Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared on March 11, 2023, and is being reissued on July 25, 2026. The reason for bringing it back is due to the great loss of instruction that has occurred since the COVID disaster. Chronic absenteeism rates have soared, and many kids aren’t even coming to school (Barragan Torres, 2025; U. S. Department of Education, 2025). These days, schools are often struggling with teacher absences too (Hansen, Aggarwal, & Wagner, 2025). This blog explains why amount of reading instruction is so important and it  provides practical advice about how to make every minute ...

Teacher question: There is much interest in many states to reduce the number of student contact days.  The typical 180 student contact days are being questioned and often replaced with fewer instructional days that are often only a few minutes longer.  Is there any research on four-day weeks versus the typical 180 school day calendar? Shanahan responds: Amount of instruction is an important variable in academic achievement. Usually, if we increase the amount of teaching by a reasonable amount, we tend to see increases in learning. From eyeballing the research studies, I’d estimate that 20-30 hours more reading instruction per year, tends to lead to ...

John Carroll (1963/1989) proposed an innovative model of academic learning. According to Carroll, learning was a function of five variables: student aptitude, opportunity to learn, perseverance, quality of teaching, and ability to understand. It wasn’t the list of variables that was so provocative, but how Carroll defined each.   He operationalized all those in terms of instructional time. For instance, aptitude – then usually a score on an IQ test – was, for Carroll, a matter of the how much time was needed to learn something. A young Einstein may be able to master a K-12 physics curriculum in 42 minutes, while it ...