Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  When a Lack of Knowledge Hurts Comprehension

  What can you do if you feel your child is not reading well because of a dearth of background knowledge? In the previous section, I argued that digital devices don’t much improve knowledge and literacy, at least as kids usually employ them. The information superhighway may somewhere be roaring with frenetic power and speed, but your child has elected to dwell on familiar byways and cul-de-sacs. What other options are open if you feel your middle or high schooler lacks the broad background knowledge needed for effective reading comprehension?

  Playing Knowledge Catch-Up

  There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is, as with fluency, that it’s never too late. Sometimes you’ll hear a news story about brain plasticity in early childhood that makes it sound as if there is a window of opportunity for learning in the early years that, if missed, means your child is out of luck. Not so. You can always learn. The bad news is that there is not a shortcut. Vocabulary and knowledge of the world accrete slowly, over the course of years. If there is an easy way to hurry it, scientists haven’t found it.

  And honestly, it’s probably not useful to think of it as “catching up.” You want your child to read more. Period. Yes, background knowledge helps, but that’s in service of your child reading a wider variety of materials and enjoying them more. So meet him where he is, bearing in mind the big-picture goal. More reading, more fun. Not catching up.

  Catching Up by Resetting the Starting Line

  Your eighth grader might not be able to read a story written at an eighth-grade reading level, but the content and themes of books written for fourth graders will not be appealing. A possible solution is a book written to the tastes of older kids—the characters are their age, their relationship problems mirror theirs—but the books are written with simpler vocabulary and sentence structure. There are comparable nonfiction books. These books are called “hi-lo,” short for “high interest, low reading level” (figure 9.8). (I list some publishers in the “Suggestions for Further Reading” section at the end of this book.)

  Figure 9.8. Hi-lo books. These books are so named because they contain high-interest content at a low reading level. The two books shown here are written at a third- or fourth-grade reading level but appeal to high schoolers. Note that the covers are meant to look age appropriate.

  Another approach is to find reading material on a subject that your child knows a lot about, thus circumventing the knowledge gap. A good choice is a book for which your child already knows the story. If he sees a movie he loves, see if it was based on a book or if a novelization has been published. If he loves a television show, a book of trivia and backstage gossip about the show might work. See if there is fan fiction written about a movie your child loves. (Fan fiction is a genre of new stories, written by fans, based on characters from an established television show, movie, or book. They are readily available on the web.) If your child is obsessed with an actor, find a biography. If it’s a singer, find a book of song lyrics.

  This reading material may strike you as trivial, but the goal is to get your child to think of leisure reading as a viable option. Thus, we’re brushing up against the question of motivation. In the next chapter we’ll tackle motivation in older kids head-on.

  Keeping It Simple Summary

  At School

  Limited time devoted to reading comprehension strategy instruction

  Beginning in middle school, increasing emphasis on domain-specific conventions about what to do with texts

  At Home

  Don’t try to help the child who lacks knowledge to “catch up.” Help this child find ways to enjoy reading.

  Notes

  “That’s especially true of poor readers, who are satisfied with a fairly minimal understanding of a text”: Long, Oppy, and Seely (1994); Magliano and Millis (2003); Yuill, Oakhill, and Parkin (1989).

  “It’s not that they are unable to make appropriate inferences.”: Johnston, Barnes, and Desrochers (2008).

  “in one experiment, sixth graders were asked to read essays at the request of an experimenter”: Markman (1979).

  “studies show that teaching strategies improves reading comprehension”: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000).

  “Just a few sessions—five or ten—give the same benefit as fifty.”: Elbaum, Vaughn, Tejero Hughes, and Watson Moody (2000); Rosenshine, Meister, and Chapman (1996); Rosenshine and Meister (1994); Suggate (2010).

  “they learn what merits special attention according to the conventions of the discipline”: Shanahan and Shanahan (2008).

  “differences, when they exist, are not due to limited learning abilities on the part of oldsters”: Bennett, Maton, and Kervin (2008); Margaryan, Littlejohn, and Vojt (2011).

  “when researchers at the University of Connecticut asked twenty-five seventh graders”: Leu and Castek (2006).

  “students rarely critically evaluate information they find on the web”: Killi, Laurinen, and Marttunen (2008).

  “but their evaluations of websites don’t actually improve”: Zhang and Duke (2011).

  “examined the number of words to which the average American is exposed per day”: Bohn and Short (2009).

  “‘I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.’”: Nusername (2013).

  “these four activities accounted for 75 percent of teens’ computer time”: Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts (2010).

  “preschoolers who watch educational television really do learn”: D. R. Anderson et al. (2001); Ennemoser and Schneider (2007); Mares and Pan (2013).

  “the ‘video deficit’”: Deocampo and Hudson (2005); Troseth, Saylor, and Archer (2006).

  “TV content, not just volume, matters”: For a review, see Guernsey (2007).

