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.
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Education Week: New Literacy Research Infuses Common Core - 0 views
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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
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We need to help children use literacy to develop critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, making distinctions among different types of evidence," said Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor
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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
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It's been 15 years since Congress convened the National Reading Panel to distill knowledge about how students learn to read
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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
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"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,
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"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."
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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."
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The Alliance for Excellent Education's 2006 report "Reading Next" helped spark the common core's approach.
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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.
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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,"
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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"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."
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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,"
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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."
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"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.
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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."
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Much of the criticism of the common core's research base comes from what it leaves out rather than what it includes.
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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.
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"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.
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"It's not because [the common-core designers] rejected that research,
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"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."
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"I see a gap between the standards and school curriculums, because typically when [previous]state standards were developed, they basically became the curriculum,
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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."
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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.
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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
Teacher Resources | Library of Congress - 0 views
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Final College-Readiness Definition Guides Test Consortium - Curriculum Matters - Educat... - 0 views
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28997 28997 « Election Brings Changes to Polarized Texas School Board | Main Final College-Readiness Definition Guides Test Consortium By Catherine Gewertz on November 7, 2012 4:16 PM What does it mean to be college-ready? Half the states in the country have agreed on a definition. And that definition will shape the way student performance is judged in those states in a couple years. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, has approved a set of descriptors for the tests it's designing for the Common Core State Standards. They lay out how many levels of achievement there will be on the test, specify what level a student has to reach to be considered "college ready," and describe the level of expertise students must show to merit that title. The development of these descriptors is a key step in designing the tests that students in the 23 PARCC states will take in 2014-15. The other group of states working on similar tests, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, is working on descriptors of its own. To get a sense of the discussions that go into these decisions, read my report on a PARCC board meeting in June, when K-12 and higher education members of the consortium hashed out their differences. Then read the blog post I wrote in July, which discusses how they blended those differences into a new version of the descriptors. They opened that one up for more feedback, and the result is the final ones, which can be found on PARCC's website. A summary of public feedback shows how K-12 and higher ed. folks weighed in on a variety of topics. One was whether to assign names or numbers to the five levels of achievement on the test. Another was how to distinguish nuances in the meaning of the descriptions of students' skills at the various levels. At exactly what point, for instance, does a student's command of the subject move from "superior" to "solid," from "solid" to "partial," from "partial" to "limited," and from "limited" to "very limited?" These are the kinds of discussions that characterize the work on this stuff. As you can see from the final documents, PARCC's policy will be that students earn the "college readiness" determination by performing at level 4 on a 5-level test. Reaching that level on the language arts part of the exam will mean that students have "demonstrated the academic knowledge, skills, and practices necessary" to skip remedial classes and go directly into entry-level, credit-bearing courses in "college English composition, literature, and technical courses requiring college-level reading and writing." Scoring at level 4 in math allows students to enroll directly in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in algebra, introductory statistics, and "technical courses requiring an equivalent level" of math. The PARCC policy says that college-readiness scores on the test will be set in such a way that students who score at that
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The PARCC policy says that college-readiness scores on the test will be set in such a way that students who score at that level—level 4—will have a 75 percent chance of earning a grade of C or better in those college courses.
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Acknowledging a sensitive area in the discussion of college readiness, the policy notes that the skills sought in the tests are only the "academic" ones necessary for college success, not the entire spectrum of skills necessary, such as persistence or motivation.
Text Complexity: Choosing Exemplar Texts | English Language Arts - 1 views
Supplemental Information for Appendix A of the Common Core State ... - 2 views
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Quick Guide to the Common Core: Key Expectations Explained - Vander Ark on Innovation -... - 0 views
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English Language Arts The text is more complex.
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Since the 1960s, text difficulty in textbooks has been declining (Source: CCSS Appendix A)
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has created a significant gap between what students are reading in twelfth grade and what is expected of them when they arrive at college.
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the CCSS cites an ACT report called Reading Between the Line that says that the ability to answer questions about complex text is a key predictor of college success.
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The text covers a wider range of genres and formats.
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In order to be college-, career-, and life-ready, students need to be familiar and comfortable with texts from a broad range of genres and formats. The Common Core State Standards focus on a broader range and place a much greater emphasis on informational text.
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The Common Core sets expectation that, in grades three through eight, 50 percent of the text be expository. Specifically, in grades three through five, there is a call for more scientific, technical, and historic texts, and in grades six through eight, more literary nonfiction including essays, speeches, opinion pieces, literary essays, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical, scientific, technical, and economic accounts.
