6X Greater Literacy Gains for CKR Students than Students at Demographically Similar ComparisonSchools
Compared to peers, kindergarteners taught with the CKR program made more progress in all areas of reading tested: spelling, phonemic awareness, decoding, and comprehension.
Teachers’ Views:
“The Skills Strand is really very good for the students. Their reading levels are higher this year than last year.”
"At first, I felt that many teachers did not know if they agreed with teaching sounds before letter names. But by January, when teachers started to see their children reading, they became believers” became believers."
“The Skills Strand has exceeded my expectations. I think it is the best reading program I have ever used. We are thrilled with the results. I hope it is introduced into more schools. We plan to change the sequence of the Listening Strand.”
“After seeing how well Core Knowledge Skills worked for teaching my children to read, I would have a hard time teaching any other way.”
administrator views:
“This year with Core Knowledge Reading, all of the teachers are communicating more, they discuss the pacing and delivery strategies” pacing and delivery strategies.
“The CK pilot has honed the professional conversation.”
“There was resistance and suspicion on the teachers part in the beginning but they are ecstatic over the results— the children are reading! “
The finding that professional conversations amongst colleagues were 'honed' is interesting. Stuart Yeh reports the same phenomenon in his book Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment and Test Reform. Sound curriculum and testing programs are as good for the grown-ups as they are for the children.
Thanks go to Erin Johnson for supplying the link.
I suspect one of the reasons that Core Knowledge got on board with the Common Core standards even though many of us believe that they are still too weak and contain intentionally ambiguous language to promote discovery learning is the existence of the new $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund.
ReplyDeleteCK would make a perfect partner for one of the validation or scale up grants with this type of data.
The presence of so many from the various NSF math and science partnerships in the CCSSI effort doesn't bode well for a sound national curriculum coming forth.
We will likely find that the "understand" language will be used to push EM, Connected Math, Investigations,etc. I suspect that is also why the high school standards are not sequential. They still want to push the awful integrated curricula.
Also the presence of Linda Darling Hammond in chairing the development of the new national test is ominous too.