[lbo-talk] willingham on the NAEP scores

[Carrol Cox]

I would trust your sense of the gist, and it does sound like an article
the existence of which I need to know, but probably one I need spend
time on now. An anecdote my daughter passexd on from a neighbor whose
daugher attends thrid-grade in a school in a fairly wealthy suburb. The
daugher missed school one day from illness, and the day she went back to
school phone her mother in a panic: they were having their math test
(presumably one you refer to) that day. Her mother reassured her: Don 't
worry; they're testing your teacher, not you. And it did turn out that
that class had done nothing for three weeks but prepare for the test.

Carrol

Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> 
> 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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> >
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