Tag Archive for ‘Literacy’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'Literacy'

Literacy, Numeracy…Visuacy??

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2008 in Curriculum. 6 Comments

An Australian federal government report argues for visual education, or “visuacy”, to take its place alongside literacy and numeracy as a fundamental part of the country’s curriculum. The National Review of Visual Education calls for “a rethinking of arts education in schools to end the distinction between art and other images.”

“In much the same way that one might conceptualise a continuum of texts in the context of the English classroom, one might similarly do so in relation to a continuum of images from the most banal to the most aesthetically complex and challenging,” the report says. Translation? The newspaper the Australian says: students should study Picasso alongside pictures of Elle Macpherson’s underwear as part of a recasting of visual arts education away from traditional forms to include images of all kinds.

[The report] cites the example of scrutinising the “conditions of value and meaning” in images as diverse as Macpherson’s bras and briefs on the back of a bus or on a billboard, a blood-strewn road safety advertisement on television, Picasso’s Guernica reproduced in the pages of a book of 20th century European art and the television transmission of a collapsing World Trade Center.

Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools chair Su Baker is already playing defense, arguing images are words in a visual language that have to be taught in the same way as English or any other language. “This report isn’t about dumbing down, it isn’t about trivialising things. It’s about the breadth of visual imagery we are confronted with and engaging with in the world we live in, which is heavily saturated with images. It’s about teaching kids to navigate, interpret and control those images.” she tells the Australian.

Text, Yes, But Is It Reading?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 28, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Literacy. 3 Comments

Are the hours kids and teenagers spend prowling the Web a threat to literacy? Or is it simply a new form of reading and writing? A sprawling New York Times thumbsucker notes that “as teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.”

Clearly when kids go online instead of turning on the TV, they read and write instead of passively consuming video. But critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., tells the Times. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” adds Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

According to the paper, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component to next year’s tests. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. “A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools,” the Times notes.

The Unlived Life Is Not Worth Examining

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 21, 2008 in Curriculum and Higher Education. 7 Comments

Why do colleges insist on personal essays with applications? Could changing the requirement create better prepared students?

The Associated Press ran a piece about college admissions essays over the weekend and the sturm und drang associated with them. Since the die is already cast on SAT scores and grades, the essay gets a disproportionate amount of attention from students and families, the AP notes, spawning a veritable industry with books and counseling and editing services.

Does it matter? “Applicants and their families have somewhat of a belief in the redemptive value of the essay,” Barmak Nassirian, of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers said. “It’s an urban myth that a student who has goofed off his whole academic career can get in with a come-from-behind epic struggle in which the essay serves as the primary tool. It’s not a substitute for a rigorous curriculum, good grades and evidence that you’re going to do well,” he said.

What if applicants were asked to write or submit a research paper instead? Which is more predictive of college success, past academic work, or a personal essay, where students labor to make themselves seem well-rounded, fascinating and irresistible to schools?

Dropping personal essays could have an interesting trickle-down effect as far down as elementary schools. The “curriculum” in my elementary school (the tedious and content-free Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop), forces children as young as third grade to grind out endless personal essays, “small moment” stories and memoirs (!) designed to plumb the depths of their eight-year old souls. But it seldom, if ever, called for kids to write anything approaching a simple five-paragraph expository essay, let alone a research paper. That might change if doing so became a requirement for college admissions.

Last year’s common application, used by scores of colleges and universities around the country, asked students to discuss an issue of personal concern, a person, fictional character or historic figure who influenced them, a life experience or a topic of their choice, the AP notes. At the risk of sounding churlish, the unlived life is not worth examining. Rather than require 17 year old to unburden themselves of their life experiences, how about three pieces of actual academic work, graded by the student’s high school teachers?

The View From 1869

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 30, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 2 Comments

While at the Grand Canyon last week, I spent time reading the journals of the members of the 1869 Powell expedition down the Colorado River. It’s impossible not to be struck by the everyday erudition of Americans of even modest educational attainment of earlier times.

George Bradley described how he “would be willing to explore the River Styx” if it meant getting out of the Army. Later he described a particularly rough night on the river. “We need only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton’s most vivid conceptions of Hell,” he wrote.

It’s hard to imagine such allusions finding their way into the diaries of even the best educated contemporary Americans, let alone a sixth-grade dropout like Bradley. Spend some time reading the letters of ordinary Americans of the 19th century and you immediately grasp how much poorer our discourse is for a lack of a common set of references. It’s lack makes the lowest common denominator not merely lamentable, but necessary for us simply to understand each other.

Dyslexia Differs By Language

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2008 in Research and Reports. 1 Comment

A fascinating piece of research reportedly shows dyslexia affects different parts of the brain depending on whether a child is raised learning English or Chinese.

“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was the first to report the study.

The researchers note that reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese. English readers turn letters into sounds, while Chinese uses symbols to represent words. “Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” says Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, who was not associated with the study. For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.

Core Knowledge Reading Program Pilot Video

Published by Linda Bevilacqua on March 19, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 0 Comments

Highlights from the Kindergarten Pilot [6:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (199)

The Core Knowledge Foundation is presently engaged in the development of a comprehensive reading program for the elementary grades. The program is based on the insight that, in order to become a truly proficient reader who is able to derive meaning from what is read, an individual must develop mastery of systematic decoding skills and possess the background knowledge, vocabulary and “cultural literacy” needed to understand what is decoded.

