Methods of Assessing Cognitive Aspects of Early Reading Development

S. Wren, 2002 SEDL

 

If all children are to become successful readers, teachers need to become extremely sophisticated and diagnostic in their approach to reading instruction. To help teachers develop a sophisticated understanding of the cognitive development that takes place as children learn to read, SEDL has created The Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read: A Framework. This framework describes in some detail the various cognitive domains that research has shown to be necessary for reading acquisition, and it also illustrates the interrelationships that exist among these various cognitive domains.

In addition to understanding what is important for all children learning to read, it is also very important that teachers understand how to assess individual children’s development in each of the cognitive domains described in the framework. Assessment should always inform instruction. Individual children come with such diverse backgrounds and skills that it is necessary to cater their instruction to their individual strengths. Ongoing assessment is necessary to discover each child’s reading instruction needs.

There are a variety of approaches that can be used to assess early reading skills, and teachers should be familiar with the different approaches commonly used to assess early reading skill development. To assist teachers in their assessment of the reading development of their students, common approaches for assessment for each of the cognitive domains outlined in SEDL’s framework of reading acquisition are described in this paper. This description of the various assessment techniques can be used to help teachers to design their own classroom assessments, and may help teachers to better understand the district or campus assessments that are already being used with their students.

Certainly “reading assessments” should not be strictly restricted to the cognitive development of each child — it is important to also assess other, more affective aspects (such as motivation, enjoyment, interest and habit), as well as situational aspects (such as availability of appropriate literature and home support). The assessment approaches described in this paper focus on the cognitive development that research has shown to be important for developing early reading skills, but teachers are advised to use a broader sample of assessments to inform their instruction.

Before examining these assessment descriptions, it may be useful to take some time to familiarize yourself with SEDL’s framework of reading acquisition (www.sedl.org/reading/framework). Because the framework provides a useful guide to inform both instruction and assessment, it makes sense to use it to inform the current discussion of assessment approaches.

Referring to the framework, we will begin with the “top three” elements on the framework, reading comprehension, decoding, and language comprehension. Then we will move to a description of assessments that are commonly used for the various cognitive domains that support language comprehension (background knowledge, linguistic knowledge, phonology, semantics, and syntax). And last we will discuss assessment approaches commonly used for the cognitive domains that support decoding (cipher knowledge, lexical knowledge, phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and concepts about print).

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Reading Comprehension: Nature, Assessment and Teaching

24 Apr 2012 – Snowling,Margaret. A1 – Cain,Kate. A1 – Nation,Kate.

 

The goal of reading is understanding. In order to understand print, a child must be able to decode the words on the page and to extract meaning. A large body of research focuses on how children learn to decode text and how best to foster children’s decoding skills. In contrast, we know much less about the process of reading comprehension in children. In this booklet we first consider what is required in order to ‘read for meaning’. We then move on to discuss children who have difficulties with reading comprehension. Our aim is to enable teachers to assess individual differences in reading and to foster the comprehension strategies that characterize fluent reading.

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Guiding Classroom Instruction Through Performance Assessment

Journal of Case Studies in Accreditation and Assessment, Carol Oberg, University of La Verne

 

“Teachers, make it your first task to know your students better, for you surely do not know them” (Jean Jacques Rousseau in Ellis, 2001, p.67). Today’s classrooms provide unique challenges for teachers. Teachers must know content matter as well as state standards. They are accountable to multiple constituents: students, parents, administrators, and community members, and are expected to demonstrate appropriate yearly progress. Teachers of special needs students are expected to teach to state
standards while aligning students’ IEP goals to these standards. In addition, district assessment demands may consist of exit exams, district benchmarks, and high stakes state assessments, often times with results made public. Teacher accountability, student achievement, progress monitoring, and analyzing testing data are key phrases in today’s educational culture. Our educational system is driven by student outcomes as measured through standardized assessments.

Today’s pluralistic, inclusive classrooms demand a sharp lens of understanding and awareness from our teachers to reach and teach all students. This lens must serve as a microscope to magnify teachers’ understanding of individual student’s talents and skills as well as a stethoscope to listen deeply to their students’ daily experiences, unique interests, and individual dreams. In short, teachers need to know their students to teach them and align “thoughtfully directed curricula” to them as much as to standards (Stanford & Reeves, 2005). They must carefully consider not only what to teach, but also how to teach and how to assess.

