Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report - S6

New Research Thinking Girds Core
By Sarah D. Sparks

he truism that students “learn to read, then read to learn,” has spawned a slew of early-reading interventions and laws. But the Common Core State Standards offer a very different view of literacy, in which fluency and comprehension skills evolve together throughout every grade and subject in a student’s academic life, from the first time a toddler gums a board book to the moment a medical student reads data from a brain scan. In doing so, the common-core literacy standards reflect the research world’s changing evidence on expectations of student competence in an increasingly interconnected and digitized world. But critics say the standards also neglect emerging evidence on cognitive and reading strategies that could guide teachers on how to help students develop those literacy skills. “In our knowledge-based economy, students are not only going to have to read, but develop knowledge-based capital. We need to help children use literacy to develop criticalthinking skills, problem-solving skills, making distinctions among different types of evidence,” said Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in earlyliteracy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The Common Core State Standards is privileging knowledge for the first time. To ensure they are careerand-college ready, we have to see students as lifelong learners and help them develop the knowledge-gathering skills they will use for the rest of their lives. That’s the reality.”

In the 15 years since the National Reading Panel convened, the knowledge base on literacy has grown
read. That group, in the heat of the socalled “reading wars” between whole-language and phonics approaches to instruction, focused on five fundamental literacy skills: the word-decoding skills of phonemic awareness and phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. The panel’s seminal 2000 report, “Teaching Children to Read,” was used as the touchstone of the $1 billion-a-year federal Reading First grant program, established under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Eight years later, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm found that schools using Reading First did devote significantly more time to teaching the basic skills outlined by the panel, but ultimately “reduced the percentage of students engaged with print,” both fiction and nonfiction. The study by the Institute of Education Sciences found students in Reading First schools were no better at drawing meaning from what they read than students at other schools, and the program eventually was scrapped. “One of the things we’re seeing with the common core is, there was general disappointment with the nrp report’s five critical skills as part of the Reading First initiative,” said Ms. Neuman, who was an assistant secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, when the federal reading program was rolled out. “When the evaluation came out and the results were very modest, people said, ‘Well, what’s next, what do we do?’ We have not seen the emergence of a new model, and now, that’s on the verge of happening.” Peggy McCardle, the chief of the child development and behavior branch—which includes literacy research—at the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, said comprehension became the “next great frontier of reading research” after the National Reading Panel. There have been other, narrowly focused panels on early reading and English-language learners, but the National Reading Panel still stands as the last comprehensive, Congressional task force on reading. “What the National Reading Panel had to say about comprehension was, we do need to teach kids strategies, and it’s better if you teach them in combination—and we’ve taken that much further,” Ms. McCardle said. “While we don’t have reading comprehension completely figured out in

COMPREHENSION AND THE STANDARDS
The Common Core State Standards take a holistic view of comprehension, asking students to derive meaning from a mix of texts, illustrations, and digital media at the same time. “Our knowledge of comprehension is changing. We used to teach strategies, on the assumption that those strategies would translate to any text. Now we

Response to Findings
It’s been 15 years since Congress convened the National Reading Panel to distill knowledge about how students learn to

recognize that transferability has real problems; we need to teach in the context of the text,” said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This is one area in which the standards have staked a position on the bleeding edge of research on learning, said Nell K. Duke, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Michigan School of Education in Ann Arbor. “How

do you teach kids to read a diagram, how do you teach kids to read a time line? What typically goes wrong with reading a graphic?”

The common core’s vision of how students ought to learn, grade by grade, to comprehend meaning differently across different media is sketched out in one strand of the reading standards—part of “integrating knowledge and ideas.” KINDERGARTEN: With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts). GRADE 1: Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events. GRADE 2: Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot. GRADE 3: Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate

understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur). GRADE 4: Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web pages) and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears. GRADE 5: Draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently. GRADE 6: Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue. GRADE 7: Compare and contrast a text to an audio, video,

or multimedia version of the text, analyzing each medium’s portrayal of the subject (e.g., how the delivery of a speech affects the impact of the words). GRADE 8: Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums (e.g., print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a particular topic or idea. GRADES 9-10: Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account. GRADES 11-12: Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem. —S.D.S

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READING IN THE COMMON-CORE ERA www.edweek.org/go/common-reading EDUCATION WEEK • November 14, 2012

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Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report

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