Literacy Now

by Peter Freebody
The University of Sydney
April 25, 2013

Issue—

We ask: ‘How can different types of research can be useful in guiding us in setting policy and shaping classroom practice?’ But there is a prior question: ‘Why, after so much research on literacy education, do we feel that we have not ‘set policy’ or ‘shaped classroom practice’ to our satisfaction?’ Why is there a sense of disappointment on this count among researchers, policy-makers, and teachers?

My Take

It seems to me that there are at least two kinds of possible answers—to do with the sites and the nature of our research. In spite of our incessant, forensic analyses of the psychological processes of reading and writing, we have relatively few detailed, well theorized studies of the two settings we claim we are trying to influence—the settings in which policy is formed, modified, and implemented, and classrooms.

Students bring to school a more complex and diverse set of socio-economic, technological, cultural, and language backgrounds, and they leave school heading for a more complex, diverse, and unpredictable life, learning, and work trajectories. So reforming both policy and pedagogy, and understanding their relationship, are crucial ongoing tasks for literacy educators.

Where Policy is Formed

How policy affects practice is complex. New policies don’t replace old ones the moment they are introduced, nor do they get acted out the same way in different sites within educational systems. They can rearrange the relationships among educators within systems, and reorder the authority of their expertise. We sense these things (see Elmore, 1996), but how they might happen next time, and with what consequences, we simply don’t know. So how we can align our ambitions with our practices is guesswork on each new occasion.

Classrooms

Similarly, there is much research on the application of commercial products, technologies, and strategies to classroom teaching and learning, but teachers’ work is affected by factors such as time, space, and technology constraints; teacher’s classroom work has many simultaneous functions: the need to manage bodies, movements, and attention, to maximize students’ participation, and their emotional and physical safety, and to monitor progress in their learning, and so on, as well as teacher’s need to teach syllabus content.

Teachers try to organize classroom activities so that all of these functions operate at the one time. So one crucial question for researchers is: ‘How are these functions best co-ordinated or orchestrated in different sites to maximize the instructional value of the activities (Dillenbourg, 2011)?

I-O Causal Connections

From this view comes a second kind of explanation for our ‘disappointment’. Much of the research we conduct in classrooms is based on two central ideas: 1) an intervention (I) of some sort—say, a new curriculum or teaching strategy—will or will not cause a change of learning outcome (O); 2) that this I-O causal connection holds in general, and 3) that we know this because we can amalgamate data from lots of classrooms or lots of individual studies. This is the powerful logic of drug testing: ‘this chemical causes the death of these bacteria—overall, generally, wherever.’

Open-System Campaigns

But researching the efficacy of educational activities may be more like researching governmental campaigns about the dangers of smoking than testing the effects of drugs on bacteria. These campaigns operate within ‘open systems’, and they may work or not depending on how they interact in possibly unpredicted ways with other mediating factors (Ms)—in families, neighbourhoods, or workplaces. In this light we have a more generative set of research questions about a variety of I-M-O connections (Reimann, in press/2013). We could improve our chances of doing rigorous work that at the same time speaks more powerfully to the sites in and around literacy education that we wish to influence. For a start, this would probably need to involve long-term projects in more extensive collaborations with teachers and policy-makers, and might even lead us into a refreshing ‘post-disappointment’ phase.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@reading.org

by John Guthrie
University of Maryland
April 15, 2013

Dilemma—

The common core state standards (CCSS) are bringing a sea change in reading and writing. Designers of the new standards, educational administrators, and teachers all say the CCSS will require new reading skills. Calling for more complex text, the standards immediately raise the difficulty of the materials in the classroom. Beyond the texts, the standards call for reading as reasoning. Merely recognizing words, or being fluent at reading aloud, is not enough. Students need to think deeply to answer high level questions.

Teachers are assembling the complex texts. They are aligning them to the standards at each grade. Daily teachers are creating unprecedented high aims for learning from books and the internet. Unpacking the CCSS-based questions themselves is a formidable reading problem. In most classrooms, most students face daunting reading demands in every lesson.  

Will this work? Can educators succeed simply by giving harder, higher reading tasks to everyone?

My Take

Absolutely not. While students must learn a new reading skill set, teachers cannot simply force feed hard reading materials. Students are not like empty jars waiting to be filled. We cannot simply pour hard reading materials into them. Too many students are passive learners, or even dislike reading. Presenting hard texts and high level questions cannot be sufficient. Students are growing beings who require nourishment. Teachers need to activate and energize their students. Teaching new skills is a must, but new skills must be balanced by inspiring students’ passions and purposes for learning.

