Tag: read

  • How do Kids Learn to Read? There Are as Many Ways as There Are Students – The 74

    How do Kids Learn to Read? There Are as Many Ways as There Are Students – The 74


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    Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels.

    This data from the 2024 report of National Assessment of Educational Progress, a state-based ranking sometimes called “America’s report card,” has concerned educators scrambling to boost reading skills.

    Many school districts have adopted an evidence-based literacy curriculum called the “science of reading” that features phonics as a critical component.

    Phonics strategies begin by teaching children to recognize letters and make their corresponding sounds. Then they advance to manipulating and blending first-letter sounds to read and write simple, consonant-vowel-consonant words – such as combining “b” or “c” with “-at” to make “bat” and “cat.” Eventually, students learn to merge more complex word families and to read them in short stories to improve fluency and comprehension.

    Proponents of the curriculum celebrate its grounding in brain science, and the science of reading has been credited with helping Louisiana students outperform their pre-pandemic reading scores last year.

    In practice, Louisiana used a variety of science of reading approaches beyond phonics. That’s because different students have different learning needs, for a variety of reasons.

    Yet as a scholar of reading and language who has studied literacy in diverse student populations, I see many schools across the U.S. placing a heavy emphasis on the phonics components of the science of reading.

    If schools want across-the-board gains in reading achievement, using one reading curriculum to teach every child isn’t the best way. Teachers need the flexibility and autonomy to use various, developmentally appropriate literacy strategies as needed.

    Phonics fails some students

    Phonics programs often require memorizing word families in word lists. This works well for some children: Research shows that “decoding” strategies such as phonics can support low-achieving readers and learners with dyslexia.

    However, some students may struggle with explicit phonics instruction, particularly the growing population of neurodivergent learners with autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These students learn and interact differently than their mainstream peers in school and in society. And they tend to have different strengths and challenges when it comes to word recognition, reading fluency and comprehension.

    This was the case with my own child. He had been a proficient reader from an early age, but struggles emerged when his school adopted a phonics program to balance out its regular curriculum, a flexible literature-based curriculum called Daily 5 that prioritizes reading fluency and comprehension.

    I worked with his first grade teacher to mitigate these challenges. But I realized that his real reading proficiency would likely not have been detected if the school had taught almost exclusively phonics-based reading lessons.

    Another weakness of phonics, in my experience, is that it teaches reading in a way that is disconnected from authentic reading experiences. Phonics often directs children to identify short vowel sounds in word lists, rather than encounter them in colorful stories. Evidence shows that exposing children to fun, interesting literature promotes deep comprehension.

    Balanced literacy

    To support different learning styles, educators can teach reading in multiple ways. This is called balanced literacy, and for decades it was a mainstay in teacher preparation and in classrooms.

    Balanced literacy prompts children to learn words encountered in authentic literature during guided, teacher-led read-alouds – versus learning how to decode words in word lists. Teachers use multiple strategies to promote reading acquisition, such as blending the letter sounds in words to support “decoding” while reading.

    Another balanced literacy strategy that teachers can apply in phonics-based strategies while reading aloud is called “rhyming word recognition.” The rhyming word strategy is especially effective with stories whose rhymes contribute to the deeper meaning of the story, such as Marc Brown’s “Arthur in a Pickle.”

    The rhyming structure of ‘Arthur in a Pickle’ helps children learn to read entire words, versus word parts.

    After reading, teachers may have learners arrange letter cards to form words, then tap the letter cards while saying and blending each sound to form the word. Similar phonics strategies include tracing and writing letters to form words that were encountered during reading.

    There is no one right way to teach literacy in a developmentally appropriate, balanced literacy framework. There are as many ways as there are students.

    What a truly balanced curriculum looks like

    The push for the phonics-based component of the science of reading is a response to the discrediting of the Lucy Calkins Reading Project, a balanced literacy approach that uses what’s called “cueing” to teach young readers. Teachers “cue” students to recognize words with corresponding pictures and promote guessing unfamiliar words while reading based on context clues.

