Decoding and Reading are two different things

Here's an ED Hirsch article which points out that children's ability to learn and expand their vocabularies precedes their ability to decode letters and words. If you want to establish a child's vocabulary at a young age, then you need to teach content: knowledge, science, history, art, and facts, in a parallel stream to teaching them decoding (like phonics) and encoding (writing and spelling.) The mechanics of reading for a young child make it harder to grasp the content of what they're reading--the mind is so busy puzzling out the sounds and the words that it has little left for understanding. Teaching content through out-loud reading can get kids the vocabulary and the knowledge they need to really be able to read.

Why Is There So Much Listening in the Core Knowledge’s Reading Program? « The Core Knowledge Blog

Exactly

Exactly right: by pushing literacy onto younger kids, we are trying to teach boys to read before most of them are ready. By the time they are ready, the class has moved on from phonics and it is too late for the boys. A rigorous spelling curriculum might help, since it can function as a second bite at the phonics apple, without tarring half the boys with a "remedial" label.

Column: Plastic women vs. cardboard men

Dumbing down

Years ago, I read a journal article on the dumbing down of the texts kids read. I'm not sure if this is the same one or not:

Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores (pdf)

The article talks about two specific movements to simplify the language of children's school books. The thinking was that kids needed the content, and by simplifying the language, they could access the knowledge more easily. The problem was, by dumbing down the texts, they never taught kids how to read more-complicated things. According to this study, only high school science books are written at a level above the level of newspapers, everything else falls below.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults

I've been meaning to link to this for ages.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults | EducationNews.org

In the United States, findings of national adult literacy surveys over the last thirty years have revealed tens of millions of adults whose literacy skills are poorly developed.

But rather than trying to address this problem through an extensive and intensive approach to adult literacy education, the major strategy has followed the homily that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Following this approach, we have tried to prevent the problem of poor adult literacy over the long run by improving the literacy skills of children in the K-12 school system. But [...] it has been argued that K-12 education is too late and that we need to improve children’s learning before they get to school. So over the years we have invested tens of millions of dollars in Head Start preschool programs for children 3 to 4 years of age. But since this has been found to not produce the hoped for long term improvements in cognitive skills, it has been argued that age 3 is too late and that we need to start with birth. So now we have committed billions of dollars to Early Head Start for children from birth to age three years.

The article is worth reading in its entirety. It goes on to debunk a major study which is used to justify Head Start. He shows that the study was deeply flawed. The best line in the article is from his fourth point on why the study is wrong:

instead of young adults taking the tests unaided, as called for in the administration procedures of the APL, in the Perry Preschool study, “the interviewer read each of the items to the respondent and could repeat them upon request”

So, on a test of literacy the test takers could have the thing read to them, and those successful results (!) have been used since 1984 to justify the massive spending on Head Start.

Deathly Hallows

All done! Just over a week after beginning it, the 9-year-old boy has now finished the last Harry Potter book. For the record, The Deathly Hallows has 204,796 words, which brings the total number of words to: 1,090,739.

He would have finished it yesterday, but he was so nasty to his sister about reading, and kept stealing her book so many times, he got his taken away last night. He woke bright and early and finished it off.

Now....what next?

Half Blood Prince

It took only two weeks for the now-nine year old to get through "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince." He finished it this morning. He read it all on his own, putting in several 100+ days. There are 168,923 words in it, which brings his HP word count up to: 885,943.

He also is trying to beat his sister through the books. She had a big head start, but he has come on strong the last few books. He started the sixth at about the same time she started the seventh. He got through his book, while she's only about 200 pages into hers. He hasn't exactly been trying to play fair; he keeps stealing her copy so she can't read it. Now he's hot on her tail and will likely pass her in the next few days.

