[Reading-hall-of-fame] Are we smarter than a 4th grader?

[Victoria Purcell-Gates]

Thanks, Tom! You keep me sane! VPG



-----Original Message-----

> Date: Wed Jul 29 11:00:18 PDT 2009
> From: tsticht at znet.com
> Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Are we smarter than a 4th grader?
> To: reading-hall-of-fame at nottingham.ac.uk
>
> Are We Smarter Than a 4th Grader?
> 
> Tom Sticht 7.28.09
> Columnist EducationNews.org
> International Consultant in Adult Education
> 
> 
> 
> In 1976 I arrived in Washington, DC at the old National Institute for
> Education (NIE), now the Institutes for Education Sciences (IES), as the
> new Associate Director for Basic Skills research. One of my first official
> duties was to sign papers which, after they went up through the chain of
> command to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare’s office, would
> lead to the establishment of the National Center for the Study of Reading
> (CSR) at the University of Illinois.
> 
> 
> 
> A little over a decade later, in 1988, a group of researchers from the CSR
> published a paper showing that children who spent more time reading outside
> of school became the more highly skilled readers of the school system
 a
> finding which I found consistent with common sense.
> 
> 
> 
> About a decade later, in 1994, in a report on Adult Literacy in America, I
> called  attention to the interrelationships among education, literacy
> skills, and engagement in literacy practices that were reported in
> assessments of adult literacy from the 1930s to the mid-1990s. I called
> this the "triple helix" of literacy development in which more education
> lead to more skill, more skill lead to more engagement in literacy
> practices, this in turn lead to more skill and then that lead to more
> education, etc. etc.
> 
> 
> 
> In more recent years, a Longitudinal Study of Adult Literacy by Steve Reder
> and associates at Portland State University found that one of the most
> important outcomes of participating in adult literacy education was that
> after people left programs they tended to engage in more literacy practices
> and that engaging in more literacy practices (i.e., reading more newspapers,
> books, etc.) caused people's literacy proficiency to increase. In short, the
> more people read the better they get at reading!
> 
> 
> 
> Now to bring this up to date, I recently participated in a discussion on the
> Professional Development listserve run by the National Institute for
> Literacy (NIFL) about literacy, what it is,  and how it is developed. The
> discussion got more and more lengthy and wordy as various theoretical and
> philosophical positions were tossed about. Finally, I couldn’t take it
> anymore and wrote what I thought was a succinct, straightforward summary of
> what the many erudite messages boiled down to. I wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Question: What is literacy?
> 
> Answer: Literacy is the ability to read and write.
> 
> 
> 
> Question: How does literacy develop?
> 
> Answer: Reading and writing leads to reading and writing.
> 
> 
> 
> Question: How should we teach literacy?
> 
> Answer: We should motivate learners to engage in lots of reading and
> writing.
> 
> 
> 
> As I thought about all this long chain of academic research, and the
> ponderous “intellectual” discussions of the nature and development of
> literacy in which I have participated over the years, I recalled a workshop
> that I had given on adult literacy education in which one of the
> participants had given me a note. As I read the note, I realized that  much
> scholarly and scientific research evidence had been found to support the
> conclusions of a genuine expert whose work I frequently cite now in my
> workshops. This expert is Anthony, a 4th grade student in Tucson, AZ at the
> time of his seminal insight in which he said, and I quote:
> 
> 
> 
> "I like reading because reading helps us get better at reading."
> 
> 
> 
> As our colleagues in the United Kingdom would say, "Brilliant"!
> 
> 
> 
> tsticht at aznet.net
> 
> 
> 
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