    A 2024 class action lawsuit filed by Massachusetts families claimed that this faulty curriculum and another cueing-based approach called Fountas & Pinnell had failed readers for four decades, in part because they neglect scientifically backed phonics instruction.

    But this allegation overlooks evidence that the Calkins curriculum worked for children who were taught basic reading skills at home. And a 2021 study in Georgia found modest student achievement gains of 2% in English Language Arts test scores among fourth graders taught with the Lucy Calkins method.

    Nor is the method unscientific. Using picture cues with corresponding words is supported by the predictable language theory of literacy.

    This approach is evident in Eric Carle’s popular children’s books. Stories such as the “Very Hungry Caterpillar” and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See?” have vibrant illustrations of animals and colors that correspond with the text. The pictures support children in learning whole words and repetitive phrases, suchg as, “But he was still hungry.”

    The intention here is for learners to acquire words in the context of engaging literature. But critics of Calkins contend that “cueing” during reading is a guessing game. They say readers are not learning the fundamentals necessary to identify sounds and word families on their way to decoding entire words and sentences.

    As a result, schools across the country are replacing traditional learn-to-read activities tied to balanced literacy approaches with the science of reading. Since its inception in 2013, the phonics-based curriculum has been adopted by 40 states and the Disctrict of Columbia.

    Recommendations for parents, educators and policymakers

    The most scientific way to teach reading, in my opinion, is by not applying the same rigid rules to every child. The best instruction meets students where they are, not where they should be.

    Here are five evidence-based tips to promote reading for all readers that combine phonics, balanced literacy and other methods.

    1. Maintain the home-school connection. When schools send kids home with developmentally appropriate books and strategies, it encourages parents to practice reading at home with their kids and develop their oral reading fluency. Ideally, reading materials include features that support a diversity of learning strategies, including text, pictures with corresponding words and predictable language.

    2. Embrace all reading. Academic texts aren’t the only kind of reading parents and teachers should encourage. Children who see menus, magazines and other print materials at home also acquire new literacy skills.

    3. Make phonics fun. Phonics instruction can teach kids to decode words, but the content is not particularly memorable. I encourage teachers to teach phonics on words that are embedded in stories and texts that children absolutely love.

    4. Pick a series. High-quality children’s literature promotes early literacy achievement. Texts that become increasingly more complex as readers advance, such as the “Arthur” step-into-reading series, are especially helpful in developing reading comprehension. As readers progress through more complex picture books, caregivers and teachers should read aloud the “Arthur” novels until children can read them independently. Additional popular series that grow with readers include “Otis,” “Olivia,” “Fancy Nancy” and “Berenstain Bears.”

    5. Tutoring works. Some readers will struggle despite teachers’ and parents’ best efforts. In these cases, intensive, high-impact tutoring can help. Sending students to one session a week of at least 30 minutes is well documented to help readers who’ve fallen behind catch up to their peers. Many nonprofit organizations, community centers and colleges offer high-impact tutoring.

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


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  • What AI Can’t Read: Ambiguities and Silences (opinion)

    What AI Can’t Read: Ambiguities and Silences (opinion)

    A year ago, I saw artificial intelligence as a shortcut to avoid deep thinking. Now, I use it to teach thinking itself.

    Like many educators, I initially viewed artificial intelligence as a threat—an easy escape from rigorous analysis. But banning AI outright became a losing battle. This semester, I took a different approach: I brought it into my classroom, not as a crutch, but as an object of study. The results surprised me.

    For the first time this spring, my students are not just using AI—they are reflecting on it. AI is not simply a tool; it is a mirror, exposing biases, revealing gaps in knowledge and reshaping students’ interpretive instincts. In the same way a river carves its course through stone—not by force, but by persistence—this deliberate engagement with AI has begun to alter how students approach analysis, nuance and complexity.

