading comprehension task than children who were deemed “good” readers, but who didn’t know much about baseball. Wexler says that study has been replicated in many other contexts.
This “knowledge gap” that concerns Wexler also helps explain the achievement gap. Largely mirroring growing income inequality, the achievement gap has remained stubbornly wide, despite concentrated efforts to close it. Wexler contends it’s not just about being rich or poor, it’s about the education level of parents. And, generally speaking, wealthier parents are more highly educated.
“Children with highly educated parents are immersed in sophisticated knowledge and vocabulary from birth, so they start school with more of that type of knowledge,” Wexler said. And, when they get to school, they continue to build on all that they knew before, whereas less affluent children often start school with less exposure to knowledge, and the gap only widens.
“So if schools are not providing content-rich curriculum in a systematic way, they can get to high school with huge, really crippling gaps in their knowledge,” Wexler said.
The severity of this comprehension gap often doesn’t make itself fully known until high school, when teachers assume students have more knowledge, the content is more complicated, and the texts more complex.
When kids sit down to take their standardized reading test, most often the passages aren’t anything they’ve been learning in class. In fact, they’re designed that way, to prevent any group from having an advantage. But Wexler contends most elementary schools aren’t teaching kids much content anyway. Instead, they read one-off articles about a topic that allow kids to practice the “skills” of reading comprehension.
The type of knowledge Wexler is referring to, the kind that leads to really good comprehension, is a long-term project. Each bit of knowledge builds on something that came before, so it can’t be measured in one or two year increments. It’s something that continues from year to year.
“If we want change to occur, we can’t just rely on teachers alone to do it,” Wexler said. “They do need to be on board, but building knowledge is a gradual, cumulative process and one teacher is not going to be able to do it.”
France inadvertently provided a massive case study on content-rich curriculum in 1989. E.D Hirsch details the change in his book Why Knowledge Matters. French lawmakers passed legislation changing elementary school education in France to a skills-based approach to reading. Prior to 1989, the national curriculum had been focused on content. French children performed well compared to their international peers, and wealthy kids performed at about the same level as poorer kids. After the switch, however, things changed. In just a few decades, French children’s performance on international tests overall declined and the gap between wealthier and poorer students grew.
For Wexler, it would be ideal for elementary school classrooms to dig into one topic for several weeks. Teachers could use read-alouds to expose children to complex texts, ones with more complicated syntax and vocabulary. In this way, kids learn about the topic and become familiar with the vocabulary. Together the class could discuss those ideas and connect them to the information they’ve already learned. Then, students might read simpler texts on their own about the same topic, but they will already be primed with some background knowledge and vocabulary.
After students have learned a fair amount of background knowledge from a teacher, in discussion, and from their own reading, they might dive into an inquiry project to investigate an area of particular interest to them. Wexler is concerned that some progressively-minded educators throw students into project-based learning or an independent inquiry when they don’t yet have much background knowledge on the topic.
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