Uncommon Students in the Common Core

I have a piece on how special ed students are faring under the new Common Core Standards on the online Atlantic:

the "triple dissociation" and slow and fast readers

re: We can see just 7 or 8 letters at a time

The NYU reading-speed study, which has come up a couple of times on ktm, found a "triple dissociation" amongst three contributors to reading speed:

• Decoding by phonics (62% of reading speed)
• Whole-word recognition (16% of reading speed)
• Word-prediction via knowledge of grammar and context (22%)

"Triple dissociation":

Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating.

I've just this moment realized the implications of the triple dissociation they found:

1. If students don't know phonics, they can never read quickly enough to do college-level reading,  which requires at least 200 wpm. 
2. Students who don't know the grammar of written English well, will be significantly slower readers than students who do. ("Know" in the procedural sense of being able instantly to comprehend grammatical structures such as appositives and relative clauses and anaphora and the like.)
3. Until you have substantial background knowledge in a subject, you will be a slow(ish) reader in that content area. 

I'd love to know how that 22% is distributed between grammar and background knowledge. The researchers did not test to see how grammar and background knowledge

Source:
Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation by Denis G. Pelli mail, Katharine A. Tillman

We can see just 7 or 8 letters at a time

I've always wondered about this:

Let us consider the behaviour in which you are currently engaged – namely, reading these words. What exactly is your brain is doing right now? What kind of behaviour is reading and what must the brain do in order to achieve it?

[snip]

Reading, when reduced to the rather prosaic level of motor actions, depends on the brain’s ability to orchestrate a series of eye movements. Now, as you read these words, your brain is commanding your eyes to make small but very rapid (about 500° per second) left-to-right movements called saccades (right-to-left or up-and-down for some other written languages). You are not consciously aware of it, but these rapid movements are frequently interrupted by brief periods when the eyes are fixed in position. Watch someone reading and you will see exactly what I mean. You’ll notice that the eyes do not sweep smoothly along the line of text, rather they dart from one fixation to another. It is only during the fixations, when the eyes dwell for about a fifth of a second, that the brain is able to examine the text in detail. Reading is not possible during the darting saccadic movements because the eyes are moving too quickly across the page. You are not aware of the blur and confusion during a saccade because fortunately there is a brain mechanism that suppresses vision and protects you from visual overload.

Reading is only possible between saccades, not only because the eyes are then stationary but also because gaze is centred on the retina’s fovea. The fovea is the only part of the retina specialized for high acuity vision (see Chapter 5), but it scrutinizes a very small area of our visual world. As a literal rule of thumb, foveal vision is restricted approximately to the area of your vision covered by your thumbnail held at arm’s length. It is a small window of clear vision within which you are able to decipher just 7 or 8 letters of normal print size at a time. The task for the brain is to generate a precise series of motor commands to the eye muscles which ensure that at the end of each saccade your high acuity vision is fixed on that part of the text you need to see most clearly next. As your eyes approach the end of a line, the brain generates a carriage return. Of course the return saccade must be to the left, of the correct magnitude and associated with a slight downward shift in gaze in order to bring the first word on the next line onto the fovea.

I have considered only the simple case of the brain directing eye movements alone, as if nothing else affects gaze direction. But of course the relative positions of the eye and page are affected continuously by head, body, and book motion. Thus the brain must continually monitor and anticipate factors affecting the future position of your eyes relative to the text. The fact that you can effortlessly read on a moving train while eating a sandwich is evidence that your brain can solve this problem quite easily. Importantly, it is done automatically and on an unconscious level without you having to think through every step. If you had to consciously think about the mechanical process of reading, you would be illiterate!

Our lack of conscious awareness of underlying brain processes can also be illustrated by reflecting on the subjective experience that the comprehension of written material represents. While reading we are not conscious of the fragmented nature of comprehension imposed by underlying move—stop—move—stop activity of the eyes I’ve just described or by the fact that only 7 or 8 letters can be deciphered at each stop. On the contrary, our strong subjective impression is that comprehension of the text flows uninterrupted and moreover that we can read several words or even whole sentences ‘at a glance’. That this is not the case can be illustrated by reading a sentence containing a word that has more than one meaning and pronunciation. For example, the word tear has two very different meanings and pronunciations in English – tear the noun of crying and tear the verb of ripping apart. Clearly such word ambiguity complicates the brain’s task of providing you with an uninterrupted comprehension. If for instance the word tear occurred at the beginning of a sentence its meaning might remain ambiguous until the subject of the sentence appears later. Because you cannot read the whole sentence at a glance your brain may be left with no option but to choose one of the alternative meanings (or sounds, if you are reading aloud) of a word and hope for the best.