    Rather than rendering students passive consumers of information, AI—when engaged critically—becomes a tool for sharpening analytical skills. Instead of simply producing answers, it provokes new questions. It exposes biases, forces students to reconsider assumptions and ultimately strengthens their ability to think deeply.

    Yet too often, universities are focused on controlling AI rather than understanding it. Policies around AI in higher education often default to detection and enforcement, treating the technology as a problem to be contained. But this framing misses the point. The question in 2025 is not whether to use AI, but how to use it in ways that deepen, rather than dilute, learning.

    AI as a Tool for Deep Engagement

    This semester I’ve asked students to use AI in my seminar on Holocaust survivor testimony. At first glance, using AI to analyze these deeply human narratives seems contradictory—almost irreverent. Survivor testimony resists coherence. It is shaped by silences, contradictions and emotional truths that defy categorization. How can an AI trained on probabilities and patterns engage with stories shaped by trauma, loss and the fragility of memory?

    And yet, that is precisely why I have made AI a central component of the course—not as a shortcut to comprehension, but as a challenge to it. Each week, my students use AI to transcribe, summarize and identify patterns in testimonies. But rather than treating AI’s responses as authoritative, they interrogate them. They see how AI stumbles over inconsistencies, how it misreads hesitation as omission, how it resists the fragmentation that defines survivor accounts. And in observing that resistance, something unexpected happens: students develop a deeper awareness of what it means to listen, to interpret, to bear witness.

    AI’s sleek outputs conceal a deeper problem: It is not neutral. Its responses are shaped by the biases embedded in its training data, and by its relentless pursuit of coherence—even at the expense of accuracy. An algorithm will iron out inconsistencies in testimony, not because they are unimportant, but because it is designed to prioritize seamlessness over contradiction, clarity over ambiguity. But testimony is ambiguity. Memory thrives on contradiction. If left unchecked, AI’s tendency to smooth out rough edges risks erasing precisely what makes survivor narratives so powerful: their rawness, their hesitations, their refusal to conform to a clean, digestible version of history.

    For educators, the question is not just how to use AI but how to resist its seductions. How do we ensure that students scrutinize AI rather than accept its outputs at face value? How do we teach them to use AI as a lens rather than a crutch? The answer lies in making AI itself an object of inquiry—pushing students to examine its failures, to challenge its confident misreadings. AI does not replace critical thinking; it demands it.

    AI as Productive Friction

    If AI distorts, misinterprets and overreaches, why use it at all? The easy answer would be to reject it—to bar it from the classroom, to treat it as a contaminant rather than a tool. But that would be a mistake. AI is here to stay, and higher education has a choice: either leave students to navigate its limitations on their own or make those limitations part of their education.

    Rather than treating AI’s flaws as a reason for exclusion, I see them as opportunities. In my classroom, AI-generated responses are not definitive answers but objects of critique—imperfect, provisional and open to challenge. By engaging with AI critically, students learn not just from it, but about it. They see how AI struggles with ambiguity, how its summaries can be reductive, how its confidence often exceeds its accuracy. In doing so, they sharpen the very skills AI cannot replicate: skepticism, interpretation and the ability to challenge received knowledge.

    This approach aligns with Marc Watkins’s observation that “learning requires friction.” AI can be a force of productive friction in the classroom. Education is not about seamlessness; it is about struggle, revision and resistance.

    Teaching history—and especially the history of genocide and mass violence—often feels like standing on a threshold: one foot planted in the past, the other stepping into an uncertain future. In this space, AI does not replace the act of interpretation; it compels us to ask what it means to carry memory forward.

    Used thoughtfully, AI does not erode intellectual inquiry—it deepens it. If engaged wisely, it sharpens—rather than replaces—the very skills that make us human.

    Jan Burzlaff is a postdoctoral associate in the Jewish Studies program at Cornell University.

