Literacy Blogs

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 ...

Someone put a bug in my ear, and I started writing, and by the time I was done, I had two blogs rather than one. I'll set the table with this one, and bring it to conclusion next time.        One of the best things about research is that it can let the wind out of windbags and force some hard thinking. Our field suffers fatuous pronouncements as much as any. An example?       How about the constant drumbeat concerning the failure of “one size fits all” instructional approaches? Seemingly, everybody agrees with that one.     I typed the terms ...

Teacher question: My district has moved into an approach of asking teachers to locate materials for standards-based instruction.  They have opted to create assessments to isolate individual standards to teach/test each standard individually. Each assessment is named by reading standard and is associated with grade-level English Language Arts courses. What thoughts do you have on how I might guide them to move from assessing isolated standards to a more integrated approach?  Shanahan response: Research has made it pretty clear that it is not possible to assess any of the individual standards so spending time on as your district is doing is a fool’s errand. Whatever scores or ratings ...

Teacher question: I currently teach English as a Second Language to grades 6-8. Next year I will have high beginners, many of whose spring MapR reading scores are in the K-1 range (153-165), and many of whom had interrupted education in their home countries. Where I teach your work is cited as the basis for a requirement that we give all students, regardless of their ESOL level, grade-level texts in English in ESOL class.   While I am OK with scaffolding up 3 or 4 grade levels, I think the gap between readers at a K or 1 level and a 7th-grade ...