  “but the relationship of grades and leisure reading is positive”: Rideout et al. (2010).

  aI say that the size of the effect is hard to calculate for several reasons. For some strategies, there aren’t enough studies to be sure, and for others, the size of the effect depends on the measure of reading. Some researchers use a standardized reading test, whereas others create their own test. Reading strategy instruction appears to have a bigger effect when experimenters write the test. That doesn’t mean that those who create their own reading tests are consciously stacking the deck in their favor. If a researcher thinks that teaching students to summarize will help their reading comprehension, it’s only natural that he will create a reading test that emphasizes summaries. The figures I cite are the lower estimates, which I think is fairer.

  Chapter 10

  The Reluctant Older Reader

  I’ve already noted that reading motivation declines steadily as children age, reaching its lowest point by about grade 10. In this chapter, we consider strategies that teachers and parents might employ to arrest the slide.

  What’s Happening at School

  In a nutshell, the problem of motivation is this: We want the child to do something we think is important but she chooses not to do it. That is, of course, a very common problem in classrooms. The typical motivator is punishment. A student who doesn’t do the required work is punished by low grades, or perhaps the feeling of disappointing the teacher, or even feeling ashamed should the failure become public. But by the time a child is in middle school, these blades have long lost their edge. Most unmotivated readers have the self-assurance to persuade themselves that reading is not all that important. Schools are not enthusiastic about punishment in any event, so many turn to rewards as motivators.

  Rewards

  We want the child to read, and we want reading associated with a positive experience . . . well, what if I told a fourth grader, “If you read that book, I’ll give you an ice cream sundae.” The child might take me up on the deal, and it sounds like he’d have a positive experience. So won’t he then then be motivated to read? It sounds so simple that it might be too good to be true (figure 10.1).

  Figure 10.1.
Book it button. Pizza Hut has conducted its Book It! program since 1984. Each month from October to March, if the child meets a reading target set by the teacher, he gets a certificate for a personal-size pizza. When he cashes in the certificate, the restaurant gives him a sticker to put on his Book It button. There are surprisingly few studies of the long-term impacts of the program on reading attitudes or habits.

  Source: Circa 1995 © Tim Stoops.

  The Science of Rewards

  Rewards do work, at least in the short term. If you find a reward that the child cares about, he will read in order to get it. But what we’re really concerned about is the reading attitude. When you stop giving the reward, will the attitude be more positive than when you began? Research indicates that the answer is often no. In fact, the attitude is often less positive because of the reward.

  The classic experiment on this phenomenon was conducted in a preschool. A set of attractive markers appeared during free play, and the researchers affirmed that kids chose the markers from among many activities. Then the markers disappeared from the classroom. A few weeks later, researchers took kids, one at a time, into a separate room. They offered the child a fancy “good player” certificate if she would draw with the markers. Other kids were given the opportunity to draw with the markers but were not offered the certificate. A few weeks later, the markers reappeared during free play in the classroom. The kids who got the certificate showed notably less interest in the markers than the kids who didn’t get the certificate. The reward had backfired: it had made kids like the markers less.

  The interpretation of the study rests on how kids think about their own behavior. The rewarded kids likely thought, “I drew with the markers because I was offered a reward to do so. Now here are the markers but no reward. So why would I draw with them?” There have been many studies of rewards in school contexts, and they often backfire in this way (figure 10.2).

  Figure 10.2. The effects of rewards. Another example of how a reward changes your thinking about why you do something: people are often less likely to help a friend when offered a reward. If I ask you to help me move my couch, you probably perceive it as a social transaction; your reason to help me out is that you like to see yourself as helpful. But if I say, “I’ll give you five dollars to help me move my couch,” I’ve turned it into a financial transaction, and five dollars may not seem like enough money for the work.

  Source: © Anne Murphy.

  Note: For a readable review of these sorts of phenomena, see Ariely (2009, chap. 4).

  We can imagine that rewarding kids for reading could work as intended in certain circumstances. What if the child has such a positive experience while reading that it overwhelms his thinking that he’s reading only for the reward? In other words the child thinks, “Gosh, I started this book only to get that ice cream sundae, but actually it’s awesome. My teacher was a sucker to offer me a sundae as a reward!” That’s great when it does happen—and I think it can—but it means that rewards represent a risk. We’re gambling that the book is going to be a big hit.

  We might hope that a reward could do some good using another mechanism: that it would work like the bedtime-snuggle works—the child already likes ice cream (or whatever the reward is), and pairing it often enough with reading makes the good feeling of eating ice cream become associated with reading. The problem is that the child might consciously think, “I hate reading, but I like ice cream, so I guess I’ll put up with reading.” Researchers have examined whether that sort of conscious thought prevents the warm association from building, but the data are not clear.

