The time-consuming test prep with endless exercises on “finding the main idea” and “questioning the author,” exercises that are supposed to help improve verbal abilities, have become the chief cause of today’s curriculum narrowing. Paradoxically then, emphasis on reading and reading tests have helped to cause low reading scores among school leavers.
E D Hirsch recently in the Washington Post
The focus on the “skill” of reading has produced students who cannot read. Teachers cannot cultivate reading comprehension by forcing children to practice soul-deadening exercises like “finding the main idea” and “questioning the author.” Students would be better off gaining knowledge by studying real subject matters in a sensible, cumulative sequence. Instead, elementary schools are dominated by content-indifferent exercises that use random fictional texts on the erroneous assumption that reading comprehension is a formal skill akin to typing.
E D Hirsch recently in the Wall Street Journal
Over the years I have grown increasingly tired of Hirsch’s one-note samba about reading. But I’ve kept my peace because the reading wars are endless, polemical, and easily bog one down in foolish debates. But these latest posts are just too over the top for me to remain mum.
For those unfamiliar with Hirsch’s critique, the only thing he thinks that truly matters is content knowledge. All of our ills – in reading, in learning generally, and in civic life – come down, in his view, to a failure of schools to teach a core and standard set of content.
But Hirsch now goes further, as the recent quotes reveal: he criticizes as unjustified any attempt to teach reading comprehension skills (and even critical thinking). Why? Because there are no such thing as “general” reading and thinking skills. He proposes, rather, that all understanding of text is almost exclusively content-dependent.
Yet, even his UVA colleague Daniel Willingham – whose research Hirsch often cites – flatly disputes Hirsch’s claim:
The National Reading Panel conducted a comprehensive review of all of the 481 studies on reading strategies published between 1980 and 1998…. The Panel concluded that eight of the 16 strategies “appear to have a firm scientific basis for concluding that they improve comprehension in normal readers…. But make no mistake, when standardized reading tests are used, there is still a positive effect of teaching students reading strategies, and the effect is not trivial.
In fact, Hirsch’s position leads to an absurd conclusion (an echo of the famous paradox in Plato’s Meno, that you can never learn anything new): no merely “skilled” reader can be expected to make adequate meaning of a book on a topic with which they are unfamiliar. It’s as if no transfer of learning is possible. (Hirsch is not strong on the topic of transfer; see below).
Main Idea. His constant bashing of teaching the skill of finding Main Idea is truly odd. (He uses this sentence or a variant of it in every piece of writing I can find by him in the last 10 years: “endless exercises on ‘finding the main idea’ and ‘questioning the author’, exercises that are supposed to help improve verbal abilities”). Yet, ironically, as I have long argued, a close look at all released test items on state, national, and international tests is that students are consistently terrible at identifying main idea and author purpose. On average, students only get such questions correct 50% of the time, in my review of released standardized tests. The results reveal over and over again that students cannot identify the key assumptions and conclusions – the main ideas that shape the text. They have great difficulty distinguishing key facts in the text from the (inferred) idea; they are too literal in their reading. Indeed, that’s a key reason why the Common Core stresses as it does the importance of Argument. And that’s why I support an increased emphasis on non-fiction in the new Standards.
Here are some examples:
Consider Hirsch’s criticism: it’s as if he ignores the fact that argument has two components – fact-based evidence and logic. What the reading comprehension skills all provide, ultimately, are analytical approaches for piecing together the logic of a text. No one denies the role of factual knowledge in comprehension. (Would Hirsch please quote someone who does deny it, instead of setting up his straw man?) What the reading literature says and the reading Panel concluded is that vocabulary, background knowledge and reading strategies all work together to frame meaning. Yet, Hirsch insists on setting up his straw man:
We are told by reading specialists that the road to improved comprehension is through mastery of comprehension skills such as classifying, questioning the author, and finding the main idea. Specific content is secondary. Any appropriate, “authentic” content, it is said, will build vocabulary and develop comprehension abilities. This how-to conception of reading dominates current thinking; but we cannot make significant progress in reading until this conception loses its power over us. Children who lag behind are being subjected to endless practicing of strategy skills such as “finding the main idea.” Their slow progress induces our schools to add still more time to the literacy block—up to three hours a day in many places—during which time students practice empty exercises on trivial fictions that subtract from time that could be devoted to the substantive knowledge actually needed to gain reading comprehension.
