[lbo-talk] willingham on the NAEP scores

[Jeffrey Fisher]

The gist of the article, dealing with the latest National Assessment
of Educational Progress (national reading and iirc also math tests) is
roughly this:  reading appears to be improving at lower levels because
students are getting better earlier at decoding. But decoding is of
course not comprehension. Reading scores for high school students are
flat, and Willingham's point is that this is because their decoding
skills are already developed, but they are not getting the breadth of
content knowledge for better comprehension. Leaving aside questions
about the usefulness of the tests being used for the NAEP, it matters
because curricula have been focusing on (largely
non-domain-transferable) reading "skills" when what's really missing
is a broad (dare I call it "liberal"?) curriculum that give students
knowledge and experience that they can then use when they read.

I reckon that's the nutshell.

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>>
>> Did you read the article?
>
> No. I seldom if ever go to web sites. It's too painful and having them
> read aloud is (at least for some months) not mucyh better. It takes time
> to shift from a lifetime of taking in texts visually to take them in
> when read by an artificial voice (even when, as in ZoomText) it is a
> very good voice. So I would only look at a web source if the post itself
> was of such great interest as to make the source something that one had
> to know.
>
> Carrol
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