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  • Why Online Learning Teams Should Read “Co-Intelligence”

    Why Online Learning Teams Should Read “Co-Intelligence”

    Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick

    Published in April 2024

    How many artificial intelligence and higher education meetings have you attended where much of the time is spent discussing the basics of how generative AI works? At this point in 2025, the biggest challenge for universities to develop an AI strategy is our seeming inability to achieve universal generative AI literacy.

    Given this state of affairs, I’d like to make a modest proposal. From now on, all attendees of any AI higher education–focused conversation, meeting, conference or discussion must first have read Ethan Mollick’s (short) book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI.

    The audiobook version is only four hours and 37 minutes. Think of the productivity gains if we canceled the next five hours of planned AI meetings and booked that time for everyone to sit and listen to Mollick’s book.

    For university people, Co-Intelligence is perfect, as Mollick is both a professor and (crucially) not a computer scientist. As a management professor at Wharton, Mollick is experienced in explaining why technologies matter to people and organizations. His writing on generative AI mirrors how he teaches his students to utilize technology, emphasizing translating knowledge into action.

    In my world of online education, Co-Intelligence serves as an excellent road map to guide our integration of generative AI into daily work. In the past, I would have posted Mollick’s four generative AI principles on the physical walls of the campus offices that learning designers, media educators, marketing and admissions teams, and educational technology professionals once shared. Now that we live on Zoom and are distributed and hybrid—I guess I’ll have to put them on Slack.

    Mollick’s four principles include:

    1. Always Invite AI to the Table

    When it comes to university online learning units (and probably everywhere else), we should experiment with generative AI in everything we do. This experimentation runs from course/program development, curriculum and assessment writing to program outreach and marketing.

    1. Be the Human in the Loop

    While anything written (and very soon, visual and video) should be co-created with generative AI, that content must always be checked, edited and reworked by one of us. Generative AI can accelerate our work but not replace our expertise or contribution.

    1. Treat AI Like a Person (But Tell It What Kind of Person It Is)

    When working with large language models, the key to good prompt writing is context, specificity and revision. The predictive accuracy and effectiveness of generative AI output dramatically improve with the precision of the prompt. You need to tell the AI who it is, who the audience it is writing for is and what tone the generated content should assume.

    1. Assume This Is the Worst AI You Will Ever Use

    Today, we can easily work with AI to create lecture scripts and decks. How long will it take to feed the AI a picture of a subject matter expert and a script and tool to create plausible—and compelling—full video lectures (chunked into short segments with embedded computer-generated formative assessments)? Think of the time and money we will save when AI complements studio-created instructional videos. We are around the corner of AI’s ability to accelerate the work of learning designers and media educators dramatically. Are we preparing for that day?

    How are your online learning teams leveraging generative AI in your work?

    What other books on AI would you recommend for university readers?

    What are you reading?

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  • Asking Students to *Really* Read Each Other’s Writing | A Conversation with Timothy Oleksiak

    Asking Students to *Really* Read Each Other’s Writing | A Conversation with Timothy Oleksiak

    I spoke with Dr. Timothy Oleksiak, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts—Boston, about two of his essays, “A Queer Praxis for Peer Review” and “Slow Peer Review in the Writing Classroom,” recently out in College Composition and Communication and Pedagogy. In these essays, they present theory and practice for a pedagogical practice they call slow peer review, a different way to approach that classical strategy of writing classes, student-to-student peer review, where students swap drafts and give each other feedback on how to improve them. Slow peer review does have students swap drafts but asks them to spend a lot more time with the drafts than usual, reading them very carefully and thinking about them deeply. Slow peer review then asks students to respond in different and more in depth ways than just giving the writer suggestions. I found the essays really compelling, opening up so many questions with relevance far beyond this specific practice and far beyond even just the teaching of writing.

