Reading Comprehension

Draining the Joy of #Reading

 

I’m not exactly sure when it occurred, when we collectively decided to drain the joy out of reading in early childhood, but it happened some time ago perhaps when we weren’t looking.

The expression about the frog being boiled by degrees so he won’t jump out of the pot, applies.

When it comes to reading we’ve been boiled by degrees and we weren’t aware of it.

The evidence for this comes from the dreadful worksheets brought to me by parents on a daily basis that are passed off as sham literature.

This week’s blog was prompted by parents who brought me “reading material’ on their child, young Brody, a second grader.   As I perused the packet of dreadful, there was a two page “story” that Brody was assigned.  The story had no redeeming value that authentic stories or literature would have, but what was even worse was what young Brody had to do after reading the story.  There were 20 multiple choice questions for the poor kid to slog through.  20!!!

The last time I looked, early second grade was not competing with the SAT.  Here’s one of the questions:

“If stir means “mix by moving around with a spoon” then stirred means

  1. Not mixing by moving around.
  2. Mix by moving around with a spoon
  3. Mixed by moving around with a spoon
  4. Mixing by moving around with a spoon.

Mind numbed yet?  I can just picture the author of this test congratulating himself for slipping in a way to learn about present and past tense.

Imagine 20 of these to sort out?

Keep in mind that I have not yet met or evaluated Brody, but the odds are pretty good that he has a reading problem.  Even if Brody turns out to be an adequate reader upon evaluation, the story and the 20 questions would have been stultifying to the best of students.

Somewhere along the line we got the notion that worksheets passing off as literature with their   accompanying tests were the answer, that each question somehow would bring the child to the next level of reading development.

I’m not buying it.

Twenty multiple choice questions following a faux story leads to turned-off kids, shutting them down.

Real literature ignites the imagination and gets the conversation going.  There’s meat on the bones.  Great stories motivate kids to read more great stories.

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For a free 15 Minute Consultation, contact Dr. Selznick: email – contact@shutdownlearner.com.

To receive free Dyslexia Infographics and updates, go to: www.shutdownlearner.com.

 

 

Comprehension – Sometimes Forgotten in #Dyslexia Land

Those of you who have followed this blog or any of my stuff over the years, know the importance I place on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency.

In fact, I have viewed the mastering of decoding as a possibly the central task or hurdle for a child to get over in their early school years (see My Decoding Hurdle Obsession: https://shutdownlearner.com/my-decoding-hurdle-obsession/ ).

I’ve also been in the business long enough to see important movements in education and educational psychology fall by the wayside and be relegated to the Attic of Forgotten Educational Initiatives & Research.

I see Reading Comprehension as having been placed up in the Attic.

For years (approximately the mid 1980’s into the mid-1990s), comprehension as a research topic in cognitive psychology and as an educational initiative was red hot. A number of universities around the country were awarded millions of dollars in grant money to study the processes involved with reading comprehension and to find ways to enhance a child’s ability to understand text. There were lots of teacher training initiatives, too, designed to enhance teachers’ skills in teaching comprehension.

I thought of the research and these initiatives the other day when I evaluated a child, young Luke, a 9 year old fourth grader.

Luke’s testing did not show any of the usual “dyslexia” concerns, such as difficulty with phonemic awareness, phonics or fluency, but when it came to responding to questions Luke was genuinely puzzled. Particularly, challenging for Luke were answering questions that involved inferences, or what I call the “hmm, let me think about it” type of responses (vs. straightforward and factual).

Within the testing, Luke read a story about a treasure hunt. The story talked about how one child sent a lantern signal to another child who was out in a rowboat that it was ok to row ashore. When Luke was asked why the signal was given, he looked at me blankly and could further no guesses, stating, “It didn’t say why.”

That it didn’t say “why” explicitly was true, but one could infer it from the story.

By contrast, another kid I tested recently, gave a great answer to the same question showing full understanding, by saying, “It was to give the ‘all clear’ signal.”

Wow, what a great inference.

I refer to children who read reasonably fluently and who don’t show any great decoding difficulty as Type II Readers.

Just like Type I Readers (the ones with decoding and fluency difficulties), these kids also need direct and explicit instruction (along with a few other things in the mix.) We will be talking more about these specifically in up and coming blog posts.

Takeaway Point

The Attic of Forgotten Educational Initiatives & Research is really filled to the brim. You should go up there sometimes and blow off some of the dust and the cobwebs. You might find some things of interest.


