Sheryl Turner RMC Research Corporation, Tampa, FL Ramona Chauvin

1. Systems Planning: Factors That Affect Reading Comprehension A Presentation for North Carolina School Leadersprovided by the Southeast Comprehensive Center Sheryl Turner RMC Research Corporation, Tampa, FL Ramona Chauvin Southeast Comprehensive Center at SEDL

2. Urgency “We educators are directly responsible for crucial, life-saving work.” Source: Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2010, p. 10

3. Urgency “Today, a student who graduates from school with a mastery of essential skills and knowledge has a good chance of successfully competing in the global market place, with numerous opportunities to lead a rewarding adult life.” Source: Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2010, p. 10

4. Urgency “In stark contrast, students who fail in school are at a greater risk of poverty, welfare dependency, incarceration, and early death.” Source: Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2010, p. 10

5. Urgency “With such high stakes, educators today are like tightrope walkers without a safety net, responsible for meeting the needs of every student, with little room for error.” Source: Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2010, p. 10

6. Hart & Risley The invisible curriculum of child rearing focuses parent talk on what children need to know – Building Knowledge: The basics: the names of all the things and actions required in order to give and follow directions Social routines: for polite giving and getting Preparation for school: naming colors, counting, and reciting name and age. Source: Hart & Risley, 1995

7. Early Language Experiences: Quantitative Differences Source: Hart & Risley, 1995

8. Early Language Experiences: Qualitative Differences Source: Hart & Risley, 1995

9. Cumulative Language Experiences30 Million Word Difference 50 – 45 – 40 – 35 – 30 – 25 – 20 – 15 – 10 – 5 – Children from: Professional Families Working Class Families Low SES Families Number of words heard (millions) 1 2 3 4 5 Age of child (years) Source: Hart & Risley, 1995

10. Think-Pair-Share • What impact does oral language have on students as they enter school? • Can you predict how each set of students will achieve in elementary and middle school?

11. “Children arrive in kindergarten with huge discrepancies in oral language development . . . and the gap between language-advanced and language-delayed children grows throughout the elementary school years.” Source: Biemiller, 2001

12. The Effects of Weaknesses in Oral Language Reading Growth High Oral Language in Kindergarten 16 – 15 – 14 – 13 – 12 – 11 – 10 – 9 – 8 – 7 – 6 – 5 – 5.2 years difference Low Oral Language in Kindergarten Reading Age Level 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Source: Hirsch, 1996 Chronological Age

13. How Do We Close the Gap? There ARE things we can do to close the gap for all of our students!

14. The Home-School Study ofLanguage and Literacy Development Longitudinal Study (Began in 1987: Studied 72 children from pre-K to grade 7) Children from lower socioeconomic homes who succeededas readers experienced: • Exposure to rich vocabulary • Extended discourse • Cognitively and linguistically stimulating home and school environments Source: Dickinson & Tabors, 2001

15. Table Talk At your table, discuss the following questions: • What do the terms “reading” and “comprehension” mean to you? • What do they look like in the classroom? • What do you see the students doing? • What do you see the teachers doing?

16. What is Reading? “Reading is thinking guided by print.” “Reading is translating between oral and written language.” Source: Perfetti, 1985

17. What Should K-12 Administrators See in Their School’s Classrooms? Good readers who • are active readers. • have clear goals in mind for their reading. They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of it, is meeting their goals. • typically look over the text before they read, noting such things as the structure of the text and text sections that might be most relevant to their reading goals. Source: Duke & Pearson, 2002

18. What Should K-12 Administrators See…? (cont.) Good readers who • make predictions about what is to come. • read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading–what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what not to read, what to re-read, etc. • construct, revise, and question the meanings they make as they read. Source: Duke & Pearson, 2002

19. What Should K-12 Administrators See…? (cont.) Good readers who • draw upon, compare, and integratetheir prior knowledge with material in the text. • think about the authors of the text, their style, beliefs, intentions, historical milieu, etc. • monitor their understanding of the text, making adjustments in their reading as necessary. Source: Duke & Pearson, 2002