Order of the Phoenix

I forgot to mention that the boy finished the fifth Harry Potter book last Wednesday. "Order of the Phoenix" has 257,045 words in it. That brings his total Harry Potter word count to 717,020 since July 12th last summer. He read this one in two bits. We started it last November, but he stopped at page 94 and went on to read other things until a month ago. Then, on May 10th, he picked it up again. This time was different than his other forays into reading Harry Potter; this time, he was reading it all on his own. When I picked it up and read a page to him, he got mad and said I was reading it terribly!! So much for guided reading; he's over it!

He's already 157 pages into the sixth.

Harry Potter and the 8 year old

Last summer, our 8 year old boy, despite my discouragement, became determined to read Harry Potter. So we sat down and read it together. He needed a ton of guidance, and I read two out of every three pages of the first book. We went through it in four days. The second one took us longer, mostly because I didn't want to spend all my time sitting on the couch with him, regardless of my admiration for his enthusiasm. By the time the third one came a along his reading level had jumped substantially--just in time for the standardized tests at school.

Then I made him take a break and read three non-HP books on his own, with no guidance. Harry Potter IV is a loooooong book, and it took a while. We went on to start to the fifth, but he grew tired part-way in and went on to read other things.

Last weekend at a birthday party, I was talking to another parent whose son is the same age. He said his boy was reading the books on his own, and I commented that I didn't think our kid could read it without help.

Boy, did the kid prove me wrong!! On Tuesday he picked up where we had left off. Despite having the busiest week of his entire year--play rehearsals every day after school until 5:30, plus homework and a very busy weekend (rehearsals for his other play, his sister's birthday party, baseball, Big Sunday, etc.)--he managed to read over 130 pages completely on his own.

After struggling to get him to read last year, Harry Potter came to the rescue, After struggling to get him to read independently all this year, Harry Potter again came to the rescue.

Wisconsin vs non-collective bargaining states

In the last few weeks, the post below and ones like it have been circulating around Facebook and the internet (see eg: here, in the comments here: , and here ):

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:

South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44th

Wisconsin is currently ranked 2nd. Welcome to the race to the bottom.

The statistics have become so widespread that they've been used by the Economist and Paul Krugman at the NYTimes has pulled similar data.

Rebuttals have pointed out that the SAT is a really bad way to judge educational achievement, since in Wisconsin in particular only a small portion of students—those heading for selective colleges—ever take it:

As it turns out, these ratings are bogus. For each state it adds the ranking for SAT scores to the ranking for ACT scores (and it's not even clear what year the data comes from), but it doesn't take into consideration the percentage of the population who take either test. The College Boards specifically warn against doing state-to-state comparisons for the SAT, because in some states all students are required to take the text, while in others only the best students do. Only 4% of Wisconsin students took the SAT in 2010, and since they tend to be the cream of the crop it's not surprising that Wisconsin does well (but third in the nation, not first). On the other hand, 69% of Wisconsin seniors took the ACT in 2010, and Wisconsin comes in 17th in terms of composite ACT scores.

A more thorough debunking of these statistics may be found here; among the revelations is the fact that the data is from 1999. The owner of this site is actually an advocate of "student organizing"; it is to his credit that he has the intellectual honesty to challenge claims that purport to back up his side of the argument.

So, since I like data, playing with data, and living in data, I decided to look at a much better measure of educational achievement—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

For a long time now, the US Department of Education has compiled NEAP scores. These are the results of exams given nationwide to a massive number of students. They show trends, and apples to apples comparisons can be made easily. The exams are given in Mathematics, Reading, Science, Technology and Engineering, Arts, Civics, Economics, Foreign Language, Geography, US History, World History, and Writing. The exams are given to both 4th and 8th graders. A pilot program has started to test 12th graders as well, but none of the states mentioned above are participants.

Iowahawk, the usually comedic web poster, took a break yesterday from satire to mine some of this data--he compared Texas and Wisconsin, with Texas coming out mostly on top.

As it turns out, I was already compiling data from this same source. I decided to focus on the two main parts of the NEAP results: Math and Reading. The reports for 2009 are available here: Math and Reading.