When teachers are fully informed about their students, they are better prepared to make appropriate instructional and curriculum decisions, and adapt, as necessary, their teaching practice to ensure success for all students. To learn about their students, teachers must rely on data collected from their students through a variety of methods. Student data must be rich enough in detail and breadth to provide teachers with necessary information to connect instructional strategies to their needs and skills. These data must provide information about students’ current ability and knowledge within the subject matter as well as information about students’ interests, learning styles, and pace.

Assessments used to collect student data for both information and diagnostic purposes are termed pre-assessments. Pre-assessment helps teachers “front load” their lesson preparation by utilizing knowledge (data) about students in the instructional planning stage. However, traditional pre-assessments such as paper-pencil tasks or question and answer formats may leave teachers “data-deprived” as they offer limited information about students. Performance assessments, on the other hand, offer a variety
of ways for students to demonstrate what they know about content, as well as elucidate students’ additional skills sets within the classroom. These additional skills are related to attitude, creativity, ethics, perseverance, honesty, teamwork, sense of fair play, and many other behaviors and dispositions needed not only in the classroom, but also in the work force (Sternberg, 2007). When performance assessments are added to teachers’ current repertoire of pre-assessment tools, they help refine teachers’ knowledge of their students so they can create robust, motivating lessons attuned to their students’ strengths and needs.

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Why develop thinking skills and assessment for the classroom?

Welsh Assembly Government, 2010

 

The ability to learn and apply new skills effectively throughout our lives is a fundamental requirement for today’s generation living in an increasingly technological driven world. Successful lifelong learners need the ability to learn, whether in school, the workplace or at home. The information revolution and the restructuring of jobs and working lives continues to make an ever­growing impact on the relevance of traditional knowledge, subject content and skills currently taught in schools today. It is imperative, therefore, that teaching pedagogy is reviewed and updated, alongside the current National Curriculum Review, in order that learners have experience of, engage in and master the skills demanded of today’s citizens.

Teaching learners to become motivated and effective learners is a primary role of teachers. It could be argued that until now, the process of learning as a skill in its own right has generally been of secondary importance to the learning of subject knowledge and key facts. As evidence from scientific research and classroom practice have been increasingly aligned and interwoven, a number of barriers have been overcome. The most notable advances have been in the fields of developing thinking skills and assessment for learning.

The development programme for thinking skills and assessment for learning aims to focus on addressing these issues and ultimately support more effective learning.

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Teaching Inference Skills in the Primary Years

Donna Thomson, Think2Read, 2006

The Think2Read team belief passionately that comprehension instruction and child-led discussion within facilitated role-focused groups is central to effective learning in the primary years. To comprehend is to ‘understand’ – to possess the tools to ‘understand’ means you can learn.

For too long now, the education system has overlooked the necessity for explicit teaching of key comprehension thinking and questioning skills, especially within the early years. For example, there is the generally held belief that beginner readers need only to read the words on the page, for comprehension to naturally follow. Robert Fisher (1990) points out that although children may be able to say the words as they read from the text, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily comprehend the meaning beyond a literal understanding.

Although children have innate inference skills on one level or another, like many adults, they are unable to recognise what these skills are when they are using them or how they might be able to apply these skills more effectively to enhance other areas of learning – without first being shown how to do so.

Explicit teaching and assessment of literal, inference and evaluation shows even young children how to recognise and identify what these essential mean-making and reasoning skills actually are; and how they can be applied to enhance overall learning and understanding to enable them to:

  • make greater sense of incoming information;
  • gather, organise and classify data efficiently and purposely;
  • predict and plan confidently;
  • reason, make valued judgments;
  • creatively solve problems,
  • learn independently and collaboratively and communicate ideas effectively.

The Think2Read programme is a research-proven whole school approach that begins with the essential strategies for understanding pictures and text in Key Stage 1. These strategies and inferential questioning techniques are developed further and consolidated as the children progress through the school from Year 1 to Year 6 and into Key stage 3.

Effective teaching of inference and deduction skills for reading

Anne Kispal, 29 May 2008

 

Effective teaching of inference and deduction skills for reading: Literature review  study, was to review all that is known about inference and deduction.

A literature review to uncover what is known about the reading skills of inference and deduction was conducted in late 2007, under contract to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The specific purpose was to distil implications for teaching from academic research. Much of the literature concerned the nature of inference and the taxonomies of different types of inference that various researchers had identified. However, practical suggestions for teachers also emerged.