Continue reading ‘Core Knowledge Reading Program Pilot Video’

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s “Modest Proposal” to Fix State Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 18, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 9 Comments

If low performance on reading tests is a function of poor content knowledge, and if broad swaths of the school day are wasted practicing reading strategies on content-free reading, why not solve both problems with reading tests that cover explicit content standards? That’s the “modest proposal” put forth by Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in the new issue of American Educator (PDF).

Hirsch has long argued that content knowledge is the key to reading comprehension, and describes the long periods devoted to language arts, the de rigueur reading block, as a “cognitive wasteland.” Instead he proposes language arts standards that specify literary works and techniques, and directly correspond to the content standards in other subjects—especially science and social studies. Why? Because some of those non-literary topics are going to show up in passages on the reading tests.

“So my modest proposal is that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade, except for math,” writes Hirsch. “For instance, if third-grade language arts standards specify Alice in Wonderland, third-grade science standards call for studying the speed of light, and third-grade social studies standards include the Vikings’ explorations of North America, then passages on the third-grade reading test should cover those same topics. We would then have true curriculum-based reading tests instead of the mysterious tests we now have. This cunning device would make tests fairer and pedagogically more useful, and boost our students’ abilities.”

As long as reading is viewed as a discrete set of skills that can be transferred from text to text, practiced and perfected, schools will continue to spend a disproportionate amount of time on test prep. Hirsch’s proposal is a nifty piece of intellectual jujitsu, which would make test prep make sense.

We Like Mike!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 14, 2008 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

I could kiss Michael Petrilli on the mouth.

A perennial, frustrating blind spot among ed reformers, with their monomaniacal focus on systems, structures and accountability, is curriculum. Trying to build good schools without looking at curriculum is like trying to build a winning baseball team by focusing on the parking lot, the stadium and the vendors and assuming the “baseball people” are the experts on the game. My new hero Mr. Petrilli gets this. Read his take in the Fordham Foundation’s Gadfly on the NY Times piece How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?

“In a 5,000 word forum on education, these words did not appear once: instruction, curriculum, reading, math, history, literature,” sayeth Mr. Petrilli, with the clarity of the child pointing out the Emperor is naked. “This ‘incentivist’ thinking is a fair reflection of the state of the ‘new’ education philanthropy. Staffed mostly by smart MBAs and obsessed with structures and systems and processes, their ignorance about the stuff of education leads to agnosticism. And, predictably, to trouble. (See Joel Klein’s embrace of Diana Lam and Lucy Calkins as Exhibits 1 and 2.).” As Petrilli sees it, to remain agnostic on curriculum and pedagogy is “like sending in nation-builders who can’t speak Arabic and never studied Iraqi history.”

He wraps up with a thought exercise. What if a billionaire wants to focus his philanthropy on smart instructionist investments? Petrilli offers three: Support the development of national standards and tests; create a voluntary national curriculum; and fund thousands of high-quality summer workshops.

Not a bad start. Bravo, sir! Discuss among yourselves, billionaires.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 11, 2008 in Opinion. 0 Comments

Before I blundered in to education some years ago, I did many years of service in Big Media. I acquired many of the habits of mind, I confess, that are still found in their halls. So for years I ignored blogs. I found myself taking in more and more of my news online, but blogs? A bunch of wannabes copping an attitude. Ho-hum.

Education has taught me what I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see. If you really care passionately about something, blogs (the best of them, anyway) are now the medium of first and last resort. Case in point, last week’s scathing Reading First report by Sol Stern for the Fordham Foundation. Go over to Google right now and key in “Sol Stern and Reading First” and be sure to choose “News” not “Web” on Google. Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.

As I write this, there’s one print media result, from Ed Week. There’s also a great piece by Sara Mead if you’re just catching up to this story. Now, look again at Google. See that little link in the lower left that says “Blogs”? Click it.

There’s eduwonk, Joanne Jacobs, Ken DeRosa, Dean Millot, eduflack and a host of others. If you’re not following the blogs, you don’t know about it. This is happening more and more. Remember the last time Sol Stern set a match to powder with his heretical City Journal piece on vouchers? The blogs had picked the bones clean and left them bleaching in the sun when the New York Times finally got around to it a month later.

I suppose it’s the frustration of the major media not picking up on Stern’s Reading First smackdown that prompted the Fordham Foundation today to issue a statement calling for an investigation “into scandalous efforts by the executive and legislative branches to sabotage the Reading First program.” That call got just as much play as the original report, from the dead-tree traffickers. All I can say to Checker & Co. is fear not, gentlemen. The Times and the rest will be by eventually. Keep a light on for them.

Hang ‘Em High

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 7, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Teaching. 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to get to Sol Stern’s eyebrow-raising exegesis of the rise and fall of Reading First. But whether you’ve read it or not, read this blistering response, which imagines a conversation between a smug reading teacher and a fourth-grader who can’t read. It may peel off your wallpaper. Tip ‘o the hat to Ken DeRosa of D-Ed Reckoning for posting this.

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