Transcript Learning from Challenging Text

COMING TO TERMS
WITH THE COMMON
CORE IN K-12
Timothy Shanahan
University of Illinois at Chicago
www.shanahanonliteracy.com
Common Core State Standards
• 46 states and DC adopted common core state standards
(almost 90% of teachers and students in the U.S.)
• CCSS covers English Language Arts and Math
• In 2014-2015, current state tests will be replaced by one of two
exams that will be taken by students in about half the states
• Purpose of the standards:
(1) to foster higher achievement of U.S. kids;
(2) to make educational opportunity more equal.
1. Challenging Text
• Past standards focused on cognitive skills and ignored text
difficulty
• Common core: Text difficulty is central to learning
• Specific cognitive skills have to be executed, but with texts that
are sufficiently challenging (Item 10).
• Should we shift attention to text to this extent?
1. Challenging Text (cont.)
1. Challenging Text (cont.)
• Quantitative factors: Readability formulas that predict
comprehension from vocabulary and sentence complexity
• Includes ATOS, Degrees of Reading Power, Flesch-Kincaid,
Lexiles, Reading Maturity, Source Reader
• Set higher than in the past”
FleschKincaid
2nd – 3rd
4th – 5th
6th – 8th
9th – 10th
11th –CCR
The Lexile
Framework®
1.98 –5.34
420 – 820
4.51 –7.73
740 – 1010
6.51 –10.34
925 – 1185
8.32 –12.12
1050 – 1335
10.34 –14.2
1185 – 1385
1. Challenging Text (cont.)
• Common core requires that children will be taught from harder
texts than in the past (texts often likely to be at their “frustration
level”)
• What about the “instructional level”?
• What about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development?
Instructional Level
• Betts (1946) theory of instructional level (independent,
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instructional, frustration and a system for measuring them)
Claimed research had shown that learning was optimized if
students were placed in text with appropriate difficulty levels
Independent (fluency 99-100%; comprehension 90-100%)
Instructional (fluency 95-98%; comprehension 70-89%)
Frustration (fluency 0-92%; comprehension 0-50%)
Source of Betts’ Criteria?
• Betts claimed instructional level was validated in Killgallon
study
• But, Killgallon didn’t do the study, nor did anyone else
(Shanahan, 1983)
• Text difficulty’s role in facilitating learning has been more a
matter of lore than empirical research
• Readability measures predict reading comprehension, not
learning
The problem
• You have likely been through standards changes before and that
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hasn’t been a big deal (you know how to handle that)
But this time it is different….
The common core standards were written differently than past
standards and they are informed by different underlying theories
That means that much of what you have done successfully in the past
in adopting new standards will be counterproductive this time
It also means that your teachers will not only be asked to teach
different content, but they will be asked to teach in different ways
Powell Criteria
• William Powell challenged Betts’ criteria during the 1960s
• He put forth the idea of “mediated levels”
• PP-2: fluency 87-93%; comprehension 55-80%
• Grades 3-5: fluency 92-96%; comprehension 60-85%
• Grade 6: fluency 92-97%; comprehension 65-90%
• Students placed in harder texts 50% of time
Betts’ Instructional Level Theory
• Claims learning is facilitated by ensuring students can
read the text with relatively good comprehension
Reader Level
Text Level
Powell’s Mediated Text Theory
• Claims that learning is best from harder texts because teaching
facilitates comprehension
Mediation
Student Level
Text Level
Evidence Text Should Be Harder
Morgan, Wilcox, & Eldredge (2000)
• Varied text difficulty for three groups
• Had groups study in the same way for the same amount of time
• Measured impact on growth in reading comprehension
• Traditionally frustration-level placement led to greatest gains
• Lack of descriptive data
More Evidence for Harder Text
• Textbook publishers/school districts strove to reduce levels of
texts since early 1940s
• Studies show that 3-12th grade textbooks have gotten easier
• Decline in text levels has presaged the declines in student
performance levels
Chall, Conrad, & Harris, 1977
Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996
Still More Hard Text Evidence
ACT (2006)
• Correlational study showing close connection between amount
of reading of challenging text in grades 8-12 and success
We’ve Been Here Before