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In addition, students are expected to understand the presentation of texts in a variety of multimedia formats, such as video.
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There is a greater emphasis on evidence-based questioning.
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The standards have shifted away from cookie-cutter questions like, "What is the main idea?" and moved toward questions that require a closer reading of the text.
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The questions are more specific, and so the students must be more adept at drawing evidence from the text and explaining that evidence orally and in writing.
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Students are exposed to more authentic text.
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The Publishers' Criteria for the Common Core State Standards, developed by two of the lead authors of the standards, emphasize a shift away from text that is adapted, watered down, or edited, and instead, focus on text in its true form. While scaffolding is still considered an important element when introducing students to new topics, it should not pre-empt or replace the original text. The scaffolding should be used to help children grasp the actual text, not avoid it.
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The standards have a higher level of specificity.
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There is a great amount of flexibility for educators to determine how they want to implement the new standards and the materials they choose to use and/or create; however, the standards themselves are quite specific.
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Additional Expectations
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Shared responsibility for students' literacy development. In grades six through twelve, there are specific standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. The message here is that content area teachers must have a shared role in developing students' literacy skills.
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Compare and synthesize multiple sources. Students are expected to integrate their understanding of what they are currently reading with texts that they have previously read.
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need to answer how what they have just read compares to what they have learned before.
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Focus on academic vocabulary. One of the biggest gaps between students, starting in the earliest grades, is their vocabulary knowledge. The new standards require a focus on academic vocabulary, presenting vocabulary in context, and using the same vocabulary across various types of complex texts from different disciplines.
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The Common Core State Standards are not "test prep" standards. They aim to teach students how to think and raise the bar on their level of comprehension and their ability to articulate their knowledge.
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However, the depth of the standards and the significant differences between the CCSS and current standards in most states require a whole new way of teaching, so even the most experienced teachers will need to make great changes and require support in doing so.
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A lot of publishers are repurposing old materials and saying that they are "aligned" with the Common Core.
Item and Task Prototypes | PARCC - 0 views
Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Content - 0 views
Reading Sage: Student-Friendly Bloom's Taxonomy Question Stems - 2 views
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Online writing tools focus on teacher development, student engagement | eSchool News - 1 views
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For years, Morse noted, schools have been using software that scores students’ essays automatically using artificial intelligence technology, which allows students to practice writing and get constructive feedback more frequently than if teachers had to score all drafts by hand.
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But these solutions “still must be grounded in sound pedagogy,” he said, “and that’s not easy.”
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To address this need, AcademicMerit created FineTune, which it calls a first-of-its-kind online professional development tool for supporting teachers in the rubric-based evaluation of student writing.
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teachers in a district can use FineTune to work toward calibrating their assessment of students’ writing to match up with a comprehensive rubric, the Common Core standards, and each other.
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Teachers choose from a database of hundreds of actual student essays and evaluate each essay based on a five-category rubric aligned with the Common Core. They receive immediate, category-by-category comparative scoring and analysis for each essay they score. The, they take built-in assessments to measure the quality of their scoring from the company’s assessment product, Assessments21.
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Once they pass these assessments, teachers become approved “readers” for common writing assignments and exams. Supervisors or mentors in the district can use the assessment data to provide focused professional development in support of teachers. The company also acts as a liaison to the district to analyze results and offer suggestions for additional training, as needed.
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Educational Leadership:Strong Readers All:Vocabulary: Five Common Misconceptions - 0 views
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When young readers encounter texts that contain too many unfamiliar words, their comprehension suffers.
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vocabulary knowledge is a key element in reading comprehension. To comprehend fully and learn well, all students need regular vocabulary exploration.
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the term exploration does not accurately describe most traditional word study in schools.
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Misconception 1: Definitions do the trick.
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knowing a word's definition is important, it's not nearly enough.
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To know a word well and use it appropriately and effectively, students need to be aware of its multiple dimensions (Bromley, 2012).
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Most students will best learn the many dimensions of words through direct instruction that includes the definition and the etymology, or origin, of the word.
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begin by showing students the word in print along with a picture or drawing. Then, connect to students' prior knowledge by asking what they know about the word or what they notice about its structure
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Provide a definition that builds on what students have supplied. Point out the word's structure and idiosyncratic spelling. Identify related words. Encourage students to use the new word in speaking. You might have student partners share sentences with each other. If students keep vocabulary notebooks, have them write the word in their notebooks and draw a picture or add a short definition for future reference.
