Recently, education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post has been writing about reading in the public schools, two of those pieces appearing here and here. One reason for doing so stems from a report issued by Renaissance Learning, a reading program that helps teachers and parents determine how well children understand the reading they do for homework and on their own.
Because of the popularity of the program, Renaissance Learning has a vast database on the books kids in public schools from kindergarten to 12th Grade actually read voluntarily and for class. The most recent findings, for the 2008-09 school year, are now released in a paper entitled “What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools” (here’s for the link).
The list of most popular titles for Grades 9 through 12 show just how powerful the social element of reading is at that age. The top four spots (!) are held by one author, Stephanie Meyer -- Twilight, New Moon, Breaking Dawn, and Eclipse. (At Border’s Books yesterday, I asked for the jigsaw puzzles and the man directed me to a rear wall, adding, “We only have six or seven puzzles, and nearly all of them are New Moon stuff.”)
At No. 5 sits To Kill a Mockingbird, then comes Night (Wiesel), A Child Called “It” (Dave Pelzer), Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Brisingr (Christopher Paolini), Romeo and Juliet, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Giver, and seven more works of literature.
That makes only two nonfiction works in the entire list, prompting Mathews to comment:
“Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read nonfiction and they can’t read nonfiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.”
This dilemma is increasingly discussed in English Language Arts circles as more and more ELA standards are oriented toward abstract reading skills. Those standards will say things like “Students identify the main thesis in a text” and “Students detail the evidence used to support a contention in a text” -- essential capacities, to be sure. To a decreasing degree, however, they ask for students to demonstrate specific “domain knowledge” such as “Students characterize, with examples, major periods of English and American literary history.”
As a result, the knowledge deficits proceed, and so does poor achievement in the higher grades. Mathews again:
“Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. “Language mastery is not some abstract skill,” he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. “It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community.”
Hirsch’s new book may be found here.
Another voice on the issue is cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, who contributes an introductory note to the reading report above. There, Willingham maintains:
“Many people think of intelligence as comprised of mental skills that are independent of knowledge. That is, smart people think logically and analytically about problems, and they do that for pretty much any problem that comes along. If you’re a ‘good thinker’ you can apply those thinking skills quite broadly. This view is inaccurate. Thinking well is intertwined with knowledge.”
Why so? Willingham:
“We tend to think of reading as a skill that can be applied to any text. Indeed, describing a child as a good reader implies that she will be a good reader no matter what the content. That is true only for decoding -- the process of turning written letters into sounds. Comprehending what you read depends heavily on what you already know about the topic.
“Here’s why that’s true. We all omit information when we speak. For example, imagine I said to a friend “I ate pasta when I wore my new sweater. Now I’m going to have to throw it out.” I don’t elaborate that I spilled pasta sauce on my sweater, or that stains are hard to remove from some fabrics, or that these fabrics are often used to make sweaters, or that I am the sort of person who would throw out a sweater if it were stained. I assume that my friend knows all this, and can fill in the gaps. If I didn’t omit information that the listener already knows, speech would be very long and very boring.”