While we cannot read whole sentences at a glance, the brain does recognize each word as a whole. What is quite surprising however is that the order of the letters is not particularly important (good news for poor spellers). That is why you will be able to read the following passage without consciously having to decode it.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. It deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aer, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht eth frist dan lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset cna be a taotl mses and yuo can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

The Brain: A Very Short Introduction by Michael O'Shea

The NYU study of reading speed (found that reading happens at 3 levels:

• Decoding (phonics): 62% of reading speed
• Whole word: 16% of reading speed
• "Sentence or story context": 22% of reading speed

And see:
How many words can readers predict?

We need a Writing Renaissance, not a "Writing Renaissance"

Here is is! (Cross-posted from Out in Left Field.)

According to an article in this past week's Edweek, K12 writing instruction is undergoing a renaissance:

Teachers are focusing on writing instruction like never before. More and more, they're asking students to write about what they read, helping them think through and craft their work, and using such exercises as tools not only to build better writers, but to help students understand what they're studying.

This renaissance, the article claims, includes a shift towards explicit instruction:

The shift is still nascent, but people in the field are taking notice. It marks a departure from recent practice, which often includes little or no explicit writing instruction and only a modest amount of writing, typically in the form of stories, short summaries, or personal reflections, rather than essays or research projects on topics being studied.

In fact there appears to be little or no increase in explicit instruction, but simply a shift in quantity and genres. For example, rather than taking inspiration from Dr. Seuss to write their own whimsical stories:

First graders in South Strafford, Vt., are reading Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, for fun, then for greater understanding, and then to hunt for evidence. They look for events in the plot that illustrate how the whimsical protagonist tries to protect the Earth and assemble examples into a simple paragraph to support the theme of the story.

In keeping with the new Common Core standards for English and Language Arts, the article notes, "these kinds of projects are unusual for the way they connect writing and reading." But the ultimate goal seems not to be to improve writing, but reading:

"Now we're seeing a lot more attention to the idea that writing about a text can improve reading about that text," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, the chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article cites a 2010 study:

a meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, which found that writing had consistently positive effects on students' reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students' comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often.

In other words, despite the fact that ever since No Child Left Behind, as the article itself notes, concerns about reading comprehension have eclipsed concerns about writing, the ultimate goal of the "Writing Renaissance" continues to be reading.

Worse, this emphasis on writing for comprehension has become yet another excuse to water down math class:

A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page "how to" books for the next fall's 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x.

What goals the article does mention that pertain specifically to writing are about quantity and argumentation rather than technique. Students should be writing more, and they should be writing pieces that shift from:

"opinion untethered to evidence" and "decontextualized" writing—writing not based on the reading of a text—in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there.

As for writing strategies, we find nothing here about corrections and revisions. Instead of rewriting, there's rereading:

They read a text again and again, first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help,... A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing.

There's something to be said for "spotting structural decisions" and trying to emulate these. Indeed, the one instance of direct writing instruction the article cite pertains to organization:

When Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they're through, students learn to write short "hand paragraphs," with the thumb as the topic sentence—the Lorax cares for the Earth—followed by three examples of how he does that and a "pinky sentence" restating the interpretation.

But none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem that affects all types of writing--no matter whether it's fiction, nonfiction, personal writing, summaries, or more involved, reading-connected writing assignments. This problem, which has become the talk of professors at campuses all around the country, is the problem that growing numbers of students have with the basic building blocks of all writing: phrases and sentences.

In none of the many Edweek articles on English and Language Arts do we find any mention of the steep decline in students' ability to write well-formed sentences. But this is arguably the greatest problem with today's writing, which, even at the college and graduate levels, is riddled with comma splices, dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement problems, and the kind of garbling that results from a dearth of direct instruction and feedback from teachers and a failure by students to review and revise. Here are just a few examples from my growing collection:

1. Comma between subject and verb: Children who experience the world in a more rigid and narrow manner, will have difficulty with social inferences.

2. Comma splice: Generalization is a tough skill for ASD students to learn, teachers are sometimes baffled that they act a certain way in one subject and completely different in other.

3. Failed subject verb agreement: Two of the defining characteristics of autism includes impairments in social interactions and communication.

4. Failed preposition agreement: There are three types of aphasia to which a child can be diagnosed.

5. Dangling modifiers: In thinking about students transitioning from high school to college, the issues of accepting the disability and self-advocacy are crucial.

