Raising Kids Who Read Page 11

The alternative is that you create a representation of the whole situation the sentences describe. It’s called, appropriately enough, the situation model. A situation model helps you keep track of many related ideas (e.g., the relative positions of the birds, branch, and birdcage) independent of the particular sentences used to describe those ideas. The situation model could be verbal, but it doesn’t have to be (figure 6.1).

  Figure 6.1. Nonverbal situation model. Visual mental images are a way to represent complex relationships without being tied to one description. You could consult this mental image and just as easily verify “birdcage is under branch” or “branch is over birdcage” however their positions were described in what you read.

  Source: © Matthew Cole—Fotolia.com.

  Background Knowledge Revisited

  You’ll recall that background knowledge was needed to make the causal connections among sentences. The same is true of the situation model. Background knowledge both influences your ability to create the situation model in the first place and colors your understanding of a text’s overall message. And as was true for the background knowledge that allows you to connect sentences, writers omit information needed to create the situation model on the assumption that readers already know it. For example, have a look at this text:

  It’s possible to use an analog watch as a compass! Simply hold the watch in your hand and rotate it so that the hour hand points at the sun. Find the location halfway between the hour hand and twelve o’clock—that’s south. (If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s north.)

  Some knowledge is required to interpret individual sentences and connect them (e.g., the meaning of “hour hand”), and the writer doesn’t bother to provide that knowledge. But even if you have all of the knowledge required to connect the sentences, your situation model would include other facts from your background knowledge like these:

  That it’s unusual to use a tool designed for one purpose for an altogether different purpose

  Why you might need a compass in a situation where you don’t have one

  That ad hoc tools like this are often pretty rough in serving their function, but if you’re lost, rough information about direction is much better than none at all

  That background information highlights the big picture for you. It’s vital to appreciating what makes this text useful and interesting. Now consider this parallel text:

  It’s possible to know where parts of the brain are simply by looking at the skull. The skulls of mammals have three large plates that meet at the top of the head. That’s called the bregma point. There are brain atlases that describe the location of different parts of the brain relative to the bregma point.

  Although this passage, like the previous one, describes how to find something, I’m guessing that reading it felt different. It’s not that you don’t understand it. The sentences make sense, and how they relate to one another makes sense. What’s missing is some sense of deeper understanding. That’s because a well-developed situation model would have other information from your background knowledge. You probably don’t know why you’d want to know where parts of the brain are simply by looking at the skull. And while you might guess that this method of localization is imperfect (just like the watch-compass technique), it’s harder to judge whether this rough information would really be better than none at all.

  It’s hard to appreciate just what a difference background knowledge makes to your situation model and thus to the experience of reading comprehension, so here’s one more example:

  Carol Harris was a problem child from birth. She was wild, stubborn, and violent. By the time Carol turned eight, she was still unmanageable. Her parents were very concerned about her mental health. There was no good institution for her problem in her state. Her parents finally decided to take some action. They hired a private teacher for Carol.

  I’m wagering that you had little trouble reading this paragraph with good comprehension. But suppose I had told you, “By the way, the character, Carol Harris? That’s actually Helen Keller. They just changed her name for the story.” That alters your understanding. For example, you interpret statements about her wildness and violence in light of what you know about Helen Keller’s blindness and deafness, and the frustration and despair it might have caused.

  Imagine a person reading this paragraph without knowing anything about Helen Keller. This reader would “comprehend” it as you did when the name Carol Harris was used. All the sentences make sense, and the paragraph as a whole hangs together. And yet an important aspect of meaning is absent. Even if you have sufficient knowledge to connect the sentences, there is usually a still deeper level of comprehension that can be reached. That’s the situation model: you integrate the ideas in the text not just into an overall big picture; that big picture is colored by other relevant knowledge from your memory.

  What’s Happening at School

  Although the demands for comprehension are modest in kindergarten and first grade (because the focus is on learning to decode), they increase rapidly thereafter. As I’ve emphasized, background knowledge is vital to support comprehension, so children should be acquiring knowledge during those early elementary years. But there are obstacles to this learning.

  Slowly Increasing Demands on Comprehension

  Developing the situation model becomes increasingly important as kids move through the elementary years, for two reasons. First, texts become more complex, meaning we place greater expectations on children to coordinate meanings from the beginning to the end. For example in the Common Core State Standards, the recommended texts for first graders include books like Little Bear and Frog and Toad Together, and others that feature large illustrations on each page with modest amounts of text. But the second- and third-grade band of texts includes Charlotte’s Web and Sarah, Plain and Tall—much longer, much more involved texts. The reader must create larger chunks of meaning, and so the situation model will be more complicated.

