Higher Reading Scores, Dumber Readers?
Published January 11, 2009 @ 12:32AM PT
U Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham's video below (h/t to Eduwonk) is about reading instruction. I recommend it to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and school board members - and especially to Arne Duncan, who testified before the Congressional Committee on Education and Labor that he increased teaching reading in Chicago Public Schools to two hours a day to achieve higher reading scores (see that eight-minute testimony in the "Baker's Dozen Videos on Education Reform" post on this blog).
Since Duncan seems to be a believer in standardized tests as the best measure of reading skills, it's no great leap to suspect that his reading instruction reforms were geared to helping students improve their scores on these tests: higher scores on low-level comprehension tests means higher reading skills - a simplistic view of reading if ever there was one.
Worse, Duncan's "solution" of expanding reading time to two hours a day begs the question: At the expense of time spent learning what other subjects? As Willingham argues in the video, real reading requires background knowledge of a wide variety of subjects - subjects I suspect get the axe under the Duncan plan. Results? Higher reading scores, and higher student ignorance.
Finally, Willingham's video focuses on primary grade reading instruction, so my last cavil may be beyond the scope of his argument, but it's this: real literacy goes beyond having the background knowledge, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and other decoding skills to be able to comprehend a text. If we stop there, we stop at the authoritarian view of reading in which the author is also the authority, and the reader little more than a subject tasked with "comprehending" the content of the authorial text. Under this model, reading is a practice of social control that places the reader in a position of compliance and obedience.
Reading must be taught as more than that. Beyond denotative and connotative comprehension, which are absolutely basic necessities that of course should be included in reading instruction, comes the real meat of reading: questioning the text, holding it at a skeptical arm's length, challenging it: Who is the author? What are the author's ideological leanings? Beyond what the author included in the text, what did s/he exclude? And more.
Here's the video. I'd love to hear what other things you "read" into it:
Image by Joel Franusic
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Comments (4)
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Author
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Clay is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he's married to his wife. According to his wife, he's married to his Mac.
No subject exists in a complete vaccuum. Why do we insist on continuing to teach in that way? There has got to be a way to flow everything together, encorporating math and reading with other subjects, etc.
Posted by Derek Viger on 01/11/2009 @ 05:46AM PT
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An excellent argument for scrapping all the standardized tests until children are older. Let Elementary school be about soaking up knowledge of the world around us.
Posted by Jennifer Parker on 01/11/2009 @ 07:30AM PT
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Yes! A great link Clay. My wife and I saw Dr. Willingham a couple of years ago at the Quest conference. He also publishes an article in the American Educator ("Ask the Cognitive Scientist"). As he spoke, several times there was a collective gasp as his research seemed to validate what most teachers have been witnessing and experiencing in their classrooms.
Willingham clearly demonstrates how reading comprehension is not a skill, but rather the accumulation of background knowledge a reader brings to a new text. Sadly there is a point when students readers' comprehension will actually regress. Think of a piece of swiss cheese with too many holes, with each hole representing a gap in prior knowledge. Unfortunately, most reading programs we have in our high schools - some millions of dollars in districts budgets - can not truly address these gaps that are years in the making.
Even though his research is sobering, it also has the power to liberate.
Posted by Brandt Robinson on 01/13/2009 @ 06:19PM PT
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A very engaging discussion. I respect your fears about "authoritarian authors" and imagine them intently applying their principles of mind-control on unsuspeting readers. However, I think thou dost protest too much.
One of the problems with reader-centered metacognitive theories is that the author-reader relationship has become unbalanced. Although the author-reader connection is vital to comprehension, the relationship should be weighted heavily on the side of the author. It is the author's thoughts that we are trying to interpret, not ours per se.
Schema theory aside, accessing prior knowledge, setting a purpose for the reading, and making personal connections are somewhat helpful, but frankly over-valued. Understanding the ideas of the author is really what readers are/should be after. Reading is not constructivism.
Additionally, focusing on the experience and needs of the readers can lead the readers to think of the text as a purely subjective experience. Instead, readers need to view the text as objectively as possible, setting aside all preconceived ideas and biases. On this point, you are more on track with your comments that place the reader in the role of "crap detector" through the process of internal monitoring of text and self-questioning strategies.
More on the relationship between author and reader with emphasis on what really works to build comprehension at http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/how-to-increase-reading-comprehension-using-the-scrip-comprehension-strategies
Posted by Mark Pennington on 06/26/2009 @ 02:16PM PT
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