According to The Nation’s Report Card on the NAEP website, nationally in 2015, “thirty-six percent of fourth-grade and thirty-four percent of eighth-grade students perform at or above the Proficient level in NAEP reading.” Surely this is an alarming national rate of reading proficiency. My driving question is to seek a correlation between independent, free reading, sometimes called recreational or pleasure reading, and reading proficiency. I believe the scope of the question has implications at all levels: international, national, state, district, and my own school and classroom level.
I have some comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one thinking that there must be a correlation, and by my hypothesis, a positive one. “Among the many findings reported by NEA is that reading for pleasure correlates strongly with academic achievement. Individuals who engage in reading for pleasure are better readers and writers than nonreaders. Children and teenagers who read for pleasure on a daily or weekly basis score better on reading tests than infrequent readers. Frequent readers also score better on writing tests than infrequent readers”(Gambrell, L. B. 2008). As I set out to find peer-reviewed articles and research articles to gain some insight into the international, national, or state findings, I keep running across one gentleman in particular, Stephen Krashen. Here’s my favorite quote so far - reasons to be divulged later. “IF THERE WERE A SUREFIRE WAY TO HELP KIDS BECOME MORE LITERATE, WOULD YOU IGNORE IT? Of course not. But that's exactly what's happening across much of our nation. Try searching the literacy information that's available from your state’s department of education, and you will be lucky to find a single mention of this method. Or peruse the National Reading Panel's 2000 report, a federally funded study of research-based reading practices, and you'll discover that this approach is scarcely mentioned. What technique am I talking about? It's called free voluntary reading, and it may be the only way to help children become better readers, writers, and spellers” (Krashen, S. 2006). I thought, surely it can’t be THAT ignored. Yet here I am, literally hours and hours later of searching educational research databases and I have found only a few relevant studies done within the past 10 years that are supported by detailed research. Here and there over the last 40 years you'll find a comprehensive study or survey, but nothing seems to have been recently. Even when you find a recent study, much of their background information dates back to the 1980's and 1990's. Mostly I find articles and blogs about teachers’ and parents’ own experiences. Yes, most of these articles are by experienced teachers and professors, and yes, their observations support my hypothesis, but there seems to be a scarcity of statewide or nationwide correlational research between reading for pleasure and academic outcomes on standardized testing for reading achievement. The greatest amount of recent research seems to revolve around language development in pre-reading children before entering school and the correlation of oral language acquisition to reading skills. There is little research on middle school and high school age students that connects reading outside of school to performance on reading tests. Perhaps I've stumbled on an area of research that needs to be more heavily examined. Certainly the lack of information on a greater scale only makes me more curious to see what my very localized research will find!
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If you want to move a mountain, study those who succeeded - and those who failed. The stories of the struggles of New Jersey and Massachusetts to maintain consistent educational gains, the histories of successful education reform in Connecticut and North Carolina, and the tale of California’s dismal failure to close its opportunity gap demonstrate that money, well spent, does matter. In Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, where significant successful education reform was enacted over the last 3 decades, part of the strategy was to fund centrally and equally all schools, regardless of their socio-economic influences. The success of Finland, Korea, Singapore, and the states of Connecticut and North Carolina is largely attributed to several other shared strategies.
What strikes me as most relevant to my own teaching practice is how impactful a well-trained, thoughtful teaching force can be on the overall success of a state’s or a country’s education reform. Most of the above mentioned monumental changes are not within the purview of my daily classroom life. What I can control daily in my sphere is who I am to my students and what I do with them. Which brings us back to Confucius. In Korea, teachers rank among “the most trusted members of society.(Loc 4089)” “Don’t even step on the shadow of a teacher,” states a Korean proverb, reflective of the deep respect for knowledge and teaching that is part of its Confucian heritage.(Loc 3953)” It’s a little daunting to think that little ’ole me has such a large role to play - it is a truly AWEsome responsibility, much like the mountain in the photo. If I want to move that mountain, I’ll start by picking up one stone at a time. And I’ll study those who succeeded in moving a mountain.
I feel these are the key elements I must include in my classroom to prepare my students for the future. 790 Blog #2 - Having reviewed the IRB, what do you need to know to address your DQ? Why? How would you measure your “need to knows”?