6. Wordiness: By providing direct instruction, this assists the students with improving their ability to give examples.

7. Awkwardness (and wordiness): Because of these results, it suggests that “object and subject relative sentences” need different amounts of working memory to be understood by the reader.

8. Displaced modifier: I first inquired about this young man’s high school experience, who I will call RC.

9. Incoherence (and wordiness): Due to the fact that these children with autism are unable to proper engage in social situations eliminates the knowledge base that they would normally acquire.

None of the above-described elements of the so-called "Writing Renaissance" will solve these problems. For this, we need direct, sentence-focused writing instruction. Yet, for all the empirical support there is for this kind of instruction, the tide shifted away from it long ago, and it will take a true Writing Renaissance to bring it back.

Being Tough on Tough

Though I haven't read it, I honestly don't get what the big deal is about Paul Tough's new book, How Children Succeed. From what I gather from various reviews and interviews, Tough's Big Idea is that persistence and curiosity matter more than IQ does for success. But was there ever a time or place when this statement wasn't obvious? Of course IQ means little if you don't apply yourself; of course intelligence leads nowhere interesting if you lack curiosity. Does anyone--especially in this Emotional Intelligence-obsessed world of ours--really think that the successful people out there--even the genuises--achieved what they did primarily because of their IQ scores? Didn't Malcolm Gladwell already write a book back in 2008 on the findings that what makes an expert is 10,0000 hours of practice? What is it about Tough's book that's garnering so much attention?

A slightly different take on Tough's Big Idea is voiced by Joe Nocera in today's New York Times:

Tough argues that simply teaching math and reading--the so-called cognitive skills--isn't nearly enough, especially for children who have grown up enduring the stresses of poverty. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing.

Notice how quickly Nocera slips from the obvious--that teaching teach math and reading isn't nearly enough--to the ridiculous. To say that learning to read and do math might not be the most important elements of success is like saying that adequate food and shelter might not be the most important elements of staying alive (after all one must also breathe oxygen). When it come to essential elements, it's pointless to quibble over what's most important.

In interviews Tough is careful to admit that, while schools need to do more to encourage persistence and curiosity, there are no clear studies on how to do this. Refreshing though this caveat is, it, too, raises the question of what this book has to offer that's new and plausible, or at least useful.

There is one disturbing answer to that last question. To the careless reader who approaches the book from the perspective of the dominant educational paradigm, it offers yet another reason to water down academics in favor of "the whole child." The connections between grit and academic rigor, and between curiosity and well-taught academic subjects, should be as obvious as the inherent importance of grit is. Indeed, I'm guessing these connections are obvious to most people. But they clearly aren't obvious to many of those wielding the greatest power over whether or not our children succeed.

palisadesk on students reading different words than the ones on the page

I write this post to another board a few years ago to explain a major cause of these errors as in Catherine's example:

In fact there has been some solid research on this phenomenon. I can't cite chapter and verse off the top of my head, but it was done by Engelmann or perhaps others in the DI community, and investigated just that pattern you mention: children who consistently misread when for then, of for from, where for there, and similar errors of words that are usually both syntactically and visually similar. [Catherine here, interrupting for a moment: the problem I was asking about mostly involved substituting one preposition for another.]

I may not be summarizing the research 100% correctly, but the gist of it is that what we are seeing is the result of the learner having been presented with two very similar things at the same time (or almost the same time), and not having been taught either one to mastery, so that the two became fused in memory in an indistinct way, and one would be randomly substituted for the other. In the case of most of these word substitution errors, the child is correct some of the time and incorrect some of the time -- so s/he doesn't ALWAYS read "when" for "then" or vice-versa. S/he randomly says one word or the other whenever s/he is presented with either of the duo. Over time, this habit becomes a neural circuit and a learned response that is very resistant to change. It rarely is self-corrected, the way some other decoding errors are, because the misreading usually makes sense even if it is incorrect (it may not make the CORRECT sense, but it is not unintelligible). "Julia talked to Edith when she went to the mall" means something different from "Julia talked to Edith then she went to the mall", but the inaccurate reader is unlikely to notice. It's not like the horse/house instance, where if a child reads "The rider mounted his house" s/he will usually recognize that can't be right.