    In our conversation, which you can watch below, we discuss opera, “the improvement imperative” (i.e., there are more things to do in a writing classroom than help students write better, even as that remains a key goal), and the concept of “cruel optimism” (which refers, in this case, to an unhealthy attachment to certain teaching strategies that aren’t working and won’t suddenly start working through being tweaked). We also discuss the ways in which writers and readers of drafts both participate in “worldmaking.” The idea here is that each draft someone writes envisions a world in which some are included while others are not, and peer reviewers can help writers imagine more clearly what sort of world they’ve built. We also discuss what all of this has to do with queer theory. Lastly, I asked Timothy whether this peer review pedagogy isn’t actually a reading pedagogy. While he’s not so sure, he does have students “read the drafts five different times” and directs students to consider such questions as “What does it mean to be fully human in this world?” (i.e., in the world of the draft being read). Those seem like scaffolds for deep reading to me. At any rate, whatever else this pedagogy does, it does ask students to really read each other’s writing. And that feels extraordinarily valuable to me.

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  • Now You’ve Read Those Things, Too | A Conversation with Arlene Wilner

    Now You’ve Read Those Things, Too | A Conversation with Arlene Wilner

    I sat down with Dr. Arlene Wilner, Professor of English at Rider University, to discuss her new book Rethinking Reading in College: An Across-the-Curriculum Approach. Central to her approach is the idea of rhetorical reading: we ought to teach students, in any discipline, to approach texts not as freestanding and homogenous info blocks but as written by specific people in specific contexts for specific purposes and constructed such that the parts relate to the whole to support those purposes. In other words, to use terms Wilner borrows from John Bean’s Engaging Ideas, texts don’t just say things, they also do things. A sentence does something in a paragraph, something different than other sentences. A essay does something in a larger discussion, something different than other essays.

    We also discussed the importance of background knowledge for reading comprehension. “It takes knowledge to learn,” she says. Now, I’ve long been wary of too great an emphasis on students gathering background knowledge, since, in my mind, that impulse can lead to a sort of teaching-as-coverage approach, where we spend all our time giving students background knowledge they never get around to actually applying to anything. But I’m coming around to Wilner’s point, which is supported by psychological studies on the matter (she cites, for instance, Daniel T. Willingham’s The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads). The key seems to be timing and balance: it can’t be all content or all skills but both.

    Stressing background knowledge, Wilner acknowledges–especially the idea that the background knowledge most important for students tends to be common cultural knowledge–could be seen as supporting regressive notions about what “common cultural knowledge” is or ought to be (i.e., traditional notions of canon). But this doesn’t have to be the case. We can a diverse set of texts in common. As one example she shares: when her students read Martin Luther King’s Letter from “Birmingham Jail” and recognize allusions to Socrates and others texts, they get excited, knowing what he’s talking about. She tells them, “Well now you’re part of the conversation, because you’ve read those things too.”

    Wilner wants more from and for students than merely connecting with and responding to the texts they read. Though that is meaningful, she wants them to go deeper, see layers, interrogate their immediate responses. It’s easy to “translate” texts “to something that’s comfortable and familiar to us,” she says, even if that translation misses what the text is actually saying. But it’s “respectful” of students and of their intellectual abilities to ask them to do more, to help them do more. Students ought not go into college thinking, “I’m going to have my existing feelings beliefs ratified” but instead, “I’m going to have them shaken up.’” Some hard, important, scaffolded reading offers a lot in that direction.

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  • IHEC Blog a project by David Comp: Excited to Read and Review a New Book: “Education Abroad: Bridging Scholarship and Practice”

    IHEC Blog a project by David Comp: Excited to Read and Review a New Book: “Education Abroad: Bridging Scholarship and Practice”

    Yesterday I received and I’m very excited to read and review for IHEC Blog: Education Abroad: Bridging Scholarship and Practice edited by Anthony Ogden, Bernhard Streitwieser and Christof Van Mol. This new book is part of the Routledge Internationalization in Higher Education series edited by Elspeth Jones.

