Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report - S11

READING IN THE COMMON-CORE ERA

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EDUCATION WEEK
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November 14, 2012

| S11

Photos by John Tully for Education Week

dards—is feedback from college professors and employers, who bemoan young people’s weakness in the analytical writing most needed in college and training for good jobs. Research, too, is sparking reconsideration of the role writing can play in making better readers. “Writing to Read,” a 2010 meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, found that writing had consistently positive effects on students’ reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students’ comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often. An expert panel brought together by the International Reading Association and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concluded in a report earlier this year that reading and writing require “independent instruction.” Too little still is known about the “reading-writing connection,” the panel said, but it is sufficiently promising to warrant further research to inform classroom practice. In 2010, the Newark, Del.-based ira revised its standards for teacher preparation to include a greater emphasis on writing “as a way of emphasizing the importance of the readingwriting connection,” said Rita M. Bean, who chaired that committee and is a professor emeritus of education at the University of Pittsburgh. A recent policy brief from the National Council of Teachers of English, based in Urbana, Ill., calls for having students write about and discuss complex texts and use those

texts as models for writing. Reading has occupied a higher profile than writing on the literacy landscape in part because of the focus on discrete reading skills that emanated from the National Reading Panel report in 2000, experts say, and the ensuing emphasis on those skills in the federally funded Reading First program and in state tests required under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Noting with alarm the growing gap, the National Commission on Writing in 2003 called for schools to double the amount of time they spent on writing. “For all intents and purposes, ‘literacy’ became synonymous with ‘reading,’ and writing became the stepchild of literacy rather than an equal partner,” said Andrés Henríquez, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which underwrote a string of studies on reading and writing, including “Writing to Read.” Students still spend little time writing in school. Teacher surveys by Steve Graham, the author of “Writing to Read,” and colleagues show that students spend less than half an hour writing each day in elementary school, and much of what they write is lists and fillin-the-blank answers to questions. Even at the high school level, seven in 10 teachers reported that their preservice training had not prepared them adequately to teach writing, and nearly half did not assign a single multiparagraph writing task per month. “What we have, typically, is kids not writing more than a paragraph of text, all the way

through high school,” said Mr. Graham, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. “It’s not very promising for writing or for writing instruction.”

Poor Performance
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reflect correspondingly lackluster writing skills. The report issued in September, for the 2011 exam, shows only one in four middle and high school students writing at the “proficient” level or better. The national picture of student writing led the authors of the common standards to elevate its role in literacy instruction and to tie it closely to reading, not only in language arts classes but across the curriculum. Assessments for the standards, being designed by two groups of states, are expected to reflect those connections as well, with tasks that combine research and writing. The idea, said Susan Pimentel, one of the lead authors of the standards, is to reduce writing “opinion untethered to evidence” and “decontextualized” writing—writing not based on the reading of a text—in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there. That shift reflects what young people can expect in college and work, she said. “In faculty and employer surveys, the kinds of skills that score high are the argument and evidence-related skills, developing ideas with relevant details and reasons,” Ms. Pimentel said. “Telling stories scores very low. Expressing one’s

Diana Leddy works with kindergartners and 1st graders at the Blue School to complete writing, reading, and drawing exercises using scenes from the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax. Built in 1858, the one-room schoolhouse in Landaff, N.H., is using the book as a way to fuse lessons in writing and reading. FACING PAGE: Elise Tyler rewrites a scene from the book on a worksheet. Wearing a mustache made of paper, Caleb Burns plays the role of the Lorax. Pupils took turns wearing the mustache and choosing their favorite scenes.

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Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report

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