The DI research indicated that children easily learn what they called misrules (usually due to poor or misleading initial presentation) , and these word substitution errors fall into that category. The more the error is practiced, the harder it is to supplant it and engrave a correct response. It may take hundreds of corrections of when/then errors before the reader reliably gets those words right (has a new neural pathway). Many examples of b/d confusion are the same thing - they are not visual discrimination errors in most cases, but are simply instances of children not having learned one of the pair thoroughly before the other was introduced. When words *are* visually similar, the likelihood of confusion is increased, but the visual similarity is not the cause of the confusion. Some children, for instance, repeatedly confuse other letter pairs, or words, that bear no resemblance to each other -- r and g, for instance, and further inquiry usually finds these were introduced about the same time, the child was not provided with adequate practice to mastery, DID remember that it was either one sound or the other, and would randomly say either /g/ or /r/ when presented with either stimulus (leading teachers to say "he knew it yesterday!" when they don't appreciate the randomness of the response -- but randomness within a very narrow range of options, usually only 2 or 3). One student I had consistently confused the words "and" and "said" which had no relation or resemblance to each other, but were introduced the same week on his classroom "word wall."

One effective remedial strategy -- not the only one -- is to teach these pairs explicitly, but first one word at a time. With when/then, for instance, practice writing the word, dictating "when" sentences, reading phrases and sentences with "when" and stories with "when" (reminding the student at the outset that /when/ is the word s/he will encounter, and no discrimination between when and then will be required); then do the same with the other in the pair, then mix them up -- but have the student slowly and carefully sound out each word if necessary. The solution to those misrule/misreading learned errors is careful and targeted practice to mastery.

One analogy I use (if someone thinks of a better one, please share) is to compare the student's experience confusing when/then to someone with a drawer full of socks -- let's say 30 pairs of socks, half of them grey and half of them black. If you pull two random socks out of the drawer, you will get a matched set half the time. It may not matter much that you get a mismatched pair the other half. Unless you have some reason to pay attention, you don't need to change anything. A grey sock and a black sock keep your feet warm, so what?

I had an experience a couple of years ago that made me aware of how this process works. I had to go around and do an attendance-taking chore first thing in the morning and check off two or three students in several classrooms (long story why -- not interesting). Most of the students I knew, and I would just look in the door and see if they were there and mark the attendance sheet. One Grade 4 class, however, had 2 girls on this list, both of whom were new to me. They did not look anything alike, really -- different ethnicities, one much taller, but both wore hijab and had very unusual first names. When I was first introduced to them, I failed to ensure I knew which one was which by solidifying identifying details in my mind. Usually, both were present, and I'd look in and say to myself, There's N. and there's F -- good -- but I could have N and F mixed up, I just noted they were both there. They would straighten me out when I met them in the hall, if I addressed them by the wrong name, but I continued to mix them up for months. I realized partway through the year that this was a similar error to the mislearning children sometimes do:

--I was introduced to 2 new items to learn at the same time, and they shared some common features but I did not spend time to adequately solidify recognition of the special features of each

-- I was frequently required to rehearse my mislearning but not in a situation where it mattered if I was correct or not, and where I rarely received corrective feedback so that I could stop myself and say, Wait a minute, N is the shorter one, or some other identifying factor.

-- The more times I repeated my random error (it was random because half the time I got their names right), the more likely I was to repeat it in the future.

-- the problem was solved by one girl moving, so after that I knew the remaining girl's name. Even so, a year later, I sometimes addressed that girl by the other girl's name. The experience did provide me with an insight into how these misrules/ mislearnings happen.

The DI research into this was part of their development of the Corrective Reading Program. They did a lot of empirical testing to find out how many times students needed to get those confusions corrected before they would master them and be error-free. The number of correction required varied with the age of the student -- the longer s/he had been making the error, the more correction required. Secondary students needed many more corrections than primary students. They have published some of this data, but it is not (probably) of that great an interest to most people. The principle of mislearning and misrules and how to correct them is of general interest, however.

So is the preventative measure, one of which is to introduce the items separately (sometimes separated by long periods, days or weeks or months), ensuring each is learned to mastery (in the case of word reading, by sounding-out all through the word, and segmenting all-through-the-word for spelling). At the upper grade levels, the DI programs also have students spell the words aloud in addition to blending and segmenting them. I've been meaning to look up the research on this (I know they included it because it improved results in large-scale field trials) but don't remember the details. Oral spelling of the words is not a feature of the programs for beginning readers.

Other programs I have heard of (not the DI ones) take the bull by the horns and DO introduce commonly confused items together -- but emphasize practice to mastery right at the start, so that the confusion and "practicing mistakes" does not have a chance to occur.

No doubt there are many other reasons why individual students get particular words wrong, but many of these common substitution errors do seem to share the same features and have similar origins. Many beginning readers are not expected to master correspondences or be accurate in their word reading (if they "make meaning" it is enough) so the Engelmann hypothesis and experimental data explain the phenomena I usually see.

