M4 WA#1: Memory Activity

11-1aBehaviorism

In a 2nd-grade classroom, Naomi finishes her assignment and begins reading a book about Sacajawea. The class is supposed to be reading biographies in their free time, so the teacher announces to the whole class how happy she is to see that Naomi is reading. Her teacher then rewards Naomi with a ticket that she can use at the end of the week to buy candy, stickers, and small stuffed animals at the school store. Tickets are given out each time a child does something positive in class. The next day, Naomi reads her biography during free time again—and so do several other children.

Naomi’s teacher is using a behaviorist approach, a token economy (see  Chapter 8), when she rewards Naomi for reading. When she gives Naomi a ticket, she influences Naomi to repeat the behavior and other students to follow Naomi’s example. Recall that operant conditioning refers to shaping behavior through reinforcement and punishment ( Chapter 3), and applied behavior analysis refers to interventions using operant conditioning ( Chapter 8).

Reinforcement also works on teachers. Anthony Yom said he initially did not like teaching at his primarily Latino school in Los Angeles because so many students were unprepared, and some tried to intimidate him (Lopez, 2016). He considered quitting. Then, in 2016, one of his students earned a perfect score on the AP (advanced placement) calculus exam. The student, from an immigrant family, credited Yom. Several other students told Yom that they appreciated his efforts and thought he was a good teacher. Thanks to these positive reinforcers, Yom continued to teach at the school. When was the last time you reinforced your instructors?

When applied well, behaviorism is a powerful tool for promoting learning and positive behavior. In this chapter, we discuss general guidelines for applying operant conditioning in your classroom and then discuss a specific approach to instruction that evolved from behaviorism, called direct instruction.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning has been effectively used to teach behaviors that lead to achievement, such as paying attention, completing assignments, and studying (Greenwood et al., 1992). If you want to teach a new behavior, it is best to use  continuous reinforcement —that is, reinforce every correct response, and reinforce it immediately. However, if you want to maintain an existing behavior and make it less susceptible to extinction, it is best to use  intermittent reinforcement —that is, reinforce some but not all appropriate responses. For example, gambling is reinforced on an intermittent schedule and is highly resistant to extinction. Gamblers go for long periods without winning but continue to gamble. Fishing and baseball hitting also function with intermittent reinforcement. Thus, if you want your students to maintain a behavior over the long term, like sitting on their assigned carpet square or bringing their books to class daily, reinforce them occasionally, but not every time, after the behavior is reasonably stable. Let’s look next at how to use reinforcement effectively.

Use Reinforcement Effectively

It is easy to misapply reinforcement and punishment in the classroom. Two common mistakes are

· (1)

ignoring behavior that deserves reinforcement and

· (2)

confusing punishment and reinforcement.

For example, praise, intended as reinforcement, can actually be punishment for children who do not want praise. A teacher may intend reinforcement when she says, “Wallace, I am so glad to see that you did your homework today! And your score on the quiz was very good!” However, Wallace may be embarrassed in front of his peers and choose to do less homework. On the other hand, scolding, intended as punishment, can actually be reinforcement for children who seek attention. For some children even negative attention can reinforce.

How do you know whether you are correctly applying reinforcement and punishment in your classroom? If the consequence reduces the probability of a behavior, it is functioning as punishment. If the consequence increases the behavior, it is functioning as reinforcement. Let’s see how this works in a 3rd-grade classroom:

Othman dislikes math work. Anytime Mr. Samms, his teacher, passes out difficult math work, Othman makes inappropriate noises and comments, flicks materials across the room, throws books, and instigates a commotion. Mr. Samms puts Othman in time-out for his misbehavior. Othman begins to act out every day in math.

It appears that Othman is acting out in order to be put in time-out. Although Mr. Samms intends to punish Othman (decrease his misbehavior), the misbehavior continues or even increases, which means that  the intended punishment is functioning as reinforcement. Othman was allowed to leave the aversive math lesson, so Mr. Samms is negatively reinforcing Othman (allowing him to escape an aversive—for Othman—situation), thus increasing misbehavior. To apply behaviorism more effectively in your classroom, follow these guidelines:

1. Determine what your students find reinforcing. Your attention may be reinforcing for many, though not all, students (Austin & Soeda, 2008). One teacher discovered that eating lunch with her was a reinforcer for her students. Another teacher found that helping a student compose an email to send to his jailed father was a reinforcer. Pride in new knowledge and problem solving may be reinforcing. Different students may find different things reinforcing. One study found that when 17 potential reinforcers such as stickers, toy dinosaurs, and candy bars were ranked by teachers and elementary students, the items ranked highest by the teachers were not ranked highly by the students (Resetar & Noell, 2008). This suggests that you may have to figure out what is truly reinforcing to your students.

2. Use grades, but carefully. Grades are one of the key consequences that teachers control in classrooms, usually from 3rd through 12th grade. Grades can serve as reinforcement, punishment, or neither. One student may be thrilled to get a C; another student may be disappointed; and still another may not care. If good grades result in students studying and trying hard, they function as reinforcement.

3. Intentionally condition positive behavior in students. Be careful not to mistakenly reinforce misbehavior, as Mr. Samms did with Othman, or extinguish good behavior by ignoring it.

4. Focus on reinforcement, not punishment. Be clear about what you want to reinforce, such as solving problems or continuing to try after failure.

5. Use material rewards with care. Although material rewards, like the tickets Naomi’s teacher used, can be quite effective in classrooms, there are several drawbacks to their use. One is that managing them can become a burden for the teacher. Another is that students come to expect them: “If I do my work, can I get a prize from the treasure box?” Teachers who used mechanical pencils as rewards said that they came to regret it because their students soon expected rewards for good behavior and good grades. Another especially important drawback is that  material rewards do little to foster intrinsic motivation for the task. This was discussed in  Chapter 8.

Shape Behavior

As described in  Chapter 3, if a student never displays a target behavior, like fully joining class activities, you cannot reinforce it. What can you do in this situation? Behaviorists use shaping, which means that you reinforce behaviors that are in the  direction of the target behavior. Behaviorists call this  reinforcing successive approximations to the target behavior. For example, 10-year-old Doug has illegible handwriting. He does not close the letters  d or  a, so they look like  cl and  u. His teacher described how she used shaping to help him:

Whenever I saw an  a or a  d on Doug’s papers that was closer to the standard, I circled it and wrote “better” beside it. One time I asked Doug to look over one of his own papers and tell me which  a he thought was best and which  d was best. I did not comment on the poorly written letters…. After 3 weeks, his handwriting had improved markedly. I retrieved one of the papers he had written a month earlier, and we compared it with his current handwriting. He was impressed … and could see how much he had improved. (Krumboltz & Krumboltz, 1972, p. 42)

Shaping can also be applied to teaching toddlers to count and to coaching youth in sports. For example, novices were taught to golf by first hitting short putts ( Photo 11.1). Then they progressed to longer putts, then to chip shots with irons, then to long drives with drivers. Compared with students who started with long drives, students whose skills were carefully shaped were more likely to win a playoff (Martin & Pear, 2003).

Photo 11.1

Shaping can improve golf and many other skills.

Hannamariah/ Shutterstock.com

If you follow these general guidelines in your classroom, learning should improve. However, you may not be able to apply operant conditioning in all situations because you cannot always control the consequences of behavior. You are likely to have more control of consequences in preschool, elementary school, or in self-contained special education classrooms than in typical secondary classrooms, because adolescents can acquire their own reinforcers like food and money. Schools try to control teens’ behavior by using demerits, grades, exclusion from sports, or special honors, but many teens are not reinforced or punished by these consequences. Nevertheless, one powerful reinforcer that you control, and that most students respond to, is caring from you. This was discussed in  Chapter 4 and is discussed further in  Chapter 16.

Direct Instruction

In addition to these general guidelines for applying behaviorism in your classroom, there is a particular approach to instruction, known as  direct instruction , that has its origin in behaviorism. There are two types of direct instruction. In the first type, a teacher follows this general format (Rosenshine, 1987):

1. Begin a lesson with a short statement of goals.

2. Provide a short review of previous, prerequisite learning.

3. Present new material in small steps, with practice after each step.

4. Give clear and detailed instructions and explanations.

5. Ask a large number of questions to check for understanding.

6. Provide systematic feedback and corrections.

7. Obtain a success rate of 80% or higher during initial practice.

This is the direct instruction approach commonly used in educational settings. When people refer to traditional instruction, they usually mean this sort of direct instruction.

The second type of direct instruction uses commercially prepared scripts. Some well-known direct instruction curricula include DISTAR,  Connecting Mathematics Concepts, and  Reading Mastery. In scripted direct instruction, teachers are provided with the  exact wording to use when teaching. Both forms of direct instruction provide frequent and immediate feedback to every student. Reinforcement should occur immediately after correct responses.

Direct instruction does not rely on discovery; everything that students are expected to know is explicitly taught. No assumptions based on home life are made about what students already know. The creed is that  if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught (Adams & Engelmann, 1996). Thus, low income, poor motivation, or lack of family support cannot be used to explain low achievement; the teacher keeps instructing until the student has learned.

There is clear evidence that direct instruction is effective, particularly for teaching  skills like decoding words, reading comprehension, arithmetic, and basic science or social studies  facts, although not all researchers agree (Borman, Hewes, Overman, & Brown, 2003; Dean & Kuhn, 2006; Rittle-Johnson, 2007). Direct instruction is also effective for teaching  concepts. For example, in one study researchers taught 3rd- and 4th-graders how to use a controlled experiment, where they altered just one variable at a time, to determine which variable (e.g., smooth vs. rough surface, or steep vs. shallow incline) caused balls to roll the farthest (Klahr & Nigam, 2004). More students (77%) in the direct instruction group learned the concept of controlled experimentation than in the discovery group (23%). Direct instruction is sometimes mistakenly described as passive learning; in fact, good direct instruction requires students to be cognitively active, thinking about what they are learning. Direct instruction is particularly effective when combined with hands-on activity (Lorch et al., 2010).

Some educators argue that direct instruction is effective for disadvantaged children who are unfairly burdened when left to discover academic knowledge on their own, in contrast to middle class children who are more likely to be taught academic knowledge at home. For example, Delpit (1988), an African American educator with extensive experience in inner-city schools, pointed out that students of color and poor students who lack background knowledge about the sounds that go with specific letters or about how to speak and write Standard English should not have to discover the rules of literacy; they need to be  taught the rules so that they too can experience the power that goes with knowledge. Yet, direct instruction, especially the scripted form, has critics. Some feel it is too heavy-handed, unresponsive to student differences, and developmentally inappropriate. Some research suggests that it results in learning that is less complex and less creative (Bonawitz et al., 2011; Dean & Kuhn, 2006). One study found that 5th-grade students wrote better essays about making a decision (considering both sides of a dilemma, describing varied reasons, and weighting some reasons as more important than others) if they participated in collaborative interaction groups than if they experienced direct instruction (Zhang et al., 2016). Let’s turn to Piaget’s theory next, which presents a different concept of how children learn and grow cognitively that leads to quite different approaches to instruction.