• 1980s “whole language” debacle (unadapted text):
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Teacher response was to read to students
Well documented in upper grades that teachers stop
using text when the text is challenging
Hard text led to an over-reliance on “guided reading”
It is not enough to place students in challenging text
Teachers (and publishers) need to select texts that
include sufficiently challenging language (the CCSS
bands), but they also need to consider the qualitative
reasons why text is challenging and scaffold student
interactions with a text
Scaffolding Challenging Text
Scaffolding Text Features
• Complexity of ideas/content
• Match of text and reader prior knowledge
• Complexity of vocabulary
• Complexity of syntax
• Complexity of coherence
• Familiarity of genre demands
• Complexity of text organization
• Subtlety of author’s tone
• Sophistication of literary devices or data-presentation devices
Other Approaches
• Provide sufficient fluency
• Use stair-steps or apprentice texts
• Teach comprehension strategies
• Motivation
Resources
Shanahan, T., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012), March. The
challenge of challenging text. Educational Leadership.
2. Disciplinary literacy
• Past standards have not made a big deal out of reading in
history/social studies or science
• Emphasis was on learning how to read and applying these
skills to content area textbooks
• However, there are unique reading demands within the various
disciplines (reading history is not the same thing as reading
literature, etc.)
• The common core state standards requires specialized reading
emphasis for literature, history/social studies and
science/technical subjects
2. Disciplinary Literacy (cont.)
• Not the hip new name for content area reading
• Disciplines possess their own language, purposes, ways of
using text
• There are special skills and strategies needed for students to
make complete sense of texts from the disciplines
• As students begin to confront these kinds of texts (especially in
middle school and high school), instruction must facilitate their
understanding of what it means to read disciplinary texts
2. Disciplinary Literacy (cont.)
• Thus, science students learn to follow and record multistep lab
procedures, and to account for exceptions or special cases
while history students are learning to analyze a series of events
to determine the causal relations among the events
• Or, history students learn to make sense of discrepancies
between primary accounts while science students learn to
analyze the relationship between the graphical and prose
information in a text
• Or, science and history both require summaries, but summaries
of what?
Chemistry Note-taking
Substances
Properties
Processes
Interactions
Atomic
Expression
History Events Chart
TEXT
WHO?
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Relation:
2
Relation:
3
Relation
4
Main point:
WHAT?
WHERE?
WHEN?
WHY?
2. Disciplinary literacy (cont.)
•Implications
• The ELA standards should be shared by the science and
history departments
• It is essential that science and history include texts in their
instructional routines
• Content teachers will need to emphasize aspects of literacy
that they have not in the past (these are disciplinary standards,
not content area reading standards—the idea is not how to
apply reading skills and strategies to content subjects but how
to teach the unique uses of literacy required by the disciplines)
3. Informational text
• Past standards emphasized literary and informational texts, but
distribution was left to teachers
• Reading textbooks emphasized informational texts only about
20% of the time, but this has been changing
• The common core standards requires the teaching of
comprehension within both informational and literary texts
• These new standards emphasize informational texts equally
with literary texts (in Grades K-5) – more complex for middle
school and high school
3. Informational text (cont.)
• Informational text is text the primary purpose of which is to
convey information about the natural and social world.
• Informational text typically addresses whole classes of things in
a timeless way (they are not typically about specific instances).
• Informational text requires the interpretation of structures,
graphics, features, etc. that are not available in literary text
• Text that comes in many different formats (books, magazines,
handouts, brochures, CD-ROMs, Internet)
Text Structure
Help readers understand author’s message
Structure
Helps the Reader….