I'm going to look through my notes from Morningside re: "close-in non-examples." I remember them having a distinct procedure for teaching two mixed-up words.

dialect mismatch & the achievement gap

One current [research] focus is on the so-called "achievement gap," which refers to the lower achievement of poor and minority children in school, particularly in areas such as reading. We have begun a project that examines factors that affect African American children's early school achievement, funded by a significant seed grant from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. This research is being conducted by Julie Washington and Jan Edwards (Comm Dis), David Kaplan (Ed Psych), Maryellen MacDonald, Jenny Saffran, and myself (Psychology), as well as several other faculty. The focus is on ways in which language background affects early school achievement. Most African American children speak the dialect termed African American English, whereas the language in the school is some version of "standard" (also called "mainstream") American English. This dialect mismatch has many effects on the African American child's school experience; it makes tasks such as learning to read literally more difficult than for children for whom there is no dialect mismatch. Our studies focus on young children's knowledge of the alternative dialects, factors that affect ability to switch between dialects, and ways that negative effects of the mismatch can be ameliorated. The idea is to provide supplementary language experiences early, when the child's plasticity for language is high. We can also use our computational models of reading to predict where dialect differences will interfere with progress, and how experience can be structured to improve performance.

Mark S. Seidenberg
Donald O. Hebb Professor
Hilldale Professor
Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Overview of Research

Seidenberg's "connectionist" model of language learning and grammar contradicts Chomsky:

[S]ince Chomsky's early work, knowledge of language has been equated with knowing a grammar. Many consequences followed from this initial assumption. For example, if the child's problem is to converge on the grammar of a language, then the problem does seem intractable unless there are innate constraints on the possible forms of grammar. What if we abandon the assumption that knowledge of language is represented as a grammar in favor of, say, neural networks, a more recently developed way of thinking about knowledge representation, learning, and processing? Do the same conclusions about the innateness of linguistic knowledge follow? The answer is: not at all.

Our goal, then, has been to articulate an alternative framework for thinking about the classic questions listed above. This is not easy: traditional grammarians have about a 40 year lead on us, and only a few linguists actually think the alternative approach will succeed. However, it's a very interesting moment in the study of language. For many years the study of language was dominating by theoretical linguistics, particularly syntax. More recently, there have been important insights coming from outside of traditional grammatical theory: from computational modeling, from studies of the brain bases of learning and neurodevelopment, from renewed interest in the statistical properties of language (which were ignored for many years following Chomsky's famous observations about the statistical triviality of sentences such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously").

Chomsky and his followers have always had their critics. However, there was never an alternative theory that could explain basic facts, such as how children acquire language under the conditions that they do. I think for the first time we have the major components of such a theory in hand. And they suggest the remarkable possibility that the standard conclusions about the nature of language and how it is acquired are just dead wrong. This would be an incredible turn of events, a major development in the intellectual history of the study of language.

That's why it's an interesting moment to be studying language.

publications

reading on auto pilot

Teri leaves this account of 'nonconscious reading':

I have wondered a bit on this topic, particularly because I do a WHOLE LOT of reading aloud to the kids and it's always curious to me what my mind can get away with while I'm reading.

I was a bit spooked one day to realize that ... I could be thinking about something else completely and still be chugging along, and the kids didn't notice a thing. Now, I had no idea what I'd been reading, and I obviously couldn't read with much animation or emphasis or expression, but it was going in the eyes, through the brain and out the mouth without disrupting the any of the other thoughts I was having.

This actually is quite handy, though, because it allows me to read ahead while I am reading so I can edit "on the fly" fairly smoothly.

Basal ganglia strike again...

how many words can readers predict?

re: readers predicting and mis-predicting words, here are Stanovich and Stanovich:

Another problem concerns the assumptions that have been made about the properties of contextual information. It is often incorrectly assumed that predicting upcoming words in sentences is a relatively easy and highly accurate activity. Actually, many different empirical studies have indicated that naturalistic text is not that predictable. Alford (1980) found that for a set of moderately long expository passages of text, subjects needed an average of more than four guesses to correctly anticipate upcoming words in the passage (the method of scoring actually makes this a considerable underestimate). Across a variety of subject populations and texts, a reader’s probability of predicting the next word in a passage is usually between .20 and .35 (Aborn, Rubenstein, and Sterling, 1959; Gough, 1983; Miller and Coleman, 1967; Perfetti, Goldman and Hogaboam, 1979; Rubenstein and Aborn, 1958).

