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Assumptions about how children learn to read have been disproven by research

227 points by dsr12 9y ago

justherefortart 9y ago
I'd say one of the biggest shifts since 1998 is the wider availability of the internet and then computer like devices in school. Instead of doing the rote learning, they make learning into a game. Where everyone advances at a glacial pace from what I've seen. Now that kids are growing up using handheld phones/tablets for their consumption, the likelihood of them sitting down and reading a book (be it digital or paper) seems less likely than during my childhood when we had to dream about these futuristic gadgets.
- __s 9y ago
  Kind of weird how the internet cuts both ways For some education was too slow relative to the potential learning of the internet. But now the internet is hampering education Meanwhile the internet is seen as an equalizer to dispense information globally. Yet software eating the world is siphoning wealth inequality into the hands of a few Another: it's a medium for the most distributed uncensored encrypted communications, while also allowing intelligence organizations to pry deeper than they've ever in the past
  - 21 9y ago
    So some days ago there was this article how todays teenagers are bored to death on their phone, and constantly swap between social media apps looking for some engagement. There was a video to. The most amazing thing to me was that none of these teenagers even considered using the device to educate themselves, like reading an article on wikipedia or watching a documentary on youtube.
- brightball 9y ago
  For what it’s worth, I basically had to force my son to read the 1st Harry Potter book. It’s slightly above his grade level and I had to actually ban him from electronics until it was finished and we quizzed him on it to make sure he actually read it. There were tears because he felt it was too hard without really trying. After he finished it, he loved it. He’s on book 3 now, reads every night because he wants to, makes a point to take the books with him, takes the accelerated reader tests for them at school (and aces them). Now the kid loves reading... :)
  - rootusrootus 9y ago
    Is that because the electronics were more attractive, or because he was still in the 'learn to read' phase and it was work to get through a large book? Crossing the threshold into 'read to learn' skill level is a huge turning point in how a kid looks at books [in my experience].
    - vostok 9y ago
      As an adult, I think it's because electronics are more attractive. As a kid, I gladly slogged through the Silmarillion. Given my choice of verb, I'm not sure that I could do it today. Reading the comments on HN gives me a much quicker and sharper burst of pleasure.
      - rootusrootus 9y ago
        My hats off to you. I didn't try Silmarillion until I was in my 20s, but I was unable to stick with it to the end. I think it has to be the social part, not the electronics per se. When I was a tween, we had mostly non-networked PCs and games (e.g. Atari, NES). We played on them plenty, to be sure, but I still spent most of my time with friends outdoors. Today it seems like most games have a social aspect to them, and right along with reading/replying to comments on places like HN, it's the feeling of connectedness that is addicting. Electronics is how, not the why. In my opinion :)
    - brightball 9y ago
      We already have a system in place at our house where you earn 30 minute slips (for electronic time) so it wasn’t so much a choice between what to do. When he did read he was just choosing really easy, below grade level stuff and wanting to read them over and over again. This was more about getting through something that took longer than 30 minutes to read. I knew he’d love it, he just wouldn’t see it through. Removing electronics til it was done just made it a non-optional task.
  - Izkata 9y ago
    When I was a kid, I didn't care for reading very much - but I was into animals. Then one day with my parents at the local drugstore, I spotted a book with a kid turning into a jaguar on the cover [0] and begged my parents to get it. I was a bit lost, since it was in the middle of a series, but it was the first book I remember wanting to read, and it was also my introduction to science-fiction. From then on I always had a sci-fi or fantasy book nearby, and I still have my original copies of that entire series. Because of that, and from what gradeschool friends have said, I've always been of the opinion that reading is too often introduced to kids the wrong way, through textbooks or very dry non-fiction, instead of through topics they'd actually find interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_(Applegate_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_(Applegate_novel...
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  The internet makes dumb kids dumber and smart kids smarter.
zaroth 9y ago
Read to your child for 30-60 minutes a day from Day 1 and by Kindergarden there are books piled on every flat surface, books piled in the car, books in the refrigerator, and you won’t be able to tear the book from their tiny little hands.
- asaph 9y ago
  Anecdotally, I've seen many parents do this with mixed results. YMMV.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    I think the shift to self directed reading will happen at different ages, depending on a million factors. But there are just so many amazing books to read out there and I think we are so hard-wired for story telling, just make reading a cherished daily activity, and the moment will come at some point from 5-7.
    - slededit 9y ago
      I can read all day about things (news, science, etc) but my brain does not easily recall humans by name alone. I need to see the face. And so for me and I assume I'm not alone - story books will never be meaningful. It requires too much mental energy to track.
  - nicksergeant 9y ago
    Yes. Every child is different.
  - gilbetron 9y ago
    Indeed, ours is 9 and has been read to every single night - rarely reads books. Constantly is on his laptop doing things I think are far better than just reading, so I'm largely ok with it. Too much youtube "crap" sometimes, but he usually balances himself out ok - a skill people heavily need that isn't often taught.
    - 9y ago
ghaff 9y ago
It's not clear to me that this article is arguing for methods that improve learning as opposed to improve testing. One of the main points seems to be that, if we taught history etc. in a more standardized way and then tested everyone for reading comprehension on those standard topics, reading comprehension scores would go up because the topics would be familiar. That makes sense to me but it also doesn't suggest to me that the students would actually be any better when reading to obtain new knowledge.
- verteu 9y ago
  Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents. I'm skeptical this is good idea. Even the famous "oarsman:regatta" SAT analogy, oft-cited as a culturally biased question, had a lower black/white gap than culturally neutral questions on the same exam [1]. > In countries that specify the content to be taught at each grade level, standardized tests can test students on what they’ve learned in school. But in the United States, where schools are all teaching different content, test designers give students passages on a variety of topics that may have nothing to do with what they’ve learned in school—life in the Arctic, for example, or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. [1] https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-richard-j-herrnstein-charles-murray-1994-jewish_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-richard-j...
  - acdha 9y ago
    > Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents. That sounds like a misunderstanding of the issue. It’s not shifting to rote memory but rather being cognizant of where the test implicitly depends on knowledge which isn’t broadly shared — e.g. how well would poor kids do on a question which used a lot of jargon related to sailing or polo? – so it’s only measuring the intended skills. In the AP tests this has apparently meant making the tests more self-contained so you’re testing someone’s ability to reason about it rather than trivia recall. The science teachers I know (all former postdocs) this has been received positively since that’s closer to how actual science happens — nobody works without an Internet connection. As for The Bell Curve, linking to decades-debunked pseudoscience is not a good way to start any discussion which will end well. There are less tainted sources for any valid argument.
motohagiography 9y ago
Sort of hoped it was because American students had in fact become better instead...
nxc18 9y ago
I've been amazed at how bad people in my peer group (I'm 23) are at reading and writing. Even in college it seemed no one was up to the task of writing a five paragraph essay without major stress. Heaven help them if they tried to read anything above 12th grade reading level or anything written before 1950 (ye olde English is hard, but should be doable). I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm encouraged by the idea of exposing kids to difficult texts early. Kids can learn really quickly when challenged. As long as it is a safe environment (you're not going to be punished for struggling with a too-hard text) I've seen that be very effective. Treating kids like they're dumb is the #1 way to make them dumb.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  I didn't really learn how to write until grad school. Even though I went to a top tier public university and a highly ranked HS, it was pretty easy to get by without writing more than a couple of paragraphs.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  > or anything written before 1950 This makes me wonder if this problem might at least partially be caused by American society valuing practical application and usefulness for bringing money home much higher than education as a value in itself. Short term as long term thinking probably also plays a role. What would someone read that was written before 1950 that is directly applicable and help getting a well paying job?
- threatofrain 9y ago
  But much of high school education in English involves reading ye olde public domain works, and I'm not sure they're actually that helpful for reading or writing. I feel like what kids are doing is practicing how to carry the pretense of intellectualism, but in a way that they, their peers, their teachers, or anyone else around them, feels is absolutely toy and obvious. It's one thing to begin riding with training wheels, and it's another to keep them on even past high school. For some, indefinitely. I feel what's important for future optimism is improvement on specifically scientific literacy and observational writing, and not Catcher in the Rye type assignments where nobody, you included, is expected to believe in anything you write. I don't think that's a healthy attitude for the next generation.
Clubber 9y ago
>Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge. Entire article can be boiled down to this. Takeaways: education is controlled by the states, and many states don't make it a priority. Over the past 20 years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse. My family has a lot of teachers in it. They've all retired in the 1990s, and it's far worse today than it was yesteryear. I would enjoy teaching, but wouldn't do it for the world. It's not all the states fault either. There are some students that just don't want to be there, yet we force them to be there and disrupt the students that do. When I was growing up, they sent those students to "bad kid" schools to keep the rot away.
- sverige 9y ago
  > Over the past 20 years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse. Prior to 1980, there was no federal Department of Education, and prior to 1953 when the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created, the federal government's involvement with education was limited to an Office of Education hidden away in the Federal Security Agency, and prior to 1939 it was a little bureau in the Department of the Interior. Philosophically, the U.S. initially emphasized local control of education. The federal government's involvement with public education didn't really become so heavy-handed until the mid-60s. The states were not that involved until relatively recent times, either; rather, education was pretty much controlled by local school boards. Regardless of which philosophy you personally favor (decentralized vs. federal control), it's very difficult or impossible to argue that Americans as a whole are better educated now than they were 50 or 100 years ago.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And what that history tends to highlight is that, at least in a classroom setting without a lot of 1:1 instruction, there's probably only so much that schools can do to move the needle by themselves absent the right kind of home environment and involvement. For example, there's very little correlation between per student spending and test achievement between towns and cities in a state.
wadeboggs 9y ago
Hard to get better when ur the best
quantumofmalice 9y ago
The article is the usual more-effort-is-needed pablum one expects from articles on education. Any analysis of American children that ignores demographics is silly. 44% of California children don't speak english at home. What on earth do you expect from these children if you test them in english proficiency?
- sverige 9y ago
  The percentages of kids who didn't speak English at home were pretty high 100 years ago, too, but they definitely were better at reading English then. The problem isn't effort. The problem is recognizing that there is value in learning to read.
  - quantumofmalice 9y ago
    > pretty high 100 years ago irrelevant: there are no hard numbers for that and that's not the timeframe the article is discussing (since the 90s)
    - ticviking 9y ago
      Why on earth would that be irrelavant? Also I'm quite sure the numbers are there, maybe not as crisp as you like, but one could make some reasonable estimates based on immigration records from ellis island and the census through those periods.
      - watwut 9y ago