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To get ideas for innovative and engaging vocabulary lessons, visit some of the websites listed in "Selected Online Vocabulary Resources."
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Misconception 2: Weekly vocabulary lists are effective.
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Unfortunately, this age-old method of vocabulary instruction continues in many classrooms.
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rote memorization does not support word learning (Allington, 2012; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). Learning anything, including new words, involves connecting or integrating the new information with what you already know. If students have little background knowledge about new words or see no connections between what they know and what is new, they will not learn effectively.
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different ways of organizing words for vocabulary exploration are readily available.
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Misconception 3: Teachers should teach all hard words, especially those printed in bold or italics.
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Many teachers preteach every difficult word identified in the basal manual or highlighted in the textbook. The problem with this approach is twofold. First, students may already be familiar with some words, so teaching them is a waste of time. Second, some words are not important enough to teach because although they appear in one selection, they will not appear frequently in future readings.
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ask the following questions: Do students know the word already? Is the word essential to understanding the selection at hand? Will the word appear in future readings?
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When you reduce the number of words to teach, you avoid cognitive overload (Bromley, 2007).
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It's probably a good idea to teach no more than 3–4 new words per selection in grades 1–3 and 5–7 new words per selection in grades 4 and up.
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Some highlighted terms absolutely need to be taught, and some should be ignored. It's also beneficial to teach students how to find the meanings of these words for themselves if they don't know them.
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Misconception 4: The study of Latin and Greek roots is too hard for young learners.
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More than 60 percent of academic words have word parts (also called morphemes or roots) that always carry the same meaning (Nagy, Anderson, Schommer, Scott, & Stallman, 1989). Knowing that words can be broken down into meaning units is a powerful strategy for vocabulary development (Ayers, 1986; Baumann, Kameenui, & Ash, 2003; Harmon, Hedrick, & Wood, 2005).
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Until recently, teaching Latin and Greek word roots occurred only in upper-grade or content-area classrooms. But a growing body of research tells us that this strategy should be introduced in the primary grades (Mountain, 2005; Rasinski, Padak, Newton, & Newton, 2011).
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Roots have two features that make them easy to teach: They represent simple, familiar concepts, and their meaning is stable—for instance, port means "to carry" and graph means "to write." Once students understand the linguistic principle that words with the same roots are related in meaning, they can use words they know to unlock the meaning of new words.
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One of the most commonly encountered roots in the English language is the Latin base mov- / mot-, which means "to move." Even the youngest learners know words like motor, motorcycle, or move. When they meet cognate academic words like promotion or motivate, students can apply the concept of movement to figure out the new words.
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Teaching the meaning of prefixes is especially helpful because a few prefixes are used in a large number of words. When the prefix re- appears in return, replace, and refund, for example, it always means "back." Figure 1 presents roots that can easily be taught in the primary grades.
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Misconception 5: Word learning can't be fun.
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Writing words multiple times, copying definitions, completing worksheets, drilling with flash cards, and taking weekly tests—students and most teachers consider this drudgery. As a result, students may come to abhor vocabulary study.
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Think about the games your family plays at home. Many of them probably involve words. Scrabble, Boggle, Balderdash, Buzzword, Pictionary, crossword puzzles, and word jumbles are just a few of the many games involving words that individuals and families have played and enjoyed for years.
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we have found gamelike activities to be a wonderful way to inspire interest in and develop knowledge about words. Many great word games can easily be integrated into a word study curriculum. Just a few of the many online resources for word games and puzzles are MindFun Gamequarium Funschool.com Vocabulary.co.il MyVocabulary Have you ever noticed that when you play a word game for a while, you get better at it? That's learning! And when students engage with word games in the classroom, they too will improve their word knowledge.
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memorizing definitions alone does not lead to word learning. Students need multiple opportunities to see, write, and use new words. Consequently, teaching fewer words and connecting these new words with familiar words or concepts will facilitate learning.
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Focusing at least some vocabulary instruction on roots, especially those deriving from Latin and Greek provides students with tools they can use to unlock the meaning of unfamiliar words. And finally, word study can—and should—be interesting, interactive, and fun!
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Selected Online Vocabulary Resources
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Figure 1. A Beginning List of Roots
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