11-1bPiaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory

According to Piaget, the processes that drive cognitive development in younger children continue to apply in middle childhood. Recall from  Chapter 3 that assimilation refers to a student incorporating a new perception into existing schemes, and a scheme is a cognitive structure, such as an image, perception, or thought. Here is an example of how it works in a 4th-grade class. The teacher is reading aloud from a book about pioneers in early Ohio. She reads about a peddler coming to an isolated farm in the wilderness. She stops to clarify her students’ understanding:

Teacher:	Who knows what isolated  means? (Several hands wave.) Jorge?
Jorge:	There’s a lot of ice there?
Teacher:	No. Lacey?
Lacey:	It is really, really, really cold there.

Through making the students’ thinking public, the teacher has discovered that the children have constructed their own understanding of the word  isolated based on their previous knowledge of the word  ice. The children were mistakenly assimilating a new word,  isolated, into their preexisting scheme of  ice.

The counterpart to assimilation is accommodation. Accommodation refers to a child revising a scheme so that a new experience makes sense. In the 4th-grade class, the teacher helped the children accommodate their scheme of  isolated:

Teacher:	Scott, will you go stand in the corner by the sink for a minute? Okay. Now Scott is isolated from the rest of us. What does isolated  mean? (All hands go up.) Trevor?
Trevor:	Away from others?
Teacher:	Right. The author means they don’t have any neighbors. No one lives within miles of them.

Remember that Piaget believed every act of learning includes both assimilation and accommodation, though the amount of each may vary, as students seek equilibrium, a state of cognitive balance and comfort. As a result of these processes, children enter a stage that Piaget called “concrete operations” in middle childhood.

Piaget’s Concrete Operations Stage

Once children reach the  concrete operational stage , they think more logically. This stage corresponds roughly to ages 7 to 11. Now children can decenter, reverse operations, classify, and conserve successfully. Recall that in Piaget’s conservation-of-liquid task ( Chapter 7) children are asked whether the amount of water in a short, wide glass stays the same after it is poured into a tall, skinny glass. Let’s take a peek at Lisa doing this task in a 2nd-grade class:

Lisa:	The tall glass has more water. It is bigger. The other one is short.
Teacher:	Does everyone agree with Lisa? (Some students nod yes, but others shake their heads no.) Aaron, you do not agree?
Aaron:	The glasses are not the same shape. The tall one is really skinny and the short one is really fat. I think they might be the same, or the short one might hold more.
Teacher:	How many of you thought about how big around the glasses are, and not just how tall they are? (Some hands shoot up, but it is clear that many 2nd-graders were just beginning to think about the possibility.)

Children of normal intelligence should master the conservation-of-liquid task during the early elementary school years.

Children also develop hierarchical classification ability ( Chapter 7) in middle childhood. You may notice children at this age collecting, sorting, and classifying—for example, collecting stamps and sorting them by country, and within country by theme (e.g., flowers, political figures, historical events). Children at this age may also enthusiastically tell you about using Grandma’s full address: Grandma Collins, 400 Orchard Street, Oradell, NJ 07649, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth.

In middle childhood, children become more capable of abstract reasoning, as in the following exchange between two 7-year-old boys eating lunch in the school cafeteria, after one had been pondering an abstract concept:

Boy 1:	Everyone is related to each other.
Boy 2:	Huh? Show me your logic.
Boy 1:	Well, I have cousins. And they have cousins, who have cousins, who have cousins, who have cousins, who have cousins …
Boy 2:	Stop! I get it.

Although children in concrete operations are now better at logical reasoning and can engage some abstractions, they still are not skilled at abstract thinking, which comes with the next stage, formal operations, described in  Chapter 15.

Classroom Implications of Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory

A legacy from Piaget’s theory is constructivist teaching. Piaget asserted that students construct their own knowledge and should be encouraged to do so. He stated that “[e]ach time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely” (Piaget, 1970, p. 715). Piaget was attacking the notion that learning is the transfer of knowledge from one person to another, where the teacher pours knowledge into children’s minds. Instead, Piaget asserted that when children act on their own, they create their own understanding; when they are told the facts, they may just memorize them in a superficial way. Learning is a constructive process that depends on the prior experience and knowledge of the student. For example, a lesson about the ocean may be more deeply processed by children who have visited the ocean or an aquarium compared to children who have not.

Although constructivism is a theory of learning, not of instruction or of curriculum design, it has been used to guide instruction. In  constructivist instruction , teachers minimize (but do not eliminate) adult authority. Instead of simply lecturing on facts, constructivist teachers provide experiences, ask questions, provoke discourse, and encourage experimentation and deep thought. This facilitates students’ personal construction of understanding. As constructivist math educators put it, “Piaget showed that children acquire logico-mathematical knowledge not by  internalizing rules from the outside but by  constructing (making or creating) relationships from within, in interaction with the environment. We, therefore, give problems to children and ask them to do their own thinking to solve them in their own ways” (Kamii, Pritchett, & Nelson, 1997, p. 5; emphasis in original).

Math instruction commonly involves learning algorithms. An algorithm is a procedure that, if followed, guarantees a correct answer. For example, in three-digit addition you add the ones column first, then carry over to the tens, then carry over to the hundreds. Some constructivists oppose teaching students algorithms because students can just memorize the procedure without really understanding the underlying concept. If they follow an algorithm for three-digit addition with carrying, they do not have to keep an understanding of place value foremost in their minds.

There are many variations on constructivist instruction that you may hear about, such as project-based instruction, apprenticeship, whole language, discovery learning, inquiry approach, transformational approach, teaching for understanding, 5E learning cycle, and minds-on instruction. Common attributes of various versions of constructivism include the following:

1. Activating prior knowledge (helping students realize what they already know about a topic).

2. Using hands-on materials when appropriate, particularly for novices (Kontra, Lyons, Fischer, & Beilock, 2015; Zacharia, Loizou, & Papaevripidou, 2012).

3. Encouraging students to connect new material to familiar objects and events.

4. Following the students’ lead; following up on their questions; talking less and listening more.

5. Asking more questions than giving answers; asking open-ended questions that foster deep thinking rather than questions that ask for a single-word answer.

6. Presenting students with puzzling or unexpected information that causes them to question their existing schemas, such as asking, “What causes the seasons? It is  not the distance from the sun.”

7. Allowing a long wait time (at least 5 seconds) after asking questions.

8. Requiring students to justify their answers regardless of whether their answers are correct or not; asking, “What is your evidence?” or “Why do you think that?”

9. Not stating that answers or reasons are correct or incorrect, but instead, asking more questions or providing experiences that allow students to correct their own errors.

10. Conducting error analysis—that is, when children respond incorrectly, asking why they responded the way they did, thus giving them insight into what they do and do not know. For example, a 4-year-old was being tested for school readiness. The examiner asked her which shape among a triangle, square, circle, and rectangle was different from the others. The correct answer was the circle, because it does not have any straight lines or angles. The child responded, “The triangle.” Fortunately, the examiner did not simply mark her answer wrong, but asked her why. The child said, “The others would be easier to divide into fourths.” That ended the test. The examiner stated the child was ready for kindergarten (if not junior high).

11. Making thinking public; encouraging students to explain their thinking process and how they came up with particular answers.

Making thinking public is important because your students’ misconceptions will remain hidden unless you attempt to understand their thinking process. In traditional instruction, teachers ask students questions in a recitation format or in tests, which makes students’  answers public, but not their  thinking. For example, Ms. Wilson was teaching 3rd-graders about state government. As she questioned them, she found that some students thought that being governor bestowed ownership of the whole state. She tried to use an analogy to correct them:

“Who is the leader of this school?” I asked, hopefully.

“Dr. Tough,” they replied in unison.

“And what does that mean?” I probed.

“That she owns the school. That’s why she gets to tell everyone what to do….”

I felt like I was being sucked into a … veritable whirlpool of misconceptions.

(Ball & Wilson, 1996, pp. 160–161)

If Ms. Wilson had not asked for student thinking, she would not have discovered their misconceptions.

It is not always easy to get students to reveal their misconceptions. Think about a time when you have been unwilling to answer a question in class. Were you trying to avoid showing your ignorance? If you give students responsibility for their learning, as constructivists would recommend, but ask them to demonstrate their understanding before they actually understand, you may end up with students who avoid making their thinking public and avoid seeking help.

Outcomes of effective constructivist instruction can include the following (adapted from Boaler & Staples, 2008; Boekaerts & Minnaert, 2006):

1. Deeper conceptual understanding

2. Greater interest and positive attitude toward the topic

3. Reduced labeling by students that other students are “smart” or “dumb”

4. Increased perceptions that students are responsible for their own learning and have some control over their own learning

11-1cVygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Whereas Piaget emphasized personal construction of knowledge and is thus sometimes termed an individual constructivist, Vygotsky emphasized social construction of knowledge, or the knowledge construction that can occur among people, and is thus sometimes termed a social constructivist. Let’s look at guidelines for improving your students’ achievement from a social constructivist perspective.

Encourage Private Speech

Recall that private speech can be a tool for controlling one’s own thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Although private speech becomes more internal as children grow, adolescents, and even adults, revert to out-loud private speech as they attempt to solve problems or do difficult tasks. For example, let’s peek at 12th-grader Zaheen in biology class:

The task is complicated, and the room is overcrowded and noisy. Zaheen is working alone but talking out loud. He reads the directions aloud to himself: “Obtain nine test tubes and place them in the rack. Fill each tube with 5 milliliters of the substance indicated on the label.” He then mouths the directions to himself again as he touches each object referred to. Finally, he actually enacts the instructions.

Zaheen was clearly using private speech to regulate his own thought and behavior. Similarly, you probably mouth some phrases in this text as you try to master details (and you may learn more if you do), particularly if you are studying in a noisy place. In addition to using private speech to aid their thinking, students use private speech to regulate their emotions, such as distracting themselves in order to avoid becoming angry (Day & Smith, 2013).

Scaffold Student Success

Although private speech is a behavior that students use with themselves, scaffolding is a technique that teachers use with students. Imagine you want to teach students how to write a research paper. You could tell the students what to do and then turn them loose to apply what they’ve learned. Such a technique tends to lead to poor writing and weak papers from novice writers. A better technique is to use scaffolding to help the students construct, through interaction with others, a shared understanding of high-quality writing. One scaffolding technique is to break the tasks into small units. Thus, you might require students to choose a topic, then to read and write notes about references, then to write a research question or thesis statement for the paper, then to outline the major sections of the paper, and so forth. At each stage of the paper, you review the students’ work and provide feedback. Social constructivism also involves interaction among peers, so you would have students provide feedback on one another’s draft manuscripts.

The following is an example of a music teacher giving a piano lesson to Lauren:

Lauren is learning a complicated piano sonata that has a difficult rhythm and many chords, including some that require her to stretch her small hand across six keys. Looking at the piece, Lauren felt overwhelmed, and she quickly became frustrated trying to read the notes. She pounded the piano and her posture collapsed, communicating “I give up!” The teacher pointed her to a single measure with four chords in the left hand. The teacher modeled the first chord and had Lauren play just that chord. The teacher repeated this with each chord. Then she had Lauren play the four chords in succession, modeling when necessary. After Lauren mastered these four chords, the teacher asked Lauren to play them with her eyes closed several times. When Lauren was finished, the teacher enthusiastically congratulated Lauren and explained to her that anything is easy if you break it down into little steps. Lauren grinned with pride.

In this example, the teacher had Lauren focus on only one hand and one measure of music at a time. The scaffolding took less than five minutes, yet it changed Lauren’s whole perspective of her ability to master the sonata.

