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Reading Instruction in a Time of Accountability: Multimodality and Physical Exercise Matter
Over the last few months, we’ve come to establish something of a round robin routine at dinner. I ask, “What were the highlights and lowlights from your day?” and then we go around the table, everyone sharing their ups and downs. Last week, our older daughter reported a lowlight that got me thinking, again, about…
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Graphing the nature of strategy application
Today, I’m excited about this graph. It shows the relative duration — or the relative proportion of time — spent on ten strategic activities over five online reading sessions by a dyad of boys who, at pretest, showed the least preparation to construct an integrated understanding across multiple, multimodal Internet texts. That’s a mouthful. The…
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Seventeen years later, evidence for “a pedagogy of multiliteracies” remains elusive
Yesterday, I had two professional exchanges that highlighted, for me, the pressing importance of expanding students’ understanding of what an informational source can be while reading on the Internet or using digital tools in school. I blogged about this idea a while back…but my conversations yesterday have prompted me to revisit it. Back in 1996,…
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Michigan Reading Association Conference
I am looking forward to presenting with my esteemed colleagues, Amber White, Anne Sherrieb and Cindy Lewis from Ruth Fox Elementary School at the Michigan Reading Association Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this coming Saturday. The focus of our talk will be on instructional implications of the [(PST)2 + iC3] framework that I developed to…
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Dinner with Laura Ingalls Wilder
Yesterday, I blogged about the celebration that my daughter’s teacher organized for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 146th birthday and the biscuits I baked (in truth, that post was mostly an excuse to take pictures of the biscuits!) As an aspiring literacy scholar, however, I just couldn’t pass up the chance to think about how these kinds…
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A formula for strategic online synthesis
The anchor standards for reading and writing in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects (2010) place significant emphasis on the construction of meaning from multiple texts in print and digital formats. To date, however, the evidence for instructional methods that support “synthesis” skills…
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Old-school tech, new school reading: On repurposing transparency film to support multiple text integration online
I’m nearing the end of data collection in a study that (I hope) will provide teachers with much-needed information on methods that support (or don’t support?) 9th grade students’ reading of multiple, multi-modal Internet texts on science-focused topics of inquiry. As I was developing my teaching intervention, I was especially concerned with methods that would…
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Do students really use multimodal options when reading to synthesize?
Yesterday, I piloted part of my dissertation study with my very Fabulous Research Assistant (FRA) at Albion College. I tested my protocols for think aloud training (putting together a space puzzle) and for the pre-test activity. The pre-test prompt that FRA piloted asks students to read about the impact of common household chemicals, and specifically…
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The Simple View of Online Reading — It’s Time to Push Back
Reading comprehension researchers will know that the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) presents reading (and reading comprehension) as a function of two factors: (a) decoding ability (D) and (b) language comprehension (LC), a composite skill that is not well articulated by the model, but that is generally understood to include vocabulary knowledge…
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It seems I’m not the only one worried about leveled reading…
In their article, Dear Governor: Lobby to Save a Love of Reading, Anne Stone and Jeff Nichols question leveled reading. They seem to have the same sorts of concerns that I have expressed here, in my blog. Like their sons who trade insults about reading levels, I, too, have heard my daughter say to one…