For a free 15 Minute Consultation, contact Dr. Selznick: email – contact@shutdownlearner.com.

To receive free Dyslexia Infographics and updates, go to: www.shutdownlearner.com.

Hooks in the Mental Closet

Medication for ADHD in children may be less important than background knowledge and reading comprehension - add hooks to your mental closet.

As part of an assessment I recently asked 17- year-old near senior, Bethany, “Who wrote Hamlet?”  Looking bewildered, she said, “I have no idea.”

Then, when asked to define the word “tranquil,” she could not further no guess.  Bethany had no association to the word.

By the end of the assessment, it turned out that Bethany scored in the 16th percentile for word knowledge and the 9th percentile for fund of information and general knowledge.

In contrast, Bethany functioned somewhat above average on tasks that were nonverbal, like putting blocks together to make spatial patterns and while analyzing a series of visual patterns.

“I think I have ADD,” Bethany said to me.

“What tells you that,” I asked her.

“When I read my mind wanders.  I have no idea what I am reading.  In class I can’t follow what the teacher is saying and have no clue what they are discussing. It has to be ADD – I think I should be on meds. Most of my friends are on meds.”

“I should be on meds” – The Drive towards ADHD Medication for Children

I get that kind of thing a lot – kids thinking they should “be on meds.”

Even though Bethany may benefit from stimulant medication, what I do know is that one of the primary reasons Bethany does not pay attention in class or while reading is that she lacks what I call “hooks in the mental closet.”

Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension

We used to think of reading as a fundamentally one-direction process.  In this model words would go from the page to the brain.  Researchers in the 1980s and 1990s enlightened us that  reading (and listening to class lectures) was more of a two-way, interactive process.

The fact is the more “hooks we have in our mental closet” (the researchers used different terminology, mind you), the better we comprehend what we are reading or understand what we are listening to.

These “hooks” also help us to pay attention.  While medication may help Bethany focus, she still needs to be building in background knowledge and word awareness to try and overcome her sense of feeling lost.

In short, Bethany needs to build in more hooks.

There are plenty of books on the market that may be helpful such as, “Words You Should Know In High School: 1000 Essential Words To Build Vocabulary, Improve Standardized Test Scores, And Write Successful Papers.”

Building Background Knowledge Strategies – 720 New Hooks

I can tell you with pretty good assurance that Bethany knew about 15% of the essential 1000 words.

Even if Bethany practiced two words per day for a year, she would be in much better shape with the 720 new words (365 words X 2) for the year that she could learn.

There would be 720 new hooks in her mental closet!!!

Takeaway Point

Hooks in the mental closet matter and may explain some of the reason your child is not paying attention or adequately comprehending. Try and build them in any way you can.

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For a free 15 Minute Consultation, contact Dr. Selznick: email – contact@shutdownlearner.com.

To receive free Dyslexia Infographics and updates, go to: www.shutdownlearner.com.

Comprehension Land

This week we move a bit away from “Dyslexia Land,” and go the other side of the continuum to “Comprehension Land.”

A few observations about comprehension:

  • It’s really hard to assess properly.
  • What we accept as a “comprehension,” may well be a poorly written story or a test that the kid does not easily connect to or understand. In other words it’s the test or story construction that is the issue.  (Try reading some of the worksheets or tests that get passed off as good stories.)
  • Comprehension is not taught by worksheets.
  • It takes a lot of work to teach comprehension.

Let’s take young Jeremy, a fifth grader who shows some signs of a “comprehension problem.”

When assessed Jeremy was given three reading formats that assessed comprehension under entirely different conditions.

On a multiple choice test where he read the passage and answered the questions, he bombed out on an easy second grade level selection, but scored adequately on a much harder sixth grade story.  His struggling at the second grade level affected his overall score, but was that a comprehension problem?

With an informal reading inventory where Jeremy read the story both out loud and silently and was then asked questions of the stories, he missed many of the concepts at the third and fourth grade levels, but then was pretty capable at the sixth.

Again, that may not be a comprehension problem, but represent difficulty with certain passages.

Additionally, many children have not had sufficient practice or feedback on how to tackle reading selections.  With comprehension there needs to be a  back and forth dialogue that takes place between the teacher/tutor who acts a facilitator who can help guide kids to find answers or to respond when the information may not be all that explicit or clear.

A simple text example would be the following:

“When the people got on the train to go to work they had to make room for those carrying their coats and umbrellas.”