I looked at three categories of student for each grade level: 1) All students, 2) Students eligible for subsidized lunches—which is a short-hand way of looking at children in poverty, and 3) English Language Learners. I also looked at two levels of educational achievement: 1) students meeting basic requirements and 2) students testing as proficient. I took the 50 states and sorted them from best to worst and gave them their numerical rank (I gave states with ties the same rank.) The charts below show the numerical rank of each state with respect to the other 49. (Some students, such as people with reading disabilities, are granted special accommodations for the exam, I used those scores for the data below.)

It is clear that Wisconsin does quite well, especially in math, but the results are really not much to crow about. Wisconsin’s reading scores are actually surprisingly low. The best ranking for Wisconsin in math in any of the categories came in at a rank of 8—that was for 8th grade English language learners testing at the basic level. In reading Wisconsin achieved a rank of two for educating ELL students in 8th grade to basic levels. It should be noted, though, that ELL students do very badly overall.

Here is what I found:

4th Grade Math



For all students, and for these six states—remember Virginia, the Carolinas, Texas, and Georgia are used for the comparison because they do not allow their teachers to collectively bargain—Virginia, North Carolina and Texas are all better at getting kids a basic understanding of 4th grade math than Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the best of the bunch at getting kids to a proficient level, but 13 other states in the union actually do better than the cheese state, putting the dairyland in the second quintile. The percentage of Wisconsin students ranking at basic and proficient levels are: 85% and 45% respectively.

For students in poverty, Wisconsin gets a ranking near the middle of the 50 states: 22 for students reaching basic levels, and a better 19 for students reaching proficient. In Wisconsin 73% of students in poverty can do math at a basic level and 24% are proficient.

For English language learners, Wisconsin is well above the median for the 50 states with rankings of 14 and 13, however, among the six states presented here, Wisconsin actually does poorly, only Georgia does worse. In Wisconsin 66% of ELL students in 4th grade are at the basic level and 15% are proficient. The ELL scores, though, do have a caveat: not all states report these results. On this exam nine states did not report: Alabama, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Whether those states would change the rankings can not be known from this data.

8th Grade Math



For 8th graders, Wisconsin does well overall, getting more kids to the basic and proficient levels than the other five states, and makes the top ten for overall basic skills. The percentage of students scoring at basic and proficient are a respectable 79% and 39%. Texas shows itself to be very good at educating children in poverty, getting a basic rank of 3 (they are tied for third place with South Dakota and Massachusetts, and North Dakota and Montana do better,) and a proficient rank of 9. (Wisconsin’s scores are 60% of student in poverty achieve the basic level, 20% proficient.) South Carolina is again the best at educating English language learners, tying with Virginia for the number 2 spot at the basic level and getting the second rank for proficient as well. Wisconsin does well (45% at basic, 9% at proficient), but lags behind Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—Georgia did not report these scores, neither did: Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming (16 states did not report ELL scores.)

4th Grade Reading



Wisconsin does surprisingly poorly on this exam. For a state that is said to have a good educational system, scoring below or at the median for reading among all students is not the educational beacon it’s been made out to be. Only 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders read at a basic level, only 33% are proficient. For students in poverty, the numbers are even worse. For the first time in the data I’ve looked at, Wisconsin falls into the bottom quintile of states, wracking up a pathetic rank of being the 42nd best (worst!) state in which to be a student in poverty. Of these six states Wisconsin is the worst at educating students in poverty (with SC tying at the proficient level.) In Wisconsin, less than half—only 46% of 4th graders in poverty read at a basic level, and only 15% are proficient. My own state of California is in the dead-last position, with only 38% of students reaching the basic level, and only 10% reaching proficiency. Again, South Carolina seems to understand how to teach English language learners, or their cohort of ELL students is different from the ones in other states. They have the honor of being at the top of the league in ELL. Wisconsin is better than Georgia among these six states, but is the second last in both basic and proficient ELL students. (Eleven states did not report their ELL scores.) Among ELL 4th graders in Wisconsin only 31% are at basic and 8% are proficient.

