Tag Archive for 'reading'

Using Video Games as Bait

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Education News. 0 Comments

Book publishers are increasingly using video games to “extend the fictional world” of novels for young readers.  By doing so, the New York Times reports, authors and publishers are hoping to lure gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book.  And that’s just a start.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom. In New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting efforts to create a proposed public school that will use principles of game design like instant feedback and graphic imagery to promote learning.

“But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word,” the Times notes. 

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University professor and author of the recent best-seller The Dumbest Generation is not among those  quoted by the Times.  But it’s a safe bet he would cast a skeptical eye on the piece.  In a recent essay he wondered whether digital literacy is reading at all. ”Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,”he cautioned, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.”

For publishers, the lure of appealing to gamers is obvious: enhanced sales and — as they say in marketing-speak — multiplatform merchandising.  For educators?  Proceed with caution.

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You’re Not Going to Read This Post

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 20, 2008 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Literacy. 4 Comments

Digital technology has become an imperial force in education, and it should meet more antagonists argues Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein.  Clearly he’s among those antagonists.  Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a strong case for reading online as a lesser kind of literacy, with profound implications for teaching and learning.  

Pointing to the work of Web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who has studied the eye movements of readers, Bauerlein notes that people read online in a physically different pattern than text on a printed page.   Online, readers eyes move in a pattern resembling the upper case letter F.  ”At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page,” says Bauerlein.  ”Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.” 

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, “‘Reading’ is not even the right word.” The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the “nut” and nothing else.

In short, online literacy is simply not literacy as we conventionally understand it.  “Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,” Baurlein writes, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading,” he writes.

Bauerlein is writing from the persepective of a college professor, and he concerns himself with higher education, but his arguments pertain to all classrooms where we are worshipping at the altar of technology.  “Given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces,” he concludes.  “Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves.”

Good, smart stuff from an iconoclastic thinker.  Of course, you stopped reading two paragraphs ago.

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Reading Strategies: A Little Goes a Long Way

Published by Dan Willingham on August 28, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Literacy. 10 Comments

Yesterday I argued that the knowledge readers bring to a text is essential to reading comprehension. But does even a knowledgeable reader comprehend automatically? Mustn’t the reader apply comprehension strategies to extract meaning from the text? The short answer is that teaching students comprehension strategies does help, but too much time is currently devoted to them.

Reading comprehension strategies include things like question generation (students are taught to generate questions about a text and then answer them) comprehension monitoring (students are taught to become aware of when they do not understand), and summarization (students are taught techniques to summarize meaning). Often, multiple strategies are taught.

The National Reading Panel  reviewed 205 studies examining the effectiveness of teaching students reading strategies, and there is little doubt that they help, and that the effect is sizable.

There are two aspects of the data which deserve special attention because they hold implications for classroom application. First, the effects of teaching students reading strategies are weak or absent before the third grade.  This finding is readily understandable—students are still learning to decode, and simply can’t juggle in mind the tasks of decoding, comprehending, and trying to implement a strategy. It’s only when decoding has become fluid so that the reader doesn’t need to think about it much that enough mental space is free to accommodate a strategy.

Second, when it comes to teaching students to use reading strategies, shorter programs seem just as effective as longer programs. This finding is crucial, because it ought to make us think differently about what reading strategies actually do. It’s natural to think that strategies improve the reader’s skill in extracting meaning from a text. But if that were true then more practice ought to make you better at it. Instead, comprehension strategies feel less like a skill and more like a trick—something like “check your work” in mathematics. It’s a very smart thing to do, and students should be explicitly taught to do it, but it doesn’t require extensive practice.

What might the trick of comprehension strategies be? A good guess is that they encourage students to think differently about reading. There is so much emphasis on decoding in early reading instruction (as there must be) that it is understandable that a student might think “If I’ve decoded, then I’ve read it.” But an adult knows that if you get to the bottom of a page and don’t know what you’ve read, you haven’t really read it, even if you’ve decoded everything. That conception of reading—that the point is communication—must click for students, and comprehension strategies may have most of their impact in getting students to think about reading as something they do to understand. Once they understand that, most of what comprehension strategies advise is something that students will do naturally: try to find the main idea, check your own comprehension, and so on.

