6-12 ELA Common Core Resources

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

It's been 15 years since Congress convened the National Reading Panel to distill knowledge about how students learn to read

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,

"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 every way, … we have it much more figured out than we did in 2000."

The common core's emphasis on more complex text with higher-level 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."

The Alliance for Excellent Education's 2006 report "Reading Next" helped spark the common core's approach.

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.

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,"

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

research by Cynthia L. Greenleaf, a co-director of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at the San Francisco-based research group WestEd, which identified specific literacy skills required in science and history classes.

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.

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 higher-than-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-story-based informational, as opposed to narrative texts. In classrooms with high numbers of poor children, informational reading occupies less than two minutes a day

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.

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."

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,"

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 at each grade. Mr. Pearson said descriptors at transition grades, such as in upper elementary and middle school, may become the "Achilles heel of the standards."

"some of the targets are a little goofy," noting, for example, that the common core requires children to compare two texts in kindergarten, but there is no specific evidence that this skill should develop in that grade versus, say, grades 1 or 2.

what the learning progressions tell us is a 4th grade teacher can no longer be a 4th grade teacher, or even a grades 3-4-5 teacher. They need to be a teacher of literacy and understand the precedents and antecedents of what a student needs to know."

Much of the criticism of the common core's research base comes from what it leaves out rather than what it includes.

reading researchers have made significant advances in the development of strategies for reading and comprehension, as well as metacognitive factors that contribute to reading success, such as attention and motivation.

"The standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning," the common core states. Rather, it says, teachers should use their professional judgment and experience to decide how to help students meet the standards.

"It's not because [the common-core designers] rejected that research,

"The notion was that you wanted to focus on outcomes, not the inputs. It might be helpful to teach a student whether he's paying attention or not, and if not, to do something. The common core isn't saying you shouldn't do that kind of thing, but that's not an outcome."

"I see a gap between the standards and school curriculums, because typically when [previous]state standards were developed, they basically became the curriculum,

If the states that adopted the common core say to their school districts, 'This is the curriculum,' and teachers feel they must teach to the test, the curriculum as it exists would not include the metacognitive strategies, the writing-process strategies... and that's a problem."

this new approach is saying is focus on the text, because many remedial readers rely too much on their background knowledge and think they understand what they are reading when they actually do not.

there has not been enough study of what good comprehension looks like and how to teach it in new contexts required by the common core, such as Internet articles, data tables, and texts that also include graphics