I have highlighted the ‘straw’ to underscore how surprisingly (and ironically) un-fact-based his critiques often are. Who are these “specialists”? He never names them. What evidence suggests that this view “dominates” current thinking? He doesn’t ever say.
What the National Reading Panel said. More to the point, by his argument, it seems as if we must conclude that all failures of misunderstanding a text relate only to factual knowledge. But over and over in academic and civic life we see failures of logic and analysis that have little to do with how much factual knowledge is possessed by the reader or arguer.
Let’s look more closely at what the Reading Panel actually said (and which Willingham quotes approvingly):
In its review, the Panel identified 16 categories of text comprehension instruction of which 7 appear to have a solid scientific basis for concluding that these types of instruction improve comprehension in non-impaired readers. Some of these types of instruction are helpful when used alone, but many are more effective when used as part of a multiple strategy method. The types of instruction are:
- Comprehension monitoring, where readers learn how to be aware of their understanding of the material;
- Cooperative learning, where students learn reading strategies together;
- Use of graphic and semantic organizers (including story maps), where readers make graphic representations of the material to assist comprehension;
- Question answering, where readers answer questions posed by the teacher and receive immediate feedback;
- Question generation, where readers ask themselves questions about various aspects of the story;
- Story structure, where students are taught to use the structure of the story as a means of helping them recall story content in order to answer questions about what they have read; and
- Summarization, where readers are taught to integrate ideas and generalize from the text information.
In general, the evidence suggests that teaching a combination of reading comprehension techniques is the most effective. When students use them appropriately, they assist in recall, question answering, question generation, and summarization of texts. When used in combination, these techniques can improve results in standardized comprehension tests.
This is a perfectly reasonable set of conclusions (and so were the proposals for follow-up study). But look at how Hirsch spins it:
The truth is that the recommendations from the NRP report about metacognitive strategies are misleading. The NRP report is highly incomplete in the very area, comprehension, on which so many sterile hours are being spent by the schools on so many fragmented and educationally trivial stories. The research citations in the NRP report ignore or deemphasize important studies that have established a central finding about reading comprehension—that the possession of relevant prior knowledge is the single most potent contributor to the comprehension of a text. The lack of relevant prior knowledge will hinder comprehension, no matter how many long hours a child has spent learning to monitor, question, or summarize.
Who said otherwise? What is misleading? Who said that background knowledge is not a factor? Where is the research that shows that most hours are spent on “sterile exercises” using “trivial stories.”? What specific research shows that prior content knowledge is “the single most potent contributor” to text understanding? In fact Willingham summarized the matter far more cautiously than Hirsch lets on:
Some researchers have suggested that prior knowledge is so important to memory that it can actually make up for or replace what we normally think of as aptitude. Some studies have administered the same memory task to high-aptitude and low-aptitude children, some of whom have prior knowledge of the subject matter and some of whom do not; the studies found that only prior knowledge is important (Britton, Stimson, Stennett, and Gülgöz, 1998; Recht and Leslie, 1988; Schneider, Korkle, and Weinert, 1989; Walker, 1988). But some researchers disagree. They report that, although prior knowledge always helps memory, it cannot eliminate the aptitude differences among people. Since everyone’s memory gets better with prior knowledge, assuming equal exposure to new knowledge (as in a classroom without extra support for slower students), the student with overall lower aptitude will still be behind the student with higher aptitude (Hall and Edmondson, 1992; Hambrick and Engle, 2002; Hambrick and Oswald, 2005; Schneider, Bjorklund, and Maier-Brückner, 1996). In the end, the issue is not settled, but as a practical matter of schooling, it doesn’t matter much. What matters is the central, undisputed finding: All students will learn more if they have greater background knowledge.
This whole either-or thinking about skill vs knowledge in reading leads Hirsch into silly territory about testing:
The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. Then base the reading-test passages on those knowledge domains covered in the curriculum. That would not only be fairer to teachers and students, it would encourage interesting, substantive teaching and would over time induce a big uptick in students’ knowledge — and hence in their reading comprehension skills. That kind of test would be well worth prepping for. [emphasis added]
Now there’s a straw man if I ever saw one! Exercises on main idea are “soul-deadening” and “sterile” but teaching content knowledge will “encourage interesting, substantive teaching”! Has Hirsch not set foot in classrooms? Everywhere one turns there is endless and disengaging marching through content knowledge. Cf Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There is poor transfer of learning of both content knowledge and skill because the pre-dominant pedagogy is didactic teaching and passive inflexible learning instead of opportunities to investigate questions, apply prior learning to new situations, and reflect on what worked and what didn’t.
