Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report - S8

every way, … we have it much more figured out than we did in 2000.” The common core’s emphasis on more complex text with higherlevel vocabulary at younger ages—and particularly the use of informational, non-narrative texts as opposed to overwhelmingly narrative texts—also puts into practice research showing that there is no bright line for when students start to read to learn, Ms. McCardle said. Setting one would be “an artificial distinction,” she said, “because the ramp up to learning from reading starts earlier and is just that, a ramp-up, not a quick switch or a dichotomy.” Viewing comprehension as a sequential skill rather than a continuously evolving one “also implies they don’t need ongoing instruction after 3rd grade, and we clearly know they do,” she said. The Alliance for Excellent Education’s 2006 report “Reading Next” helped spark the common core’s approach. Education professor Catherine A. Snow and thendoctoral student Gina Biancarosa of the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that explicit comprehension instruction, intensive writing, and the use of texts in a wide array of difficulty levels, subjects, and disciplines all helped improve literacy for struggling adolescent readers. “There are two really big ideas underlying the common core,” said P. David Pearson, a professor of

language and literacy, society, and culture at the University of California, Berkeley. The standards first set out that children build knowledge through their close reading of texts, a concept “consistent with the last 20-30 years of research,” Mr. Pearson said. “But the second big idea is its grounding in the disciplines,” Mr. Pearson added. “If you think of science and history and even literature as disciplines, you can see why they have separate standards in reading for literature, informational text, science, and technical areas. You’re not just learning to read; you’re learning to read within a rich content area. This reflects a huge refocusing of reading research in the last 10 to 15 years on reading in the disciplines. It’s been timely; they’ve hit a theme in the realm of education policy and practice.”

of such a modest level. ... We were unintentionally holding them back, and the common core called us on that.”
TIMOTHY SHANAHAN
University of Illinois at Chicago

WE WERE SETTING EXPECTATIONS

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Content and Complexity
Mr. Pearson pointed to research by Cynthia L. Greenleaf, a codirector of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at the San Franciscobased research group WestEd, which identified specific literacy skills required in science and history classes. Timothy Shanahan, the director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the commoncore literacy-standards committee, likewise has found differences not just in the content knowledge but the approach to reading and getting information from text by professional scientists and historians. While “reading across the curriculum” research in the mid-1990s also stressed text in different content areas, Dorothy Strickland, a reading professor and education professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., said the common core leverages emerging research on how students analyze and verify what

they read in different types of text, from literature to a lab report or an Internet blog. “One of the key elements of executive function is holding more than one thing at a time” in mind, she said. “Kids have to read across texts, evaluate them, respond to them all at the same time. In office work of any sort, people are doing this sort of thing all the time.” The “Reading Next” report also highlights labor studies that show the 25 fastest-growing professions from 2000-2010—computer software engineers, database administrators, and medical assistants, among them—require higherthan-average literacy skills, particularly in informational texts. In a series of experiments across several grades beginning in 2000, Nell K. Duke, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, found elementary classrooms spend on average only 3.6 minutes a day reading non-storybased informational, as opposed to narrative texts. In classrooms with high numbers of poor children, informational reading occupies less than two minutes a day. “Even if there hadn’t been one stitch of research on informational text with young children, it’s still conceivable the common core would have had an incredible emphasis on informational text because that was what colleges and employers were saying students needed to be able to read,”

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Ms. Duke said. “Fortunately, there was a nice alignment between the concerns of researchers and the concerns of the college and business community.” The fundamentals discussed in the National Reading Panel are still there, too, but have been given different weight. For example, vocabulary gets much more attention in the common core, not just individual words, but their meanings in different contexts and the nuances in families of related words. In part, that’s because a student’s depth and complexity of vocabulary knowledge predicts his or her academic achievement better than other early-reading indicators, such as phonemic awareness. “There was a big push on academic vocabulary and the discourse of the disciplines. It’s likely come from that whole tradition of making sure kids not only have general academic language but deep vocabulary of history, social studies, science,” Mr. Pearson of uc-Berkeley said. The common core also marks a sea change in the way researchers and teachers think about a child’s reading level. For example, in a 2010 study in the Journal of Educational Psychology, researchers assigned two groups of poor readers in grades 2 and 4 to practice reading aloud text either at or above their reading level; a third group, the control, had no additional practice. They found students who practiced reading, even when it was difficult, were significantly better 20 weeks later at reading rate, word recognition, and comprehension, in comparison with the control group. “It flies in the face of everything we’d been doing. Since the 1940s, the biggest idiots in the field— like me—were arguing that you couldn’t teach kids out of books they couldn’t read,” Mr. Shanahan said. “We were setting expectations of such a modest level of learning being possible. We were unintentionally holding them back, and the common core called us on that.”

Standards and Grades
Ms. Strickland and Mr. Pearson said the common core’s strength comes from integrating many factors that have been identified as vital to adult literacy—such as facility with complex text or academic vocabulary—across all grades and academic subjects. “I think the idea of 10 standards that play themselves out grade after grade across different disciplines is a powerful thing,” Mr. Pearson said. Still, researchers said, while individual standards are backed by evidence that students’ level of mastery of them can predict their eventual literacy in college and work, there is much less research supporting the grade-level descriptors of how those skills look through the years, or the most effective instructional strategies

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Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report

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