Indeed, as Gough (1983) has shown, this figure is highest for function words, and is often quite low for the very words in the passage that carry the most information content.
How research might inform the debate about early reading acquisition
Keith E. Stanovich, Ontario institute for Studies in Education and Paula J. Stanovich, University of Toronto | Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423
Volume 18, Issue 2, 1995, pp 87-105

Here's the abstract from the NYU study, which is quite fascinating (I need to read it again...):

Research in object recognition has tried to distinguish holistic recognition from recognition by parts. One can also guess an object from its context. Words are objects, and how we recognize them is the core question of reading research. Do fast readers rely most on letter-by-letter decoding (i.e., recognition by parts), whole word shape, or sentence context? We manipulated the text to selectively knock out each source of information while sparing the others. Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating.

and, from the text:

The question is: if parts, wholes, and context all play roles in object recognition, do the mental processes associated with them interact? Does impairing one process impair the others as well? Or, alternatively, if we remove one process, will the others continue working, unaffected? To explore this question, we turn to reading.

We want to know how people quickly and effortlessly recognize an object when there are a vast number of possibilities. Ordinary reading demonstrates this amazing human skill. In studying object recognition, reading is one of the few cases where one knows the composition: letters are parts, words are wholes, and sentences provide context. Using reading, we can attempt to isolate and measure the contributions of parts, wholes, and context to the recognition of words as objects.
Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation
Denis G. Pelli*, Katharine A. Tillman
PLOS One | August 2007 | Issue 8 | e680

I'm going to knock off for tonight - will try to get some more up tomorrow.

A couple of quick notes, though:

• The study looks at decoding -- reading the words accurately out loud -- not comprehension.  
• "Context" in this study means syntax: the grammatical order of words in the sentence. The authors manipulated context by switching words around. Here's the example they give: contribute others. the of Reading measured - Trying to read this series of words, you have no "context clues" at all, i.e. no syntax to tell you 'a verb has to come next.' 

update 8/9/2012:

from the Eurkalert announcement:

Readers in the study read passages from a Mary Higgins Clark novel. The text was manipulated to selectively knock out each process in turn while retaining the others. Whole word shape was removed by alternating case: “sHe LoOkEd OvEr hEr ShOuLdEr.” To knock out the whole language process, the order of the words was shuffled. To knock out phonics, some of the letters were replaced with others.

Pelli and Tillman’s results show that letter-by-letter decoding, or phonics, is the dominant reading process, accounting for 62 percent of reading speed. However, both holistic word recognition (16 percent) and whole-language processes (22 percent) do contribute substantially to reading speed. Remarkably, the results show that the contributions of these three processes to reading speed are additive. The contribution of each process to reading speed is the same whether the other processes are working or not.

“The contributions made by phonics, holistic word recognition, and whole-language processes are not redundant,” explained Pelli. “These three processes are not working on the same words and, in fact, make contributions to reading speed exclusive of one another.”

question for reading teachers

I've emailed palisadesk & now am posting.

Here is a reading issue I've seen before: a student who, reading out loud, replaces prepositions with other prepositions, sometimes reads verbs incorrectly (e.g. "walk" for "walking" or vice versa), and sometimes reads the wrong pronoun (e.g. "she" instead of "he" or vice versa).

It's as if the student is predicting the next word he or she expects to read, reading that word out loud, and not noticing that the prediction was wrong.

What is going on in cases like these?

And what does one do about it?

FedUp Mom on emotional vs academic problems

FedUp Mom writes:

I am thoroughly skeptical of the ability of "experts" to determine whether a child's problem is emotional or academic.

Our Younger Daughter was refused admission to a LD school on the grounds that her problems were "emotional and behavioral, not academic." After a year of a great deal of academic work on our parts, guess what -- no more emotional or behavioral problems on her part.

It turned out that her emotional problems were caused by underlying academic problems. Basically, she wasn't learning how to read, which caused anxiety, which caused bad behavior.

Right.

IQ & dyslexia

ABSTRACT:
The Brain Basis of the Phonological Deficit in Dyslexia Is Independent of IQ

Although the role of IQ in developmental dyslexia remains ambiguous, the dominant clinical and research approaches rely on a definition of dyslexia that requires reading skill to be significantly below the level expected given an individual's IQ. In the study reported here, we used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine whether differences in brain activation during phonological processing that are characteristic of dyslexia were similar or dissimilar in children with poor reading ability who had high IQ scores (discrepant readers) and in children with poor reading ability who had low IQ scores (nondiscrepant readers). In two independent samples including a total of 131 children, using univariate and multivariate pattern analyses, we found that discrepant and nondiscrepant poor readers exhibited similar patterns of reduced activation in brain areas such as left parietotemporal and occipitotemporal regions. These results converge with behavioral evidence indicating that, regardless of IQ, poor readers have similar kinds of reading difficulties in relation to phonological processing.

