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Educators are facing the implementation of the new Common Core State Standards and the expectation to use technology to engage and motivate students to learn these standards.

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Gone are the days when you read a text cold, and this is good news for typical and nontypical students. Some students mistakenly think that doing prep work for reading a novel is borderline cheating, as teachers know that real “cheating” would be reading Cliff Notes without reading the assigned text. In college, I realized that reading a text with just my own perspective wasn’t helpful when studying A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Yes, I tried reading it cold. And my college professor’s lectures made me question if I read the same book. I honestly thought that this “literary great” was just a writer who couldn’t get outside his own thoughts. Only when I sat in the library, surrounded by social histories that accurately placed where James Joyce was writing from, to understanding the physical places where the narrator experienced (nearly subliminally in his thoughts), to varied literary analysis, could I digest any of this influential fiction — or understand the class lectures.

I would expect to come across reading strategies from a college-level English Department, but the Counseling Center at Guerrieri University Center in Salisbury, MD has put a list of seven critical reading strategies (outlined below). Some of the suggested list works for teachers preparing younger children for reading assignments to college-level students:

1.  Previewing: Learning about a text before really reading it.

The Center suggests previewing as skimming the instructional formatted material: nicely organized with titles, headers, any pull quotes and pictures with captions. This provides “an overview of the content and organization,” and the structure not only helps absorbing the subject content – it can help to frame note taking, which can be used for study later on.

2.  Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.

Readers response theory is the first step to a student understanding reading material – where a student makes personal connections to the text. But readers do need to go beyond the lens of their own experiences. To do this, readers need to understand that some “texts you read were all written in the past, sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text.” For example, in an affluent classroom of mostly Caucasian high school students who are reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley, many of the student won’t be able to bridge their experiences to the text (although it is a good starting place). They need to understand the text’s context, and teachers can provide its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts or assign research groups to provide the text’s context.

3.  Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.

The Center suggests that teacher questions that guide literature does often work, but students should consider writing their own questions as they read. You can have younger children journal their “as I read” questions, pinpointing not only comprehension issues but also higher-level thinking questions. And when they discover an answer to one of their own questions, it provides a student-centered learning and, for older students, a potential working thesis for essay writing.

The Center adds, “With this strategy, you can write questions any time, but in difficult academic readings, you will understand the material better and remember it longer if you write a question for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should focus on a main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph.” Great advice.

4.  Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining your personal responses.

This part may be more difficult for younger students to address, but even middle school students can use some help in identifying their own beliefs and values – compared to what a text is suggesting. Not an opportunity for indoctrination of any divergent viewpoints, it can help clarify one’s own beliefs and help frame argumentative essays.

The Center suggests marking the text with Xs “where you feel a personal challenge to your attitudes, beliefs, or status. Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. What patterns do you see?” What a great way to visually note challenges and places where one can counter arguments.

5.  Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your own words.

“Whereas outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection’s main argument in brief.” The Center adds, “When you make an outline, don’t use the text’s exact words” and summarize using your own words because it “requires creative synthesis.” This is tricky for younger students, and I would suggest outlining text using the text’s clues (headers, titles, sometimes italicized words) and allowing them to copy provided text. The bottom line is “being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples…Putting ideas together again — in your own words and in a condensed form — shows how reading critically can lead to deeper understanding of any text.”

6.  Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact.

I personally feel that this is the single most overlooked aspect of reading: critical thinking. I try to have my students understand that just because a text says this is so, doesn’t mean that it is an absolute truth. We want a nation of readers who are open-minded enough to evaluate arguments and decide where they stand for themselves. A text’s credibility is most important – what is the source, who wrote it, is this person affiliated with a group or ideology, and how strong is the writer’s other written work?

The Center writes:
All writers make assertions that they want you to accept as true. As a critical reader, you should not accept anything on face value but to recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support. The claim asserts a conclusion — an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view — that the writer wants you to accept. The support includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics, and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion. When you assess an argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning as well as its truthfulness (these are not the same thing). At the most basic level, in order for an argument to be acceptable, the support must be appropriate to the claim and the statements must be consistent with one another.

I feel that they are driving home a good point: reasons are shared beliefs, assumptions, and values; evidence is facts, examples, statistics, and authorities. Understanding an authors reasons and evidence are critical, as is understanding one’s own.

7.  Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better.

The Center writes: “Many of the authors we read are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss them in different ways.” This part is about understanding the big picture. You can understand a subject more deeply by considering different points of view on the subject, and you become an expert. What comes to mind is asking older students to write a pro-argument essay, and then follow up with a con-argument essay. Yes, I can hear the students groan, but I think that defending both sides of an issue means that the student better understands a particular subject matter than most, and, more importantly, understands and can defend his or her own viewpoint.

Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

That time is almost upon us ….

Summer!

What about some ideas for students who may need some extra encouragement to keep reading over the summer?