        It is irrelevant, because comparison was not done with literacy of people 100 years ago. Which would also be 1918 which is first world was and results back then were likely to he affected by that big time. And it was also time of racial segregation which would affect a lot too.
  - concrete-faucet 9y ago
    Where I live, there are gifted schools for kids that speak Polish, Spanish and Russian. Their only goal for English is to make sure the child is proficient by the 6th grade. The kids section at the local library branch (there is one in every neighborhood) will have half the books in English and the rest in whatever languages are common in that neighborhood. Language barriers are only a problem if your local city makes them one. My son is in 3rd grade and his NWEA MAP reading score put him at the 11/12 grade level, so he got put into an advanced reader class. In the fall, they read books about history, wrote about and discussed them in class. This spring, the teach chose a young adult novel that I guess is entirely appropriate from a reading-level point of view. But some of the subject matter goes way over the heads of the kids and other stuff in the book is disturbing to them. Our son simply refused to finish reading the book. The teacher wasn't going to switch books because a couple kids didn't like it, and the class depended on discussing what they read... What can you do but stop reading and/or drop out of the class?
gaius 9y ago
It's a miracle that in the UK they can read at all given the quality of teaching
zokier 9y ago
While there is undoubtedly a lot to improve in education, it is worth noting that (if I'm reading the article right) American students haven't gotten any worse at reading either. Considering how much critique education generally receives (as is apparent in this thread), I'd say that this is half-good outcome. I'm not sure even upon what the assumption of ever-improving results is built upon. Maybe we are just reaching the tail end of the S-curve in education, which doesn't sound completely implausible considering that reading is one of the oldest subject matters to be taught generally.
helloworld 9y ago
The implication here is that American students, on average, should have gotten better at reading over the last 20 years. But might their performance in fact be asymptotic to some maximum possible achievement level, as constrained by general intelligence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
- ticviking 9y ago
  That would imply that the G factor might have something to do with the gap in achievement though. And if that were the case we'd have very little justification for aiming to improve low income scores. Since we have evidence that students do better as family income increases I'm thinking we are wondering why we can't close the gap called by other things.
rayiner 9y ago
This is extremely misleading. The lack of increased scores in the student body as a whole is the result of a large growth in the proportion of students from disadvantaged and ESL backgrounds. Reading scores have been going up within each of those demographics, however. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf (Figure 3). In fact scores for black, Asian, and Latino students have gone up faster than for white students.
- komali2 9y ago
  Wouldn't that be a separate, socioeconomic analysis issue? The fact remains that as a whole, Americans are not getting better at reading. So the country still suffers regardless if specific classes of people managed to improve.
  - watwut 9y ago
    His argument is that people with low scores were not tested before. They dropped out before being tested. If it is true, it is not separate issue.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    It matters in thinking about solutions. And, of course, in the ever-popular hobby of assigning blame. The title I see is "Schools Are Failing to Teach Kids How to Read". If rayiner is correct, then the actual title should be, "Schools Doing Fine, But Their Job Is Getting Harder".
    - acdha 9y ago
      This is key: my wife is a teacher and hates these stories because the headline should be more like “Schools doing fine, fewer students are falling through the cracks”. It’s especially important when you see people obsessing about school test scores and paying huge premiums to live a neighborhood without poor people when the public data clearly shows that anyone from a stable household performs the same as at the school which has more rich kids.
redwyvern 9y ago
"But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text." This is what angers me the most about the ACT exam. I recall that passages with vague and uninteresting topics were difficult to comprehend. What was even more infuriating was a passage on a capacitor physics experiment in one exam. I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one tiny detail.
- ouid 9y ago
  when I took the SAT, I first took a practice test and scored quite poorly on it, but when I realized that all of the things I had missed were tiny details, or very literal interpretations of questions, I scored very well on the actual test. The same was true of the math test, as well. The SAT is basically testing how easy it is to fool you with a trick question. However, in defense of the SAT, I'd wager that this is pretty strongly correlated with critical reasoning and ability to succeed in college and beyond.
  - asfgionio 9y ago
    I have read that the SAT is basically an IQ test in disguise. If that's true, there's no need for it to correspond to real-world skills. That's not what it's meant to test, and the only reason it deals with vocabulary and mathematics is to dodge the controversy surrounding IQ tests. This is by no means the only perspective on the SAT, but it's a reasonable one. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
    - kafquaesque 9y ago
      An IQ test (there are multiple types) tests crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. The way I have heard them described is basically crystallized intelligence is a test of accumulated knowledge/previously seen patterns versus fluid intelligence being the ability to see a pattern in a novel situation and figure out how to solve the novel situation (on-the-spot problem solving). They are linked. I have also read from different sources that high fluid reasoning can lead to an increase in knowledge acquired. For the SAT to be a genuine determinant of the difference in ability we would have to have all people taking the exam to have the same preparation(school/sub-culture/country/teachers and pre-test work). One could compare it to an IQ test in the sense that it is testing learned information with novel problems? IIRC the test correlates with college/university success because it can showcase the combination of inherent skill and preparation necessary to succeed in a college environment (I would assume this is heavily debated). Here is the Wikipedia article on the difference if you want to look up sources or dive into this topic more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intel... If you want to research the different types of IQ tests: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
dboreham 9y ago