On transfer. In fact, Hirsch’s views on transfer of learning are downright puzzling, as I suggested above:
Reading, like riding a bike, is an ability we acquire as children and generally never lose. Some of us are more confident on two wheels than others, and some of us, we are told, are better readers than others…. When you think about your ability to read — if you think about it at all — the chances are good that you perceive it as not just a skill but a readily transferable skill…
The message has not yet reached American classrooms. A stubborn belief in reading comprehension as a transferable skill combined with the immense pressures of testing and accountability results in ever more time being wasted on scattered, trivial, and incoherent reading.
Think of reading as a two-lock box, requiring two keys to open. The first key is decoding skills. The second key is oral language, vocabulary, and domain — specific or background knowledge sufficient to understand what is being decoded. Even this simple understanding of reading enables us to see that the very idea of an abstract skill called “reading comprehension” is ill-informed. Yet most U.S. schools teach reading as if both decoding and comprehension are transferable skills. Worse, we test our children’s reading ability without regard to whether we have given them the requisite background knowledge they need to be successful.
Why aren’t meta-cognitive and other comprehension-aiding abilities mentioned as a third key – which was clearly the view of the National Reading Panel? Because it doesn’t fit Hirsch’s narrative.
Transfer never magically happens. Not even Hirsch’s precious background knowledge transfers unless there is practice, feedback, and tasks that demand such transfer. Here’s what the National Reading Panel had to say on transfer:
With respect to the scientific basis of the instruction of text comprehension, the Panel concludes that comprehension instruction can effectively motivate and teach readers to learn and to use comprehension strategies that benefit the reader.
These comprehension strategies yield increases in measures of near transfer such as recall, question answering and generation, and summarization of texts. These comprehension strategies, when used in combination, show general gains on standardized comprehension tests. Teachers can learn to teach students to use comprehension strategies in natural learning situations. Furthermore, when teachers teach these strategies, their students learn them and improve their reading comprehension.
A common aspect of individual and multiple-strategy instruction is the active involvement of motivated readers who read more text as a result of the instruction. These motivational and reading practice effects may be important to the success of multiple- strategy instruction.
The empirical evidence reviewed favors the conclusion that teaching of a variety of reading comprehension strategies leads to increased learning of the strategies, to specific transfer of learning, to increased retention and understanding of new passages, and, in some cases, to general improvements in comprehension.
The pressing need is for improved teacher training and skill in these areas:
The preparation of teachers to deliver comprehension strategy instruction is important to the success of teaching reading comprehension. As indicated by the Panel’s review of text comprehension, reading comprehension can be improved by teaching students to use specific cognitive strategies or to reason strategically when they encounter barriers to comprehension when reading. The goal of such training is the achievement of competent and self-regulated reading.
…[I]mplementation of the direct instruction approach to cognitive strategy instruction in the context of the actual classroom has proved problematic. For one thing, it is often difficult to communicate what is meant by “teaching strategies and not skills.” Several papers have been written whose purpose is to explicate exactly how teachers are taught to become teachers of comprehension strategies, and it appears that no small part of the challenge of training teachers comes from the difficulty of describing what is required of them. In addition, acquiring and practicing individual strategies in isolation and then attempting to provide transfer opportunities during the reading of connected text makes for rigid and awkward instruction.
Proficient reading involves much more than utilizing individual strategies; it involves a constant, ongoing adaptation of many cognitive processes. To help develop these processes in their students, teachers must be skillful in their instruction. Indeed, successful teachers of reading comprehension must respond flexibly and opportunistically to students’ needs for instructive feedback as they read. To be able to do this, teachers themselves must have a firm grasp not only of the strategies that they are teaching the children but also of instructional strategies that they can employ to achieve their goal. Many teachers find this type of teaching a challenge, most likely because they have not been prepared to do such teaching.
[note that these last few paragraphs support my critique of so-called reading strategies being taught as discrete skills in this prior blog entry. I agree with Hirsch: too often the strategies are taught as discrete skills, but that doesn’t invalidate the approach.]
This is of course a far different spin on Hirsch’s criticism of teaching reading skills. In effect, the Panel is saying: look, the research is clear on the benefits of teaching comprehension skills, but teachers do not adequately implement them nor have adequate training in how to teach readers to be cognitively strategic. So, transfer doesn’t happen. In other words, Hirsch conveniently overlooks the fact that the panels’ criticism was not of the value of comprehension strategies per se but the actual teaching of them.