If a child was asked, something like “What do you think the weather was like in the story,” he might say something like, “I don’t know.  It didn’t say anything about the weather.”

That is because the child who answers like that is not tuned into to making inferences.

A child more tuned in might say, “Well, it mentioned coats and umbrellas, so I am guessing it was chilly and rainy.”

Such a response would be a perfectly plausible inference based on the text.

My guess would be that about 50% of the population of fifth graders are pretty capable of managing the processes involved with comprehending.

That leaves a hefty 50% who show what I refer to as, “Swiss cheese holes” in their understanding of what they read, especially with forming inferences.

Takeaway Point

What is called “comprehension” is complex and multifaceted.  It is very hard to make blanket statements about comprehension.

Ultimately, for kids struggling in this domain they need a lot of guided, back and forth practice conducted over  time to help them become more “tuned in.”

Reading Comprehension in the “Way Back Machine”

Let’s go once again into the “Way Back Machine.”  This time we will go to the mid 1980’s.  What was the red hot topic in the field of reading and cognitive psychology?

I will give you a hint.  It wasn’t decoding or reading fluency.

The topic of the decade, the one receiving millions of dollars of grant money across the country to major university centers (especially in the Midwest region), was not dyslexia.

The central topic was reading comprehension, with a particular emphasis on higher-order thinking, inferential reasoning and that funky term that almost no one understands –  “metacognition.”

Sadly, like most of these hot topic initiatives and movements (anyone out there remember Reading First), over time they are largely forgotten and put into the educational/psychological dust bin, sort of like an education  psychology version of Toy Story.  (“Hey, remember me, I was the toy you  played with all of the time  and now you’ve forgotten me.”)

Interactive Nature of Reading Process

Even though we are squarely in the Decade of Dyslexia (Is everyone “dyslexic” these days), there were important research findings from that era that are important to remember.   (Sadly, our version of “evidence based” practice seems to be based on about a five year window of research, so good research conducted in a time such as the 1980’s would not make the cut.)

One of the biggest take away points from that time is the interactive nature of the reading/learning process.

We used to think about reading in more one-directional terms.  That is, there was text on the page that somehow went up through the eyeballs and into the brain for comprehension.

The cognitive psychologists studying this stuff in the 1980s told us that was erroneous.  Reading was not a one-directional process. Instead, we have “schema,” (i.e.,  prior knowledge or the stuff in our head) that gets activated while reading.

The more “stuff” (schema) we have in our head, the better will be our understanding of the material on the page.

Another big takeaway that is now in the dust bin is that in order to improve comprehension we need to interact with different types of questions that stimulate a child to seek information and find justifications in the text.    In other words, just answering questions on a worksheet was not how to teach comprehension.

Inferential thinking is a skill that does not come naturally to many kids, but can be taught with good facilitated instructional practice and questions that guide this type of thought process.

Comprehension is not an easy skill to teach, but if the research findings were followed, comprehension could be improved.

Takeaway Point

Some of the toys forgotten in the toy chest may still have some value.

On the Inference Road : “Reading Between the Lines”

There is a great deal of emphasis these days on “decoding” development, but there is another side to the coin, often overlooked.   It is the side that involves the child’s understanding of what she has read.   “Comprehension” is very difficult to teach well and is often left to having a child read a story and answer some questions about it. The “corrective feedback” is either a check or an x with a score at the top of the page. (I know, because i get many of these worksheets brought to me.)

This is not teaching comprehension.

Good comprehension instruction/remediation involves a great deal of back and forth dialogue to help shape the child’s skill in managing text.  This instructional dialogue becomes particularly important in the middle to upper elementary grades where the text becomes dense, often overwhelming to the child and there is a greater emphasis on “higher-order reasoning.”

As an example, take a young girl I evaluated recently, Ada, age 9, in the fourth grade.   Ada showed a lot of difficulty with inferential thinking and answering questions that went beyond the basic factual information in the text.  If the question was not asking about something that  was not stated explicitly in the story, Ada was often at a loss as to how to respond.

To illustrate this difficulty, Ada read a story  that involved the narrator reflecting about a lake home that they used to go to as children that is no longer there.    Why the house is not there is not stated explicitly, but one can read between the lines that the house has been taken down.

When the comprehension question asked Ada whether the person telling the story still went to the house, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know.  It didn’t say.”

While Ada is technically correct that the story didn’t explicitly state that the narrator  didn’t go to the house anymore, with a little reading between the lines,  she would be able to use the clues and come up with a reasonable response.  Ada did not know how to use the clues.