8th Grade Reading



By comparison to the other five states in this dataset, Wisconsin does well at educating students in 8th grade reading. However, with the exception of ELL students, Wisconsin still isn’t doing very well. Wisconsin has a 50-state rank of 19 and 15 for educating all students to the basic and proficient levels respectively. In Wisconsin 78% of 8th grade students reach the basic level of reading, and 34% are proficient readers. Again Wisconsin is below the national median at educating students in poverty to the basic level of competence (61% of students in poverty achieve basic scores), but does slightly better than the median at getting kids to proficiency (18%). The ELL exam is again hampered by the fact that not all states report these results; in this case nearly half (23) failed to report. Among Wisconsin’s ELL students in 8th grade, only 49% can read at a basic level and only 7% are proficient.

Conclusions: Don’t send your kids to school in Georgia! Georgia did poorly across the board, though in a couple categories Wisconsin actually did worse. Wisconsin comes in at being a better-than-average state for education, but not if you are a student in poverty. Of the 24 categories presented here, Wisconsin was the best of the six states in nine of them, Virginia: eight, South Carolina: seven (all ELL), Texas: four, North Carolina: one, and Georgia: none.

Does Wisconsin’s collective bargaining state shine above the ones without it? Not according to this data. Unlike the skewed SAT results, this shows these states doing some things well and some things poorly. None are shown off in a really good light, and Wisconsin’s reading achievement is surprisingly bad when compared to its reputation as a great state for education.

The need for phonics...in college?

This is a story about British education, but I think it is a sad commentary on a lot of today's education in the US as well:

The report also found that many pupils were being held back by a failure to use phonics – the back-to-basics method of teaching pupils to read by breaking words down into individual sounds.

It said there were “few instances of systematic phonics teaching” in secondary schools or colleges, even though it was proved to help pupils struggling the most.

If a young adult--which is what college students are--needs help from phonics instruction, I would postulate that that individual has no business being in college in the first place*!

* People with learning difficulties such as dyslexia excepted.

Goblet is in the can!!

The boy and I just finished "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". Yay!!! That one has 190,637 words in it. Add that to the previous 269,338 that we've read in the first three books, and we've done 459,975 words of Harry Potter since June. Cool beans!

Prisoner of Azkaban is done!!!

Steven just finished the third Harry Potter book. I looked it up and it had: 107,253 words in it. I tried to read one page out of every three, while he read the other two-thirds.

Together, so far, we have gone through: 269,338 words of Harry Potter!!! Yay!!!

Hand in hand

In the last few years, I've done a lot of tutoring of our 5-8 year old boy. We started with "Hooked on Phonics" and built from there. Last year, we tackled his weak spelling through the use of the "All About Spelling" curriculum. I also do a lot of reading with him (he hates to read alone--it's a very social thing for him.)

I've figured out one thing: Learning how to spell is crucial to reading!

The opposite is also, obviously, true.

Learning the rules of syllable division, vowel and consonant teams, and all of the rules of spelling has allowed him to sound out words he never could read before. He didn't learn that at school or from any reading/phonics curriculum. He learned it by learning how to spell.

So, these seem to me to be the crucial questions:

1. How much and at what level of detail are kids being taught the rules of spelling these days?
   
   
2. Can structured and rules-based spelling instruction help poor readers to catch up?
   
   
3. Is part of the reason for declining literacy rates (particularly in boys) due to a lack of strong spelling instruction? (Boys have always learned reading later than girls, but traditionally have caught up by 4th and 5th grades. That is no longer true, as early literacy is happening too early for many boys. In previous eras, how much did strong spelling instruction play a role in helping boys catch up in later elementary years?)
   
   
4. Most importantly, can detailed spelling instruction work as a second phonics course for learners who missed the first phonics go 'round in kindergarten and first grade? Putting it another way, is strong spelling instruction a way to help boys and late-blooming girls get the phonics they need, when they need it, without the stigma of remedial instruction, or worse: retention?