Evidence

Every teacher knows that students have to be motivated to learn. Opening the book, looking at it, concentrating to comprehend it, and using what you learn from text are all motivated. They take effort and energy. Learning to read the more complex texts demanded in the CCSS takes more dedication, certainly not less. In these times, students have to be more fully engaged and motivated than ever. A review showed that 100 studies have connected motivation to comprehension (Guthrie, 2009). For example, children who enjoy reading stories in their spare time and have favorite authors or genre like mysteries are higher in comprehension than less avid readers (Becker, 2010). Evidence substantiates what most teachers know. Students with interest, drive, desire, belief in themselves and passion for reading will tackle complexity, devour deeply, and persist in reading until their jobs are done.

Teachers often believe that motivation comes from home, which is partly true. But tragically many teachers overlook the empowerments of their own classrooms. A host of studies shows that the classroom context can be a motivator (Guthrie, 2012). For example, when teachers give academic choices and some freedom, students awaken to learning; whereas when teachers dominate the landscape and control everything, children shrink from engagement and decline in achievement. The classroom can motivate and inspire or it can discourage and disengage. This pattern is vividly evident from primary through secondary grades (Christensen, 2012).

Teachers can expand on how they enhance their students’ motivation and learning. Even when they have not done so before, teachers can learn to give students a few meaningful choices—choice within boundaries is the idea. Teachers can promote partnership activities instead of constantly expecting solo work. Teachers can link a story or a science book to student backgrounds and personal interests to show relevance. Choice, collaboration and relevance are all motivators—and there are dozens more.

In our work, we have found that even with just a half day of professional training, coupled with a half day of coaching, teachers can enrich their classrooms with motivational activities (Guthrie, 2013). Equally important, we know just providing new materials and turning teachers and students loose on them doesn’t do the job.  In the absence of training for motivation and engagement, an infusion of complex information texts and guidelines for comprehending them does not increase achievement (Baker, 2011). A barren text that is not interesting, relevant, important or inspiring—no matter how interesting we as educators might think it is—has few chances of boosting students to the heights of CCSS attainments.

It may appear that providing a more motivational context is a bit more work for the already overworked teacher. But that bit of extra work will pay big dividends because motivated students initiate their own activities. They require less discipline, guidance, organization and micromanagement.  A small investment in designing for engagement yields a classroom of self-directed learners, freeing the teacher to plan and organize creatively.

Closing

To assure that all students are attaining the CCSS, teachers want to afford them a rich—and balanced—literacy diet of teaching for skill and designing for engagement. Without both parts of this diet in every lesson, students stumble out of their classrooms half starved—and still hungry for engaging activities that lead to the sort of learning championed in the CCSS.

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@reading.org

P. David Pearson
University of California, Berkeley
April 15, 2013

Welcome to the IRA Literacy Research Panel Blog! The Panel looks forward to using this blog, and its archives, to connect with IRA members around literacy research relevant to policy and practice. Please email us to submit questions to the Literacy Research Panel.

It seems fitting that in this first blog, we should make a case for attention to literacy research. We realize that some IRA members may be jaded about literacy research, noting that

• some use research more to support an ideological position than to provide real insights about policy or practice,
• publishers may be more interested in using research to sell a product than to illuminate real strengths and weaknesses of an approach,
• single studies are sometimes overinterpreted or overused, or simply that
• some research seems far removed from the real world of students and classrooms.

As a Panel, we hope to ally each of these concerns. Through our Scintillating Studies posts, we will draw attention to studies that offer practical insights for policy and practice. Through our Research Roundup, we will highlight reviews of research that consider the weight of the evidence, not just individual studies, to provide guidance for the field. In Ask a Researcher we take on questions you submit about what research has to say—or doesn’t say—about a particular question in policy and practice, underscoring that literacy research should be serving you, your colleagues, and your students.

As a panel, we also hope to increase your trust and interest in research. We believe that research can offer some insights that it is not practical for an individual literacy educator to glean on his or her own (Duke & Martin, 2011).

• Research can allow us to learn about what happens to students over much longer periods of time under a broader range of conditions than we can typically observe.
• Research enables us to see inside students’ home and community settings in ways that are not typically possible to gain insights that help us connect with students.
• Research can allow us to look at larger numbers of students to see patterns that may not be otherwise evident, as well as to look more deeply at the experiences of any one student.
• Research can help us see things—such as particular instructional moves that are particularly effective or specific gaps in instruction—that we may not have seen ourselves.

As ambassadors for literacy research, we hope to make these affordances of research more evident to IRA members and the larger literacy education community. We look forward to engaging with you in this effort.

The International Reading Association Literacy Research Panel

Reader response is welcomed. Email your comments to LRP@reading.org