Kids are either wired to do this type of  “clue seeking” thought process fairly intuitively or they are not and feel stuck with those questions.  For those in the latter category, they need much more guided, facilitated practice with similar style questions.

With good interactive instruction, emphasizing inferential questions, children need to be encouraged to be “detectives” and find the clues in the text even if something is not directly or factually stated. This process takes a lot of practice for a child to become more adept at the skill of inferences.

Takeaway Point

“Reading between the lines (inferences)” can be very difficult for many  kids.

When a kid looks blank and shrugs, ask,  “What clues are there that might give you the answer?”

Push the child to find the clues and she will be on the inference road.


For a free 15 Minute Consultation, contact Dr. Selznick: email – contact@shutdownlearner.com.

To receive free Dyslexia Infographics and updates, go to: www.shutdownlearner.com.

Reading Decline

Researchers have found a sharp decline in reading enjoyment after the age of eight. Sixty-two percent of children between six and eight say they either love or like reading books for fun, but this percentage drops to just 46% for children between the ages of nine to 11, with the figure at 49% for 12-14-year olds, and 46% again for 15-17-year-olds. “Reading enjoyment declines sharply after age eight,” reported the publisher. From, “Sharp decline in children reading for pleasure, survey finds” (The Guardian)

We’ve sucked it out of them. We’ve drained reading of enthusiasm, by Common Coring, PARCCing and work-sheeting, among other factors (screen addiction). Insisting on research supported robotic teacher scripts to teach reading material that is not real literature, how can any of it compete with Instagram, Snapchat and Youtube? I do have to admit, however, that film adaptations can be a great gateway into reading. Take the Lord of the Rings for example. The films were an astronomical success and are still wildly popular today and they led to millions of copies of the books being sold around the world, decades after their release. There’s even a dedicated Gimli Wiki page, showing how beloved the characters have become. None of that may have happened without the films – they brought the books back into popularity.

Reading is still a lost art though.

This week I had an unusual moment with a great 12 year old boy. As part of a reading test that I administer there is a line taken from the wonderful teen novel, The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. Many years ago as a middle school teacher I used to teach that book, The Outsiders. The kids loved it; it had all the right elements. I loved it too. You simply have to look on https://www.shoppok.com to see if you can find a cheap second hand version of it to get your teeth into. I doubt you’d be able to find it in normal book shops now.

Upon reading the line, the boy commented, “Hey, I read that book,” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that from The Outsiders?”

I was taken aback. Of the thousands of times I’ve given that test over the years, no one has ever commented on the fact that the line was a quote from a novel.

“What did you think of the book,” I asked him.

“Oh, man, it was great,” he told me. “It was so exciting.”

While I loved my interaction with this young man, it also made me sad to reflect on how few children have actually read The Outsiders and how far we have come from kids being excited about a novel.

I think it is all misguided.

I believe it still comes down to one overriding variable when it comes to igniting and motivating kids.

Passionate, creative teachers who love reading and literature are the only answer to overcoming the pervasive reading malaise out there and motivating the legion of children (primarily the boys) who are disconnected from this activity and see little to no value in it.

Takeaway Point

Who knows, maybe some teachers will read The Outsiders this summer and it will stir something in them.

Whether they will be allowed to teach it is another story.

Stage III of Reading: Riding the Bike

In the last two posts I talked about the value of understanding the Stages of Reading. As I noted, knowing where your child is in his/her stage of reading development provides you with a road map as to what you need to focus on with your child at any given time. Like the skill of riding a bike or learning to play the piano, one can quickly size up where a person is in their skill mastery. The same is true of reading.

Having discussed Stages 0 – II previously, today’s focus is on Stage III. Stage III typically corresponds to the third grade through middle school. A Stage III child has mastered word decoding and reading fluency is not an issue. From my point of view reaching Stage III represents the Promised Land because at this stage you are no longer “learning to read.” In fact the vast majority of print, whether in magazines, books or online is available to a Stage III reader in terms of the readability. A person who has gotten to Stage III joins the ranks of people who have fundamental literacy skills.

As a parent of a Stage III child, you should concentrate pm developing your child’s broad array of comprehension skills, such as with higher order reasoning, inferencing and drawing conclusions, along with enhancing his/her reading and speaking vocabulary.

