curriculum and the achievement gap [email protected] [email protected]
TRANSCRIPT
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Why?• How is it that tests so early can predict
results so many years later?• What is in our curriculum that might be
perpetuating these trends?• What is not in our curriculum that
might be perpetuating these trends?• What is in our curriculum that explains
why the gap between proficient readers and non-proficient readers increases every year?
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What are not the causes?
• Lack of critical thinking
• Failure to know or use comprehension strategies
• Failure to master the standards
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If critical thinking, strategies and standards
are not the causes…
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What are the causes?• Vocabulary: Failure to grow
sufficient vocabulary
• Knowledge: Failure to develop wide background knowledge
• Fluency: Failure to become a fluent reader
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The Fluency-Vocabulary Connection
• Name the smartest, wisest person whoever lived.
• Rare words per 1000 (Hayes and Ahrens 1988)– College graduate speech 17.3– Popular Adult TV shows 22.7– Expert Eye Witness Testimony 28.4– Children’s Books 30.9– Adult Books 52.7– Comic Books 53.5 – Popular Magazines 65.7– Newspapers 68.3
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The Fluency-Comprehension Connection
• “Comprehension” is a strange concept.
• A disfluent reader cannot integrate word, phrase and sentence meaning into her sense of what the text is about. (Perfetti 2007)
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Fluency and the Common Core• The Common Core calls for more complex text
• Let’s consider the feature of complex text and which of these might disproportionately influence disfluent readers
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What are the Features of Complex Text?• Subtle and/or frequent transitions
• Multiple and/or subtle themes and purposes
• Density of information
• Unfamiliar settings, topics or events
• Lack of repetition, overlap or similarity in words and sentences
• Complex sentences
• Uncommon vocabulary
• Lack of words, sentences or paragraphs that review or pull things together for the student
• Longer paragraphs
• Any text structure which is less narrative and/or mixes structures
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In General Two Types of Fluency Instruction
• The repeated readings of texts students have been prepared to read in other words that they can read fluently
• Following along in a text that is being read aloud by a fluent reader
• Why do you think this works?
• Let’s look at some strategies to do this
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Importance of Vocabulary• Nearly a century of research (Whipple 1925,
NAEP 2013)• Feature of complex text that likely causes
greatest difficulty (Nelson et al 2012)• Having to determine the meaning of too many
words slows readers up; problem gets much worse with complex text
• Not knowing words on the page is debilitating• “30 Million Word Gap” http://
www.readtosucceedbuffalo.org/documents/30%20Million%20Word%20Gap.pdf
• After much research…
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Topics and References in Third Grade SBAC and PARCC Sample Tests
• Babe Ruth• Smithsonian• Alaska• Native peoples• Japan & Japanese art• National Geographic
Society• Indonesia• Animal
communication• U.S. Congress
• Animal mating• Gills • Animal traits• Vertebrate• Amphibian• Larva• Pupa• Lifecycle• Mammals• Mass-produced
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The Baseball Study Recht & Leslie (1988)
• Compared reading comprehension for four categories of students:
High reading abilityHigh knowledge of baseball
High reading abilityLow knowledge of baseball
Low reading abilityHigh knowledge of baseball
Low reading abilityLow knowledge of baseball
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Findings
• Knowledge of the topic had a MUCH bigger impact on comprehension than generalized reading ability did (pg. 18)
• With sufficient prior knowledge “low ability” students performed similarly to higher ability students. (pg. 19) The difference in their performance was not statistically significant.
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A student doesn’t have ONE level.
Each student has MANY LEVELSdepending on topic & knowledge.
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We owe our students a better experience reading than this.
We have to help them get the vocabulary and knowledge of the world they need to be able to read complex text.
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Topics in Passages on the SAT• Burgess Shale• Controversy surrounding question of earliest
North American settlements• Self Discovery via Early 20th Century
Shakespearean Theatre Tour• Integrity of Modern Film Remakes• Sleep Research• Honore de Balzac• Controversy surrounding the architecture of the
Getty Museum• Politics of Environmental Reporting
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What To Do About Vocabulary and Knowledge
“Building knowledge systematically in English language arts is like giving children various pieces of a puzzle in each grade that, over time, will form one big picture…”
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Close Reading Volume of Reading
Less pages More pages
Grade-level complex text
Text at different levels of complexity
All students same text
Student or teacher choice of text
Teaches students to attend to text and to words
Rapidly builds knowledge & vocab
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Close Reading Volume of Reading
Heavy support Light support
Solely instructional Guided or Independent
Exposes students to higher-level content
Builds knowledge of words, and the world
Gives all students access
Builds love of reading
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• Students cannot build knowledge and vocabulary without a high volume of reading.
• Most words are learned through reading or being read to.
• Building knowledge helps level the playing field for students.
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Not all high-volume reading is equally effective
• Research by Landauer and Dumais into vocabulary acquisition shows that students acquire vocabulary up to four times faster when they read a series of related texts.
• Reading a number of texts within a topic grows knowledge and vocabulary far faster than any other approach
• Text Sets and the SAP Text Set Project