They make an even stronger claim about instruction with respect to another of Hirsch’s favorite topic, mentioned above, vocabulary:
The need in vocabulary instruction research is great. Existing knowledge of vocabulary acquisition exceeds current knowledge of pedagogy. That is, a great deal is known about the ways in which vocabulary increases under highly controlled conditions, but much less is known about the ways in which such growth can be fostered in instructional contexts. There is a great need for the conduct of research on these topics in authentic school contexts, with real teachers, under real conditions.
[emphasis added]
As I mentioned, much of his analysis reflects Hirsch’s skewed view of educational history and the decline of reading ability. Here are three excerpts from different writings:
The root cause of this decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child-centered school of the twentieth—a process that was complete by 1950.
Yet in the 1930s, American schools transformed themselves according to the principles of “progressive education,” which assume that students need to learn not a body of knowledge but “how-to” skills that (supposedly) enable them to pick up specific knowledge later on.
This contradictory and self-defeating situation has arisen because of a quirk in child-centered educational theory. Though it is opposed to imparting facts in a definite curriculum, it is not against inculcating all-purpose general skills—such as reading strategies and critical thinking. “Rote learning” and a set curriculum are to be regarded with scorn, but students may be subjected to drills in how-to skills… Many of the weekly hours that are assigned to language arts in the early grades are now being devoted to practicing reading strategies such as “questioning the author” and “finding the main idea.”
Never mind that since 1880 researchers were decrying the lack of fundamental knowledge of American students. Never mind that Progressive education died out during World War II and had limited impact on typical schools. Never mind that no reputable educator has ever scorned a “definite curriculum” in my life-time except a handful of radicals. But even if we grant a decline in American education, how can Hirsch justify such a statement as the following?
Teachers in a typical American classroom cannot rely on their students having acquired any specific item of knowledge. But effective classroom teaching depends on key prior knowledge being shared by all the members of the class. Without such shared knowledge, truly effective whole-class teaching cannot occur—no matter how potentially effective the teacher is.
Cannot rely on their students having acquired any specific item of knowledge? Really? And successful whole-class instruction is impossible without every student coming in knowing the same things?? How can such a claim be made without evidence, since it is so clearly not credible on its face in a country as diverse, mobile, and specialized as ours?
Not being taught? Or not being learned? So, finally, let’s zero in on Hirsch’s constant refrain: core content isn’t taught in our schools. Why does Hirsch always write that key knowledge is not taught? What evidence does he have of this failure to teach content? In fact, a far stronger argument can be made, on the basis of sources as varied as the National Study of Student Engagement, Hattie’s meta-analysis, How People Learn from the National Academy of Science, and state standards and standardized test results based on them (not to mention a visit to any classroom in America) that content is routinely taught but not learned.
This is even true in math, the subject that Hirsch ironically tries to set up as a more effective case of content-based teaching leading to better results than reading. As I have often noted, math tests reveal repeatedly that students do not sufficiently understand such core content as the Pythagorean Theorem; they cannot “see” this idea to transfer it in novel problems. How does Hirsch explain such failures? The content was indeed taught, multiple times; however, it was clearly not understood and transferred. Surely the possibility of and the problem of deficits in transfer of learning are a more likely culprit than an absence of teaching of content. At the very least, Hirsch ought to justify this incessant claim of his that core knowledge is not taught in American schools.
I have spent 35 years in classrooms. Everywhere I go I see core content being taught. But it isn’t being well taught or well learned in many cases, echoing the National Reading Report, Hattie’s analysis in Visible Learning, and NAEP results. So, it’s time we retire Hirsch’s broken record about content not being taught. It’s well past time to focus on learning, not teaching, because regardless of one’s ideology the one undeniable fact that Hirsch and I can probably agree on is that students leave school with far less than they were taught, whether it is knowledge of the Algonquins (a piece of content in Hirsch’s core curriculum) or main idea.
PS: It’s already started – the either-or thinking that plagues this profession. A critic of my piece claims that I don’t value content knowledge. Nowhere do I say it or imply it. The aim of learning is not content knowledge; the aim is transfer of learning – including content knowledge – to new situations. Hirsch claims, without much evidence, that content knowledge is the determining feature in reading comprehension. I am responding to his narrow claim, period. As I noted and as the Reading Panel noted, reading well is a function of numerous factors and nowhere do they support the claim that background knowledge is the most powerful determinant of comprehension which is Hirsch’ claim.
