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

[Jay Samuels]

Tom, thanks for sharing that.  It was brilliant and the kid was "on target".
Jay samuels

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

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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