P. David Pearson

A Historically Based Review of Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children

Book reviewed in this article: Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Catherine E. Snow, Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin (Eds.). 1998.

Six Ideas in Search of a Champion: What Policymakers Should Know about the Teaching and Learning of Literacy in Our Schools

Being invited to participate in this policy forum is at once an honor, an opportunity, and a responsibility. The honor arises from the invitation itself and the thought, however fleeting, that I might have something to say on behalf of the academic contingent of the literacy education community. The opportunity emerges from the context in which the forum is constructed: By extending participation in this conversation to both researchers and policymakers, the editors of JLR have all but insured a serious response from other members of the policy community. The responsibility comes from the possibility that in contrast to most of the limited-audience writing we all do for one another someone who affects decisions about educational policy and practice might actually take these ideas seriously. I hope that this is but the first in a long tradition of such conversations. I was asked to share a handful of ideas crucial ideas that I would want policymakers to understand about the literacy needs of the nation, and the role that scholarship might play in informing our understanding of those needs as well as our capacity to meet them. I offer several interrelated observations for consideration. If there is a theme uniting them, it is that we should celebrate the good work that teachers are doing, then in the same breath acknowledge the vexing issues that still confront us, and finally, prepare ourselves to generate the material resources and intellectual muscle needed to address those issues. 1. Although we do have serious literacy needs, much of the current literacy crisis is manufactured. Both in public and professional arenas, it is commonplace to complain about Americas literacy crisis. Usually the crisis is cited as the basis for fixing the blame on some educational policy, practice, or movement and championing an alternative policy, practice, or movement as the solution to our educational ills. I myself have cited literacy needs and poor student performance as a basis for seeking support for my own research and my institutions teacher education programs. Recently, however, I have run across some compelling arguments, accompanied by even more compelling data, to suggest that the literacy crisis, like most other educational crises (Berliner & Biddle, 1995), is manufactured to benefit particular interests often to support those with an ax to grind, a product to sell, or a partisan view to champion. It is simply not the case that this generation of students reads, writes, punctuates, or performs any other literacy task less well than previous generations. In the aggregate, exactly the opposite is

Building on the Past, Bridging to the Future: A Research Agenda for the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.

In late winter 1997, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education issued a request for proposals for a new reading center. First at the University of Illinois and then at the Universities of Georgia and Maryland, a federally sponsored reading cen ter had been a part of the American educational research scene since 1976. Unlike earlier federally sponsored read ing centers, the request for proposals in 1997 had a specif ic, rather than general, mission for a new reading center: to address the persistent problems of early reading, defined as the period from preschool through Grade 3, and to find solutions that would enable the country to meet its national goal of every child reading by the end of third grade. In response to that call, we mounted an effort to address per sistent problems that have faced the field in improving early reading theory and practice. We conceptualized these problems and questions as situ ated within a set of interacting planes of inquiry. In the innermost plane were reader and text, the dyad most clear ly implicated in the reading process. In the intermediate plane were home and school, the sites in which children learn to read. The outermost plane consisted of the policy and profession contexts that exert important, if indirect, influences on learning to read by shaping the quality of materials and instruction available to learners through poli cies, funding, and professional development. We wanted to implement a balanced and diverse portfolio of research, ensuring to embrace diversity of three types: (a) in the populations of students involved in our work; (b) in the range of professionals with whom we worked to design materials, instructional interventions, and dissemina tion efforts; and (c) in our methodological tools and per spectives. Our fundamental commitment would be to work with and learn from teachers and administrators who work in

The First-Grade Studies : A personal reflection

The author describes the importance of “The First-Grade Studies” to his own development as a literacy researcher and educator, and highlights the works importance to the field in several areas: learning about the efficacy of early reading instruction, learning about contextual variables, learning about the practice of research, and learning lessons to guide future research.

Performance assessment and the literacy unit of the new standards project

Abstract To overcome the dominance of machine-scored tests, the Literacy Unit of the New Standards Project, housed at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, is attempting to develop an alternative system of English Language Arts performance assessment for K-12 schools, using on-demand tasks lasting typically three to five days and involving the reading of a selection and writing of an essay and portfolios. The portfolio system, which is being piloted by 1,500 teachers in 20 states, includes a student handbook, complete with a list of entries, and a scoring system, which includes anchor entries and rubrics. A number of important questions have emerged form this project: (1) Do multiple choice tests collect significant data from students at the low end of performance? (2) What tasks or portfolio entries adequately sample domains like reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and how should these tasks and entries be weighted in scoring portfolios? (3) What are the acceptable trade-offs between validity and reliability and between efficiency (low cost) and or authenticity? (4) Can an audit or moderation system track the reliability of judging at various school sites? (5) Does the use of decimal scoring, allowing readers to add to or subtract from a score, increase reliability? (6) What are the methods for defining Mastery and cut-off scores after scoring is completed?

The National Reading Conference: Presidential Retrospectives

As the Journal of Literacy Research (formerly Journal of Reading Behavior) commemorates its 30th anniversary, this article offers a collection of reflective essays written by past presidents of the National Reading Conference, the journals parent organization. They write with reference to the year they served as president of the organization and consider such issues as the nature and character of the organization at that time and the major research topics under investigation. The compilers of the essays attempt a synthesis of the reports that focuses on recurrent themes and issues as the organization and the field of inquiry have evolved over time.

Un marco de referencia para una evaluación fiable de la lectoescritura

La evaluacion del conocimiento y, especialmente, la de un proceso tan integrado en la cultura como la lectoescritura no deberian abordarse solo desde y por los educadores, puesto que la funcionalidad de la lectoescritura se extiende mas alla de las tareas escolares. Este articulo presenta un modelo experimentado de «lectoescritura global» y su evaluacion, tanto por el agil sistema de carpeta del educador como por sistemas mas convencionales.