43 Responses
Mr. Wiggins, notwithstanding the gravity of this excellent post, I was chortling all the way through. It’s always amusing to watch while a contortionist gets straightened out. Thanks!
🙂
I’m wondering whether Hirsch would be happy with reading strategies that focus on lower-level components of reading comprehension (like grammar,vocabulary, and paragraph structure) rather than the somewhat vaguer notions like main idea and author’s intent. My rather limited reading of proponents of content-first pedagogy suggests that most would be happy with more emphasis on grammar and mechanics.
As a sometimes writing instructor, I wish students had more attention paid to the fundamentals. I see plenty of evidence that students have not mastered sentence and paragraph structure, and so can only put ideas together in rather vague and nebulous ways in their writing (reminiscent of the “graphic and semantic organizers (including story maps)” you mention).
Note, I’m not arguing against the importance of the reading strategies you are championing here, but in favor supplementing them with some more fundamental understanding of English sentences. (Note: I don’t know that there is any evidence that older techniques like sentence diagramming help, and I suspect that they don’t much—but there must be better techniques than commonly used for teaching how causality, contradiction, and correlation are expressed in English.)
Agreed: kids can’t write. But they were ‘taught’ to write, just as they were ‘taught’ the Pythagorean Theorem. I am perfectly happy to admit that students fail to learn and transfer their learning. Indeed, my entire career is built around investigating the annoying and unsettling gap in the ‘yield’ of learning from teaching. That’s why I am a strong critic of the status quo. That’s why I make no apologies for proposing fundamental reforms and why I find Diane Ravitch’s conversion off the wall. She makes it sound like no reform is needed; reformers just seek to destroy public schools. I want schools to be a LOT better and I believe that if teachers taught better they would be. That’s what Hattie’s research shows as does our work in UbD. When people know and use best practice, kids learn. Period. Let’s get on it.
Now I understand what gave you writers block! Quick question, how does this analysis of what to teach relate to the fully guided instruction of Clark, kirschner and sweller on how to teach? Keep up the good fight!
Indeed: I was having a lot of trouble collecting my thoughts for a brief post with so much pent up irritation.
There’s nothing wrong with direct instruction and guided instruction. But the goal is transfer, not recall of what was taught. So the only response I can make is: fine, as far as it goes. But transfer cannot be learned via didactic instruction, only discrete skill and knowledge can. Transfer and meaning are learned via attempts and response – feedback and its meaning. Chapter 2 in How People Learning summarizes all the lit. on transfer.
“transfer cannot be learned via didactic instruction, only discrete skill and knowledge can.”
The worked example literature via John Sweller from the 1980s contradicts this. Students who studied worked examples obtained the highest transfer scores.
Worked examples are indeed key to transfer, as is generalizing from those examples. You are taking my meaning of didactic instruction too expansively: I mean lecturing merely.
If I recall, there was talk – gossip? – about the perceived distance between some of these panelists and the curricular materials developed later. I also recall considerable discussion about the amount, kinds and quality of the research they consulted.
I believe EH is right that a lot of time is spent on strategies — what I would call “practicing” reading. He, too, has visited classrooms though perhaps not so many as you have.
There is definitely a “Western” bias in his ideas about what content should be included. I leave everyone to make of that what they will.
One thing about prior knowledge: your blogs about math and teaching math fascinate me. Likewise, the soccer examples. I have never played soccer, and I have trouble understanding all you want me to get from it not because I cannot decode, but because I have no experience. All the strategies in the world won’t help; I do know how to go about knowing more which is a good strategy to have. The same thing happens with your math writings. Math and its terminology have changed so much since I finished my 3 1/2 semesters of high school math, I feel lost. Not completely. I know little enough that I cannot quibble with what you say, however.
But what is so striking is that the Panel’s recommendations were balanced and reasonable. He just didn’t like the conclusion. I can bet why: if you look at the 7 questions they took up, the issue of background knowledge wasn’t even one of them. That’s why he claims they “overlooked” stuff. But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t say there is boring bad teaching of reading “skill” and not investigate boring bad teaching of content. Nor can you claim that reading most depends upon background knowledge when there are no studies to support such a bold claim. The study he always returns too made a different point: seemingly ‘weak’ readers can look good when the reading is on something they really know and love compared with ‘stronger’ readers who don’t know a thing – in that case, baseball. But it’s a huge stretch to go from that example to the conclusion that background knowledge explains reading ability. He’s also wrong about the lack of reliability of individual reading scores. All questions have unreliability; all major goals have redundant items because one score is often unreliable. Willingham admits the key finding – I didn’t quote this part, but you can find it in his article – there is NO research on how much and why individual student scores vary. We just don’t know the ‘inherent’ variability of reading when confronted with new texts.