Enumerative structure
Understand details about concepts and
phenomena
Compare-contrast structure
Understand the similarities and differences of
concepts and phenomena
Sequential structure
Understand the progression or time sequence of
events
Cause-effect structure
Understand the connections between
antecedents and consequents
Problem-solution structures
Understand the relationship between problems
and potential solutions
Print Features
Guide readers through text
Feature
Helps the Reader…
Table of contents
Identify key topics in a book and their order of
presentation
Index
See everything in a text listed alphabetically, with
page numbers
Glossary
Define words contained in the text
Preface
Set a purpose for reading, get an
overview of the content
Pronunciation guide
Say the words
Appendix
By offering additional information
Illustrations
Alternative forms of information
Feature
Helps the Reader…
Photos/Drawings
Understand what something
looks like
Drawings
Understand what something looks like, might look
like, or looked like
Technical drawings
Understand accurate dimensions and proportions
(proximity, scale)
3-Dimensional projections
Understand shapes, proportions, etc.
Magnification
See details in something small
Organizational Aids
Help readers find important information
Feature
Helps the Reader….
Bold Print
By signaling the word is important
and/or found in the glossary
Understand the word is important
Understand the word is important
Emphasize key points/
concepts
Locate different categories in
the text
Identify topics throughout the
book as they skim and scan
Navigate through sections of
Text
Understand a picture or photograph
Colored print
Italics
Bullets
Titles
Headings
Subheadings
Captions
Labels
Sidebars
Identify a picture or photograph
and/or its parts
Gather additional or explanatory
information.
Graphic Aids
Represent information in some specific way
Feature
Diagram
Helps the reader…
Understand interactions among variables or relations among
parts, how something is constructed, or how it works
Flow
diagram
Understand a complex sequence of
movements or actions
Sketches
Visualize an important concept
Comparisons Understand the size of one thing by
comparing it to the size of something familiar
Graphs
Understand relativity between elements
Figures
Combine text information with
graphical aids
Maps
Understand placement and relationships among objects in a
space
Tables
Understand how data are organized into categorical parts and
the relations among these parts across multiple observations,
values, or states
Graphic Aids
Represent information in some specific way
Feature
Helps the reader…
Charts
Understand relations among multiple variables symbolically
(e.g., bar chart, line chart, pie chart, flow chart).
Crosssections
Understand something by looking at
it from the inside
Overlays
Understand additional information
Time-lines
Understand the sequence of time
3. Informational text (Cont.)
•Implications
• Text selections need to need to shift (textbooks and leveled
books)
• Primary grade teachers and English teachers will need to raise
their comfort level for working with informational text
(informational text will get a great emphasis in upper grades,
too, but this is not as big a change for these grades)
• Need to guard against informational text being taken over by
literary treatments of factual information (such as biography)
Resources on informational text
• http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/PracticeGuide.aspx?sid=14
• Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson,
P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving
reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3rd grade: A
practice guide (NCEE 2010-4038). Washington, DC: National
Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance,
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
Retrieved from whatworks.ed.gov/publications/practiceguides.
• Doing what works
http://dww.ed.gov/Reading-Comprehension/topic/index.cfm?T_ID=36
4. Close Reading
• Past standards based on theories of reading comprehension
drawn from cognitive science (reader, text, context)
• CCSS depend heavily upon literary theory, specifically “New
Criticism”
• In New Criticism all of the reading emphasis is on the text
So what is close reading?
• It starts with the Protestant Reformation
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(no, really)
Martin Luther dueled with the Church about whether priests
had to interpret the Bible or whether people could read it
themselves
In the 1920s and 30s English Departments were dominated by
Scholasticism; that is professors/teachers taught the meanings
of the texts
Reader Response (Louise Rosenblatt): The readers’ feelings/
meanings are what matters
New Criticism (Brooks & Warren, etc.): The meaning is in the
text and text must be read closely to get it to give up its
meaning
Many versions of close reading
• There are many versions of close reading, but basically
meaning is hidden in the text and needs to be acquired through
careful and thorough analysis and re-analysis
• Readers need to understand how texts work (that is that they
use metaphor, irony, paradox, etc.)