Something odd about the word "gotten" in the context of student literacy? Or is it just me? I see the headline here has since been edited to remove that word. Perhaps this is some clever "English as she is wrote" kind of joke that flew over my head??
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jwilk 9y ago
  What's wrong with "gotten"?
  - dboreham 9y ago
    To me (British English native) it sounds like a non-word. I'm well aware of its meaning and that many "Americanisms" are actually old English usage. It still sounds to me like something a cartoon weasel would say.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Perhaps it's a sly hint to the fact that you can go online to learn the meaning of words you don't recognize: https://www.google.com/search?q=define+gotten https://www.google.com/search?q=define+gotten
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  Gotten is the past participle of to get in both standard American English and Scottish English (I won't say Scots because that is often regarded as almost a separate language from English). I wouldn't say it myself but then it isn't part of my south western English (North Wiltshire) dialect, my wife on the other hand used it all the time (she was from Orkney).
golemiprague 9y ago
Not a word about genetics? Not a word about the feminisation of the education system? Maybe the richer and more educated are better because they inherited better genes? Maybe nothing change because the system is now completely feminised and as we all know females are not geared towards changes and innovation?
gaius 9y ago
The last person you should ask about education is a teacher. It would be like asking the waiter about farming or the supply chain or vetinary medicine.
- wisty 9y ago
  No, the last person you should ask about education are the people who teach teachers. Unless they're the kind who looks at meta-analysis and goes "huh, the textbook is encouraging stuff that's essentially a placebo".
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mrob 9y ago
"A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby." I wonder if the test conditions are to blame. In real life, if you don't know a word then you look it up in a dictionary. It takes a few seconds, and you always have a dictionary with you (a smart phone). If you don't know a concept then you can look it up in Wikipedia. Rugby is an unpopular sport in the US, so I think it's reasonable that a sixth-grader hadn't heard of it. For a general reading test, and not specifically a vocabulary test, I think she should have been allowed to look up a definition. Are dictionaries generally allowed in reading tests?
- walshemj 9y ago
  How do you get a oo sound from u ?
  - mrob 9y ago
    Suit, super, sue, suicide, suet, etc.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      Ah I take the point
dahart 9y ago
> The long-standing view has been that the first few years of elementary school should be devoted to basic reading skills. History, science, and the arts can wait. For a long time I've thought math education has this problem. Math as a subject is abstract and lacks context. Learning subjects like physics or computer graphics or robotics requires learning math along the way to get something done, but they come with goals and results and context that can be far more motivating to the average person than just learning the mechanics of linear algebra or calculus in isolation.
ianbicking 9y ago
While a lot of people here are focusing on the testing, and it does seem to be an important negative feedback cycle, there's also a discussion on pedagogy that's worth having. I've noticed what the article talks about when reading with my own daughter. She's a natural whole-word reader - meaning she might think through a few syllables, but ultimately comprehension is a gestalt event. This is where everyone usually arrives, and it's necessary because you can't really sound out words... and really, if you sound out "rug-bee" or "rug-bye" it doesn't matter that much unless you know what rugby is. (And haven't we all encountered avid readers who pronounce things wrong even though they fully comprehend the word?) Carefully watching my daughter read like this, I also realize it only works because she knows a lot of words (and phrases, literary devices, plot details, etc). Decoding words (ie phonics) is useful scaffolding, but it's only scaffolding. You also just need to know a ton of things. And of course there's also the depressing findings on class and privilege, and the number, variety, and quality of words children hear. The differences are staggering.
projektir 9y ago
Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the kid even goes to school? I have no idea how kids manage to learn how to read at all in schools, American or otherwise. Reading is... difficult. The school environment does not promote the study of difficult things well. If you haven't been prepared, you'll have trouble. Sometimes I'm not sure what we're measuring, education quality or just how good someone's parents are. Pretty much everything I knew that helped me at school/college did not come from school/college.
- learc83 9y ago
  >Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the kid even goes to school? No, most kids in the US start school at the age of 5. Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read is detrimental, and the vast majority of kids aren't ready to read before they are 5.
  - projektir 9y ago
    I'm not mentioning age anywhere in my post? I don't recall starting school at 5, I think it was later than that, but it wasn't in the US. In the first grade already if I didn't know how to read prior, I'd be in huge trouble. Most students were actively struggling to read and continued to struggle for 2 more grades. If you are not ready to read at 5 before school, why would you be ready to read at 5 in school? Why would teaching someone to read 3 months prior would be so much more horrible than waiting for them to hit the school system and suffer in there instead? If that's the argument, school should just start later. I came into the US school system late but people were seriously struggling with reading in 6th grade, as well. People for whom English was their native language. I am not really seeing that parental interference is not needed. > Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read(y) This is a tautology. I'm not sure what is the magical age at which children are "ready" to read, but I am very sure that people should be able to comfortably read by grade 6, and I'm similarly very sure that the educational system alone won't accomplish that.
    - 9y ago
icc97 9y ago
A rather prescient quote from Alan Kay's Dynabook paper in 1972 [0] > For many years it has been a tradition to attempt to cure our society's ills through technology: "You have slums? Let's build low-cost housing!" "You can't afford that TV? We'll build a cheaper one and you can buy it on time, even though it will break before you've finished paying for it!" "Your kids aren't learning and education is too expensive? We'll build you a teaching machine which will guarantee your kids will pass tests!" [0]: https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html