Key Findings:

    • Inference skills pre-exist reading skills. This means that teachers can practise activities to develop inferencing abilities outside the literacy classroom. Developing inference skills in all domains will help pupils in drawing their own inferences during reading. This finding is especially useful for reluctant readers, who may be discouraged when faced with extended pieces of text and for early readers, who may not have built up reading stamina. It is suggested that teachers should make use of listening activities and story tapes to develop the inference skills of young pupils.
    • Teachers should know and nurture the key characteristics of good inferencers. These are:
      • being an active reader who wants to make sense of a text;
      • monitoring one’s own comprehension and resolving misunderstanding as one is reading;
      • having a rich vocabulary;
      • having a good working memory.
  • Teachers should model how to draw inferences. For years, teacher modelling of good writing has been common practice in classrooms. The research shows that teachers need to model how they themselves draw inferences by:
    • thinking aloud their thoughts as they read to pupils;
    • asking and answering the questions that show how they monitor their own comprehension;
    • making explicit their own thinking processes.

Source

Teaching Inference and Early Comprehension Skills through Pictures

Donna Thomson (article for ‘Innovate My School’ online magazine, May 2013)  Reading Mission

‘Reading pictures can be as easy or difficult as reading printed text.’ Gomez-Reino, 1996

My research into how to teach young children explicit inference skills began in 2001 when I observed that there was a discrepancy in my school between many of our fluent reader’s ability to read and their overall comprehension.

Evidence worryingly showed that an emphasis placed on phonics was producing readers who could decode the words but often had no understanding of their meaning. This was later reflected in the Rose Review’s ‘Simple View of Reading’ (2006) and more recently substantiated by York University’s ESRC reading study (2008) that raised the concern that ‘pupils’ ease at reading words out loud may mask those who have difficulties with comprehension’. The cause of the problem was highlighted further by Anne Kispal’s ‘Effective Teaching of Inference’ NFER report in 2008 which concluded that poor inferencing skills cause poor comprehension and not vice versa’.

We realised that there was clearly a need to teach our children how to consciously infer and apply comprehension strategies as early as possible, if we wanted them to read for meaning and enjoyment from the very beginning.

We began finding ways of explicitly teaching these skills in Years 5 & 6 by exploring intriguing picture books with the whole class to help them focus on the process of ‘understanding’ rather than ‘decoding’. We wanted them to think about and share with each other how they unravel meaning to make sense of something, and how they identify clues and generate questions to make meaning. This meta-cognitive process was an equally successful foundation for teaching comprehension and reasoning skills to our Year 2 classes.

Over the years we have found that reading and interpreting images provides a powerful and stimulating comprehension teaching and assessment tool that supports children of all ages and abilities. Pictures are full of inferred and hidden meaning and as such are a great starting point for explicit comprehension instruction. If children cannot infer from pictures, they are unlikely to infer from text. This is because literal, inferential and evaluative visual clues are more immediate and easier to identify than text clues. Pictures can activate prior knowledge and experience in an instant. They prompt a range of emotions and personal reactions that absorb children and invite them to investigate and enquire further.

Evidence from classroom practice has consistently shown that once literal, inference and evaluative questioning skills and reading for meaning strategies such as summarising, predicting and clarifying are consciously applied and secure using pictures, young readers respond more confidently to being shown how to make inferred links between picture evidence and clues in the title or first or second line of text. From this understanding they can then successfully progress towards comprehending more lengthy text with illustrations – and finally text with little picture supplementation.

In addition, the metacognitive processes involved in picture comprehension enquiry and discussion leads to greater understanding of text that helps children to develop essential thinking, reasoning and justifying skills that they can consciously apply to other areas of learning in the curriculum.

Think2Read Comprehension Enquiry Project 2008 – 2011, funded by Real Ideas Organisation in association with Creative Partnerships (British Arts Council).

 

Effective Teaching of Inference and Early Comprehension Skills Through Pictures

Donna Thomson, May 2013 (article for ‘Innovate My School’ online magazine)

 

‘Reading pictures can be as easy or difficult as reading printed text.’ Gomez-Reino, 1996

My research into how to teach young children explicit inference skills began in 2001 when I observed that there was a discrepancy in my school between many of our fluent reader’s ability to read and their overall comprehension.