Use Classroom Discussion

Through classroom discussion, students can co-construct understanding in their zones of proximal development and achieve greater skill. When students explain their thinking aloud, they may notice their errors and correct them. Deep discussion requires that students agree, disagree, and critique one another’s reasoning—hence, the social dimension of social constructivism. In constructivist classrooms, there should be a great deal of student-to-student commentary rather than just teacher-to-student commentary. Students report that they are more interested during such discussions and put out more effort (Wu, Anderson, Nguyen-Jahiel, & Miller, 2013).

In a constructivist 2nd-grade classroom, the teacher poses an arithmetic question: 19 + 13. One child gives her answer—26—and the classroom erupts into a loud cacophony of “Agree!” and “Disagree!” This sort of discussion is usually extolled as a virtue of social constructivist instruction. But how do students feel about it? Some like it, but some do not. According to a 5th-grader: “[I]t can get sort of embarrassing at times, because like … you say something and everybody will raise their hand and want to say something different or they all disagree with you. And it makes you sort of feel like you want to crawl into a hole and die” (Lampert, Rittenhouse, & Crumbaugh, 1996, p. 742).

Students will not engage in the kind of classroom discussion that makes social constructivist instruction work if they feel vulnerable to ridicule, teasing, or appearing stupid. Teachers must work hard to provide a supportive environment and keep the discourse civil without squelching it. This means maintaining a neutral stance, using a warm tone, and providing supportive comments. It also means training the students to be able to discuss respectfully.

In constructivist settings, children are given the opportunity to work together so that they will be confronted with different views. Students of differing levels of ability are placed together so that the more advanced students will clarify their knowledge by having to explain to others, and the less advanced will be challenged to understand thinking a bit above their own. However, you cannot assume that just because students are discussing subject matter, they are learning; even if they are on-task, their conversations may not lead to understanding. In  Chapter 13, you will learn how to implement group work and cooperative learning effectively.

Use Reciprocal Teaching

One of the best-known applications of the principles of Vygotsky’s social constructivism is  reciprocal teaching , which research suggests is effective (Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Spörer, Brunstein, & Kieschke, 2009). Reciprocal teaching puts the student in the teacher role ( Photo 11.2). It is applied most often to reading comprehension. Students read a text in a group of two to six students, with the teacher’s expert scaffolding. The teacher introduces the reading by asking students to state what they already know about the topic and to predict what the passage is about based on the title. Then a student is assigned to be the student-teacher for a passage. After the group reads the passage, the student-teacher asks a question about the main point, summarizes the passage, seeks to clarify anything unclear, and then makes a prediction about what might come next. The teacher scaffolds the student-teacher’s responses and provides feedback. Eventually the teacher can leave the students alone to scaffold one another.

Photo 11.2

Students engaged in reciprocal teaching.

Michael Newman/PhotoEdit

The following is an example of reciprocal teaching by a 7th-grade student, Charles, during his first experience with reciprocal teaching (from Palincsar & Brown, 1984, pp. 138–139).

TEXT:	The water moccasin, somewhat longer than the copperhead, is found in the southeastern states. It lives in swampy regions. It belongs, as do also the copperhead and the rattlesnakes, to a group of poisonous snakes called pit vipers. They have pits between their eyes and their nostrils, which, because they are sensitive to heat, help the snakes tell when they are near a warm-blooded animal …
Charles:	What is found in the southeastern snakes—also the copperhead, rattlesnakes, vipers—they have … I’m not doing this right.
Teacher:	All right. Do you want to know about the pit vipers? What would be a good question about the pit vipers that starts with the word “why”?
Charles:	(No response)
Teacher:	How about, “Why are the snakes called pit vipers?”
Charles:	Why do they want to know that they are called pit vipers?
Teacher:	Try it again.
Charles:	Why do they, pit vipers in a pit?
Teacher:	How about, “Why do they call the snakes pit vipers?”
Charles:	Why do they call the snakes pit vipers?
Teacher:	There you go! Good for you.

Reciprocal teaching is beneficial to reading comprehension because students, like Charles, are often unaware that they do not comprehend a reading passage. Even among our hundreds of university students, almost none has ever come to class asking for clarification of an obscure passage, although all textbooks (except this one!) contain obscure passages.

You can apply reciprocal teaching to content areas besides reading. For example, students studying history can take on the student–teacher role to summarize, question, clarify, and predict as they read historical texts.

11-1dA Note of Caution about Constructivist Instruction

Both Piaget and Vygotsky present a theory of constructivist  learning. This does not necessarily translate to a case for constructivist  instruction as it is typically construed. Many teachers assume constructivist instruction must involve hands-on activities, group discussion, interactive games, and other behaviorally active forms of instruction. They view lectures, books, worksheets, and online presentations as too passive. They also assume constructivist instruction must be based on discovery learning, in which students are left to figure out (discover) things on their own. Neither is necessarily true. A constructivist teacher helps students make sense of incoming information, organize it coherently, and integrate it with previous knowledge. Passive methods (such as lecture) can foster these processes, and active methods (such as hands-on experiments) can fail to foster these processes. It is  cognitive activity rather than  behavioral activity that matters. Children learn by thinking.

Some teachers are concerned about implementing a constructivist curriculum because they view it as incompatible with the proficiency exams and college entrance exams for which they need to prepare students. However, research shows that curricula that are based on constructivist methods do provide students with the skills to do well on standardized tests (McCaffrey et al., 2001; National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008). Any sort of activity that makes learning more cognitively active for the student, from group discussions to personal response systems (e.g., clickers), tends to raise achievement (Freeman et al., 2014).

11-2Information Processing in Middle Childhood

In  Chapter 3, you were introduced to the information-processing model. Next we discuss how information processing develops in middle childhood, and how you can help students grow one component of that model—long-term memory—through use of memory strategies.

11-2aDevelopment of Information Processing

In middle childhood,  processing speed continues to improve, although the rate of growth eventually slows down.  Figure 11.1 shows how processing speed increases from 5 to 18 years of age. (If you immediately thought, “Ah! That is a quadratic function,” you were right. You were paying attention in math class.)

Figure 11.1Processing Speed by Age

Children were given rows of six numbers, like 8, 9, 5, 3, 9, 7, and asked to circle the identical numbers. The number of rows they can do in a 3-minute period is a measure of processing speed. Can you describe how processing speed develops with age in this graph? Graphs of working memory tend to have the same shape (e.g., Dempster, 1981). Try this with children of different ages to see if you get a similar age trend. Be prepared with about 60 rows if you are testing intelligent adolescents!

Source: Kail and Ferrer (2007).

Inhibition continues to improve, although at a slower rate than in early childhood. One way this is measured is with go/no-go tasks (Best & Miller, 2010) in which children are asked to push a button for every “go” indicator on a computer screen (e.g., all letters but  X), but not for every “no-go” indicator (e.g., the letter  X).

Cognitive flexibility also improves steadily from ages 4 to 14 and then levels off. This allows children to update the information in their working memory. Second-graders are just on the cusp of the ability to update memory (Barrouillet, Gavens, Vergauwe, Gaillard, & Camos, 2009). Older children should have less difficulty with it.

Working memory also improves substantially (Cowan et al., 2010). On simple memory span tests, children improve in roughly 2-year steps such that an average 3-year-old can remember one number or word, a 5-year-old two numbers or words; a 7-year-old, three; a 9-year-old, four; an 11-year-old, five; a 13-year-old, six; and a 15-year-old, seven (Kemps, De Rammelaere, & Desmet, 2000). On more complex tasks, the number of “chunks” of information that can be processed increases steadily until adult capacity of about four chunks is reached. The improvement in working memory is partly due to faster processing speed. The improvement in working memory is also partly due to better control of attention.  Figure 11.2 shows that children’s working memory capacity gets larger, and control of attention becomes more efficient, freeing memory capacity as they get older.

Figure 11.2Working Memory Capacity

Working memory capacity increases with age, as indicated by a larger circle. At the same time, the proportion of that capacity that is needed for processing diminishes.

Not all children are able to control their attention. In classrooms, students must ignore distractions when given a task that requires concentration, and they must suppress irrelevant information. Some students are described by their teachers as “inattentive, easily distracted, can’t concentrate, daydreams.” Inability to control attention is a defining feature of  attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (see  Box 11.1). Scientists believe that poor information processing underlies some forms of ADHD (Nigg, 2010). However, mind wandering is common, and the larger your working memory capacity, the  more your mind may wander during undemanding tasks—so don’t assume daydreaming is always a problem (Levinson, Smallwood, & Davidson, 2012).

Box 11.1

Challenges in Development: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

In a 4th-grade class, Adam is supposed to be completing a math worksheet. He writes some numbers, erases them, and whispers to Amanda, “Hey, Amanda, can you help me with this?” Amanda quickly tells him what to do for the first problem. Adam then gets out of his seat to sharpen his pencil. He wanders over to the window and looks outside. The teacher asks him to sit down, so he returns to his seat and looks at the worksheet. He whispers to Carmen, “This is boring.” The teacher comes and stands over Adam, who completes the first problem. The teacher goes to help another student. Adam walks over to the bulletin board and softly reads out loud from a poster, “Bullying is never okay.” He walks back to his seat and taps three students on their shoulders as he walks by.

Adam has ADHD, which is the most common neurobehavioral disorder in childhood. About 9% of school-age children have ADHD, and the rate of occurrence in boys is three times the rate in girls (Akinbami, Liu, Pastor, & Reuben, 2011; Getahun et al., 2013). Everyone varies in how easily distractible they are, but students diagnosed with ADHD are at the extreme end of the continuum (Forster & Lavie, 2015).

The primary symptoms of ADHD are hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention. ADHD can be reliably diagnosed as young as age 3, although children on average are diagnosed between 8 and 10 years of age (Getahun et al., 2013). For most children (70%), symptoms last into adulthood, but hyperactivity diminishes across childhood.

What Might Lead to ADHD? Both genes and environment contribute to ADHD. This means ADHD runs in families. Heritability estimates of 70% have been found; yet only small effects (1 to 3%) are linked with genome patterns (Nikolas, Klump, & Burt, 2015). If you recognize this puzzling mismatch as “missing heritability” from  Chapter 4, you get a gold star! This mismatch suggests a gene–environment interaction. That is, ADHD is substantially more likely in children who have both a genetic predisposition and environmental risk factors rather than genetics alone (Pennington et al., 2009). For example, children whose mother smoked during pregnancy and who have genetic propensity are particularly likely to be distractible (Wiebe et al., 2009).

Prenatal experiences linked to ADHD include the mother feeling stress or using tobacco or alcohol during pregnancy; low birth weight is also a predictor (Schneider & Moore, 2000). ADHD is also linked to quality of parenting. Children with a mother who has chronic depression, anxiety, or other emotional disturbance are four times more likely to have ADHD. There is also higher prevalence among children in step, adoptive, foster, or single-parent households; households that move frequently; and negative, conflict-ridden households (Lesesne, Visser, & White, 2003). Children with insecure attachment to their parents are more likely to have ADHD symptoms.