227 points by dsr12 9y ago

I'd say one of the biggest shifts since 1998 is the wider availability of the internet and then computer like devices in school. Instead of doing the rote learning, they make learning into a game. Where everyone advances at a glacial pace from what I've seen. Now that kids are growing up using handheld phones/tablets for their consumption, the likelihood of them sitting down and reading a book (be it digital or paper) seems less likely than during my childhood when we had to dream about these futuristic gadgets.

__s 9y ago
Kind of weird how the internet cuts both ways For some education was too slow relative to the potential learning of the internet. But now the internet is hampering education Meanwhile the internet is seen as an equalizer to dispense information globally. Yet software eating the world is siphoning wealth inequality into the hands of a few Another: it's a medium for the most distributed uncensored encrypted communications, while also allowing intelligence organizations to pry deeper than they've ever in the past
- 21 9y ago
  So some days ago there was this article how todays teenagers are bored to death on their phone, and constantly swap between social media apps looking for some engagement. There was a video to. The most amazing thing to me was that none of these teenagers even considered using the device to educate themselves, like reading an article on wikipedia or watching a documentary on youtube.
brightball 9y ago
For what it’s worth, I basically had to force my son to read the 1st Harry Potter book. It’s slightly above his grade level and I had to actually ban him from electronics until it was finished and we quizzed him on it to make sure he actually read it. There were tears because he felt it was too hard without really trying. After he finished it, he loved it. He’s on book 3 now, reads every night because he wants to, makes a point to take the books with him, takes the accelerated reader tests for them at school (and aces them). Now the kid loves reading... :)
- rootusrootus 9y ago
  Is that because the electronics were more attractive, or because he was still in the 'learn to read' phase and it was work to get through a large book? Crossing the threshold into 'read to learn' skill level is a huge turning point in how a kid looks at books [in my experience].
  - vostok 9y ago
    As an adult, I think it's because electronics are more attractive. As a kid, I gladly slogged through the Silmarillion. Given my choice of verb, I'm not sure that I could do it today. Reading the comments on HN gives me a much quicker and sharper burst of pleasure.
    - rootusrootus 9y ago
      My hats off to you. I didn't try Silmarillion until I was in my 20s, but I was unable to stick with it to the end. I think it has to be the social part, not the electronics per se. When I was a tween, we had mostly non-networked PCs and games (e.g. Atari, NES). We played on them plenty, to be sure, but I still spent most of my time with friends outdoors. Today it seems like most games have a social aspect to them, and right along with reading/replying to comments on places like HN, it's the feeling of connectedness that is addicting. Electronics is how, not the why. In my opinion :)
  - brightball 9y ago
    We already have a system in place at our house where you earn 30 minute slips (for electronic time) so it wasn’t so much a choice between what to do. When he did read he was just choosing really easy, below grade level stuff and wanting to read them over and over again. This was more about getting through something that took longer than 30 minutes to read. I knew he’d love it, he just wouldn’t see it through. Removing electronics til it was done just made it a non-optional task.
- Izkata 9y ago
  When I was a kid, I didn't care for reading very much - but I was into animals. Then one day with my parents at the local drugstore, I spotted a book with a kid turning into a jaguar on the cover [0] and begged my parents to get it. I was a bit lost, since it was in the middle of a series, but it was the first book I remember wanting to read, and it was also my introduction to science-fiction. From then on I always had a sci-fi or fantasy book nearby, and I still have my original copies of that entire series. Because of that, and from what gradeschool friends have said, I've always been of the opinion that reading is too often introduced to kids the wrong way, through textbooks or very dry non-fiction, instead of through topics they'd actually find interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_(Applegate_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_(Applegate_novel...
nickysielicki 9y ago
The internet makes dumb kids dumber and smart kids smarter.

zaroth 9y ago

Read to your child for 30-60 minutes a day from Day 1 and by Kindergarden there are books piled on every flat surface, books piled in the car, books in the refrigerator, and you won’t be able to tear the book from their tiny little hands.

asaph 9y ago
Anecdotally, I've seen many parents do this with mixed results. YMMV.
- zaroth 9y ago
  I think the shift to self directed reading will happen at different ages, depending on a million factors. But there are just so many amazing books to read out there and I think we are so hard-wired for story telling, just make reading a cherished daily activity, and the moment will come at some point from 5-7.
  - slededit 9y ago
    I can read all day about things (news, science, etc) but my brain does not easily recall humans by name alone. I need to see the face. And so for me and I assume I'm not alone - story books will never be meaningful. It requires too much mental energy to track.
- nicksergeant 9y ago
  Yes. Every child is different.
- gilbetron 9y ago
  Indeed, ours is 9 and has been read to every single night - rarely reads books. Constantly is on his laptop doing things I think are far better than just reading, so I'm largely ok with it. Too much youtube "crap" sometimes, but he usually balances himself out ok - a skill people heavily need that isn't often taught.
  - 9y ago

ghaff 9y ago

It's not clear to me that this article is arguing for methods that improve learning as opposed to improve testing. One of the main points seems to be that, if we taught history etc. in a more standardized way and then tested everyone for reading comprehension on those standard topics, reading comprehension scores would go up because the topics would be familiar. That makes sense to me but it also doesn't suggest to me that the students would actually be any better when reading to obtain new knowledge.