Evidence worryingly showed that an emphasis placed on phonics was producing readers who could decode the words but often had no understanding of their meaning. This was later reflected in the Rose Review’s ‘Simple View of Reading’ (2006) and more recently substantiated by York University’s ESRC reading study (2008) that raised the concern that ‘pupils’ ease at reading words out loud may mask those who have difficulties with comprehension’. The cause of the problem was highlighted further by Anne Kispal’s ‘Effective Teaching of Inference’ NFER report in 2008 which concluded that poor inferencing skills cause poor comprehension and not vice versa’.

We realised that there was clearly a need to teach our children how to consciously infer and apply comprehension strategies as early as possible, if we wanted them to read for meaning and enjoyment from the very beginning.

We began finding ways of explicitly teaching these skills in Years 5 & 6 by exploring intriguing picture books with the whole class to help them focus on the process of ‘understanding’ rather than ‘decoding’. We wanted them to think about and share with each other how they unravel meaning to make sense of something, and how they identify clues and generate questions to make meaning. This meta-cognitive process was an equally successful foundation for teaching comprehension and reasoning skills to our Year 2 classes.

Over the years we have found that reading and interpreting images provides a powerful and stimulating comprehension teaching and assessment tool that supports children of all ages and abilities. Pictures are full of inferred and hidden meaning and as such are a great starting point for explicit comprehension instruction. If children cannot infer from pictures, they are unlikely to infer from text. This is because literal, inferential and evaluative visual clues are more immediate and easier to identify than text clues. Pictures can activate prior knowledge and experience in an instant. They prompt a range of emotions and personal reactions that absorb children and invite them to investigate and enquire further.

Evidence from classroom practice has consistently shown that once literal, inference and evaluative questioning skills and reading for meaning strategies such as summarising, predicting and clarifying are consciously applied and secure using pictures, young readers respond more confidently to being shown how to make inferred links between picture evidence and clues in the title or first or second line of text. From this understanding they can then successfully progress towards comprehending more lengthy text with illustrations – and finally text with little picture supplementation.

In addition, the metacognitive processes involved in picture comprehension enquiry and discussion, that leads to greater understanding of text, helps children to develop essential thinking, reasoning and justifying skills that they can consciously apply to other areas of learning in the curriculum.

Think2Read Comprehension Enquiry Project 2008 – 2011, funded by Real Ideas Organisation in association with Creative Partnerships (British Arts Council)

Teaching Reading: What the evidence says

Henrietta Dombey and United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) colleagues, 2010

How should decisions about education be made?

At first glance, there’s an obvious answer to this question: on the basis of experience and evidence. Thousands of teachers work every day with hundreds of thousands of pupils. Thousands of hours of educational research are spent looking at how teachers teach, how learners learn. Surely, the job of ministers of education is to find ways of synthesising all this and, within the constraints of funding, to turn it into policy.

Ah! if only.

In fact, what takes place is that ministers do something quite different. By and large, they don’t listen to teachers and they don’t look at research -particularly if it’s research about how children learn. Instead, they look for ‘favourites’, experts whose views correspond with their party’s philosophy-of-the-moment. At such times, many of the usual requirements and stipulations of educational research go flying out of the window. So, what gets dispensed with is the rigour of demanding that:

  • all research making comparisons between two sets of pupils, compares ’like with like’, in terms of age and range of ability, in terms of race, gender and class, in terms of linguistic background;
  • samples of pupils being exposed to a specific new programme of teaching are compared to a ‘control group’ whose education is as near as possible going on under the same conditions as the sample group,bar the specific new programme of teaching (keeping the variables constant);
  • any conclusions about the consequences following a new programme of teaching should be short-term, medium-term and long-term (and not just one of these);
  • every effort should be made to make the testing of the consequences as multi-dimensional as possible and not restricted to one simple quantitative test of one aspect of the skill concerned.

