Then as night follows day, 3rd grade literacy rates will rise. All Topics. About Us. Group Subscriptions. Recruitment Advertising. Events and Webinars. Leaders to Learn From. Current Issue. Special Reports. EdWeek Research Center. EdWeek Top School Jobs. EdWeek Market Brief. Menu Search. Sign In Subscribe. Reset Search. Scaling back small-group instruction would have dramatic improvements in literacy.
By Mike Schmoker — November 19, 4 min read. Share article Remove Save to favorites Save to favorites. Mike Schmoker. Mike Schmoker is an author, speaker, and consultant. The most successful K-3 teachers I've observed use small groups sparingly. Related Tags: Instruction Early Literacy. Thank you for subscribing. Reading and viewing, as a mode of English, is an integral part of learning in all disciplines in the primary school. The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Reading Rowe, concluded that "all students learn best when teachers adopt an integrated approach to reading that explicitly teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge and comprehension" p.
As such these five key skills plus literature, multimodal literacy, visual literacy and literacy across the curriculum form the foci of literacy within the toolkit. For more information, see Literacy focus. Following an extensive review of research into early reading in the US, Snow, Burns and Griffin noted:. Consequently the teaching practices included in the toolkit are modelled reading, shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, guided reading-reciprocal teaching, literature circles, close reading, and the teaching-learning cycle.
For more information, see Teaching practices. Our website uses a free tool to translate into other languages. This tool is a guide and may not be accurate. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck.
But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story.
Context — including a picture if there is one — helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader. Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education.
Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. I heard this from other educators.
Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't. Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught.
Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing. When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy. Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.
The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken. If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools? One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work.
I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.
I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.
I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.
When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.
I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that. He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead.
His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. And different letters say "horse"? Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words?
And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there? Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies.
He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.
This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.
The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence. Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers. Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
Molly Woodworth is finance director at a reading center in Flushing, Michigan , where she went for help in high school when she couldn't get through the ACT test. In reading, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. See this article by Keith Stanovich. This blog has more on Matthew Effects in reading with many citations to research. You may also be interested in these articles:. Are reading and behavior problems risk factors for each other? Do poor readers feel angry, sad, and unpopular?
Are reading difficulties associated with bullying involvement? About 16 percent of children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade do not graduate from high school , a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers.
The link between reading problems and incarceration has been known for decades. This report concluded that "reading failure is most likely a cause, not just a correlate, for the frustration that can and does result in delinquent behavior. Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game. This article provides some background on Clay's theories about the reading process. You can find this quote on page 8 of Clay's book, Becoming Literate. For discussion of how this idea is not supported by empirical evidence, see this article.
The full article is only available behind a paywall. See Goodman's book, On Reading. Reading "is not a matter of careful attention to detail or concern for accuracy" because readers "get to the meaning without attending to all the detail of the letters and the words. This book chapter discusses the growth of the whole language movement in the United States and explores its theoretical underpinnings. According to this article , Reading Recovery was "by far the most widely researched and widely used tutoring program in the world.
This is a summary of some of the major research on reading over time. Stanovich tells the story of how he became interested in the cognitive processes involved in reading in his book Progress in Understanding Reading.
See Progress in Understanding Reading , p. See Romance and Reality and the references at the end of the essay. Many of the scientific papers are technical and available only behind paywalls. If you are interested in reading more about these studies, here are some of the scientists whose work you may want to look up: Charles Perfetti , Tom Nicholson , Philip Gough , William Tunmer , Keith Rayner.
There are many blogs and essays that summarize the problems with the three-cueing theory, including several by Kerry Hempenstall for example, The Three-Cueing System: Help or Hindrance? Books that discuss the research evidence against cueing include Language at the Speed of Sight and Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. The audio version of this story mentions research by Donald J. You can find a paper he co-authored on the role of context in word recognition here and his dissertation that includes the experiment described in the audio story here.
See also this synthesis of the research on reading : "In the NICHD intervention studies, teaching children to use context and prediction as strategies for word recognition resulted in greater numbers of reading disabilities than instruction that taught children to use their sound-spelling knowledge as the primary strategy for word recognition. You can find the video here. You can find references to cueing on the website of the Reading and Writing Project , founded by Calkins. For example, here and here.
You can also find references to cueing on the Fountas and Pinnell Literacy website, for example here and here. Goldberg had worked for Collaborative Classroom as a materials developer for two years before starting her job with the Oakland Unified School District. The quotes collected here provide background on whole language beliefs about phonics. In the cueing theory of how reading works, just a bit of phonics knowledge is enough because readers have other ways to identify words.
See this piece , for example: "Some knowledge of phonics can restrict the possibilities of what the unknown words are. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Recent research using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI provides further evidence of the critical role of phonology in learning to read. See this study and this one. Adams' piece about the three-cueing system was originally published in the book Literacy for All.
There are also versions of it published as an article online. The online versions don't include the appendices. A report summarizing research on the efficacy of phonics instruction since the NRP can be found here. See this article from Keith Stanovich and also this more recent overview of the research. See this book , p. Linnea Ehri first described the process of orthographic mapping in the s.
Another prominent researcher in this area is David Share. Here's a blog post that describes the basics of orthographic mapping. See this article and this article by Ehri.
See What Reading Does for the Mind. David Kilpatrick is author of the Essentials book cited previously as well as Equipped for Reading Success. He was a school psychologist for 28 years. Teachers might be especially interested in these articles.
Decoding Before Context : "We have had many conversations with teachers about the fact that the system is not only void of research and evidence, but — equally important — it is also teaching children habits that are difficult to change. Worse yet, this approach sets children up for frustration and failure. You will know if you are using a three cueing approach to reading if you have posters or prompts in your classroom that encourage the following Also see this article , which notes that "decoding problems underlie the difficulties of most primary grade students who struggle with reading.
Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined. Achieve Academy is part of the Education for Change charter school network.
The other charter school network is Aspire Public Schools. Andrea Ruiz uses two different phonics programs. For other students, she uses Being a Reader. Vocabulary lessons come from a program called Making Meaning.
See "The Simple View of Reading. The model has been upheld by decades of research on reading. See this article by the original researchers. Some blog posts that explain the Simple View are here , here and here. Another helpful way to understand the relationship between word recognition and skilled reading is Scarborough's Rope.
There's a large body of research that shows teachers are not being taught what they need to know about how children learn to read. The U. Department of Education published a study back in A report on educator preparation to teach reading in Australia cites research from the United States.
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