  Students must also coordinate meanings over multiple texts; they apply knowledge from prior texts when they read something new. Suppose a child is passionate about butterflies. He reads books about their behavior, he has identification guides, and so on. The situation model of each text doesn’t lie in memory, totally insulated from the situation model of other texts. What he knows from these different sources ought to get brewed together. As kids move through school, we increasingly expect that they will remember and apply things they have learned before to new reading.

  Second, students start to encounter a greater variety of genres. At the start of school, most of the texts children read or hear are stories. Thus, most kids come to understand typical Western narrative structure pretty well: there is a main character who has a goal, there is an obstacle preventing the character from reaching the goal, the character has some adventures and complications in pursuing the goal, and then at the end of the story, the character reaches the goal. Knowing that basic structure helps the child’s comprehension. As she reads, each new character and event she encounters can be fit into that familiar story structure. When children begin to read other genres of text, however, they no longer have that support to comprehension; they must learn the conventions of other genres (figure 6.2).

  Figure 6.2. Learning new genres. “Literacy” means stories until the early elementary years. At that point children start to encounter new genres. Teachers might have kids publish their own newspaper as a writing project, or they may encourage children to read age-appropriate news stories on one of the many websites designed for kids. “Here, There, Everywhere” was created by a former Today Show producer who wanted to bring the news to young children.

  Source: © Alexandra Thiessen. Here, There, Everywhere website screen shot reproduced by permission.

  A number of studies in the past thirty years show that knowledge of specific topics is a powerful aid to comprehension. In one, elementary school children took standardized tests of their verbal comprehension and reasoning skills. They were al
so tested on their knowledge of soccer. The experimenters separated the students into four groups based on their soccer knowledge (high or low) and their general verbal skills (high or low). Then students read a story about soccer, and experimenters measured their comprehension and recall (figure 6.3).

  Figure 6.3. Knowledge and verbal skill. The graph shows how much readers remembered of a text about soccer. Kids identified as having “high verbal skills” remembered a bit more than kids with “low verbal skills” (compare the dark and light bars). But that effect is tiny compared to the effect of knowledge of soccer.

  Source: “Domain specific knowledge and memory performance: A comparison of high- and low-aptitude children” by W. Schneider, J. Körkel, & F. E. Weinert, in Journal of Educational Psychology, 81, 306–312. Data are from Table 2, p. 309. © American Psychological Association, 1989.

  In this experiment, “verbal skill” doesn’t mean much compared to knowledge. Knowing the kinds of things that generally happen in a soccer game and the sequence in which they are likely to happen provides the same sort of framework that knowledge of stories would.

  Here we see still another reason to ensure that students have broad background knowledge if our goal is that they be able to read most any text written for the layperson. Knowledge is important not just for connecting sentences; it makes a separate contribution to understanding longer, more challenging texts. How can we ensure that kids learn what they need to know in the early elementary years?

  The Importance of Acquiring Background Knowledge

  Research shows that reading depends on broad knowledge of all subjects: history, civics, science, mathematics, literature, drama, music, and so on. Furthermore, it makes sense that subject matter knowledge be sequenced. It’s commonly appreciated that mathematical concepts build on one another, and they are easier to learn if they are sequenced properly. The same is true of other subjects. It’s easier to understand why the last remnants of European colonialism crumbled in the 1950s if you know something about World War II. It’s easier to understand World War II if you know something about the Great Depression. And so on. So the content that students will learn in the earliest grades is hugely important. It’s the bedrock of everything that is to come (figure 6.4).

  Figure 6.4. First European colonists. Typically children learn about the arrival of the first European colonists (here depicted on a panel from the US Capitol Rotunda) in their early elementary years But wouldn’t it be easier to appreciate the arrival of the colonists if you first studied the Native Americans who were already here? And wouldn’t it be easier to understand their lives and culture if you had already had a unit about farming? And wouldn’t it be easier to understand farming if you had first studied plants?

  Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_USCapitol_-_Landing_of_the_Pilgrims,_1620.jpg.

  Still, talk of “academic content” in early grades makes some adults anxious. So let me address some of the more common concerns.

  Can’t Kids Just Be Kids?

  When people hear “academic content in prekindergarten,” they sometimes jump to the conclusion that it means studying long lists of facts and that the mode of teaching will be a lot of teacher talk, followed by practice worksheets, followed by tests. After all, that’s how older kids are often taught academic content. But if you’ve read this far, you know that drilling and testing are not my style. I’m thinking of activities like read-alouds, projects, independent work with materials, field trips, video, and, yes, listening to the teacher, visitors, and one another.

  Ideally, when kids get a bit older, they learn rich content as they practice reading. Unfortunately, that’s not likely, as the commonly available basal readers tend not to be heavy on ideas and tend not to have a systematic sequence to whatever ideas they do contain. So schools and districts need to pay special attention to the need for knowledge. They won’t get it from most off-the-shelf products.