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Thinking To read, Reading to Think: Closing the learning & literacy gap

Donna Thomson, March 2013 (article for National Primary Head’s Association ‘The Primary Voice’ magazine)

Although heartening to know that we have made improvements in literacy, (Ofsted’s: ‘Moving English Forward’ Report 2012), it was also dispiriting to hear that yet again, ‘..standards in English aren’t high enough and one in five children is not achieving the expected literacy levels by the end of primary school’. For the last decade underachievement in literacy, particularly amongst disadvantaged children in the UK, has stubbornly persisted. The progress in International reading Literacy Study (PIRLS report, 2011), stated that this decline was particularly evident from 2001- 2006 when England dropped from 3rd to 19th place out of 35 countries with regard to reading comprehension. Although children’s comprehension performance in 2011 was significantly higher than in 2006, ‘retrieving straight forward information and inferencing’ was still lower than expected. This prompts the question: ‘Are our literacy levels still below expectations because government initiatives and interventions have not focused on solving the reading comprehension issues reflected in the PIRLS report?’ The Think2read team and a number of other educators believe that this may be so. As far back as 2003, literacy experts such as Morag Stuart (Fine Tuning the NLS, 2003) have warned that ‘we neglect the development of language comprehension at our peril’ and that ‘we need more focused teaching of comprehension strategies’. The 2012 Moving English Forwards report echoes Stuart’s concerns that ‘too few schools currently develop reading skills effectively across the curriculum’. The report also highlights how this impacts on other areas of learning when ‘teachers are less aware of approaches that might help pupils to read effectively and make sense of what they are reading’. For some years now central government directives seemed to have focused almost exclusively on how phonics is taught in primary schools, rather than how we might deliver a more balanced reading experience to children -that includes early comprehension instruction. Particularly effective instructional approaches for comprehension have been those based on reciprocal teaching (Rosenshine and Meister review of Educational research, 1994) in which teaching of more than one comprehension strategy was followed by reading a text and students questioning each other or making predictions about the text (palicsar and Brown,1984). reading instruction that includes explicit teaching of inference skills and questioning(Parkin, Parkin and Pool, New Zealand, 1999) further helps to deepen children’s understanding of how to generate and answer questions about text to extend independent reading for meaning. Inspired by this approach, the Think to read Comprehension Skills project was setup to explore how these reading skills might be assessed and put effectively into practice in classrooms in the UK.

We began this action-research project in our large Devon primary school when we first detected reading comprehension problems amongst our Years 5 & 6 children in 2001. Previously, we had been confident that because many of our children were achieving high fluency levels, they were ‘good readers’. However, when we introduced our readers to reciprocal reading to extend their reading and encourage independent and collaborative exploration of text; to our dismay, our fluent readers struggled to engage with any real confidence in the process. we began to wonder if the long-held assumption that ‘children develop an understanding of text as they become more fluent’ was perilously misplaced. We examined our children’s comprehension skills in greater depth to see if we could uncover the problem and find a possible solution. The results of the investigation were unsettling, to say the least. We extended our assessment and analysis of reading across both key stages over a period of two years from 2001 – 2003 and compared the outcomes from two reading measures: ‘PM Benchmark, Kit 1’(Nelson Thornes, 2000) and the ‘Probe Comprehension reading Assessment’ (Triune Initiatives, New Zealand, 1999). The evidence consistently revealed a discrepancy between the children’s ability to decode and their comprehension at the same level. This was later reflected in the Rose Review’s ‘Simple view of reading’ (2006) and more recently substantiated by York University’s 2008 reading Comprehension study (Snowling, Cain, Nation and Oakhill) that raises the concern that ‘pupils ease at reading words out loud may mask those who have difficulties with comprehension’. The results confirmed to us that teaching for fluency levels and word recognition without including strategic comprehension instruction over time, had produced a significant number of high decoders who had little understanding of the text they were reading or how to delve deeply for meaning to support their understanding. Our assessment analysis identified the following areas of comprehension failure that correlated with Stuart’s findings at the time (Fine Tuning the NLS, 2003):

  • poor skimming and scanning skills and tendency to rely on memory only to respond to questions from the text,
  • poor knowledge of story structure and the different ways of gathering literal, inference and evaluation information from the text,
  • little understanding that the authors intention is presented as clues in the text,
  • failure to make links and connections from own experience with that of incoming new knowledge,
  • more literal than in-depth enquiry during reading,
  • poor interpretation skills due to limited knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.