Why Does It Matter if Children Have ADHD? Children with ADHD may have cognitive and behavior problems as early as age 3 (Loe et al., 2008). They are more likely to use drugs, be injured, and as teenagers to be involved in theft, assault, and use of a weapon. In school they are likely to underachieve, as they struggle to comply with classroom demands (Harstad, Levy, & AAP Committee on Substance Abuse, 2014). They are more likely to be retained a grade or drop out of school. Achievement on standardized test scores and school grades improves when children with ADHD receive treatment (Arnold, Hodgkins, Kahle, Madhoo, & Kewley, 2015). Children with ADHD later have higher unemployment and lower earning in young adulthood compared to children without ADHD (Fletcher, 2014).

Practicing Inclusion—How Can You Help Learners with ADHD? Inclusion refers to creating a learning environment that is fully welcoming and accommodates diverse students with special needs. Because ADHD is so prevalent, you will likely practice inclusion with students like Adam in your classroom. First, confirm that the student does not have sleep deprivation, which mimics ADHD(Bonuck, Freeman, Chervin, & Zu, 2012). If sleep deprivation is ruled out, you may be called on to provide evidence as part of a diagnosis. Teachers’ assessments of ADHD are often more valid than parents’ assessments (Mannuzza, Klein, & Moulton, 2002).

If the student has ADHD, research suggests that the following may help:

· (1)

give the student a choice between two acceptable tasks;

· (2)

incorporate the student’s interest into the task;

· (3)

seat the student away from objects or classmates that are distracting;

· (4)

give instructions in short bouts rather than lengthy lists;

· (5)

praise good behavior and success; and

· (6)

make sure the student gets periodic exercise, which helps the brain focus (Harrison, Bunford, Evans, & Owens, 2013).

Don’t try to overcontrol movement if it is not distracting others. Students with ADHD tend to perform better on tasks if they fidget a little, like tapping their foot or rocking their chair (Sarver, Rapport, Kofler, Rasiker, & Friedman, 2015).

Follow the guidelines on classroom implications for information processing in this chapter and  Chapter 7.  Chapter 16 provides other suggestions to help students improve self-control. In addition, you may be involved in a treatment plan that includes parents and a counselor. Treatment usually includes behavior therapy and/or medication. Behavior therapy typically involves applied behavior analysis (see  Chapter 8) as well as therapy aimed at altering thoughts (e.g., “I need to pause before acting”). Medication reduces fidgety and impulsive behavior, but whether it improves achievement in the long term is disputed (e.g., Arnold et al., 2015; Molina et al., 2009). Medication is controversial because all drugs have side effects. These may include growth deficits, muscle tics, sleep problems, lack of emotion, and possibly an increase in suicide (National Institute of Mental Health, 2008). The US Food and Drug Administration requires that warnings be placed on ADHD drugs. In spite of these concerns, drug treatment is common and increasing, even among preschoolers. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends combined medication and behavioral treatment for parent and child (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2011b).

11-3Literacy in Middle Childhood

The heart-warming note in  Figure 11.4 is from 6-year-old Nora, at the end of kindergarten. At this age, Nora knows all her letters and can write some correctly. In this section, we follow Nora’s literacy progress during elementary school as we address how students become literate—but first let’s clarify what literacy is.

Figure 11.4Nora’s Heartwarming Note

Nora’s note reads: “I really, really like you and I hope you have a Happy Mother’s Day.”

David Bergin

Literacy can be defined broadly as any sort of communication or narrowly as communication in printed language. We use the narrower definition in this chapter, focusing on reading and writing in school. However, this isn’t the only kind of literacy. Children can have multiple literacies in contexts other than school. For example, some of your students may be more literate than you at decoding gangsta messages, tweeting, or at texting emoticons and abbreviations, like BBL, or L8R (for “be back later,” and “later”).

Reading skill has five components:

· (1)

phonological awareness,

· (2)

vocabulary,

· (3)

decoding,

· (4)

fluency, and

· (5)

comprehension.

Recall that  phonological awareness is the ability to distinguish phonemes, or the sounds in language.  Vocabulary is the number of words you know. Understanding the meaning of words helps with reading them (Taylor, Duff, Woollams, Monaghan, & Ricketts, 2015).  Decoding is the ability to identify words you have never seen. You decode by applying  phonetic skills, which include recognizing letters, knowing their sounds, and pronouncing a string of letters correctly. In English, irregular words, like  choir or  yacht, do not follow phonetic rules and must simply be memorized.  Fluency is the rapid, automatic decoding of novel words or recognition of memorized words. It is typically measured in words accurately read per minute and abbreviated as  wpm. Comprehension is the ability to understand text. Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. Next we examine how these components, as well as writing, develop with age.

11-3bIndividual Diversity in Literacy

Some students write well and others do not. Some students struggle to read a book that their peers read with ease. Students in the top quarter for reading fluency can read twice as many words per minute as those in the bottom quarter. Are these differences among students stable?  Figure 11.8 shows differences in reading fluency among students from 2nd to 12th grade (Spichtig et al., 2016). This and other studies show that reading ability is remarkably stable (Pfost, Hattie, Dörfler, & Artelt, 2014; Sparks, Patton, & Murdoch, 2014), which means that good readers tend to remain strong and poor readers tend to remain weak in their reading skills. Thus, students in the lowest and highest quartile tend to stay there.

Figure 11.8Average Words per Minute Read across 2nd to 12th Grade

This graph represents number of words per minute that students can read with good comprehension. How does words per minute compare for students in the four quartiles?

Source: Graph from Spichtig et al. (2016).

Despite the stability of literacy skills, struggling readers can improve. In a study in which roughly two-thirds of low-SES children who were struggling in 1st grade remained struggling readers in 4th grade, one-third dramatically improved, becoming average readers by 4th grade (Spira, Bracken, & Fischel, 2005). Which struggling readers improved? Children with better phonological awareness, emergent literacy skills, and classroom behavior were the ones who improved.

What Do Individual Differences in Literacy Predict?

Literacy predicts academic achievement in school subjects. This effect begins with emergent literacy skills in kindergarten or earlier, and continues as conventional literacy develops (Duncan et al., 2007). This is not surprising because literacy helps children learn. Reading allows children to take information from text. Writing improves thinking, helping children transform fuzzy thoughts into clear concepts. Literacy allows children to complete worksheets, take tests, and understand assignments. However, it might surprise you that literacy also predicts achievement in math—as early as 2nd grade, before children are doing math word problems (Lee, Ng, & Ng, 2009; Swanson, Jerman, & Zheng, 2008). Perhaps this is because literacy and math skills share the same causes, such as general intelligence or a stimulating home (Hart, Petrill, Thompson, & Plomin, 2008).

Literacy predicts both emotional and social competence. Children who struggle to read feel angry, ashamed, anxious, and sad by 5th grade (Ackerman, Izard, Kobak, Brown, & Smith, 2007). These emotions reduce enjoyment of school and willingness to take on challenging tasks. This may explain why struggling readers also tend to misbehave more and are liked by fewer classmates over time. Unfortunately, misbehavior undermines their literacy development. In contrast, students who behave well become more literate over time (Miles & Stipek, 2006).

What Predicts Individual Differences in Literacy?

Learning to be literate takes a coming together of several skills. Thus, there can be a variety of reasons why some children become more literate than others. Students who have an unusually hard time learning to read may have dyslexia (see  Box 11.2). Next we discuss characteristics of the child and of the environment that contribute to literacy.

Box 11.2

Challenges in Development: Specific Reading Disability

In 3rd grade, Veronica is in the lowest reading group. Her classmates are reading “chapter books,” but she is still struggling with beginning readers. At the school library, after children select a book, the librarian asks them to read a random page and hold up a finger for each word they can’t read. If five fingers go up, the children are to choose an easier book. In 5th grade, Veronica is still using the five-finger method, but her classmates no longer need to. Veronica cannot read the social studies textbook, so an aide reads it to her. Her parents are both college educated and perplexed by the problem. In desperation, her mother buys a phonics program and drills Veronica in sounding out words. It works. In 10th grade, Veronica is in an Honors English class, but she still avoids reading when possible.

Veronica is not unusual. As many as 40% of children have reading problems, which run in families (Snowling & Melby-Lervåg, 2016). Reading problems can result from low IQ, neurological problems, low motivation, poor vocabulary, or inadequate instruction in phonics (Ferrer, Shaywitz, Holahan, Marchione, & Shaywitz, 2010). When these problems are ruled out, but a child still has difficulty learning to read, the child has  specific reading disability , commonly called  dyslexia, or reading disorder. About 5 to 15% of children have dyslexia. Veronica was never referred for reading intervention, although she needed it.

What Is Specific Reading Disability? It is the most common learning disability. It is primarily caused by poor oral language abilities, specifically poor vocabulary and phonological awareness (Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervåg, & Snowling, 2015; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). Students with dyslexia have difficulty linking letters with sounds, blending sounds together, or judging whether two words rhyme. These phonological problems result in labored decoding, poor word recognition, and weak spelling.

There is debate over the identification of dyslexia, just as there is with other learning disabilities. Learning disability is sometimes defined by an IQ-achievement discrepancy, which means that achievement that is lower than what you would expect based on a child’s measured intelligence (discussed in more detail in  Chapter 15). Some educators object to a discrepancy definition of dyslexia for three reasons:

1. Low-IQ or ELL students, and those who lack opportunity to learn, cannot qualify for intervention.

2. It suggests that either you have dyslexia or you do not, yet in reality difficulties fall along a continuum. The cutoffs for defining dyslexia are arbitrary (Snowling & Melby-Lervåg, 2016).

3. It results in diagnoses too late. An alternative way to identify dyslexia is to use test scores for reading or phonological awareness that are in the bottom 10th to 25th percentile.

Although dyslexic children have normal intelligence, they may have some information-processing problems, particularly slow processing speed, poor executive functions, and limited working memory (Im-Bolter et al., 2006; Sexton, Gelhorn, Bell, & Classi, 2012; Swanson & Jerman, 2006). Scientists believe this may explain why dyslexia co-occurs with other problems such as math disabilities, ADHD, and delayed language, each of which may result from underlying information-processing problems (Bishop & Snowling, 2004; Sexton, Gelhorn, Bell, & Classi, 2012). This means that your students with dyslexia may learn concepts adequately but have difficulty with tasks that ask them to rapidly process multiple pieces of information at the same time.

Dyslexia and the Brain Some differences in the brains of dyslexic and nondyslexic children have been found. Infants who later have dyslexia show a very early speech-processing deficit and abnormal brain functioning (van Zuijen, Plakas, Maassen, Maurits, & van der Leij, 2013). However, recall that the brain is modified by experience. After many hours of intervention, the brains of dyslexic children more closely resemble those of good readers (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2005).

What Can Be Done about Dyslexia? Intervention for dyslexia is the same high-quality reading instruction we hope all students get, but more of it. Interventions focus on letter knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, and word-recognition strategies. Word-recognition strategies include simply memorizing common words and figuring out a new word by analogy ( like is similar to  bike) or by taking off suffixes (change  looked to  look). Interventions also focus on guided oral reading with feedback. Experiments show that these interventions help dyslexic students become more fluent readers. Unfortunately, not all students readily respond to intervention. Early childhood interventions for children at family risk of dyslexia have not shown strong results (Snowling & Melby- Lervåg, 2016). Struggling readers who become more fluent are likely to have received better instruction, be of higher SES, and come from literate homes, like Veronica (Shaywitz, Mody, & Shaywitz, 2006). In addition to intervention, you can help dyslexic students by accommodating them in three ways:

· (1)

Provide extra time for tasks that involve reading;

· (2)

use recorded books; and

· (3)

allow oral test-taking (Shaywitz, Morris, & Shaywitz, 2008).