The Brain Basis of the Phonological Deficit in Dyslexia Is Independent of IQ
Hiroko Tanaka, Jessica M. Black, Charles Hulme, Leanne M. Stanley, Shelli R. Kesler, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, Allan L. Reiss, John D. E. Gabriell and Fumiko Hoeft
Psychological Science
Vol. 22, No. 11 (NOVEMBER 2011) (pp. 1442-1451)
Page Count: 10

good news from the state tests for once

Robert Pondiscio on Pineapplegate 

The kids interviewed in the Times seem to know exactly what's wrong with the pineapple item.

reading without teaching

in Education Week:

"A federal study has found no learning gains from a summer reading program that provided books to students, but little else.

The report, by the Institute of Education Sciences, explores whether fall reading-comprehension scores could be improved through a summer reading initiative for economically disadvantaged children with below-average reading skills. The randomized, controlled study involved 1,571 students in 112 schools during the summer between 3rd and 4th grades. Students received eight books appropriate to their reading levels and their interests.

Unlike some other summer reading efforts, though, this one offered no interventions beyond six postcard reminders throughout the summer. The aim was to learn if the program could close reading gaps without additional strain on parent and teacher resources."
Summer Reading By Hannah Rose Sacks

As far as I can tell, and contrary to what parents and schools universally believe, "reading a lot" doesn't work particularly well. To get better at something, you have to engage in deliberate practice, and deliberate practice is pretty much the opposite of reading for pleasure. More-reading-less-Facebook isn't the answer to our nation's reading problems.

Btw, I had no idea that more-reading-less-Facebook wasn't the answer to our nation's reading problems until I read Tom Fischgrund's book on students who scored perfect 1600s on their SATs.

I think there's another problem with independent reading as well, but that is for another day.

high school - college reading gap

at the Irvington Parents Forum

advice for adults with reading problems

resources in the comments thread

And here are The Phonics Page and Don Potter.

What Philadelphia 5th graders should know how to do

I recently came into possession of one the Philadelphia School District Parent Teacher Brochures, which breaks down the goals that each Philadelphia School District student should be able to meet by the end of each grade level.  Since I'm homeschooling my 5th grade daughter, I was particularly interested in the goals for fifth grade. And I was shocked, shocked, to find myself more baffled than enlightened after reading through these goals.

The language arts goals are all about process, purposes, and genres, with a developmentally inappropriate assignment thrown in in the form of a research project:

•Continue to build a reading, writing and speaking vocabulary
•Read to learn new information
•Read a wide range of stories, books and magazines for enjoyment
•Understand a problem or conflict in stories or books and talk or write about an appropriate solution
•Make connections between stories and texts that they have read and the world around them
•Tell and/ or write a summary that gives the main idea of what they read and the most important details or events
•Complete a research project including a written report
•Write stories with several paragraphs
•Write poems, plays, and reports

Not a word about specific reading skills (vocabulary level, sentence complexity, making deductions and bridging inferences within the context of the text) or writing skills (grammar and punctuation, sentence construction, paragraph construction).

As for the math goals, most are vague ("compute" and "find the relationships"), easy (locating numbers on a number line; comparing numbers; sorting shapes), and emphasize verbal explanations over mathematical performance. Four out of the 13 goals are about data and probability. Here the developmentally inappropriate goal (especially given what isn't covered here) involves algebra:

• Compute and find the relationships using whole numbers, fractions, and decimals
• Locate positive and negative numbers on a number line (integers)
• Explain to you what prime numbers, factors, multiples and compositie numbers mean
• Compare numbers (equal to, greater than, and less than)
• Collect, organize, display, and analyze data in a variety of ways
• Find mean (average), median (middle number), mode (most frequent) and range (difference between largest and smallest) of data
• Predict or determine all possible combinations and outcomes, such as, "How many outfits can be created with six shirts and eight pants?"
• Calculate the chance of a simple event happening
• Use a variety of methods to solve for unknown quantities in simple one-step algebra equations (solve for x)
• Sort polygons according to their properties and angles, such as triangles, rhombi, and parallelograms
• Define and compare perimeter (distance around) and area (amount covered inside) of shapes
• Understand properties of a circle
• Explain how they solved a math problem in their own words.