  Is This Developmentally Appropriate?

  Another take on the “can’t kids just be kids” argument is to suggest that kindergarten children cannot learn certain concepts. The usual term is that such content is “developmentally inappropriate.” In other words, there is a predictable sequence to the development of the mind, and six-year-olds are cognitively incapable of understanding certain concepts. This concern was voiced strongly in 2013 when New York State posted part of a first-grade curriculum module on early civilizations that included vocabulary terms like “sarcophagus” and “cuneiform.”

  A number of bloggers took to the web, suggesting that such a lesson would be developmentally inappropriate. How can children be expected to understand anything about a five-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian civilization when they (1) have no concept of five thousand years; (2) have no concept of where countries are located on a globe (e.g., “modern-day Iraq” will be meaningless to them), and (3) don’t know what their own civilization is, much less someone else’s?

  My reply will necessarily be brief, but here goes. Drawing broad conclusions about what children can and can’t understand doesn’t work because their understanding depends on the task. I’ve heard people say “six-year-olds can’t understand abstractions.” But learning to use the word “dog” (or any other category label) is an abstraction. The idea that “dog” applies not just to particular objects but to any instance of a class of objects (many of which look dissimilar) is an abstraction. Whether a particular abstraction can be learned depends more on what the child already knows and less on some biologically predetermined course of development, linked to the child’s age (figure 6.5).

  Figure 6.5. Old, dead subjects. The idea that children will be baffled and bored learning about things that are unfamiliar and cannot be physically encountered seems belied by the fascination many children have for dinosaurs and ancient Egypt.

  Source: Dinosaur © Redvodka; derivative work, original by Mathnight, via Flickr: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#mediaviewer/File:TriceratopsTyrrellMuseum1.jpg. Mummy © Klafubra, via Flickr: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mummy#mediaviewer/File:Mummy_at_British_Museum.jpg.

  “Developmental appropriateness” rests on an assumption about the mind that is probably wrong. It suggests that the mind develops in discrete stages, where one month the child’s mind works one way and then a few months later it works another way. That’s the idea behind “they are incapable of learning that, but in a year most will be ready.” It’s more accurate to describe the learning of new ideas as coming in fits and starts; the child understands in one situation but not another. The child shows understanding on Tuesday and then doesn’t in the identical situation on Thursday. So it will be with children gaining some appreciation of what it means for a civilization to have existed five thousand years ago. If you wait until you’re certain they can understand it, you will wait too long. And you will find that students from wealthy homes are more likely to have been exposed to ideas that help them understand it earlier.

  I can’t resist providing one example from the classroom of my wife, an early elementary teacher. She teaches seven-year-olds about the creation of the universe and the origins of humankind. She reads a description of the big bang; the subsequent formation of galaxies, stars, and planets; the formation of the earth; the coming of life; the development of other species; and finally the development of humans. (The description is about three pages long.) As she’s reading, an assistant unrolls a strip of black felt. It’s a foot wide and forty-five feet long. The last sentence describes humankind emerging, and that’s when the last of the felt is exposed—and it’s covered by a thin red ribbon. The black felt represents the time since the big bang, and the red ribbon is the amount of time that humankind has existed. So after seeing that, do seven-year-olds have a perfect conceptual understanding of vast time? Of course not. But they are closer than they were.

  Making Time

  A more serious concern is time. I’m suggesting that more attention be paid to content knowledge, and attention means t
ime. There’s less instructional time in early elementary classrooms because students take longer to transition from one activity to another. And once a teacher has done some phonics work, some read-alouds, and some writing, how much time is left in the day? Well, in a couple of studies from the early 2000s, researchers observed several hundred first- and third-grade classrooms across the United States and wrote down what happened (figure 6.6).

  Figure 6.6. Time in classrooms. Time spent on different subjects in first grade (darker bars) and third grade (lighter bars). The numbers add to greater than 100 percent because some lessons combined more than one subject.

  Source: First-grade data from “The relation of global first-grade classroom environment to structural classroom features and teacher and student behaviors” by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, & Early Child Care Research Network. Elementary School Journal, 102, 367–387. Data from Table 2, p. 376. © The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Third-grade data from “A day in third grade: A large-scale study of classroom quality and teacher and student behavior” by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, & Early Child Care Research Network. Elementary School Journal, 105, 305–323. Data from Table 2, p. 314. © The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

  As you can see, language arts and math account for nearly all instructional time. Science and social studies are neglected.a So in answer to the objection that “there’s no time to add content,” I answer, “We have to make time.” And it’s pretty obvious what to cut, at least looking at these averages. We have to curtail language arts activities that we think offer students the least benefit and replace them with science, history, drama, civics, and so on. If we don’t, we can expect a cost to reading comprehension in later grades.