The Core Knowledge Blog

“Teaching comprehension strategies is not the same as equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.” — Sara Mead, Early Ed Watch

Nice to see Sara Mead at Early Ed Watch pick up on what E.D. Hirsch and others at Core Knowledge have been arguing, that reading is not a skill that exists in a vacuum. All the reading “strategy lessons” in the world won’t help if you don’t have background knowledge to apply to what you’re reading.

Mead weighs in on Reading First noting the IES research released last week “raises serious questions about Reading First’s effectiveness, but it’s worth taking a closer look before writing the program off entirely.”

“Finally, we should ask whether the person who should really be declaring victory here is not Reading First’s critics, but E.D. Hirsch,” Mead notes “This study focused on one indicator of children’s reading performance: student reading comprehension as assessed by the Stanford Achievement Test. The researchers did not assess children’s phonemic awareness, decoding ability, or fluency, for example. That makes sense because comprehension is, in the researchers’ words “the essence of reading.” But it’s also problematic because, as Hirsch has argued passionately in recent years, reading comprehension is about much more than basic literacy skills. To comprehend, readers must also have a rich content knowledge that enables them to connect what they read to existing knowledge. (Hirsch is fond of citing an article describing a baseball game as an example here: Poor readers who know a lot about baseball will comprehend the article better than excellent readers who have never seen a baseball game.) Teachers observed in this study spent substantial time teaching children reading comprehension, but teaching comprehension strategies is not the same and equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.”

The way we teach reading—endless focus on comprehension strategies—has limited efficacy as Dan Wilingham and others have shown. If we really want our kids to succeed, we’ll arm them with decoding skills, then a content-rich curriculum that gives them broad background knowedge. Teaching content isn’t something to do after kids have learned to read.

Teaching content IS teaching reading.