Professional rugby player Kenny Logan said that as a young adult he could not read or write. “If there was ever a team meeting involving reading, I would turn up 15 minutes late and hide in the toilets…. I wasn’t brave enough to tell anyone my secret” (Rooke, 2016). Logan said, “School was awful. For years I would have this horrible stomach ache, a dull pain inside me…. I looked confident on the outside and was terrified on the inside. Words and letters confused me from the very beginning of primary school to the end of high school. I saw the other children progress while I was left drowning” (p. 119). Later, his future wife recognized his disability and sought help for him. As a teacher, you can be the one who recognizes and helps students with specific reading disability.

Physical Factors

Differences in brain structure are linked to literacy. For example, the neural system that connects speech to print is different for students with dyslexia. These brain differences may be genetic and may explain why reading ability has a genetic component (Logan et al., 2013). Genes may influence literacy through their effect on general cognitive abilities like processing speed, working memory, and attention control. Or genes may influence literacy through how much children are read to, which is partly heritable and partly shared environment (Oliver, Dale, & Plomin, 2005). How do children inherit being read to? A genetic predisposition may lead some toddlers to respond more to books and show more interest, so their parents read more to them.

Brain differences may also be due to experience. Experience alters brain circuitry. Intense instruction alters the brains of dyslexic children as they become more fluent readers. In addition, the areas of the brain that process sound are altered by music lessons, by hearing different languages like Mandarin versus English, and by phonetic instruction (Kraus & Banai, 2007). This is important because children whose brains are slow to process sound have difficulty learning to read.

Cognitive Factors

Reading and writing require general cognitive abilities, like working memory, knowledge, reasoning, and processing speed. Students with good cognitive abilities become fluent readers earlier and with more ease. However, literacy also requires language-specific cognitive abilities, like phonological awareness, print knowledge, vocabulary, and decoding ability.

Verbal Ability

Children with good verbal ability learn to read more easily than their peers. Good verbal ability includes a large vocabulary, ability to retell a story coherently, letter-sound knowledge, and phonological and morphological awareness. These abilities help children become better readers and spellers (e.g., Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Caravolas, Lervåg, Mousikou, et al., 2012; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012; Melby-Lervåg et al., 2012; Quinn et al., 2015). Children with poor vocabulary and poor phonological and morphological knowledge tend to have reading problems.

Emotional Factors

Children with secure attachment tend to develop better literacy skills and attitudes toward reading than do insecure children. Secure children have pleasant encounters with print because their parents are sensitive, which makes them better literacy coaches (Clingenpeel & Pianta, 2007). Pleasant interaction during parent–child storybook reading predicts reading fluency and positive attitudes as children begin to read on their own (Bergin, 2001). In contrast, negative emotions, like anger or anxiety, interfere with the information processing needed for reading and writing. This may occur when parents aggressively command, “Sound it out!” as their children are learning to read.

Social Factors

Literacy is social; it is acquired through social interaction and is used to connect with others. Preschoolers who are socially skilled and cooperative tend to have stronger language and literacy development than children who are not (Arnold, Kupersmidt, Voegler-Lee, & Marshall, 2012).

Play can be beneficial because it can provide practice and authentic reasons to read or write, like writing a sign while playing shopkeeper. The term  authentic literacy activities refers to reading for information one wants or writing to inform a reader (Duke, Purcell-Gates, Hall, & Tower, 2006). Nonauthentic literacy tasks are done for the purpose of learning to read or write, or just to complete an assignment. Besides play, authentic tasks may include text-messaging friends and reading the newspaper sports page to see how your team did.

11-3cGroup Diversity in Literacy

On average, students’ literacy varies by gender, class, and ethnicity. Let’s look at these differences next.

Gender

Girls tend to have greater literacy than boys. This gender difference begins in preschool, when girls have slightly higher emergent literacy abilities, and continues into high school. Gender differences are international; 4th-grade girls outperform boys in 35 countries (Baer, Baldi, Ayotte, & Green, 2007). However, in the United States, by high school the difference between boys’ and girls’ reading ability is small, although writing differences get larger. Research consistently shows that girls like reading more than boys (McKenna, Conradi, Lawrence, Jang, & Meyer, 2012).

Socioeconomic Status

Think about This

Do SES-related differences in verbal ability and literacy fit the “family investment” or “family stress” model of poverty you read about in  Chapter 1? How do they fit the bioecological model?

Low-SES students tend to have lower literacy than other students. Parents’ education, a key component of SES, is particularly important. Parents with more years of education have children with better reading ability. Even among low-income children, those whose mothers have more education tend to have better literacy skills (Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2003). This also pertains to Internet literacy. In one study, higher-SES students had better reading comprehension on Internet-based text (effect size 5 1.5, which is a very large effect), and they also had a large advantage on regular text (effect size 5 1.9) (Leu et al., 2015).

Ethnicity

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), White and Asian American students have consistently higher reading scores than Black or Latino students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. In  Chapter 1, and later in  Chapter 15, we discuss possible causes of this achievement gap. In addition, ethnic differences may be due to print exposure at home. White children (64%) are more likely to be read to daily than Black (48%) or Latino (42%) children (Raikes et al., 2006).

Ethnic differences may also be due to language mismatch. For example, students who speak African American English (AAE) may hear different letter–sound pairs than those in Standard English (SE). To understand this, imagine that a student is reading the sentence, “Their hands are cold.” In AAE this could sound like “Deir han’ a’ co’.” The student has to learn that the letters  th can spell the sound for  d as in  their. The student also has to learn to spell the word  hand with a  d, even though there is no spoken sound for the  d in the student’s speech (Charity, Scarborough, & Griffin, 2004). Learning letter–sound pairs is simpler for SE-using students or for AAE-using students who can readily code switch to SE.

Another aspect of language mismatch is that some languages, like AAE and Asian languages, do not indicate time with verb tense, like Standard English does. For example, an AAE speaker might say, “I be going to school and seen Devin.” It is not clear whether this sentence means, in SE, “I went to school and saw Devin” or “I was going to school and saw Devin” or “I go to school everyday and see Devin.” Some students need to be taught verb conjugation to master SE. For example, Hong is a US-born 9th-grader with Vietnamese parents who lives in a neighborhood where Vietnamese and AAE are spoken:

Hong cannot speak or write fluently in Standard English. She has low achievement but gets passing grades on papers because she has friends edit them. When it becomes clear she will not pass the high school exit exam, she is referred to a language intervention teacher. Ms. Cole identifies a key problem: Hong does not distinguish different forms of verbs, like  walk, walks, walked, and walking. Ms. Cole helps Hong learn to conjugate verbs by asking Hong to hold up a card with the correct ending  (ed, ing, s) as Ms. Cole says a variety of verbs.

After just four training sessions, Hong conjugates verbs correctly in both her speech and her writing. Although all students experience some language mismatch between spoken English and written, formal English, students whose spoken language is a greater mismatch may have more difficulty with school literacy.

Ethnic differences may also be due to cultural mismatch. One aspect of cultural mismatch, introduced in  Chapter 1, is different notions of narrative structure and what is a good story. African American children may write stories that appear less coherent in other cultures but that include multiple narratives, vivid imagery, complexity, and rhythmic language, making them equally competent, although with a different style (Gardner-Neblett, Pungello, & Iruka, 2012).

In addition, students who struggle with school literacy can be highly literate in out-of-school peer culture, such as in graffiti and tagging. For example, girls of color who were in gangs in Salt Lake City wrote notes that followed elaborate rules, such as crossing out the letter  O because a rival gang’s name began with  O (see  Figure 11.9). Some of these girls were indifferent to in-school writing but were meticulous in their note writing to friends (Moje, 2000). Other youth cross cultural borders, becoming skilled in both in-school and out-of-school literacy. For example, Maria, a Mexican American, was a tagger (i.e., graffiti writer) and was in AP classes; she said that  The Old Man and the Sea was a favorite book (MacGillivray & Curwen, 2007). The challenge for teachers is to channel the abilities of these talented youth.

Figure 11.9Writing Sample from a Gang Member

Adolescents can have well-developed out-of-school literacies.  Source: Moje (2000).

David Bergin

11-3dClassroom Implications of Literacy Development

You learned earlier that literacy affects achievement in other subjects. Because of this, literacy skills are emphasized in the early grades in the United States. However, some schools are more successful in promoting literacy than others (see  Figure 11.10). What makes them more effective? The same general practices you’ve learned in this textbook—more time on task, positive teacher–student relationships, opportunity to engage in rich discussions rather than working alone, deliberate practice, and so forth.

Figure 11.10Schools Make a Difference in Literacy Development

This chart shows two groups of students from the same Head Start preschool program. Those who went on to school district A developed better reading ability in 1st grade than students who went on to school district B. District A students were at grade level, and a whole standard deviation above their peers in district B.

Source: Adapted from Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998).

Typically, in preschool through 2nd grade, schools emphasize phonological awareness, decoding, and beginning writing, all of which were discussed in  Chapter 7. From 3rd grade through high school, the emphasis shifts to fluency, comprehension, and advanced writing. Let’s look at how to promote each of these aspects of literacy.

Promote Fluency

Even if students can decode words, they may not read fluently. You help your students become fluent readers when you:

1. Provide guided oral reading. Providing immediate feedback as students read out loud improves literacy at all ages (Rasinski et al., 2005). It is ideally done one-on-one. To make this practical, some schools have senior citizens tutor struggling readers.

2. Provide frequent practice reading. You can provide regular time in the school day for reading, or ask students to read when they finish assignments early, or ask students to read at home each day.

Some educators advocate independent silent reading, sometimes known as SSR (sustained silent reading) or DEAR (drop everything and read). However, just having students read more does not necessarily lead to better reading because students may not be comprehending (Kim, 2007). A major shortcoming of independent silent reading is that there is no feedback.

Promote Comprehension

The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. Good vocabulary is critical to comprehension ( Photo 11.4). When students know the words they read, they comprehend more. In addition,  decoding and knowing the relevant phonemes are foundational to reading comprehension. Thus, you promote your students’ comprehension when you teach decoding skills and vocabulary (see  Chapter 7). In addition, you promote your students’ comprehension when you enact the following:

1. Directly teach comprehension strategies (Edmonds et al., 2009), including overviewing before reading, encouraging students to make predictions, asking what the author is trying to communicate and why, asking what the more important ideas are, stopping periodically to clear up confusion (e.g., by going backward in the reading), summarizing, and applying the KWL approach (described earlier in this chapter). Students who summarize are better at judging whether they comprehend the text and are ready for a test (Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007).

2. Discuss texts. Students comprehend more and develop better reasoning ability when they critique and question texts in group discussion (Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009). However, you need to facilitate the discussion for it to be productive; mere student talk doesn’t necessarily lead to deep thinking.

Photo 11.4

When you build your students’ vocabulary, you promote both their verbal ability and literacy.

Marmaduke St. John/Alamy Limited

Some evidence suggests that comprehension strategies are best taught embedded in content areas such as science and social studies (Kamil et al., 2008). For example, students who study history using multiple, conflicting texts, and who are taught to think about who, why, and when their texts were written, learn more content and learn to think more like historians (Nokes, Dole, & Hacker, 2007). That is, these  guidelines are not just for language arts teachers.