What’s exciting about Stage III readers is that they’re no longer hampered by the more mechanical aspects of the text as they were in Stages I and part of Stage II. Mental energy is no longer bottle-necked with issues of decoding or reading fluency.

Takeaway Point
As a parent of Stage III child phonics, decoding, and reading fluency are a thing of the past and you can now encourage broad reading with an array of different subject matter.

7 Keys to Comprehension

Susan Zimmermann covers reading comprehension strategies in 'The Seven Keys to Comprehension.'

Recently I had the good fortune of being able to interview Susan Zimmermann on The Coffee Klatch Network. Zimmermann is the author of The Seven Keys to Comprehension: How to help your kids read it and get it!

Within the interview, we talked about the challenges with comprehension. Susan highlighted some of the elements that research has shown contribute to successful comprehension.

Zimmermann’s Reading Comprehension Strategies

As she discusses in her wonderful book, successful readers do the following:

  1. Create mental images: Good readers create a wide range of visual, auditory, and other sensory images as they read. They also become emotionally involved with what they read.
  2. Use background knowledge: Good readers use their relevant prior knowledge before, during, and after reading to enhance their understanding of what they’re reading.
  3. Ask questions: Good readers generate questions before, during, and after reading to clarify meaning, make predictions, and focus their attention on what’s important.
  4. Make inferences: Good readers use their prior knowledge and information from what they read to make predictions, seek answers to questions, draw conclusions, and create interpretations that deepen their understanding of the text.
  5. Determine the most important ideas or themes: Good readers identify key ideas or themes as they read. They can distinguish between important and unimportant information.
  6. Synthesize information: Good readers track their thinking as it evolves during reading, to get the overall meaning.
  7. Use fix up strategies: Good readers are aware of when they understand and when they don’t.  If they have trouble understanding specific words, phrases, or longer passages, they use a wide range of problem-solving strategies. These include skipping ahead, rereading, asking questions, using a dictionary, and reading the passage aloud.

Reading Comprehension

Comprehension research received a great deal of attention in the 1990s, but has largely been overlooked for some time due to an emphasis that has been placed on decoding and reading fluency. If your child is struggling with aspects of comprehension, you may want to check out the interview and her reading comprehension strategies.

Give it a listen!

The interview aired on Tuesday, November 11, 2014. To hear the interview (and to access archived interviews), click here.

Improving Reading Comprehension Through Dread

A father of a sweet 11-year-old girl came in to have her child evaluated this week.  By impression and observations, the girl, Katie, was on the innocent side of life.  She was still in the “Hello Kitty” phase, which was nice to see, given how fast and advanced many kids are that I meet at her age.

Before we started the evaluation, the dad handed me a recent story that the child had to read and answer comprehension questions. In an incredulous tone, the dad said, “Here you go, Doc, let’s see what you make of this one.”

The story was a nonfiction piece called, “Terrorists are Big Bullies,” from edHelper.com.  A comparison between bullying behavior and terrorism was the theme of the selection.

Here’s a quote from the story:

“Terrorists spread out and cover a wide area. They are sneaky. They use the media (radio, TV, Internet) to burst into our homes and businesses. They can threaten a whole nation with a beat down, not just a few students in a single school.

Terrorists are big bullies. They use threats and violence to get what they want. Terrorists aren’t after our lunch money; they want something bigger. It may be a change in how a country is ruled. It may be a change of law. It may be freedom for their friends who have been arrested. Whatever the causes they believe that violence will solve the problem. Innocent adults and children are hurt and even killed by terrorists and the terrorists aren’t sorry.”

To make sure the child comprehended the selection (and I presume to make sure she got the message), here were some of the multiple-choice items:

1.       A bully is to a terrorist as a firecracker is to a ________

A.    nation

B.     firework

C.     bomb

D.    threat

2.      Which one of these is NOT mentioned as a way terrorists enter our homes?

A.    front door

B.     TV

C.     internet

D.    radio

3.      Which one of these could be a weapon of mass destruction?

A.    poison gas

B.     knife

C.     pistol

D.    cell phone

4.      Even under a terrorist attack, we can try to enjoy __________

A.    life

B.     nap time

C.     video games

D.    dessert

Wow!!!!  My breath is taken away.

I can’t imagine how this could improve a child’s reading comprehension. From where I sit, the only gain would be an increase in personal terror, dread and fear in the child.

Whatever happened to the concept of developmental appropriateness (not that I can come up with the appropriate age on this one)?

Well, I guess it’s a boon to the psychiatry business.