There obviously is no quick-fix out of the problems of declining literacy(*,**) But my hunch is that proper spelling instruction is one of the pieces of the puzzle.

(* Especially when middle and upper-income children come to school having heard literally millions more words than children of lower-income families.)

(** And when 25% of high school boys with at least one college-educated parent, can not read a newspaper.)

Second Potter book has been read!

Last night, a little after 10, Steven completed the second Harry Potter book. At 85,141 words, that puts his Potter reading total at: 163,107 words. It took him longer than the first, in part because we never seemed to find time to read during the day, but we went through 60 pages yesterday to finish it. I probably read more of this book than that last, but he still read more than 75% of it.

Now, on to Azkaban!

The boy's latest obsession

The boy has his healthiest obsession since his Lego Summer.

I while back, he became interested in Harry Potter and asked me a million questions about it; however, I thought he wasn't ready for a 308 page book.

Then, he found out about a knick-knack Harry Potter ring, and his mom said she'd get it for him if he read the book.

He began it Monday night and read 29 pages. Then on Tuesday, he read another 49 pages. Yesterday, he read 84 pages. He can't read it entirely independently and needs someone to sit with him. He has trouble with the names, with getting off by one line, with Hagrid's lines, and with some of the little words. He gets most of the big words just fine.

He's now on page 162, and wants to spend today reading too. At this rate, he should be done by next week.

Update: He finished it! He read 74 pages on Thursday, and 72 pages on Friday. For a total of 308 pages in 4 days plus a few hours on Monday. We looked up the word count and it comes in at 77,966. That's more words than he's probably read in 6 months or more.

I started following along with my finger and he started reading much better and faster, with fewer silly mistakes in the little words (he reads almost all of the big words easily). I've been telling him for years to follow along with his finger, and he totally refuses to do it.

K versus C

How do you teach a kid which words start with a "k" and which words start with "c". Well, here are two ways:

1. Remember that the combinations "ce" and "ci" make the soft "s" sound, not the hard "k" sound. So, a word spelled "cite" would be pronounced like: site. So, that word must be spelled with a "k": kite. (A similar rule exists for "g": "ge" and "gi" frequently make the soft "j" sound, particularly in the middle of words: eg. engine.) Everything that has a different first vowel starts with a "c".
   
   
2. Just remember: "Hey kid! Kiss the kind king, and keep the key in the kitchen with the kite, and never kick the kitten, the kettle or the kangaroo."

I came up with that phrase this way: I went to the Dolch words* and found the few that start with the hard "k", I also went to the Fry words* and found the hard "k's" there. Then, I added "kid", "kettle" and "kangaroo" from memory.

Kangaroo is obviously the exception, since it has an "a" as leading vowel.

* The Dolch words are a list of words that kids are supposed to be able to sight read at different ages. The list is broken down into Pre-Primary, Primary, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. But the way I see it, a first grader should pretty much know them all.

The Fry list is a bit more interesting. A researcher added up all the words we encounter as adults on a regular basis. Counted each instance of each word and ordered them from most common to least common. What he figured out was that half of all the words we encounter every day are the same 300 words: a, an, the, and, etc. That's the Fry list. I figure that if a kid can sight read those 300 words, reading becomes a snap--a kid already knows half of all the words on the page.

Why boys fail (II)

Interesting...I've been reading lots of the links on the Why Boys Fail blog mentioned below. In one they discuss gross-out books as one way to get boys into reading, and the debate about whether this is the right tactic to use. There were other articles I read on similar subjects.

Why stands out for me is that two old-time remedies for boys' lack of interest in reading were never mentioned:

1) The comic book.

2) Science fiction.