Promote Writing Skills

To become competent writers, students need many of the skills discussed earlier—good verbal ability, phonological awareness, spelling ability, adequate vocabulary, and exposure to print. Thus, as you follow the preceding guidelines, you will help your students become better writers. However, you also need to provide writing instruction. You help your students become better writers when you use these methods:

1. Provide handwriting instruction. Teaching handwriting improves the quality, length, and fluency of students’ written work (Santangelo & Graham, 2015). Less legible written work gets considerably lower scores (Graham, Harris, & Hebert, 2011). Using word-processing software also tends to improve writing quality (Graham, Harris, & Santangelo, 2015).

2. Provide instruction in writing strategies, like how to generate and organize ideas before starting a draft and how to provide supporting arguments for a persuasive essay. An evidence-based technique is to have students revise a draft and add at least three new ideas, then address both sides of the argument with three or more reasons to support their own side and at least two reasons from the opposing side (Graham et al., 2015).

3. Teach specific steps of writing; give feedback; and guide revision. Weak writers benefit from instruction in step-by-step writing. However, writers who are already capable of monitoring their own writing process may not (Pritchard & Honeycutt, 2006).

4. Provide opportunity to write, especially using authentic activities. For example, after a lesson on volcanoes, 3rd-graders had many questions about where lava comes from and how hot it is, so their teacher assigned small groups to report the answers in writing to the class. In another class, students wrote about pond life in a brochure to be used at a nature center. Students given such authentic literacy assignments develop better writing skills (Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Martineau, 2007). Merely increasing time writing tends to improve writing skill (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, & Harris, 2012).

Even with good instruction, some students will struggle. Seek the help of language intervention specialists for such students. There are effective literacy interventions for struggling students from 1st to 12th grade (Connor et al., 2013). Many struggling students are crossing cultural borders and are English language students. Let’s take a look at classroom implications for these students next.

Bridge Cultural Borders

One way to bridge cultural borders is to use multicultural literature. For example, one Black 5th-grade boy tried to avoid literacy assignments until he discovered the biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, an African American voting advocate. Suddenly he couldn’t read enough African American biographies (Smith, 1995). A Chinese American high school student wrote that reading  The Joy Luck Club made her proud of her culture (Athanases, 1998). At the same time, students should be encouraged to identify with people of other genders, ethnicities, and times. For example, a White adolescent read  House of Dies Drear and said that when a runaway slave named Thomas dropped his light in a cave, she imagined that she was with him. Literature helps students understand others who are different (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Thus, students should not only be exposed to diverse literature, but also to literature that is personally relevant.

Teachers may also bridge cultural borders by engaging students’ ethnic culture during instruction. For example, Ms. Lee, a teacher, used signifying to teach literary analysis to African American students.  Signifying is verbal teasing that uses double meaning and irony, with clever twists and surprises (Smitherman, 2000). For example, a pregnant woman told her sister, “Yes, I guess I am putting on a little weight.” In response, the sister signified on her: “Now look here, girl, we both standing here soaking wet and you still trying to tell me it ain’t raining” (Gates, 1988, p. 83). Signifying is evident in rap and hip-hop music. Signifying is also part of Twitter literacy, where tweets can mark Black identity. For example, there are groups that signify on specific Black artists, like this tweet signifyin’ on the R&B singer and rapper Drake:

@charles_star: I got ride like a bicycle. Huffy. Am I the worlds worst rapper? Puffy. #fakedrakelyrics (Florini, 2014, p. 227)

Signifying is interpreted figuratively, not literally. Ms. Lee asked students to interpret samples of signifying and defend their interpretation. She then asked them to do the same with a short story and two novels set in a Black community that used African American English ( Their Eyes Were Watching God and  The Color Purple). The students learned about irony and figurative language. They performed better on a literary test than students from the same school who had traditional instruction (Lee, 1995).

When bridging cultural borders, it is important to avoid a deficit view that emphasizes the language and literacy abilities that students lack; instead, emphasize the strengths and background knowledge they bring from their heritage culture. Depending on their backgrounds, students may have extensive knowledge of topics such as agriculture, building trades, engine repair, language dialects, and music. Draw on students’ funds of knowledge in ways that attract their interest and highlight areas of competence (Rios-Aguilar, Kiyama, Gravitt, & Moll, 2011).

Support Biliterate Students

For some students, crossing cultural borders involves learning to use a completely different language. Students who speak English fluently as well as another language, like Vietnamese or Arabic, often have better literacy skills than monolingual students. Thus, being bilingual is not an impediment to becoming literate. Immigrant kindergartners who are not yet bilingual, but who are ELL, may struggle initially, but most will successfully learn to read in English by 4th grade (Lesaux, Lipka, & Siegel, 2006). Indeed, many immigrant students have higher reading and math achievement than native-born students—particularly if they attend schools with high-achieving peers (Han, 2008). What can you do to help your ELL students become biliterate? Research suggests doing the following:

1. Help ELL students develop literacy in their heritage language. The importance of some skills—phonological awareness, print concepts, and composition—is similar across languages that use alphabets (Caravolas, Lervåg, Defior, et al., 2013; Fitzgerald, 2006). Note that phonological awareness may be less important for students whose language is Spanish because Spanish sounds and letters consistently match (Goldenberg et al., 2014). Good literacy skills in a first language help students acquire a second language and achieve in school (Guglielmi, 2008; Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, Humbach, & Javorsky, 2008).

2. When possible, teach ELL students to read and write in a bilingual setting (Farver, Lonigan, & Eppe, 2009). Students can simultaneously learn both literacies—it does not necessarily confuse them. However, do not wait for them to become literate in their heritage language. The US Department of Education recommends that kindergarten through 5th-grade ELL students be taught to read English from their first day of school, regardless of whether they are also being taught to read in their native language.

After ELL students have acquired basic literacy skills in the primary grades, they may still struggle with advanced literacy in the upper grades (Merino & Hammond, 2002).  Advanced literacy includes being able to summarize texts, evaluate arguments, and write a reasoned essay. It is used in tasks like science lab reports or literary analysis. For example, one college-bound Spanish-speaking student wrote a science lab report that began, “The diffusivity of different solvents at different temperatures are determine by using the SDT experiment” (Schleppegrell, 2002). She was a good science student who spoke English well, but she was still struggling with advanced writing. Advanced literacy is related to academic language, discussed earlier. To help ELL students develop advanced literacy, follow these guidelines:

1. Recognize that capable ELL students who understand everyday use of Standard English will sometimes falter with advanced school-related reading and writing and academic language. Their competence with day-to-day conversation does not necessarily mean that they have the same level of competence with academic language.

2. Provide explicit instruction in grammar and the specialized writing used in your class. Provide needed corrective feedback.

3. Require ELL students to write as much as other students. Even if they understand the topic, ELL students may write as little as possible in order to avoid getting points deducted for poor writing. Unfortunately, this hampers their ability to become more literate. Instead, encourage longer writing, but with sufficient scaffolding to be successful.

All of these guidelines for teaching ELL students may apply to other students who are at risk for low achievement in school. Thus, the lessons in this chapter are not just for primary teachers, nor are they just for English teachers.

Think about This

Imagine that you teach science to an ELL student who writes a grammatically incorrect report. Should you deduct points for low-quality writing even if the student does the experiment correctly and understands the concepts? What would be your best solution for assigning grades in this situation?

When these guidelines are combined into a comprehensive program across the school, achievement in all subjects can rise. For example, in one California high school, all teachers in the school (i.e., not just English teachers) work to develop a schoolwide academic language of words such as  discuss, evaluate, excerpt, and  analyze. Every class in the school engages in independent reading when students finish their work early. The entire faculty requires every student to answer questions in full sentences. Although these are only some approaches to intervention, this school district has won awards for narrowing the achievement gap for minority, ELL, and low-SES students.  Box 11.3 summarizes how you might apply different theories to literacy development and instruction. Let’s look further into achievement next.

Box 11.3

Theories & Theorists: Putting the Theories to Work: The Case of Literacy

Although basic language skills are typically mastered early, universally, and without formal instruction, literacy must be formally taught. But how? This is an important question because NAEP results suggest that only one-third of 8th-graders comprehend text proficiently and only one-fourth of 12th-graders write at or above the proficient level (NCES, 2010). How should you teach literacy?

Implications for Teachers from Different Theories As with math ( Chapter 7), your view of how literacy should be taught will vary depending on your theory about how students develop. Let’s look at the implications for literacy from some major theories (key concepts from past chapters are italicized).

Behaviorism and Literacy Behaviorists believe that learning (or conditioning) results from a pairing of behavior and its consequence. As a behaviorist teacher, you would emphasize  direct instruction, teaching each skill explicitly, with no reliance on discovery learning. You would set goals for your students, watch their  observable behaviors (such as using correct punctuation in writing), and then  reinforce behavior toward the goals. You would use much  drill and practice, giving frequent and immediate  feedback.

As a behaviorist teacher you would teach skills in a  hierarchical sequence. Students would first master  prerequisite low-level skills and then move to more complex, advanced skills. For example, you would first teach young children letter names and sounds. Once children mastered these basic skills, they would progress to blending the sounds to read and spell small words, and later move on to reading and writing sentences. Similarly, you would intervene with struggling adolescent readers by building basic skills first.

Behaviorists favor a phonics approach to literacy instruction. The  phonics approach involves directly teaching students phonological awareness, pairing sounds with spelling, blending sounds together to decode words, and breaking words apart to spell them. Phonics instruction can include a variety of techniques such as learning nursery rhymes, playing games, and using worksheets.

Research supports the behaviorist approach. Students with good phonological awareness and decoding skills become better at reading and writing than those with weak basic skills (Christopher et al., 2015; Graham, 2000; Spichtig et al., 2016). Research also shows that direct instruction may be the most effective approach for teaching decoding, vocabulary, reading comprehension strategies, writing strategies, and sentence construction (Graham & Perin, 2007). However, many educators do not like the behaviorist approach because it treats students as passive. They prefer a constructivist view—either Piagetian or Vygotskyan, or a combination of the two.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development and Literacy In contrast to behaviorists, Piaget believed children are active thinkers who  construct their own knowledge. Young children  assimilate new experience with what they already know, creating unique language such as invented spellings (e.g.,  lik for  like) and grammar (e.g.,  footses instead of  feet). As a Piagetian teacher, you would teach literacy by providing children with a print-rich environment. You might encourage children to initiate their own literacy activities, such as writing a note to Daddy or a letter to the editor. You might help children read a new word by asking them to use what they already know to figure it out, rather than telling them what it is. With young children, you would also use  hands-on activities with concrete objects that allow them to reinvent literacy for themselves, rather than by directly teaching basic skills. For example, you could encourage young children to play with magnetic letters, crayons, paper, and books. However, research challenges the effectiveness of  unguided hands-on play with concrete objects for literacy learning. Play with concrete objects can cause children to focus more on the object than on what it stands for (Uttal, Liu, & DeLoache, 2006).

