Elementary education has gone terribly wrong: In the early grades, US schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids
The title implied something the article doesn't claim - I (possibly ironically) read it as 'reading-comprehension skills' vs 'knowledge' - and the pedagogic debate is almost 100% settled there,...
The title implied something the article doesn't claim - I (possibly ironically) read it as 'reading-comprehension skills' vs 'knowledge' - and the pedagogic debate is almost 100% settled there, which is rare AF for anything pedagogic in the slightest. Reading comprehension skills ARE better than knowledge, one is a multiplier on everything you do from that point onward where the other is a static boost.
Problem is it's actually talking about 'reading-comprehension skills' vs 'reading-comprehension knowledge', which is entirely different. I would name it a bit different, i.e. 'reading-comprehension techniques' vs 'reading-comprehension practice in context'. And anyone who follows any mainstream pedagogic tradition post-1900 will immediately be able to tell you why the second one is going to do better than the first. What on earth has happened with the development of Common Core to allow the first to be what is taught? Crazy...
I kind of agree and disagree with this article. It feels anti-intellectual, without actually being so. I was really gifted at reading at a young age, but I saw that most of my peers had real...
I kind of agree and disagree with this article. It feels anti-intellectual, without actually being so. I was really gifted at reading at a young age, but I saw that most of my peers had real problems and many of them were behind the reading levels they were expected to have at their age, at least up to the start of high school when reading wasn't measured as often. School was mostly a breeze for me, while many of my peers were struggling to keep up with the lessons.
The methodology of the baseball experiment actually explains my biggest problem with the article. The reason why children who had no knowledge about baseball had worse reading comprehension than the children who did makes perfect sense. Baseball, to a child, is a very complex system with many moving parts. It would be like explaining how Java class inheratance works to a layman; they may be able to understand some of the terms, but they won't understand their significance or how things work together, and it's made more confusing because there are words the person already knew that are being used with different definitions than they know. The problem is not that they don't know the words, but that they don't have a grasp of the underlying system. I personally don't know enough about baseball to know who the shortstop is and thus would have failed the test. If that test had the students read a short briefing about how baseball works and what the terms refer to, it would have helped to even out the scores for the students with good reading comprehension.
I think my real issue with this article is that it just seems to be too simple of an understanding of the issue. I 100% agree that students should get a more rich learning experience, that's for sure. The solution to get over the problem of unfamilliariaty in regards to reading is not to avoid the subjects, but to expose students to them.
But my biggest issue is that it's yet another voice criticizing common core standards. In case I need to explain why that's a problem, Common Core (and any other type of standard) is the goal; the problem is implementation - how we get to that goal. The writer of the article conflates the two, which is problematic for obvious reasons. It talks about how the standards tell teachers to use nonfiction, but doing a quick search I can't find the word nonfiction mentioned before Year 6. The student he uses as an example at the beginning of his article is in the first grade. The standards do talk about informational texts for every year, but that does not necessitate nonfiction.
I'd be interested to see how much of the gap between low-income students and high-income students who have both been exposed to similar comprehension-focused materials comes down to a matter of...
I'd be interested to see how much of the gap between low-income students and high-income students who have both been exposed to similar comprehension-focused materials comes down to a matter of digital illiteracy. Lower-income homes typically do not benefit from the same internet connection quality that upper-income homes do, and have fewer skills when it comes to verifying and trusting the information they find online.
This digital divide may hinder children's ability to acquire the knowledge they need to perform at similar levels as upper-income students. Basically, as upper-income students have increasingly greater access to information and knowledge than lower-level ones, it doesn't matter how much comprehension skills either group has. The digital gap between them will grow.
The title implied something the article doesn't claim - I (possibly ironically) read it as 'reading-comprehension skills' vs 'knowledge' - and the pedagogic debate is almost 100% settled there, which is rare A F for anything pedagogic in the slightest. Reading comprehension skills ARE better than knowledge, one is a multiplier on everything you do from that point onward where the other is a static boost.
Problem is it's actually talking about 'reading-comprehension skills' vs 'reading-comprehension knowledge', which is entirely different. I would name it a bit different, i.e. 'reading-comprehension techniques' vs 'reading-comprehension practice in context'. And anyone who follows any mainstream pedagogic tradition post-1900 will immediately be able to tell you why the second one is going to do better than the first. What on earth has happened with the development of Common Core to allow the first to be what is taught? Crazy...
I kind of agree and disagree with this article. It feels anti-intellectual, without actually being so. I was really gifted at reading at a young age, but I saw that most of my peers had real problems and many of them were behind the reading levels they were expected to have at their age, at least up to the start of high school when reading wasn't measured as often. School was mostly a breeze for me, while many of my peers were struggling to keep up with the lessons.
The methodology of the baseball experiment actually explains my biggest problem with the article. The reason why children who had no knowledge about baseball had worse reading comprehension than the children who did makes perfect sense. Baseball, to a child, is a very complex system with many moving parts. It would be like explaining how Java class inheratance works to a layman; they may be able to understand some of the terms, but they won't understand their significance or how things work together, and it's made more confusing because there are words the person already knew that are being used with different definitions than they know. The problem is not that they don't know the words, but that they don't have a grasp of the underlying system. I personally don't know enough about baseball to know who the shortstop is and thus would have failed the test. If that test had the students read a short briefing about how baseball works and what the terms refer to, it would have helped to even out the scores for the students with good reading comprehension.
I think my real issue with this article is that it just seems to be too simple of an understanding of the issue. I 100% agree that students should get a more rich learning experience, that's for sure. The solution to get over the problem of unfamilliariaty in regards to reading is not to avoid the subjects, but to expose students to them.
But my biggest issue is that it's yet another voice criticizing common core standards. In case I need to explain why that's a problem, Common Core (and any other type of standard) is the goal; the problem is implementation - how we get to that goal. The writer of the article conflates the two, which is problematic for obvious reasons. It talks about how the standards tell teachers to use nonfiction, but doing a quick search I can't find the word nonfiction mentioned before Year 6. The student he uses as an example at the beginning of his article is in the first grade. The standards do talk about informational texts for every year, but that does not necessitate nonfiction.
I'd be interested to see how much of the gap between low-income students and high-income students who have both been exposed to similar comprehension-focused materials comes down to a matter of digital illiteracy. Lower-income homes typically do not benefit from the same internet connection quality that upper-income homes do, and have fewer skills when it comes to verifying and trusting the information they find online.
This digital divide may hinder children's ability to acquire the knowledge they need to perform at similar levels as upper-income students. Basically, as upper-income students have increasingly greater access to information and knowledge than lower-level ones, it doesn't matter how much comprehension skills either group has. The digital gap between them will grow.