• Mortimer Adler (Great Books): How To Read a Book
Close reading
• Great books (challenging books) need to be read and reread
• Each reading should accomplish a separate purpose
• The first reading of a text should allow the reader to determine
what a text says
• The second reading should allow the reader to determine how
a text works
• The third reading should allow the reader to evaluate the
quality and value of the text (and to connect the text to other
texts)
Close Reading
• All focus on text meaning
• Minimize background preparation/explanation (and text
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apparatus)
Students must do the reading/interpretation
Teacher’s major role is to ask text dependent questions
Multi-day commitment to texts
Purposeful rereading (not practice, but separate journeys)
Short reads
Text dependent questions
• Close reading requires close attention to the ideas expressed
and implied by the author and to the author’s craft
• Often comprehension questions allow students to talk about
other things besides the text (How do you think people felt
about the Emancipation Proclamation? If you were a slave how
would you feel about it?)
• Questions are text dependent if they can only be answered by
reading the text (the evidence must come largely or entirely
from the text and not from elsewhere)
Text Dependent (cont.)
• Text dependent questions are not necessarily low level
• “Low-level” questions are little more than memory tasks—
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they ask readers to remember what the author has said
explicitly;
“High-level questions” ask for answers that require logic,
inference, and/or analysis of the text information
Text dependent questions can be low level or high level
Past research indicates that a mix of question levels leads
to better comprehension
The common core encourages both low level and high
level questions the answers of which depend on text
evidence
Text dependent questions
• How did Frederick Douglass’ ability to read contribute to his
emotional struggle for freedom? Cite examples from the text to
support your answer.
• After reading Frederick Douglass’ narrative, in what ways does
America represent the hope for freedom that lived in the heart
of Frederick Douglass?
Why did CCSS go there?
• School reading has become so focused on rituals rather than
student-text negotiations, on general reading skill rather than
sense making of particular texts
• Emphasis on prior knowledge and reader response had placed
the attention on the reader instead of the text
• Teacher purpose setting had often replaced actual reading
• Emphases on text structure and reading comprehension
strategies have seemed to become ends in themselves
4. Close Reading (cont.)
Implications”
• Students will need to engage to a greater extent in deep
analysis of the text and its meaning and implications
• Less emphasis on background information, comprehension
strategies, picture walks, etc. (though these still can be brought
in by teachers)
• Greater emphasis on careful reading of a text, weighing of
author’s diction, grammar, and organization to make sense of
the text
• Rereading will play a greater role in teaching reading
5. Multiple texts
• Past standards have emphasized the reading of single texts:
students had to learn how to make sense of a story, article or
book (with perhaps an occasional emphasis on multiple texts)
• The common core state standards emphasize the interpretation
of multiple texts throughout (at all grade levels, and in reading,
writing, and oral language)
• Students will still have to be able to interpret single texts, but
much more extensive emphasis on reading and using multiple
texts (about 10% of the ELA standards mention multiple texts)
Multiple Texts
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Compare and contrast the adventures of characters in familiar stories (K)
With prompting and support, recognize basis similarities in and
differences between two texts on the same topic (e.g., in illustrations or
descriptions) (K)
Distinguish major categories of writing from each other (e.g., stories and
poems), drawing on a wide reading of a range of text types (1)
Compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story (e.g.,
Cinderella stories) by different authors or from different cultures (1)
Identify similarities in and differences between two texts on the same topic
(e.g., in illustrations or descriptions) (1)
Compare and contrast characters or events from different stories
addressing similar themes (2)
Describe similarities in and differences between two texts on the same
topic (2)
Multiple Texts
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Compare and contrast the plots, settings, and themes of stories written by
the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books in a
series) (3)
Compare and contrast information drawn from two texts on the same
subject (3)
Compare and contrast thematically similar tales, myths, and accounts of
events from various cultures (4)
Describe how two or more texts on the same subject build on one