Children cannot by themselves reinvent the print system. Some children will learn to read without formal schooling, but they are not reinventing literacy. Instead, they are internalizing the literacy experiences they have had during social interaction. This is a key point of difference between Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s constructivism. Sociocultural constructivists give greater emphasis to social interaction and cultural transmission.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and Literacy Socioculturalists believe that literacy is learned through  social interaction in  culturally organized activities. Print is a  cultural tool. To become literate, students’ skills must move from interpsychological (between people) to intrapsychological (within the person). This happens through  apprenticeship. In an apprenticeship, the expert, or teacher,  scaffolds the child’s literacy by gradually giving more responsibility to the child. The expert first performs the cognitive work, and the child participates as a spectator. As the lessons progress, the child becomes more involved in the cognitive work and eventually takes over while the expert becomes the supportive spectator. The degree of scaffolding depends on the child’s  zone of proximal development. Effective teachers provide different types of instruction to the same students across the school year as the zone of proximal development shifts (Connor et al., 2009).

Scaffolding can be done between students during  cooperative learning or  groupwork. For example, students can do paired reading, edit one another’s writing, memorize vocabulary together, or discuss the meaning of texts.  Reciprocal teaching is effective for developing comprehension strategies. Let’s take a look at how Ms. Cole scaffolds struggling high school students’ writing ability:

First, we outline in detail. My students aren’t yet skilled enough to think about  what to write as well as  how to write, so the  what has to be completely thought out before the first draft is attempted. Second, we write one paragraph at a time. I remind students what the basic components of each paragraph should be. For example, an introduction paragraph should begin with a catchy opening followed by the name of the author, title of the work, and a short plot synopsis. The paragraph should be finished with a thesis sentence that lists the main points of the essay in the correct order. This approach may seem overly prescriptive, but my students learn to write. Third, we do peer editing, also one paragraph at a time, as I walk them through it. Two peers go through the same paragraph—the first student for content, and the second, for grammar errors. We pass the papers on for the next paragraph; eventually students’ papers are read by 10 different editors. No student is “stuck” with a weak editor for more than one paragraph, and students see 10 different samples of writing. This is eye-opening for the struggling writer. Then students go on to the next draft. We peer edit again to really polish the piece. I take serious time guiding students through peer editing because it has great benefits, but if not  strictly guided, it does not.

Research supports the effectiveness of providing models of writing and having students work together to plan, edit, and revise their writing—two tenets of sociocultural theory used by Ms. Cole (Graham & Perin, 2007).

The Information-Processing Model and Literacy The information-processing model is concerned with how information is processed, regardless of whether the information was obtained through direct instruction, constructive thinking, or social interaction. Students tend to be better readers and writers if they have these information-processing skills (Carretti, Borella, Cornoldi, & De Beni, 2009; Fenesi, Sana, Kim, & Shore, 2015):

· Faster  processing speed, particularly speed in naming letters and identifying words.

· Greater  working memory. This helps students juggle all the tasks involved in reading or writing, and also helps them learn new vocabulary as they read.

· Greater  executive functions, or the ability to suppress irrelevant information and control attention, from kindergarteners to older students. This helps writers keep the argument in mind while searching for appropriate words, spelling correctly, monitoring grammatical rules, and keeping out intrusive thoughts (e.g., “What’s for lunch?”).

· Greater  metacognition, or the ability to monitor their reading or writing process as they are doing it. This helps students pause for reflection and self-monitor.

· Greater  long-term memory, or prior knowledge. Students who know more in general, and more vocabulary in particular, comprehend more of what they read.

Students also tend to be better readers and writers if they have strategies for  memorizing and  problem solving, because literacy requires strategy use, like memorizing vocabulary words or figuring out how to spell a word. Just as with math,  retrieval is the most efficient strategy.

There are three key implications from the information-processing model for your role as a teacher. First, help students acquire greater knowledge—both literacy-specific knowledge such as letter–sound pairs and vocabulary, as well as general knowledge. Students comprehend what they read, and they write better when they know more about the topic (Graham & Perin, 2007; McCutchen, 2006). Second, help students make basic literacy skills, such as decoding, so automatic that they do not tax working memory. When struggling readers use all their working memory to decode words, they cannot comprehend what they are reading. Writing especially taxes working memory. Third, help students acquire efficient strategies for literacy tasks, from decoding  bat to writing a scientific abstract. One way to help students shift from less-efficient to more-efficient strategies is to have students  explain their strategy, which facilitates metacognition. Strategies can also be taught through modeling, direct instruction,  spaced practice, and  frequent testing with  feedback.

Comparing the Theories As you learned in  Chapter 1, the different theories of child development are not so much contradictory as they are unrelated because they explain different pieces of development. But sometimes they conflict. Historically, two approaches to literacy instruction have been at odds. Behaviorists favor a phonics approach. Constructivists favor a whole-language approach—in which reading and writing for meaning are emphasized and drilling students in mechanics, such as phonics and grammar, is de-emphasized. Phonics skills are taught individually as needed, not to the group. Constructivists encourage writing for authentic reasons and ignore invented spelling and nonstandard punctuation in order to focus on the child’s meaning.

Which approach is best? Many studies converge on the notion that teaching phonics is critically important, particularly for low-SES students and secondary students who are struggling readers (McArthur et al., 2012; National Reading Panel, 2000; Suggate, 2010). Students with weak emergent literacy or phonological skills may need more phonics instruction than average readers (Connor et al., 2009). Students with strong emergent literacy skills can succeed with either a whole-language or a phonics approach (Xue & Meisels, 2004).

Although phonetic skills are necessary, they are not sufficient for a child to become a fluent, skilled reader. Whole-language techniques such as focusing on meaning and using authentic literacy tasks are important. Ideally, teachers would use a combination of approaches (Connor et al., 2009; Steubing, Barth, Cirino, Francis, & Fletcher, 2008).

Each theory is true to some extent and can be applied in your classroom. For example, you can teach comprehension strategies effectively through direct instruction (behaviorism), modeling of more skilled others (social cognitive theory), and scaffolding in the child’s zone of proximal development, with guided practice (sociocultural constructivism). Effective instruction draws on the best of each theory.

11-4Achievement

An experiment in New York City paid 4th and 7th graders for high test scores on a set of 10 standardized tests. Students were excited about the prospect of earning money for test scores, but compared to a control group that was not offered money, the rewarded students did not earn higher test scores. When interviewed about what they could do to earn more money on the next test, every student had trouble answering the question. They tended to refer to test-taking strategies rather than ways to improve their learning and understanding. For example, they said they would read the test questions more carefully and not race through the test. “Not a single student mentioned reading the textbook, studying harder, completing their homework, or asking teachers or other adults about confusing topics” (Fryer, 2010, p. 33).

Students often lack a clear understanding of what behaviors result in learning, good grades, and high test scores. How would you coach these students toward greater academic achievement? First let’s clarify what is academic achievement.

Think about This

What is the difference between grades and standardized test scores, which are modestly correlated? Do they measure the same thing? How might intelligence affect the correlation?

Academic achievement is usually measured in one of two ways:

· (1)

Teacher-assigned grades or grade point average (GPA). Grades are subjective and can vary by teacher, school, and district. That is, an A might be much easier to earn from one teacher than from another, or in one school than in another.

· (2)

Standardized test scores.

Tests are  standardized when everyone has the same testing materials, time, instructions, and scoring standards. Standardized tests allow comparison of students’ knowledge across teachers, schools, and districts. They include tests such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT), Stanford Achievement Test (SAT10—not to be confused with the SAT college entrance exam), and state proficiency tests. College entrance exams like the ACT and SAT are also standardized tests.

Teachers constantly base instructional decisions—such as what content to cover, and the type and difficulty level of learning activities—on their own assessment of student achievement rather than on students’ performance on standardized tests. How accurate are teacher assessments? A meta-analysis of many studies found that the average correlation between teacher assessment and standardized test scores was 0.63 (Südkamp, Kaiser, & Möller, 2012). This means that they overlap, but not completely; they provide similar but not identical measures of performance.

Standardized tests are typically customized for each grade, so they are not designed to reveal age trends. However,  grades tend to decline from 6th to 12th grade. The decline is particularly noticeable at major transitions, like the transition from elementary school to junior high and from junior high to senior high (Eccles et al., 1993; Ryan, 2001). This may be partly due to students’ perceptions that the teachers in their new school do not care about them in comparison to teachers at the previous school, especially among minority students. The decline may also be partly due to increasing demands on personal responsibility and organization—doing your homework on your own, showing up for class, keeping track of when homework is due, and completing assignments on time (Gregory, 1995).

11-4aIndividual Diversity in Achievement

Students of the same age vary in their academic achievement. This variation is relatively stable and predicts later outcomes, like dropping out of school.

Stability of Individual Differences in Achievement

Can you remember who were the highest or lowest achievers in your 1st-grade class? If you stayed in the same school district, you probably saw these same peers maintain their academic status through high school. Achievement rank tends to be fairly stable across childhood, whether measured by standardized tests or by GPA (e.g., Ladd & Dinella, 2009; Mok, McInerney, Zhu, & Or, 2015). That is, children who are high achievers at one age tend to be high achievers at another age. However, this does not mean that children never change. Even though achievement is quite stable, it does change for some students.

What Do Individual Differences in Achievement Predict?

To the extent that grades and test scores reflect meaningful knowledge, high academic achievement is its own reward. Greater knowledge helps children be more informed citizens and better problem solvers. High achievement also opens doors of opportunity for a college education, which becomes an avenue for high-status employment that requires advanced training. Research shows that high achievers tend to have greater career success and higher income than lower achievers (Lubinski, Benbow, & Kell, 2014; Ritchie & Bates, 2013).

You may be interested to know that achievement in  college also predicts career success. College grades have a small to moderate relationship with adult salary, promotions, job performance, and success in graduate school, with grades in one’s major having the greatest predictive power (Roth, BeVier, Switzer, & Schippmann, 1996).

In contrast,  low achievement, as early as elementary school, is associated with dropping out of school, particularly when low achievement is combined with other factors such as low classroom engagement and low parental expectations. Retention in grade is one of the consequences of low achievement. Retention is also associated with later dropping out, even when it occurs in first grade (Stearns, Moller, Blau, & Potochnick, 2007). Dropping out, in turn, is associated with lower wages, higher rates of welfare dependency, worse health, and increased criminality (Freeman & Simonsen, 2015; Lansford, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 2016).

What Predicts Individual Differences in Achievement?

A variety of factors contribute to children’s achievement in school—the child, family, culture, and school. You have read about several factors in earlier chapters and will read about more in each of the subsequent chapters. For example, child factors that contribute to higher achievement include emotional and social competence. Child behaviors that contribute to academic failure include poor behavior at school, low attendance, low homework completion, flunking a grade, not expecting to complete high school, and academic disengagement (Lucio, Hunt, & Bornovalova, 2012).

Several family characteristics are associated with academic achievement. You have already seen that maternal depression, parental substance use, family stress, and family investment are linked to children’s achievement. So are frequent family moves that involve changing schools, which also predict low self-control and greater inattention and impulsivity (Friedman-Krauss & Raver, 2015; Ziol-Guest & McKenna, 2014). In  Chapter 1, you learned that accumulation of risk factors predicts lower achievement. In  Chapter 4, you learned that secure attachment between parent and child predicts higher achievement. In  Chapter 8, you learned that an authoritative parenting style and use of induction during discipline predict higher achievement. Other factors that affect academic achievement, such as divorce, social skills, and motivation, are also discussed in this book. Thus, you will keep revisiting the issue of child and family characteristics linked to achievement throughout this text.