Our evidence was corroborated later by two local authorities in 2006 (Devon Education Services, and Blaenau-Gwent Education Authority, Wales) who used our assessment procedure to assess reading comprehension skills in greater depth in a number of other schools. The results were similar. The assessment indicated that many of the children’s poor comprehension was due to a lack of strategic knowledge about the skills involved in drawing inferences and making meaning of text. Anne Kispal’s 2008 review, ‘Effective Teaching of Inference Skills for Reading’ echoes this, when she reports that ’Evidence shows that poor inferencing skills cause poor comprehension and not vice versa.’ we concluded that our reading practice needed to change. We needed to rethink our approach to teaching reading skills. whilst acknowledging the importance and success of phonics. We felt that our children also needed to systematically learn how to infer, question and process their thinking as early as possible if they were to achieve a good grasp of the author’s meaning and intention as they read. However, because we could find little in the way of an explicit meta-cognitive and cooperative learning approach to help us teach these skills, we developed our own comprehension and questioning skills programme (Think To Read, 2005 – 2011) based on Palicsar and Brown’s reciprocal reading model (1986), the dialogic approach of philosophy for Children (Murris & Haynes, 2000) and the Taxonomy of Question Types (Parkin, Parkin & Pool, 2002). This was designed initially to provide in-depth comprehension instruction and assessment for our Year 5 and 6 children and later (with modifications) for our children in Year 2 classes upwards. The results from the programme were encouraging. SATS results for the participating Year 6 class during the action-research project showed a particularly high comprehension result of 90% passes at level 4/5, with a significant rise in standards in just two terms. During the trialling and evaluation of the Think2read programme from 2007–2012 we tracked the reading and learning progression of classes as they moved from Year 2 to Year 5. Their reading and comprehension SATs results remained at a high level. Teachers across the school and in two other schools who were using the Think2read methods (2007 – 2008), reported that pupil’s reading improved and ‘the children were more willing to learn from one another’s assumptions and keen to explore and challenge each other about text and the author’s intention’. Maureen Lewis, an observer from the national Literacy Strategy who came to visit the school in 2005, reported that the sessions seemed to have ‘opened the gates to children’s learning of prediction, clarification, questioning and summarising. ’Think2read’s explicit and inclusive approach is particularly effective because it tackles the comprehension problem for children head on. Instead of relying on teachers questions and prompts about text, children as young as six years old are taught how to identify the skills that help them to summarise, predict and clarify text. They also learn how to classify information and consciously generate and answer their own literal, inference and evaluative questions about text. This process enables them to monitor their own understanding with confidence as they read. The importance of child-led rather than teacher-led questioning with regard to comprehension improvement was underlined by Lori Oczkus (National Reading Association, 2005 (citing Singer & Dolan, 1982): ‘when students pose their own questions, they show more improvement in comprehension, than students who simply answer the teacher’s questions.’ The final report of the rose review (2006) acknowledges the importance of reading comprehension within the learning-to-read process: ‘…it is an obvious truth that the goal of reading is comprehension and that skilled reading involves understanding as well as decoding text. In short, learning to read progresses to reading effortlessly to learn. The teaching of beginner readers requires an understanding of the processes that underpin this progression’. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA, 2006) emphasised further that pupils need to understand the purpose for reading beyond fluency: ‘Children need to understand that alongside ‘accurate decoding of text, reading involves making meaning from content, structure and language’. Evaluation of Think2Read’s impact on the children’s reading and learning across the school confirmed that youngsters from six years upwards respond well to explicit and dialogic instruction about reading concepts and skills (Real Ideas Organisation, 3 -Year Enquiry project in association with Creative Partnerships 2008 -11). Teachers, pupils and creative practitioners agreed that when the children were shown how to identify the difference between being literal and inferential and how to apply detective skills and questioning to seek meaning for themselves, they gained a greater love of reading and were more able to explore texts independently in reciprocal reading teams. We discovered that the logical progressive steps used to explain these strategies also enabled the children across the age and ability range to make important links of learning to other areas of the curriculum. This led us to wonder whether a general lack of in-depth comprehension instruction and child-led enquiry over the past years might have also impacted on pupil’s motivation and ability to learn in general. In December 2004, the Sunday Times reported that ‘100,000 young people were estimated to leave UK schools each year without basic literacy oral, social and thinking skills to function adequately in society’, (Mckay and Cowling, 2004). One can’t help wondering whether a link exists between the lack of explicit reading comprehension instruction and poor reading for meaning in other learning areas mentioned in the recent Ofsted report (2012) and the McKay and Cowling report that highlights students’ inability to make learning links and connections across the primary and secondary curriculum. During our ten years of the Think2read project we have discovered that there is a way of closing the gap in literacy underachievement that promises to impact not only on reading but also on learning in general. We have learned that when young children understand how to process their thinking to comprehend and question – when they are given the team skills (Johnson, Johnson,and holubec, 1993; Slavin 1991, Stahl and Van Sickle, 1992), and the opportunity to develop a passion for group reading and enquiry – it produces confident and active readers who become independent and collaborative learners.