20. What Should K-12 Administrators See…? (cont.) Good readers who • try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and concepts in the text and deal with inconsistencies or gaps as needed. • process text during “reading” as we have traditionally defined it, and during short breaks taken during reading; even after the “reading” itself has commenced, even after the “reading” has ceased. Source: Duke & Pearson, 2002

21. What Should K-12 Administrators See…? (cont.) That comprehension is a consuming, continuous, and complex activity, but one that, for good readers, is both satisfying and productive. Source: Duke & Pearson, 2002

22. What Does This Research Mean to Me as a K-12 Administrator? • Children are not born knowing how to do the things good readers do when they read. • Children cannot, for the most part, “see” good readers doing these things. • Some children will figure these things out on their own. • But many children need teachers to let them in on these secrets of good reading.

23. Revisit Your Table Talk Based on the information provided about good readers that you as a K-12 administrator should see in classrooms, what are you seeing regarding reading in your school’s classrooms since school started this year?

24. Factors to Consider • Reading and the Brain • Student Level of Activity • Motivation • Vocabulary Instruction • Comprehension Skills and Strategies: Multiple Teaching Strategies • Instructional Planning and Delivery

25. Brain Activity vs. Brain Activation

26. MEG Activation

27. Reading and the Brain Source: Reading Rockets, Creative Commons Use: http://www.readingrockets.org/license_av/

28. The Effects of Successful Intervention

29. Results of Intensive Intervention(Subjects 1–4) N = 8 7-17 years Before After Source: Simos et al., 2002. Neurology. 23;58(8):1203-13

30. Think-Pair-Share • Take a few minutes at your table to think about how the brain works when a student is reading well and when a student is having difficulties. • Also, reflect on the information shared about interventions and their effects on how the brain works when a student is reading and comprehending. • Can a teacher “re-program” the brain of a struggling student?

31. Scarborough’s Reading Rope LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION • Background Knowledge(facts, concepts, etc.) • Vocabulary Knowledge(breadth, precision, links, etc.) • Language Structures(syntax, semantics, etc.) • Verbal Reasoning(inference, metaphor, etc.) • Literacy Knowledge(print concepts, genres, etc.) SKILLED READING: fluent execution and coordination of word recognition and text comprehension. increasingly strategic WORD RECOGNITION • Phonological Awareness(syllables, phonemes, etc.) • Decoding (alphabetic principle, spelling-sound correspondence) • Sight Recognition(of familiar words) increasingly automatic Source: Scarborough, 2001

32. Reading Comprehension and The Brain As you are sitting here reading this text, your occipital cortex is starting to become quite active. This part of your brain is processing all of the information that you are seeing as you read: the words, letters, and even the size and shapes of the letters. The frontal lobe of your neocortex is now meting out the meanings of words, sentences, and the texts that you are reading. At the same time, your brain is working to relate what you are currently reading with any background information you have on the subject.

33. Reading Comprehension and The Brain (cont’d.) It is interesting to note that if you are right-handed, the left side of your temporal lobe is also working to process all of the “sounds” of reading. While you may be reading silently, there is a part of the brain that processes speech sounds in the same way that it would if you were listening to someone read the information out loud. While brain functions may be very complex in nature, the functions are extremely structured in the way that they work. Tasks, including reading, are broken down into smaller, less complicated tasks and then dispersed to different areas of the brain. These dispersals will be sent in certain timing patterns to the sections of the brain that concentrate on performing tasks that increase understanding.