11-4bClassroom Implications of Research on Achievement

Research has identified many school factors that affect achievement. Seven factors are discussed next: testing, study skills, time-on-task, homework, retention in grade, class size, and high-stakes tests.

Testing

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, students remember content better when they have been tested on it, although students tend to mistakenly believe that restudying is more effective than testing. You can enhance your students’ learning by testing or quizzing frequently (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014). The quizzes need not be graded, but students must commit to an answer; otherwise, when they hear the answer, they are likely to think that they already knew it. You could use paper-and-pencil quizzes, questions that you project on a screen, or electronic clickers. You can use similar, but not identical, test items on several different days (spaced practice). Using different wording prevents students from just memorizing the answer, rather than understanding the concept, and helps them transfer their understanding to different situations, which improves later performance (Glass & Sinha, 2013). Testing improves performance for students of all ages (Lipowski, Pyc, Dunlosky, & Rawson, 2014).

Study Skills

It may surprise you, but many students do not develop good study skills. You can improve your students’ achievement by teaching them effective study skills (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Pashler et al., 2007). What skills should you teach? Earlier in the chapter we reviewed strategies related to helping memory. The following overlap with those suggestions:

1. Self-testing, which may result in deeper conceptual learning than rereading.  Delayed self-testing is best. Teach your students to wait a little while rather than self-testing right after studying.

2. Spaced, or distributed, practice rather than cramming. Cramming does little to improve long-term learning and retention.

3. Asking and answering complex or deep questions (related to elaboration) about the material, such as “What caused X to occur? What if Y had occurred instead? What are similarities and differences in X and Y?” For example, a student trying to understand that distance from the sun does  not cause the seasons could ask questions like “In the Northern Hemisphere, what is the difference between shadows at noon in winter and summer? Why?”

Some common study skills—such as underlining and highlighting or merely rereading—are not particularly effective.

Time-on-Task

Time-on-task, or  academic learning time, is the amount of time spent learning after subtracting time for taking attendance, messing around, lunch, recess, daydreaming, and so forth. Thus, time-on-task is much less than  allocated learning time, which is the time that is set aside for a particular topic. Time-on-task is linked to the amount of academic growth children experience, after controlling for prior achievement (Pianta, Belsky, Vandergrift, Houts, & Morrison, 2008). Time-on-task tends to be low in US schools, and varies greatly from class to class.

Off-task time can be due to students’ inability to control their attention. It can also be the result of student sabotage, such as when students get the teacher talking about his or her dating life in order to avoid discussing the course topic. Off-task time can also be the result of poor teaching. In a junior high, we observed a teacher spend 40 minutes of a 50-minute class going over instructions for an assignment, like breaking down how many points each component was worth, how to turn it in if it was late, and so on. No content was taught. In contrast, another teacher put children to work solving a geometry problem at their desks as soon as they entered the room. When most had finished, she had three students solve the same problem on the board. As a class, they compared different approaches and discussed better ways to solve it. The teacher modeled how to solve one problem, and students modeled how to solve others. Only 5 minutes of 50 were spent discussing the next assignment. We also observed a preschool where an 18-month-old boy repeatedly asked to be read a book on airplanes. One teacher merely read the book verbatim. A second teacher helped him count the seven airplanes on the page. The second teacher provided more time-on-task for math learning. Typically, preschoolers spend almost half (44%) of their time in noninstructional activities such as waiting in line to wash hands (Early et al., 2010). Thus, a key classroom variable that you, the teacher, will directly influence is time-on-task.

One way to increase time-on-task is by offering academic instruction after school or during the summer. Evidence shows that these sorts of interventions, if well implemented with high-quality curriculum, can increase achievement (Bergin, Hudson, Chryst, & Resetar, 1992; Zvoch & Stevens, 2013).

Homework

Does homework facilitate achievement ( Photo 11.5)? Not as robustly as you might think. The relationship between achievement and homework is complex because, for example, diligent but low-ability students might do lots of homework yet earn low grades. Some high-ability students with good grades boast about doing almost no homework; they finish their schoolwork on the bus or during easy, boring classes. Still others take several AP classes and have a crushing load of homework. Overall, research shows almost no relationship between homework and achievement for kindergarten to 6th-grade students and a consistently positive relationship for junior and senior high school students (Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006; Eren & Henderson, 2011). Effects are stronger for math than for other subjects.

Photo 11.5

Homework can promote achievement if it is of high quality.

Comstock Images/Thinkstock

Homework is more effective if it is of high quality and supports classroom learning objectives. That is, if it is not busy work, is interesting, and requires concentrated thought, but is not so difficult that students cannot figure out what to do (Dettmers, Trautwein, Lüdtke, Kunter, & Baumert, 2010; Rosário et al., 2015). High-quality homework can serve as time-on-task.

The National Parent Teacher Association (PTA, a parent–teacher organization), the National Education Association (NEA, national teachers’ union), and researchers state that appropriate homework is about 10 to 20 minutes per day in grades K–2, and about 30 to 60 minutes per day in grades 3–6 (Cooper & Valentine, 2001). They did not make a specific recommendation for junior or senior high school. In summary, Marzano (2007, p. 71) makes these recommendations:

· Assign less homework to younger students.

· The amount of homework should not be a burden to parents or students. This may require communication among teachers.

· Homework should have a clear learning purpose.

Retention in Grade

One way that schools attempt to improve learning of low-achieving students is by having them repeat a grade. Some believe retention is a “gift of time” for late-developing children to catch up to their peers. Others believe it harms children because it is viewed as punishment and makes children feel inferior. What does the research say? Retention predicts later dropping out and a lower likelihood of attending college (Alexander et al., 2001; Ou & Reynolds, 2010). It also predicts worsening achievement, greater anxiety, increased disruptive behavior, and increased inattentiveness across elementary school, beyond preexisting problems. However, the research is correlational, so it is not clear whether retention causes the behavior and achievement problems.

Students who are retained are more likely to be male and to have other risk factors such as low SES, low birth weight, and poor social skills (Pagani, Tremblay, Vitaro, Boulerice, & McDuff, 2001). Minority students are more likely than White students to be retained and subsequently to drop out.

A study of students retained in 1st grade found that over the next 4 years, they not only showed some improvement in achievement, but also erosion of their improvement, suggesting an unhealthy pattern of failure, success, and failure, yet greater likelihood of passing the 3rd-grade proficiency test. They had reduced hyperactivity and improved academic confidence (Hughes, Chen, Thoemmes, & Kwok, 2010; Wu, West, & Hughes, 2010). Staying in kindergarten an extra year means that the student will likely be 19 at graduation, not 18, and being older is a risk factor for not graduating at all.

Thus, retention is an expensive intervention (about $12,400 per student per year of school) with mostly small effects (Allen, Chen, Willson, & Hughes, 2009; Cham, Hughes, West, & Im, 2015). Struggling students, whether retained or not, may need more intensive, targeted support.

Class Size

Some studies find that small classes of about 12 to 17 are linked to achievement gains in the primary and middle grades. The longer students are in small classes, the greater the effect. However, some studies find the effects occur only up to 1st grade, and primarily for high-achieving students.    Other studies find positive effects primarily for low-SES and African American students (Winne & Nesbit, 2010). Furthermore, not all studies find a positive effect, and when positive effects are found, they are small (Whitehurst & Chingos, 2011).

The effects may be small because teachers do not change their teaching approach much when they move from large to small classes (Winne & Nesbit, 2010). The small positive findings may not generalize to districts that cannot hire additional  qualified teachers (due to a shortage) and that lack additional classrooms. Districts with these limitations may “reduce” class size by adding teachers to a classroom, so that instead of a 15:1 student–teacher ratio, it is 30:2. In these situations, teachers may simply trade off teaching 30 students at a time—one does clerical work while the other teaches—without altering their teaching approach (Graue, Hatch, Rao, & Oen, 2007). Thus, small class size may sometimes help, but is not robustly linked to improved achievement (Finn et al., 2001).

High-Stakes Tests

To raise the achievement of all students and to close the achievement gap between SES and ethnic groups (see  Chapter 15), the federal government requires schools to test all students to determine whether the gap is closing and to ensure that all students have grade-level proficiency in core content. These are  high-stakes tests , designed to create strong incentives to improve achievement. Based on test scores, schools can be designated as  in need of improvement. When a school receives this designation for a few years or more, drastic measures can be taken such as replacing teachers, giving students the option to transfer to another school, or even the takeover of the school by the state or other group. This is an example of  standards-based reform, which refers to attempts to improve achievement by setting standards and holding educators accountable for achieving those standards.

In some states, these mandated tests are not high stakes for students because nothing happens to individual students who get low scores. There is little reason for students to try hard on the tests. However, other states make the tests high stakes for students because they cannot graduate or be promoted if they do not achieve a specific score.

Is this approach working? The data so far suggest that there is a small increase in math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), but it is not closing the achievement gap (Lee, 2008). Schools designated as needing improvement tend to have a majority of poor or ALANA (African, Latino/Hispanic, Asian and Native American) students enrolled. The high-stakes testing approach is more effective for math than for reading, and for elementary than for secondary students. Some have suggested that children who are just at the border of proficiency are nudging up, but there is no change for higher and lower achievers (Porter & Polikoff, 2007). States that respond to accountability testing by raising teacher certification standards, improving professional development, and increasing school resources are more successful (Lee, 2008). However, there is evidence that when teachers focus lessons on test preparation, they lower the cognitive demands of their lessons; one commentator in a 3rd-grade classroom wrote, “There were very few opportunities in the [test preparation] lessons for students to express their opinions, problem-solve, or generate ideas in response to open-ended questions” (Plank & Condliffe, 2013).

You can prepare your students for high-stakes tests by teaching test-taking skills ( Photo 11.6) such as the following (adapted from Kubiszyn & Borich, 2003, pp. 38–42):

1. Follow directions carefully.

2. Read test items, passages, and related information carefully; this may require highlighting, rereading, and double-checking.

3. Manage test-taking time. You can provide practice with timed assignments.

4. Attempt easier items first. Some students quit when they come to a difficult item, assuming they will not be able to get further items correct. You can provide practice on classroom tests so that students get used to tests  not being ordered from easy to difficult.

5. Eliminate obviously incorrect options before choosing an answer.

6. Check answers if there is time.

7. Take advantage of preparation materials that are available. For example, many states provide practice tests.

Photo 11.6

You can teach your students test-taking skills.

Westend61/Red Chopsticks Images/Jupiterimages

However, avoid overemphasizing proficiency tests. You can undermine your students’ motivation if you hold the test up as the primary reason for learning. According to one 7th-grade girl:

All the teachers care about is the proficiency test. They don’t care if we learn anything. They’re always saying stuff like, “Now, you’d better restate the question, because if you don’t, you’ll lose points on the proficiency test.” Who cares? In life, do you have to restate the question?

In summary, school factors associated with academic achievement include testing frequently, teaching study skills, and fostering more time-on-task. Sometimes assigning homework is useful. Retaining low-achieving students in grade is not generally associated with improved achievement. Under some conditions, small class size is found to be associated with higher achievement. High-stakes testing has not yet demonstrated strong positive effects on achievement, although that is the intent.

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