verteu 9y ago
Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents. I'm skeptical this is good idea. Even the famous "oarsman:regatta" SAT analogy, oft-cited as a culturally biased question, had a lower black/white gap than culturally neutral questions on the same exam [1]. > In countries that specify the content to be taught at each grade level, standardized tests can test students on what they’ve learned in school. But in the United States, where schools are all teaching different content, test designers give students passages on a variety of topics that may have nothing to do with what they’ve learned in school—life in the Arctic, for example, or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. [1] https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-richard-j-herrnstein-charles-murray-1994-jewish_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-richard-j...
- acdha 9y ago
  > Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students with wealthy or intellectual parents. That sounds like a misunderstanding of the issue. It’s not shifting to rote memory but rather being cognizant of where the test implicitly depends on knowledge which isn’t broadly shared — e.g. how well would poor kids do on a question which used a lot of jargon related to sailing or polo? – so it’s only measuring the intended skills. In the AP tests this has apparently meant making the tests more self-contained so you’re testing someone’s ability to reason about it rather than trivia recall. The science teachers I know (all former postdocs) this has been received positively since that’s closer to how actual science happens — nobody works without an Internet connection. As for The Bell Curve, linking to decades-debunked pseudoscience is not a good way to start any discussion which will end well. There are less tainted sources for any valid argument.

motohagiography 9y ago

Sort of hoped it was because American students had in fact become better instead...

nxc18 9y ago

I've been amazed at how bad people in my peer group (I'm 23) are at reading and writing. Even in college it seemed no one was up to the task of writing a five paragraph essay without major stress. Heaven help them if they tried to read anything above 12th grade reading level or anything written before 1950 (ye olde English is hard, but should be doable). I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm encouraged by the idea of exposing kids to difficult texts early. Kids can learn really quickly when challenged. As long as it is a safe environment (you're not going to be punished for struggling with a too-hard text) I've seen that be very effective. Treating kids like they're dumb is the #1 way to make them dumb.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
I didn't really learn how to write until grad school. Even though I went to a top tier public university and a highly ranked HS, it was pretty easy to get by without writing more than a couple of paragraphs.
ajmurmann 9y ago
> or anything written before 1950 This makes me wonder if this problem might at least partially be caused by American society valuing practical application and usefulness for bringing money home much higher than education as a value in itself. Short term as long term thinking probably also plays a role. What would someone read that was written before 1950 that is directly applicable and help getting a well paying job?
threatofrain 9y ago
But much of high school education in English involves reading ye olde public domain works, and I'm not sure they're actually that helpful for reading or writing. I feel like what kids are doing is practicing how to carry the pretense of intellectualism, but in a way that they, their peers, their teachers, or anyone else around them, feels is absolutely toy and obvious. It's one thing to begin riding with training wheels, and it's another to keep them on even past high school. For some, indefinitely. I feel what's important for future optimism is improvement on specifically scientific literacy and observational writing, and not Catcher in the Rye type assignments where nobody, you included, is expected to believe in anything you write. I don't think that's a healthy attitude for the next generation.

Clubber 9y ago

>Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge. Entire article can be boiled down to this. Takeaways: education is controlled by the states, and many states don't make it a priority. Over the past 20 years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse. My family has a lot of teachers in it. They've all retired in the 1990s, and it's far worse today than it was yesteryear. I would enjoy teaching, but wouldn't do it for the world. It's not all the states fault either. There are some students that just don't want to be there, yet we force them to be there and disrupt the students that do. When I was growing up, they sent those students to "bad kid" schools to keep the rot away.

sverige 9y ago
> Over the past 20 years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse. Prior to 1980, there was no federal Department of Education, and prior to 1953 when the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created, the federal government's involvement with education was limited to an Office of Education hidden away in the Federal Security Agency, and prior to 1939 it was a little bureau in the Department of the Interior. Philosophically, the U.S. initially emphasized local control of education. The federal government's involvement with public education didn't really become so heavy-handed until the mid-60s. The states were not that involved until relatively recent times, either; rather, education was pretty much controlled by local school boards. Regardless of which philosophy you personally favor (decentralized vs. federal control), it's very difficult or impossible to argue that Americans as a whole are better educated now than they were 50 or 100 years ago.
- ghaff 9y ago
  And what that history tends to highlight is that, at least in a classroom setting without a lot of 1:1 instruction, there's probably only so much that schools can do to move the needle by themselves absent the right kind of home environment and involvement. For example, there's very little correlation between per student spending and test achievement between towns and cities in a state.

wadeboggs 9y ago

Hard to get better when ur the best

quantumofmalice 9y ago

The article is the usual more-effort-is-needed pablum one expects from articles on education. Any analysis of American children that ignores demographics is silly. 44% of California children don't speak english at home. What on earth do you expect from these children if you test them in english proficiency?