34. The Role of Syntax in Comprehension As a student reads a sentence, he/she stores the words in working memory until he/she has read a clause. At this point, the student interprets the clause's meaning and forms a gist, which the student then stores in working memory. Source: Adapted from National Reading Technical Assistance Center (RMC)

35. The Role of Syntax in Comprehension (cont’d.) As the student continues to read, he/she adds new gists to the gists already stored, and thus forms higher and higher level gists; first for the sentence, then for the paragraph, then for the passage, then for the complete text. The higher the level of a gist, the more likely it is to be retained. Source: Turner, 2010

36. Understanding How Readers Organize Information: The Schema The schema is also useful for thinking about how students appreciate and remember stories. As the student reads more and more fiction, the student develops schemas for different types of events; these schemas then set up an expectation for how these types of events work and thus help the student interpret and remember these types of events in the future. Source: Turner, 2010

37. Understanding How Readers Organize Information: The Schema (cont’d.) Schemas also help students make inferences; for instance, if a student has read The Adventures of Robin Hood, that student will later be able to infer that a reference to “a Robin Hood” refers to a person who gives to people in need. Source: Turner, 2010

38. What the Student Needs What happens after the student reads and comprehends a sentence? How does the student put sentences together to comprehend the connections between them and then form an idea about a longer passage? Source: Turner, 2010

39. What the Student Needs (cont’d.) • To read a paragraph or longer passage fluently, the student needs to be able to pick out the main points from the text in order to recover the meaning, or gist, of the passage. • To understand the main points of a paragraph, the student needs to be able to make inferences about such things as the relation between a cause and its effect as well as which nouns are referred to by pronouns. Source: Turner, 2010

40. Reading Paragraphs for Literal, Inferential, and Causative Comprehension • The reader's goal is to extract coherent meaning from the text. • Though literal comprehension is a priority for the reader, he or she is usually more concerned with maintaining coherence than with memorizing and reproducing the exact text. Source: Turner, 2010

41. Reading Paragraphs for Literal, Inferential, and Causative Comprehension (cont’d.) • The coherent meaning constructed by the reader will be somehow related to the reader's prior experience and to the structures already formed in the reader's mind. Source: Turner, 2010

42. Working Memory In order to comprehend a text, the student must use working memory to store semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information and use this stored information to clarify ambiguities, form an idea about the text, and integrate subsequent text. Source: Turner, 2010

43. Working Memory (cont’d.) In addition to working on the text at hand, this process might call on knowledge the reader has already learned. Source: Turner, 2010

44. Working Memory (cont’d.) Information becomes part of working memory in several ways: • Information is stored after just reading a text. • Comprehension as a gist is formed. • Information is activated by text (or recently formed gists) and retrieved from long-term memory. Source: Turner, 2010

45. When readers read a passage twice, they are doing different things. • On the firstreading, readers spend more time on the new information than on the old information. • On the second reading, readers spend more time on the important information than on the unimportant information. Source: Turner, 2010

46. Implementing in the Classroom • So how does this work in the classroom? • What does it look like?

47. Eight Evidence-Based Instructional Practices that Improve Comprehension • Comprehension Monitoring: the reader learns how to become aware or conscious of his or her understanding during reading and learns procedures to fix comprehension problems. • Cooperative Learning: readers work together to learn strategies in the context of reading. • Graphic and Semantic Organizers: enable readers to graphically represent the meanings and relationships of the ideas that underlie the words in the text. Source: National Reading Panel (NRP), 2000, pp. 4–6

48. Eight Evidence-based Instructional Practices that Improve Comprehension (cont’d) • Story Structure: the reader learns to ask and answer who, what, where, when, and why questions about the plot and maps out the time line, characters, and events in stories. • Question Answering: the reader answers questions posed by the teacher and is given corrective feedback. • Question Generation: the reader asks himself or herself what, when, where, why, what will happen, how, and who questions. Source: National Reading Panel (NRP), 2000, pp. 4–6

49. Eight Evidence-based Instructional Practices that Improve Comprehension (cont’d) • Summarization: the reader attempts to identify and write the main or most important ideas that integrate or unite the other ideas or meanings of the text into a coherent whole. • Multiple-Strategy Teaching:the reader uses several strategy procedures with guidance from the teacher; multiple-strategy teaching is most effective when the procedures are used flexibly and appropriately in naturalistic contexts. Source: National Reading Panel (NRP), 2000, pp. 4–6

50. Comprehension strategies are not ends in themselves; they are means of helping students understand what they are reading.