    Learn more at https://bit.ly/2YNGcon

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  • Using SQ3R to help college students read

    Using SQ3R to help college students read

    When students arrive in college, faculty often make the assumption that they know how to read for comprehension and retention. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, many students are not well versed in how to read for class. In today post, I want to share an excerpt from my book, Teaching for Learning, about how you can use SQ3R to help college students read.

    Photo credit: Marketa

    SQ3R

    Overview

    The SQ3R activity provides a framework for students to better comprehend and retain information from readings assigned for class. Students often read course readings as they would any other text: start at page 1 and read to the end without framing the content, thinking critically about the content, and engaging the content. This IDEA offers a more systematic approach to better study the material while reading (Artis, 2008).

    SQ3R is a five-step process:  survey, question, read, recite, and review. The activity helps students engage with material and improve their processing of the information through framing and reflection. Although the use of these five steps take longer than simply reading a text, the advantages of improved understanding and recall are beneficial for students and they improve the teaching experience.

    Guiding Principles

    SQ3R is built on the foundation of an information processing theory of learning (Newell & Simon, 1972; Tadlock, 1978). This theory suggests that people structure and organize information into systems of meaning. The limitations of learning are frequently attributed to limits on the ability to organize information and by encoding information in a way that facilitates recall. By providing a framework to organize new knowledge, SQ3R helps students develop understanding faster and more efficiently. 

    The activity also makes use of the ways the brain stores and retrieves information using short and long-term recall. The framework of SQ3R encourages students to slow down and spend time on information which activates the processing strengths of particularly long-term memory. By asking questions and encouraging recitation, SQ3R allows students to better store and recall information from course readings.

    Preparation

    Most frequently, the SQ3R activity is completed by the student outside of class as part of assigned readings. Prior to assigning SQ3R, provide the framework for students and also explain why the activity proves useful. Students often complain that this process increases the time it takes to complete the reading and in doing so they often fail to see the value. Providing an understanding of why it works based on the guiding principles above can help students know the value and use the activity (Tadlock, 1978).

    Process

    • Explain the framework of the activity in the class and assign (or suggest) students use it on the readings for homework. The following steps explain the process of the activity.
    • Survey helps students gather the basic structure of the topic presented in the reading including reading the title, headings, graphics, and any text called out such as definitions or objectives. 
    • Question involves turning headings and other main ideas identified in the survey stage into question. Students should then seek answers to the questions as they read. 
    • In the Read stage, students read the text to capture the main ideas as identified in the survey and question stages. The goal is to write down the answers to the questions raised by filling in the main ideas without getting too bogged down by the details. 
    • Next, students Recite material, which assists with concentration and recall. Students look at each of the questions of a section and attempt to answer the question (while covering up their notes).
    • The Review step allows the students to consolidate learning and comprehension by reviewing each of the questions and answers.   

    Pro-tips

    Many students have never been taught how to read texts or study content rich material. This activity presents a great strategy to help students by providing a versatile framework to use while reading. Many instructors find it helpful to walk students through how to complete the steps in class. Taking the time to model the process in class can improve students’ use of the activity and improve their reading comprehension as a result.

    There are many different variations that have grown out of SQ3R such as, SQ4R (survey, question, read, recite, wRite, and review) (Pauk, 1984),  PQ4R (preview, question, read, reflect, recite, and review), and FAIRER (facts, ask questions, identify major/minor details, read, evaluate comprehension, and review) (Lei, Rhinehart, Howard, & Cho, 2010). Fundamentally, these all provide frameworks for self-regulation of reading. You can use any variation of this system, as the goal is to provide a way for students to work through a framework to organize and comprehend new information.

    One of the more difficult, yet important, aspects of the SQ3R activity is developing good questions. Students often can easily turn headings and other readily identifiable major points into questions, but struggle with developing good topic spanning questions. As part of other class activities and in debriefing this activity, help students develop good questions. You may do this by sharing good questions raised by classmates or by providing some starter questions early in the course you identified. Helping students learn to ask questions can assist students in your class and throughout their education.

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