sverige 9y ago
The percentages of kids who didn't speak English at home were pretty high 100 years ago, too, but they definitely were better at reading English then. The problem isn't effort. The problem is recognizing that there is value in learning to read.
- quantumofmalice 9y ago
  > pretty high 100 years ago irrelevant: there are no hard numbers for that and that's not the timeframe the article is discussing (since the 90s)
  - ticviking 9y ago
    Why on earth would that be irrelavant? Also I'm quite sure the numbers are there, maybe not as crisp as you like, but one could make some reasonable estimates based on immigration records from ellis island and the census through those periods.
    - watwut 9y ago
      It is irrelevant, because comparison was not done with literacy of people 100 years ago. Which would also be 1918 which is first world was and results back then were likely to he affected by that big time. And it was also time of racial segregation which would affect a lot too.
- concrete-faucet 9y ago
  Where I live, there are gifted schools for kids that speak Polish, Spanish and Russian. Their only goal for English is to make sure the child is proficient by the 6th grade. The kids section at the local library branch (there is one in every neighborhood) will have half the books in English and the rest in whatever languages are common in that neighborhood. Language barriers are only a problem if your local city makes them one. My son is in 3rd grade and his NWEA MAP reading score put him at the 11/12 grade level, so he got put into an advanced reader class. In the fall, they read books about history, wrote about and discussed them in class. This spring, the teach chose a young adult novel that I guess is entirely appropriate from a reading-level point of view. But some of the subject matter goes way over the heads of the kids and other stuff in the book is disturbing to them. Our son simply refused to finish reading the book. The teacher wasn't going to switch books because a couple kids didn't like it, and the class depended on discussing what they read... What can you do but stop reading and/or drop out of the class?

gaius 9y ago

It's a miracle that in the UK they can read at all given the quality of teaching

zokier 9y ago

While there is undoubtedly a lot to improve in education, it is worth noting that (if I'm reading the article right) American students haven't gotten any worse at reading either. Considering how much critique education generally receives (as is apparent in this thread), I'd say that this is half-good outcome. I'm not sure even upon what the assumption of ever-improving results is built upon. Maybe we are just reaching the tail end of the S-curve in education, which doesn't sound completely implausible considering that reading is one of the oldest subject matters to be taught generally.

helloworld 9y ago

The implication here is that American students, on average, should have gotten better at reading over the last 20 years. But might their performance in fact be asymptotic to some maximum possible achievement level, as constrained by general intelligence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

ticviking 9y ago
That would imply that the G factor might have something to do with the gap in achievement though. And if that were the case we'd have very little justification for aiming to improve low income scores. Since we have evidence that students do better as family income increases I'm thinking we are wondering why we can't close the gap called by other things.

rayiner 9y ago

This is extremely misleading. The lack of increased scores in the student body as a whole is the result of a large growth in the proportion of students from disadvantaged and ESL backgrounds. Reading scores have been going up within each of those demographics, however. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf (Figure 3). In fact scores for black, Asian, and Latino students have gone up faster than for white students.

komali2 9y ago
Wouldn't that be a separate, socioeconomic analysis issue? The fact remains that as a whole, Americans are not getting better at reading. So the country still suffers regardless if specific classes of people managed to improve.
- watwut 9y ago
  His argument is that people with low scores were not tested before. They dropped out before being tested. If it is true, it is not separate issue.
- wpietri 9y ago
  It matters in thinking about solutions. And, of course, in the ever-popular hobby of assigning blame. The title I see is "Schools Are Failing to Teach Kids How to Read". If rayiner is correct, then the actual title should be, "Schools Doing Fine, But Their Job Is Getting Harder".
  - acdha 9y ago
    This is key: my wife is a teacher and hates these stories because the headline should be more like “Schools doing fine, fewer students are falling through the cracks”. It’s especially important when you see people obsessing about school test scores and paying huge premiums to live a neighborhood without poor people when the public data clearly shows that anyone from a stable household performs the same as at the school which has more rich kids.

redwyvern 9y ago

"But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text." This is what angers me the most about the ACT exam. I recall that passages with vague and uninteresting topics were difficult to comprehend. What was even more infuriating was a passage on a capacitor physics experiment in one exam. I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one tiny detail.

ouid 9y ago
when I took the SAT, I first took a practice test and scored quite poorly on it, but when I realized that all of the things I had missed were tiny details, or very literal interpretations of questions, I scored very well on the actual test. The same was true of the math test, as well. The SAT is basically testing how easy it is to fool you with a trick question. However, in defense of the SAT, I'd wager that this is pretty strongly correlated with critical reasoning and ability to succeed in college and beyond.
- asfgionio 9y ago
  I have read that the SAT is basically an IQ test in disguise. If that's true, there's no need for it to correspond to real-world skills. That's not what it's meant to test, and the only reason it deals with vocabulary and mathematics is to dodge the controversy surrounding IQ tests. This is by no means the only perspective on the SAT, but it's a reasonable one. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
  - kafquaesque 9y ago
    An IQ test (there are multiple types) tests crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. The way I have heard them described is basically crystallized intelligence is a test of accumulated knowledge/previously seen patterns versus fluid intelligence being the ability to see a pattern in a novel situation and figure out how to solve the novel situation (on-the-spot problem solving). They are linked. I have also read from different sources that high fluid reasoning can lead to an increase in knowledge acquired. For the SAT to be a genuine determinant of the difference in ability we would have to have all people taking the exam to have the same preparation(school/sub-culture/country/teachers and pre-test work). One could compare it to an IQ test in the sense that it is testing learned information with novel problems? IIRC the test correlates with college/university success because it can showcase the combination of inherent skill and preparation necessary to succeed in a college environment (I would assume this is heavily debated). Here is the Wikipedia article on the difference if you want to look up sources or dive into this topic more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intel... If you want to research the different types of IQ tests: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

dboreham 9y ago

Something odd about the word "gotten" in the context of student literacy? Or is it just me? I see the headline here has since been edited to remove that word. Perhaps this is some clever "English as she is wrote" kind of joke that flew over my head??

