Literacy Blogs

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began testing fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders in 1970 to find out how well American kids could read. NAEP was to evaluate national reading performance twice a decade. The idea wasn’t to provide an estimate of how well each child could read, but simply to index the level of American literacy. In fact, back then NAEP wasn’t even allowed to describe how the individual states were doing; and, at that time no states were evaluating reading. Boy, have things changed. In the early 1990s, NAEP expanded to permit state comparisons—meaning that more students had to be ...

Teacher question: I’m a regular reader and it seems to me that you undervalue activities like Reader’s Workshop and what it can do for children. Letting them pick their own books is great for their motivation and this isn’t like free reading, independent reading, or SSR because I meet with them regularly, one-on-one, to talk about what they are reading. There is more to teaching reading than phonics lessons or fluency practice.  Shanahan response: Thanks for being a regular reader and I hope that you’ll continue to be after you read my answer. Your inference is right on the button. I’m not a big ...

Teacher question:  We are having an interesting conversation in our district. We currently give AIMSweb as a screening probe three times a year. One of the school psychologists pointed out that for the last several years the first graders seem to do better in the fall than in the spring on nonsense word fluency. When we look at measures of comprehension and fluency using other measures, we do not see a decline. Is there any research out there that might help us understand what we are seeing and whether or not this is a serious issue? Shanahan responds: What you describe is a common experience with AIMSweb and other progress monitoring tests. And, the more ...

Blast from the Past: This entry was first posted on September 17, 2017 and was re-posted on March 2, 2019. This entry isn’t from very long ago, but the guidance it provides appears to be timely given some of the recent questions that I have received. Test preparation season seems to be in full swing, so many of my correspondents are questioning both the value and the approaches taken to oral reading fluency. Research is clear—many of the boys and girls who don’t do well on their state tests are disfluent and that undermines their ability to comprehend well. Oral reading fluency is not tested directly on ...

Man, sometimes when you publish a blog entry you’d wish you stayed in bed. You hope to write something that someone will find useful. But the responses might make you feel more like you’ve been dropped onto the set of Fox News or MSNBC. Recently, I’ve experienced some interesting responses. m For example: Studies show that phonemic awareness (PA) training helps young kids learn to read (PreK through Grade 1). From those studies, I claimed we should teach PA to the point where kids can fully segment words into their individual phonemes. This conclusion was based both on the experimental impacts of training studies and ...