The first is much more problematic than it used to be. Ever since the rise of the "Dark Knight" comic book in 1986 (I remember friends in college being so excited about that one!), comic books...sorry graphic novels aren't what they used to be. Now they are dark, moody, uber-violent and filled with se(x). I know there are still youth-oriented ones, but there aren't as many as there used to be, and as a parent, I would worry about boys wanting to move on to the more graphic of the graphic novels before they should.

The second seems like a good option. However, looking around the early reader section, I can think of only one sci-fi book that isn't a movie tie-in (6 year old boy loves "Wall-E".) Looking around the chapter book section, I'd have to say the same. Since J K Rowling, there has been a massive explosion of fantasy novels, but not sci-fi.

Some thing tells me there is a big market out there waiting to be tapped.

Sight words II

I went looking around some more for sight words, and I found a second list. This one with similar origins, only named after someone named Fry. These are supposed to be the 300 most-used words in American English.

So, I took the Dolch list and the Fry list, and combined them. There was a great deal of overlap between the two, so the result is 356 words.

These words:

a, about, above, add, after, again, air, all, almost, along, also, always, am, America, an, and, animal, another, answer, any, are, around, as, ask, at, ate, away, back, be, because, been, before, began, begin, being, below, best, better, between, big, black, blue, book, both, boy, bring, brown, but, buy, by, call, came, can, car, carry, change, children, city, clean, close, cold, come, could, country, cut, day, did, different, do, does, done, don't, down, draw, drink, each, earth, eat, eight, end, enough, even, every, example, eye, face, fall, family, far, fast, father, feet, few, find, first, five, fly, follow, food, for, form, found, four, from, full, funny, gave, get, girl, give, go, goes, going, good, got, great, green, group, grow, had, hand, hard, has, have, he, head, hear, help, her, here, hers, high, him, his, hold, home, hot, house, how, hurt, I, idea, if, important, in, Indian, into, is, it, it’s, its, jump, just, keep, kind, know, land, large, last, later, laugh, learn, leave, left, let, letter, life, light, like, line, list, little, live, long, look, made, make, man, many, may, me, mean, men, might, mile, miss, more, most, mother, mountain, move, much, must, my, myself, name, near, need, never, new, next, night, no, not, now, number, of, off, often, oil, old, on, once, one, only, open, or, other, our, out, over, own, page, paper, part, people, pick, picture, place, plant, play, please, point, pretty, pull, put, ran, read, really, red, ride, right, river, round, run, said, same, saw, say, school, sea, second, see, seem, sentence, set, seven, shall, she, should, show, side, sing, sit, six, sleep, small, so, some, something, sometimes, song, soon, sound, spell, start, state, still, stop, story, study, such, take, talk, tell, ten, than, thank, that, the, their, them, then, there, these, they, thing, think, this, those, thought, three, through, time, to, today, together, too, took, tree, try, turn, two, under, until, up, upon, us, use, very, walk, want, warm, was, wash, watch, water, way, we, well, went, were, what, when, where, which, white, white, who, why, will, wish, with, without, word, work, world, would, write, year, yellow, yes, you, young, your

There you have it. If you look at the words we actually use regularly, that list makes up about half of them.

Sight words

My nephew can read almost any word at this point (except things like "ough" and "tion" words), but he does it slowly, usually letter-by-letter and with only a few sight words under his belt. He obviously needs more practice and drilling.

So I went looking for a good website for sight words. I found one with printable flash cards, a word book with each word used in a sentence, and even 2 stories which include all of the "Dolch" sight words.

According to Wikipedia Dolch Sight words were compiled by a Edward Dolch in 1948 from the words he commonly found in childrens' books.

Interestingly, Wikipedia says:

Houghton Mifflin asked Ted to write and illustrate a children's primer using only 225 "new-reader" vocabulary words. The result of that challenge was "The Cat In The Hat"

BTW, the Wikipedia page for Dolch site words lists them all.

I printed off pages of flash cards, I'm going to see about getting them laminated for durability and shuffleability. I intend to start flashing them at him soon.

Now I have to figure out a game we can play with them.