BigUniverse Learning provides great books that could be used with many of these activities:

Summer Reading Activities for Struggling Readers (from Imagine Learning)

• See a movie that’s based on a book. Then, read the book together.
• Encourage your child to read for fun by reading entertaining books, newspapers, and magazine articles together.
• Have your child read the recipe as you make something fun, like a favorite family dish.
• Read stories out loud, either to your child or with your child.
• Encourage your child to explore new interests by signing up for a sports team, summer camp, or even a fun summer class.
• Then, find books and magazine articles about his or her new interests and read them together.
• Have older children read out loud to their younger siblings.
• Make reading together enjoyable by focusing on the meaning of what you read rather than focusing on reading accuracy.
• Talk to your child about things he or she has read in school or at home.
• Play board games that involve reading, and include siblings and friends whenever you can.
• Ask your child’s teacher to recommend books.
• Have your child watch reading-focused television programs on PBS.
• Make reading a family event by having 15-30 minutes of family reading time every day.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks via photopin cc

In Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Harvard Graduate School of Education, professor Daniel Koretz has a lot of say about our nation’s “high-stakes testing” and the impact of testing special needs students. Maria Fusrao summarizes Koretz’ findings, providing interview video clips and text on Measure for measures: What do standardized tests really tell us about students and schools? The challenge that we face is avoiding misleadingly low or inflated scores — and if we are in fact testing the same skills. Can we assess if standardized testing can properly demonstrate proficiency? It is a challenge that we need to address.

Testing Limitation 1: Misleadingly Low Scores

Koretz begins by explaining that the test scores have limitations: “scores on those tests have often become misleading, sometimes wildly misleading” and that “we tend to overestimate what tests can do. Tests are not designed to summarize all that students and schools can do.” Ask any teacher, I am sure that he or she will agree that testing competence on one area is only a small portion what what students have learned in a classroom. Add special needs test takers to the mix, and the results can be even more inaccurate. Testing students with special needs is troubling because you need the scores to reflect students’ proficiency, yet Koretz points out that “when students have certain disabilities, their test scores may in fact be misleadingly low.”

Testing Limitation 2: Testing the Same Skills through Testing Accommodations

We also don’t want to go the the other extreme by inflating test scores through accommodations. He explains that “the purpose of an accommodation [larger print, modified room lighting, or a specialized computer screen for vision impaired students] is not to make the students’ scores higher, but to help them score as well as their actual proficiency warrants.” Koretz then speaks of a scenario where a student with dyslexia is tested and suggests that “when the impediments caused by the student’s disability are directly relevant to the knowledge and skills the test is designed to measure,” we may not be measuring what the test intended. Koretz points out that the test taker uses different skills:  decoding (barrier for that student) or interpreting the meaning of text, so having the text read to him actually changes that test from a reading comprehension to oral language comprehension.

The testing limitations and their implications should give parents and teachers pause. Does Koretz suggest that standardized testing can’t “accurately” measure special needs abilities? If so, it is tough pill to swallow, for teachers and parents of special needs students. Yet Koretz does provide hope: understanding these limitation helps clarify the testing problem, so we can work toward meeting this challenge.

Image courtesy of Keerati at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What do you think about Character Analysis?

Does listening of seeing how your students understand and analyze characters provide a method for you to access their concept of the story?

Once I saw this infographic, I could not stop thinking about it!

Although this was created to help one create and develop characters, I see many ways it can also be used to provide ideas for analyzing characters:

photo credit: Olaya B via photopin cc

It may never occur to you that as your child reads, that he may also be picking up some bad reading habits. What could be bad about reading? I thought any attempt to read was good effort. It turns out that there are bad reading habits that can negatively impact reading. According to The University of Alabama’s Center for Academic Success, there are five bad reading habits that slow down reading speed, and they also offer some strategies to overcoming them.

1. Silent Voicing

Have you seen your child moving her lips as she silently reads? That can slow her down to reading “about 150 words per minute,” which is equivalent to fast-paced speech. An average elementary school child can read about 200 words per minute (wpm) while an adult can read about 200 – 250 wpm. The Center suggests “Put your fingers on your lips to stop the motion.” When you catch your child doing this, you can show her that she is using his lips to read, and doesn’t have to.

2. Vocalizing

Vocalizing, or using your voice box in the throat – with no sounds also slows you down. They suggest checking for vocalizing by “rest your fingertips lightly against the vocal cord area of your throat. If you feel a vibration, or if you find that your tongue is moving, you are vocalizing.” As an adult, and a pretty quick reader I might add, I was shocked to realize that I do this too!

3.  Reading everything at the same speed

The Center also suggests that you should tailor your reading speed to “your purpose for reading and the difficulty level of the material,” a difficult concept to pass down to young readers. The Center maintains, “The more difficult the material, the slower the rate,” and that to me means, it is okay to cut yourself some slack when reading a technical article versus lighter type materials.

4.  Regressing (rereading a word, phrase, or sentence) out of habit

Readers can fall into a trap of rereading text, not out of need to comprehend, but because it has become a habit. How can you break out of this? The Center offers a simple visual technique: “Use a card or paper to cover the text after you read it to prevent regressing.” This is great for reading text-heavy books, and also helps youngsters who feel overwhelmed with how much more text on that page that they have to cover.

5.  Reading one word at a time

The Center says that “slow readers tend to see only one word at a time,” whereas stronger readers “see several words at a time and their eyes will stop only three or four times as they move across a page.” They recommend: “reading in idea-phrases speeds your reading and improves your understanding of what you have read.” And doing this can be as simple as “Mark the phrases in the sentences of a passage, then practice seeing more than one word at a time.” This seems to be a task best done with more experienced readers.

A great way to model reading speed — and help you to target some poor reading habits that will slow young readers down — to  is to read with your children and follow along with Big Universe read-alouds. Let us know which reading habits that you have uncovered.

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos.net