another; provide a coherent picture of the same information they convey
(4)
Compare the treatment of similar ideas and themes (e.g., opposition of a
good and evil) as well as character types and patterns of events in myths
and other traditional literature from different cultures (5)
Multiple Texts
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Analyze stories in the same genre (e.g., mysteries, adventure stories),
comparing and contrasting their approaches to similar themes and
topics (6)
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Assess the similarities and differences between two or more texts on the
same subject and apply the knowledge gained to inform reading of
additional texts (6)
Analyze a specific case in which a modern work of fiction drawn on
patterns of events or character types found in traditional literature (7)
Analyze where two or more texts provide conflicting information on the
same subject and determine whether the texts disagree on matters of fact
or on matters of interpretation (7)
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Multiple Texts
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Compare a fictional portrayal of a time, place, or character to
historical sources from the same period as a means of understanding
how authors use or alter history (8)
Compare and contrast how two or more authors writing about the
same topic shape their presentations of key information by
emphasizing different evidence or advancing different interpretations
of facts (8)
Analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on
the same topic (History, 6-8)
Compare and contrast the information gained from experiments,
simulations, video, or multimedia sources with that gained from
reading a text on the same topic (Science, 6-8)
Multiple Texts
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Analyze a wide range of 19th and early 20th century foundational works of
American literature, comparing and contrasting approaches to similar
idea or themes in two or more texts from the same period (9-10)
Analyze how authors argue with or otherwise respond to one another’s
ideas or accounts of key events, evaluating the strength of each author’s
interpretation (9-10)
Compare and contrast treatments of the same topic in several primary
and secondary sources (9-10, History)
Compare experimental findings presented in a text to information from
other sources, noting when the findings support or contradict previous
explanations or accounts (9-10, Science)
Multiple Texts
• Analyze how an author draws on and transforms fictional source material in
a specific work (e.g., how Shakespeare draws on a story from Ovid or how a
later author draws on a play by Shakespeare) (11-12)
• Synthesize explanations and arguments from diverse sources to provide a
coherent account of events or ideas, including resolving conflicting
information (11-12)
• Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into
a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among
sources (11-12)
• Integrate information from diverse sources (e.g., video, multimedia sources,
experiments, simulations) into a coherent understanding of a concept,
process, or phenomenon, noting discrepancies among sources (11-12)
5. Multiple Texts (cont.)
Implications
• There will be a greater need for combinations of texts that can
be used together
• Need for greater emphasis on text synthesis (how to combine
the information from multiple sources into one’s own text or
presentation)
• Need for greater emphasis on comparative evaluation and
analysis
• Need for a consideration of non-text sources (e.g., video,
experiments)
6. Writing about Text
• Past standards have emphasized writing as a free-standing
subject or skill
• Students have been expected to be able to write texts requiring
low information (or only the use of widely available background
knowledge)
• The common core puts greater emphasis on the use of
evidence in writing
• Thus, the major emphasis shifts from writing stories or opinion
pieces to writing about the ideas in text
6. Writing about Text (cont.)
• Summarizing text
• Writing texts based on text models
• Analyzing and critiquing texts
• Synthesizing texts
6. Writing about Text (cont.)
Implications
• Writing will need to be more closely integrated with reading
comprehension instruction
• The amount of writing about what students read will need to
increase
• Greater emphasis on synthesis of information and critical
essays than in the past
Conclusion
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The common core state standards are based upon very
different theories and conceptions of teaching than our
current standards are
Teacher preparation and textbook design are largely based
upon theories and approaches that are (somewhat)
inconsistent with those supporting the common core
standards
Changing instructional practices to better support the
standards will require a major professional development
and materials transformation
http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/2012/09/presentationfor-council-for-public.html