Literacy Blogs

I don’t do this often, but occasionally a study that catches my eye is particularly pertinent to questions that teachers are asking me. National surveys suggest that middle and high school teachers are increasingly likely to place kids in texts that are relatively easy to read (Rand, 2017; Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); texts that are supposedly at the students’ “instructional levels.” Teachers ask me all the time how they can be expected to use high school level texts when so few kids in their classes are reading at grade level. And, yet, high school students often tell me that they hate being placed in what they refer to as the ...

Teacher question:  A colleague asked me about using e-books in high school science classes instead of textbooks. I like the idea that e-books might be more current and kids would likely read outside of class if they didn’t have to lug a huge book home. However, I remember reading something about the brain processing the reading of e-books differently than traditional texts. Do you know of any sound research on that? Shanahan response: I knew this question was coming.   Back about 25 years ago or so, I just knew someone would ask me about such reading. So I conducted a small study.   No, I didn’t ...

Boy, oh, boy! The past couple weeks have brought unseasonably warm temperatures to the Midwest, and unusual flurries of questions concerning teaching children at their, so-called, “instructional levels.” Must be salesman season, or something.           One of the questions asked specifically about my colleague Dick Allington, since he has published articles and chapters saying that teaching kids with challenging text is a dumb idea. And, a couple of others queries referred to the advertising copy from Teachers College Press (TCP) about their programs. Both Dick and TCP threw the R-word (research) around quite a bit, but ...