The bottom line is that teaching comprehension strategies is a good idea, but it appears to be a one-time boost. There is no evidence that more practice yields more benefit. More information on this subject can be found here: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter06-07/CogSci.pdf

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Is It Better To Read Junk Than Not Read At All?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 11, 2008 in No category. 7 Comments

Where’s Richard Whitmire when you need him?  A pair of Wall Street Journal articles raise interesting questions about boys, reading, engaging reluctant readers…and sports trivia.  A Page One piece by John Hechinger points out what just about every elementary school teacher figures out 20 minutes into the job: if you want to see a boy engaged with a book, slip him any of the burgeoning genre of gross-out books.

Publishers are hawking more gory and gross books to appeal to an elusive market: boys — many of whom would rather go to the dentist than crack open “Little House on the Prairie.” Booksellers are also catering to teachers and parents desperate to make young males more literate. ‘There has been a real revolution’ in books that ‘have more kid appeal,’ especially when it comes to boys, says Ellie Berger, who oversees Scholastic’s trade division. ‘It’s a shift away from the drier books we all grew up with.’

The bottom line, the kind of book you used to sneak into school, and hoped not to get caught reading, has gone mainstream.  So is “Captain Underpants” the only way to turn boys into readers?  More to the point, is all reading created equal?  Does time spent with ”Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger?” help reading comprehension?  As a teacher, I’m all for engaging boys, but a steady diet of this fare invites the law of diminishing returns. 

In an unrelated WSJ piece, “Raising Bob Costas: Is Memorizing Sports Trivia Good for the Brain?” James Freeman frets that his son is spending all of his time memorizing sports trivia, and hopes to find an academic silver lining in this obsession from neuroscientists, Harvard’s Howard Gardner, and Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

I figured that if anyone would trash the idea of kids consuming trivia it would be Hirsch but he found reasons to appreciate Will’s hobby. The University of Virginia professor recalled the line from Keats that “every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.” Mr. Hirsch said that it’s great to find an interest like Will’s because “it means you like to do something intensely, and you’re more likely to be successful in life” when you do.  But Mr. Hirsch was not suggesting that learning about football had any value at all in helping one to learn about academic subjects. “I don’t think there’s any benefit as far as ‘learning-to-learn,’ because that’s been exploded.”   

I’m with Freeman’s kid.  When I was his age, I could tell you from memory the teams who plated in every World Series ever played.  Numbers invariably invoked baseball statistics: 367, 511 and 714? Ty Cobb’s liftime batting average, Cy Young’s career wins and the number of homerun Babe Ruth hit, respectively. 

But you knew that. 

 Update:  Sir Fartsalot author Kevin Bolger weighs in below in the comments section.

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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.

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Teaching to the Tex

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 21, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 1 Comment

A section of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) is coming under scrutiny.  Even Texas’ best students struggle with a section of the test that asks students to express themselves and back up their claims with evidence, revealing either faulty tests or preparation.

Three short-response questions require students to stretch their brains by generating clear, reasonable ideas from a reading selection, the Dallas Morning News reports.  Then they must support those ideas with evidence from the text in a well-written response.  ”Students are passing the ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade language arts TAKS at higher rates than ever, the paper notes. “Some even post near-perfect passing rates. But on the short-response portion, fewer than half of North Texas students pass.”

Texas Education Agency officials say the short-response questions provide a better window into how well students can think, communicate and write.  ”This paints a much different picture for teachers and parents than the multiple-choice test,” Victoria Young, a testing official with TEA tells the paper. “You’re finding out two very different things about kids.”  Richard Kouri of the Texas State Teachers Association said curriculum doesn’t have the depth it used to because teachers are pulled in so many different directions by the TAKS demands.

Here’s the scoring rubric for the short-answer reading section of the test.  Seems a reasonable set of tasks for high school students.

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