Loosely following Falk’s and Mertler’s outlines of how to formulate and refine a driving question for action research, here’s draft 2 of my driving question. (At the time of writing this blog, I haven’t been able to access the IRB site.) Framing the Question What impact does time spent reading have on reading competency? Subquestions:
Clarifying the Context and Background In my current teaching context at Independent Studies, my students spend far more time at home than they do in the classroom. I have perhaps an hour of instruction time per week. Predominantly their reading skills will be acquired independently. Creating strong readers has long been a passion of mine as a teacher. I am trying to find a way to increase overall reading fluency and reading comprehension in my students without the benefit of direct or guided instruction and time spent reading in the classroom. When I examine my own perceptions and biases around this topic, I admit that I probably already have a hypothesis that I want to test. I perceive and hypothesize that children who spend more time reading have stronger reading fluency and comprehension. I further believe that increasing reading time will result in stronger reading competency, perhaps within a relatively short amount of time such as a few months. Scrutinizing my own biases, I find that I’ve formulated an anecdotal and perhaps incorrect assumption that kids spend less time reading now than they did two or three decades ago. Further, I have attributed this perceived decrease in reading to increased technology and screen time. My observation is that easy access to television and video games has largely replaced recreational reading. I’m curious to see what the research on this topic shows and what my own action research will reveal about my own students. Need to Knows
Plan to Do (beginning thoughts)
In The Flat World and Education author Darling-Hammond directs our attention to the unsettling statistics that show that the Math, Science, and Literacy scores of U.S. students place us below the top 20 performing industrialized nations. She points out that U.S. education changes and reforms lack a consistent approach in the past decades, compared to countries such as Finland, South Korea, Singapore, China and Japan whose education initiatives rebuilt their systems to address the needs of the 21st century learner. In the United States, our educational policies and reforms have consisted of programs that are not bottom-up reconstruction. “... U-turns in education policy and practice are not unusual in U.S. education. Local, state, and sometimes, federal policies frequently force schools to change course based on political considerations rather than strong research about effective practice.” Further, Darling-Hammond shows how teachers in the United States receive less training and ongoing instructional and job support than their peers in many countries, notably Singapore, where “teachers, meanwhile, engage in action research, sponsored by the government, to continually improve their teaching.” A couple months ago I heard a conversation between a district academic specialist for Science assigned to a school and that school’s middle school Science teacher, whose weekly courses span three grade levels of Science. The academic specialist was checking in to see how using the newest Science standards was progressing. As I was reading Darling-Hammond’s argument that we have a problem in U.S. education, especially in math and science, I was reminded of this conversation. The Science teacher did not have the newest standards (except perhaps online) and it seemed had not been clearly given any instructions about when and how to begin using them. She had been offered no new training. The specialist didn’t have a copy for her and showed her a website to access. It seemed the district couldn’t provide any materials; in fact, no textbooks or support material had been identified to match the new standards. From what I could understand, the content wasn’t actually significantly different, just ordered differently among the grade levels and given a new perspective that would speak to 21st century skills. The Science teacher, wanting to get on board with the new standards, asked how she should begin. She was given a few websites where she could look up curriculum, materials, information, lesson plans, and a school in Oakland that had spent some energy developing lessons to match the content standards for various grades. Now I’ve only ever taught elementary science classes, but I know that even at that level, an effective, engaging Science unit for one grade level takes hours and hours of serious thought to design and develop; not to mention the time and money to collect materials for experimentation. My heart went out to both the specialist and this teacher because it seemed to me that they were essentially being asked to create multiple grade levels of Science curriculum and instruction by cobbling together their resources. How would either of them ever have the time to do this mammoth task justice? Thankfully, this particular Science teacher had years of experience to draw upon. Imagine a first year teacher attempting to identify grade-appropriate material that would be effective and designing learning moments that would engage, inspire, and be accessible to all students. Fast forward to a conversation with a friend a week ago. Her third grader has yet to do Science once this year. It’s no wonder, then, that ”our students rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in math and science achievement” (Darling-Hammond). I’ve had the opportunity to experience the world of education in five different states, either as a student or as a teacher; I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to try my hand at elementary, middle,and high school teaching; and I’ve been a student and a teacher in both the private sector and the public school system. This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered what causes the difficulties of education in the United States. I found Darling-Hammonds comparison between U.S. education policy and that of a few other notable countries in the past 4 or 5 decades to be especially insightful. Just in my own teaching career I’ve seen national or state standards change 3 times, federal education policy make major directional changes to programs and funding, mandated state teacher preparation and professional standards and certificates change every couple years, and of course, our textbooks and materials are on a constant 3 or 4 year rotation. A friend of mine who has worked in Sacramento for 20 years in such positions as legislative aid, chief of staff for an assemblyman and a senator, and now as a lobbyist told me that textbook conglomerates maintain lobbyists active in pushing new education legislation and reform. Publishing is big money! I imagine the boardroom of Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt-Brace-McGraw-Hill-Pearson-Holt in early November. A voice is heard to exclaim, “Okay people! New President means new education policies! That means we’re gonna be busy! Get ready to publish some new textbooks! Let’s go, people!” Certainly every new president I’ve watched has seemed to want to put his own stamp on education. Although our new president hasn’t yet turned his attention to major educational overhauls, it’s most likely coming soon. I certainly wait with curiosity. And, well, this is just me… hope springs eternal...maybe, just maybe, this time we can get it right? |
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December 2017
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