Not a word about which computation skills the child should develop, what sorts of numbers, fractions, and decimals the child should be able to do computations on (perhaps only the "friendly" fractions and decimals), and what level of computational fluency the child should have. Not a word about multiplication tables, long division, repeating decimals, ratios and percents, and multi-step word problems.

Turning to science, only one substantive topic is mentioned (solar energy) and goals pertaining to it remain vague ("build an understanding;" "recognize"). Most the goals pertain to process rather than achievement, many of them involving developmentally inappropriate activities that wrongly assume that children can function as little scientists:

• Develop skills that will emphasize the five senses while doing science
• Use prior knowledge when making observations
• Make predictions and hypotheses based on observations
• Design investigations with a control and one or two variables
• Gather, organize and display data independently
• Build an understanding of how solar energy is transferred
• Recognize that the sun is the main source of energy for people and they use it in various ways
• Design and conduct experiments with variables. Students should be able to explain cause and effect
• Study the relationship in an ecosystem that shows the relationship of an organism to its environment
• Conduct hands-on investigations to discover and understand their world
• Record observations in science notebooks

It would seem that, "goals" aside, the Philadelphia Schools are avoiding any commitment to help your 5th grader increase his or her vocabulary, reading level, sentence construction skills, or computational fluency with "unfriendly" numbers; or learn any scientific content other than a few vague propositions about solar energy.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

query for palisadesk and other teachers and parents

As some of you know, I've been teaching freshman composition at a local college. I'm interested in hearing more about this category of readers:

The last group [of children experiencing the fourth-grade slump], which Jeannette Chall discusses in some detail, are students whose language skills generally are weak and who thus cannot make the jump from reading simple, literal text to more complex material, even when they decode well. While vocabulary is often mentioned as the key factor, I have not found this to be the case. Language comprehension generally – understanding of complex syntax, subordinate clauses, connecting words, subjunctive, pronoun referents, temporal sequence, idiomatic expressions – the list goes on. There are some good DI programs for developing the needed language skills, but this kind of “Fourth Grade Slump” requires a more long-term approach.

Worth revisting: Arthur Whimbey's zoonoses test.

chemprof on masked deficits in high-achieving students

chemprof responding to "EVERY PARENT SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO SPELLING"

Absolutely. I think I've told the story of my first research student before, a very bright biochem major. She got a low C in biochem (after A's in organic) because of exactly this kind of problem. She was an early reader who basically memorized words, but really only read the first 3-4 letters. So she couldn't keep what she called the "glys" straight - glycine, glycolysis, glycogen, etc. all looked the same to her. She really needed explicit phonics, but no one noticed early enough.

That is an amazing story. Amazing, and chilling.

In the early grades, a strong ability to memorize, which C. had and has, is going to mask deficits if the only data anyone cares about is a passing score on the state tests.

C., too, was an early reader with a quick memory; he was one of those kids who 'taught himself to read.' But when he was in fourth grade, I discovered that he could not read a two-syllable nonsense word.

And he couldn't spell at all, which I knew was not right. Everyone in the household thought he'd naturally learn to spell if he just read more, but he had abruptly stopped reading, and his school didn't give many reading assignments.

Interestingly, at some point after C. enrolled in his Jesuit high school, he told me that "The kids are better readers" -- meaning they could read out loud better than kids in his public school. He also heard stories of parents who put their kids in Catholic school "because they couldn't read."

Catholic schools still teach phonics, I believe.

---------------

from the annals of All the answers are belong to us: trying and failing to buy a Direct Instruction spelling book

do students learn to read from beginning to end?

from the math and reading thread, EM reports:

I have in fact encountered quite a few SAT students who quite literally don't understand what it is that they're reading.

It has nothing to do with them not producing a particular answer that a teacher has arbitrarily deemed "correct" but rather is a result of their inability to unpack complex syntax, infer meanings that aren't literally spelled out for them, and, astonishingly (at least I was astonished the first time it happened - now I've been desensitized), to read an entire sentence from beginning to end, paying attention to every word, rather than "skimming" it in such a way that they only pick up random words that bear no apparent relationship to one another. If asked to summarize the gist of a reading in their own words, they're often completely lost.

Did I mention that some of these kids have attended elite Manhattan private schools since kindergarten?

At least from what I've seen, the problem isn't as bad as most people think. It's actually a lot worse.

I assume some of the problem can be attributed to balanced literacy reading instruction, which teaches students to move their eyes around the text as they seek clues to help them decipher unknown words. But I don't know, of course.

Thoughts?

Must get palisadesk on the case---!

Here is Arthur Whimbey making the same observation.