  What about praise instead of a reward? Generally praise is motivating to kids: they will do more of whatever was praised. But praise can go wrong if it’s overly controlling (“I’m so glad to see you reading. You really should do that every day.”) or if the child thinks it’s dishonest (“You are the best reader at school.”). But if the praise seems like sincere appreciation, it’s motivating. And one of the advantages of praise is that it lacks the disadvantage of rewards. Rewards are usually set up in a bargain before the action: if you read, you’ll get ice cream. Praise is generally spontaneous. You don’t promise praise contingent on good behavior. That means that the praised child won’t think, “I did that only to get the praise,” the way that the rewarded child thinks, “I did that only to get the reward.” The praised child elected to engage in the desired behavior of her own accord, and then the praise came spontaneously. The problem is that the child must choose to read on her own before you get a chance to praise her.

  Rewards in Practice

  As I’m sure is clear by now, I’m not a big fan of school-based rewards for reading. That includes public classroom displays of reading achievement—for example, posting on a bulletin board the number of books each student has read, or adding a segment of a class bookworm for each book. To my thinking, it puts too much emphasis on having read rather than on reading. Some students (I was one) will pick easy books to boost their “score.” And as a way to recognize student achievement, it doesn’t account for student differences; for some, getting through a book in a month may be a real achievement, yet they will feel inadequate compared to their peers. Some more formal programs (like Accelerated Readera and Pizza Hut’s Book It) try to make up for some of the problems inherent in a reward system. Different books are allocated different points based on difficulty, for example, or different students get different teacher-set reading targets.

  Still, I think it’s a mistake to be so absolutist as to say rewards should never be used. Instead I’m suggesting they not be the first thing teachers try, and I want them to be aware of the research literature that describes the potential drawbacks. I know that some districts tune Accelerated Reader or another program to their own use, ignoring the points, for example. The research literature on Accelerated Reader in particular is, in fact, mixed. Much appears to depend on how it is implemented.

  I’m also keeping in mind a conversation I had with a district administrator. Kids in her schools come from very poor homes, and she told me that they are not growing up seeing their parents read. A benefactor started a program whereby children earn cash for reading books, and the administrator felt that it was helpful. Kids had not been reading, the rewards got them started, and they discovered they really liked to read. I think it would be high-handed and naive to suggest that the district stop the program. In fact, this seems exactly the situation to try rewards: when you can’t otherwise get a toehold, a way to get kids to at least try pleasure reading. The child may then discover that she likes it, and even when the rewards stop, she keeps going.

  But if rewards are to be a last resort, as I’m suggesting, what ought to be tried first?

  Pleasure Reading

  Our goal is that children read because they feel the pleasure of reading; rewards were meant to be a temporary incentive to get the process going. Another way to frame the problem is this: kids are already feeling the pleasure of reading, but that feeling gets lost in less positive feelings—feelings created by the other demands of schoolwork.

  Academic versus Pleasure Reading

  We expect students to feel the joy of reading when they get lost in a narrative or feel the pleasure of discovery when reading nonfiction. But as I noted in chapter 9, this is the age at which we add other purposes to reading. One is learning: the student is expected to read a text and study it so that he can reproduce the information (e.g., on a quiz). A second purpose is to help complete a task—a project, say—and that usually entails gathering information. A third purpose is to analyze how a text works, that is, how the author writes to make the reader laugh or cry. I’ll use the umbrella term academic reading to contrast these purposes with pleasure reading.

  My concern is that kids might confuse academic reading with reading for pleasure. If they do, they will come to think of reading as work, plain and simple. Sure, we’d like to think that academic reading is pleasurable, but in most schools, “pleasure” is not a litmus te
st. The student who tells the teacher, “I tried reading that photosynthesis stuff, but it was too boring,” will not be told to find something else she’d prefer. Academic reading feels like work because it is work. But pleasure ought to be the litmus test for reading for pleasure.

  I think it’s a good idea for teachers to communicate these distinctions to students—not that “most of the reading we’re doing is academic, and therefore not fun,” but that reading serves different purposes and that there is a distinction between academic reading and pleasure reading.

  In some classrooms, pleasure reading is segregated from academic reading: we read because we love reading, and then we also learn how to work with texts. But the way that pleasure reading is handled can still send a silent message to students that reading is work. Coercion sends that message. I’ve warned against requirements that children read a set number of minutes per day at home or that a pleasurable activity be withheld until the child has completed his reading. The same goes for school. If a teacher makes pleasure reading a requirement (ten minutes per night, say) or demands accountability (by keeping a reading log, for example) students may think she believes that they would not read of their own accord.

  Pleasure Reading in Class

  I’ve said rewards shouldn’t be off the table but also shouldn’t be the first thing that schools try, and I’ve said coercion has drawbacks. What’s left? I think the best strategy is the one that is successful at home: make reading expected and normal by devoting some proportion of class time to silent pleasure reading. A lot of what goes into a typical elementary reading program is not reading; in one study of six basal reading programs, researchers found that student reading averaged just fifteen minutes each day out of a reading block that averaged ninety minutes.