deleted 9y ago
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jwilk 9y ago
What's wrong with "gotten"?
- dboreham 9y ago
  To me (British English native) it sounds like a non-word. I'm well aware of its meaning and that many "Americanisms" are actually old English usage. It still sounds to me like something a cartoon weasel would say.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Perhaps it's a sly hint to the fact that you can go online to learn the meaning of words you don't recognize: https://www.google.com/search?q=define+gotten https://www.google.com/search?q=define+gotten
kwhitefoot 9y ago
Gotten is the past participle of to get in both standard American English and Scottish English (I won't say Scots because that is often regarded as almost a separate language from English). I wouldn't say it myself but then it isn't part of my south western English (North Wiltshire) dialect, my wife on the other hand used it all the time (she was from Orkney).

golemiprague 9y ago

Not a word about genetics? Not a word about the feminisation of the education system? Maybe the richer and more educated are better because they inherited better genes? Maybe nothing change because the system is now completely feminised and as we all know females are not geared towards changes and innovation?

gaius 9y ago

The last person you should ask about education is a teacher. It would be like asking the waiter about farming or the supply chain or vetinary medicine.

wisty 9y ago
No, the last person you should ask about education are the people who teach teachers. Unless they're the kind who looks at meta-analysis and goes "huh, the textbook is encouraging stuff that's essentially a placebo".

deleted 9y ago

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mrob 9y ago

"A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby." I wonder if the test conditions are to blame. In real life, if you don't know a word then you look it up in a dictionary. It takes a few seconds, and you always have a dictionary with you (a smart phone). If you don't know a concept then you can look it up in Wikipedia. Rugby is an unpopular sport in the US, so I think it's reasonable that a sixth-grader hadn't heard of it. For a general reading test, and not specifically a vocabulary test, I think she should have been allowed to look up a definition. Are dictionaries generally allowed in reading tests?

walshemj 9y ago
How do you get a oo sound from u ?
- mrob 9y ago
  Suit, super, sue, suicide, suet, etc.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Ah I take the point

dahart 9y ago

> The long-standing view has been that the first few years of elementary school should be devoted to basic reading skills. History, science, and the arts can wait. For a long time I've thought math education has this problem. Math as a subject is abstract and lacks context. Learning subjects like physics or computer graphics or robotics requires learning math along the way to get something done, but they come with goals and results and context that can be far more motivating to the average person than just learning the mechanics of linear algebra or calculus in isolation.

ianbicking 9y ago

While a lot of people here are focusing on the testing, and it does seem to be an important negative feedback cycle, there's also a discussion on pedagogy that's worth having. I've noticed what the article talks about when reading with my own daughter. She's a natural whole-word reader - meaning she might think through a few syllables, but ultimately comprehension is a gestalt event. This is where everyone usually arrives, and it's necessary because you can't really sound out words... and really, if you sound out "rug-bee" or "rug-bye" it doesn't matter that much unless you know what rugby is. (And haven't we all encountered avid readers who pronounce things wrong even though they fully comprehend the word?) Carefully watching my daughter read like this, I also realize it only works because she knows a lot of words (and phrases, literary devices, plot details, etc). Decoding words (ie phonics) is useful scaffolding, but it's only scaffolding. You also just need to know a ton of things. And of course there's also the depressing findings on class and privilege, and the number, variety, and quality of words children hear. The differences are staggering.

projektir 9y ago

Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the kid even goes to school? I have no idea how kids manage to learn how to read at all in schools, American or otherwise. Reading is... difficult. The school environment does not promote the study of difficult things well. If you haven't been prepared, you'll have trouble. Sometimes I'm not sure what we're measuring, education quality or just how good someone's parents are. Pretty much everything I knew that helped me at school/college did not come from school/college.

learc83 9y ago
>Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the kid even goes to school? No, most kids in the US start school at the age of 5. Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read is detrimental, and the vast majority of kids aren't ready to read before they are 5.
- projektir 9y ago
  I'm not mentioning age anywhere in my post? I don't recall starting school at 5, I think it was later than that, but it wasn't in the US. In the first grade already if I didn't know how to read prior, I'd be in huge trouble. Most students were actively struggling to read and continued to struggle for 2 more grades. If you are not ready to read at 5 before school, why would you be ready to read at 5 in school? Why would teaching someone to read 3 months prior would be so much more horrible than waiting for them to hit the school system and suffer in there instead? If that's the argument, school should just start later. I came into the US school system late but people were seriously struggling with reading in 6th grade, as well. People for whom English was their native language. I am not really seeing that parental interference is not needed. > Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read(y) This is a tautology. I'm not sure what is the magical age at which children are "ready" to read, but I am very sure that people should be able to comfortably read by grade 6, and I'm similarly very sure that the educational system alone won't accomplish that.
  - 9y ago

icc97 9y ago

A rather prescient quote from Alan Kay's Dynabook paper in 1972 [0] > For many years it has been a tradition to attempt to cure our society's ills through technology: "You have slums? Let's build low-cost housing!" "You can't afford that TV? We'll build a cheaper one and you can buy it on time, even though it will break before you've finished paying for it!" "Your kids aren't learning and education is too expensive? We'll build you a teaching machine which will guarantee your kids will pass tests!" [0]: https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html