Where do you stand on phonics only?

Donna Thomson, N0v. 2013, (article for ‘Education for Everybody magazine)

Primary literacy specialist, Donna Thomson, has spoken out, against the practice of teaching young children only synthetic phonics.

She believes there is a “narrow-minded and bullish obsession with synthetic phonics, which is proving harmful to our children’s futures.”

The method has been used in England for nearly 10 years and is often described as a “back to basics” system. It first teaches children the sounds of letters and how they blend into words, before moving to combinations that make up words.

Donna Thomson said: “Successive governments have made synthetic phonics the lynchpin of their efforts to improve literacy, but too many children are reading without understanding; they simply learn to ‘de-code’ the words.”

Her views come hot on the heels of a report by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) which placed England near the bottom of an international literacy tests league.

The OECD study showed England had slipped to 22 out of a total of 24 countries.

“If we want our children’s literacy to improve and for reading to become a pleasure, we need to give them the skills that support ‘a whole reading’ experience from the start,” says Ms Thomson, a researcher, primary educational writer and reading comprehension specialist with 15 years’ experience of supporting and extending children with reading and writing difficulties.

She says teaching children how to make meaning gives them the tools to question, understand and make sense of words, images and concepts within context as well as make links to problem solve and understand others’ points of view. It also allows them to develop curiosity, to reason, justify and express themselves clearly.

“All of these skills are the sorts of soft skills that employers are crying out for, yet we are not even furnishing our youngest children with them – we are giving them a shameful diet of synthetic phonics that does not produce the independent readers, and cross-curricular learners we are led to believe it does,” adds Ms Thomson.

In a bid to redress the balance, she is now working with individual headteachers in England and Wales who also think ‘phonics is not enough’.

Wales for instance, has developed a new literacy framework – after the Education and Skills department recognised the need to tackle the teaching of comprehension and cross-curricular literacy head-on.

A recent pilot project with very young children in Wales has been a resounding success, Headteacher at Coed-y-Lan school, Robert James said: “This Think2Read project fulfils most of the skills of the new curriculum in Wales because it asks children to summarise, predict, evaluate and make connections when they read text – in other words to understand, and enjoy, what they are reading.”

Interestingly of the parents who responded to a questionnaire about the Coed-y-lan pilot 94.6 per cent thought their child was beginning to ask more questions when reading a book and the same number reckoned their child was more interested in books.

Ms Thomson said: “‘When you see how empowering it is for six- year-olds to ask and answer their own in-depth questions about text and pictures as they read to support their understanding, it makes you realise just what could be achieved if you begin the reading journey for them at an earlier age through ‘talk’ and discussion about books at school and at home with their parents.”

Next year Ms Thomson will be working with primary schools in South Yorkshire – in an area of high social deprivation, with generations of jobless.

She explained: “The project in Yorkshire is unique. While working with young children (four and five-year-olds) we will also be focusing on parents. Many of these parents will have never been employed and come from a long line of poor education and unemployment. By learning the skills that develop and support their children’s reading and learning – the process will unlock their own potential and provide them with aspirations for further learning alongside their children’s experience. It will also foster important relationships between the community and the school.”

The Yorkshire project is in line with a report last week, which said millions of children in England, and Wales were being held back by their parents’ poor basic skills.

The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education – NIACE – report said involving the whole family in learning can boost educational attainment across generations and should be integral to schools.

Governments, it said, should give family learning more support.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Ms Thomson. “If we want a nation of literate young people we need to start teaching four and five-year- olds how to use strategies for making meaning and asking and answering their own questions about information at home and in school.

“Changing the way that we teach children reading and literacy in their formative years will have a profound and positive effect on our children’s futures for generations to come, I don’t think I can overestimate the effect this could have on our economy in years to come.”

Researching citizenship

R. Etienne, 2007, London Metropolitan University

 

An interesting  booklet on how we connect co-operative learning and co-operation with practice-based research. Read it here: https://metranet.londonmet.ac.uk/fms/MRSite/Research/cice/pubs/practice/practice-01.pdf