You make a KEY distinction that he never makes. The issue is experience, not ‘knowledge’. Book knowledge does not transfer well; experience playing and watching games does. he conveniently ignores the distinction between knowledge and experience over and over again.
Just FYI the Reading Panel link does not work — I tracked down this Chapter 4 Part II link https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/ch4-II.pdf.
Darn, thanks, I’ll fix it.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Science and commented:
Great post by Grant Wiggins on content knowledge and comprehension strategies in reading instruction. Very similar ideas apply in the science practices vs. content knowledge debate in science education.
I apologize in advance for the length, but I do have a point.
Let me tell you what I do, as a homeschooling Dad, and you (Grant Wiggins and readers here) tell me if (a) I am doing anything wrong, and (b) whether what I do is more in line with what Wiggins recommends, or instead Hirsch. Because, frankly, I’m having trouble telling what this argument is really about.
I started reading to my son when he was a baby. I read a huge amount to him, and ran my finger under the words. Around age 2, we started going through cards (which I spent a couple years digitizing on ReadingBear.org) and watching the much-ballyhooed “Your Baby Can Read” (which he loved). In short, by age three he was able to appreciate and love books like “Charlotte’s Web” and “Pinocchio”–with me explaining vocabulary, a lot. I read those books to him, but he was able to read them to me, if I asked. I made powerpoint presentations in which I explained al sorts of basic facts and especially vocabulary (see http://www.slideboom.com/people/papa123abc). After Hirsch’s heart, I’m sure. Moreover, whenever we read a word or phrase that I think my children don’t understand, I explain them immediately, before they ask. They are used to understanding at least the words all the time.
Around age 5, although my older son was able and somewhat willing to read books on his own, he didn’t do it so much. He relied on me to read to him, which I did a lot–it was easier, because I explained everything. But I wanted him to get into the reading-to-himself habit, so I assigned him to start reading chapter books, and he did. At that age he was reading books like “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” and occasionally harder things. We worked our way up to 60 minutes a day, sometimes more, and those are for him the easiest and generally most enjoyable part of his day. When he’s done with his reading time I usually ask him questions about what he’s read. Sometimes we look up questions on enotes.com and he answers those. Of course I ask him to write occasionally about what he reads, or what I read to him, but not really that much–I usually let him write about whatever he wants to.
When he was 6 he read, with a dictionary, “Treasure Island” and “Tom Sawyer.” those were definitely the hardest books he was reading; he re-read the Beverly Cleary books for fun. He was able to answer my questions and enotes.com questions reasonably well. Now at age 7 he’s reading “My Side of the Mountain” and Harry Potter #3 among others, which he enjoys, and complains if I make him look up words in a dictionary because he says he doesn’t need them. The 7th grade vocabulary tests on BigIQTests.com are about his level now.
I’m still reading to him, at about 7 1/2 years old, at bedtime. We’re finishing up “The Return of the King” and, if you can believe it, we’re up to Act V Scene III of “Macbeth.” Before you accuse me of child abuse, let me assure you that the latter was his idea and what he asks for almost every night. We use an iPad app, “Shakespeare in Bits” (tagline: “Making Shakespeare Easier!” and they really, really do). I read it to him, I do glosses of half of what we read, we read the app’s notes, and to decipher the really hard we head over to Sparknotes’ “No Fear Shakespeare” site. At first I wondered how much he really could be understanding. But he soon discovered the app’s “My Notes” feature, in which the student can put his or her own notes into the system. Rather suddenly he wanted to do this for every page, and was writing a paragraph actually explaining what was going on on the page. Sometimes he was not giving much more information than was explained to him either by me or by the No Fear Shakespeare notes; but frequently he came out with things that weren’t mentioned in either place and were clearly all him. I didn’t ask him to do this, ever–it’s clearly “above and beyond,” and he has since stopped doing this (he stopped around Act IV). But he had satisfied me once and for all that (a) he was capable of understanding very difficult texts and (b) he really was understanding them reasonably well.
I rarely ask him, “What’s the main idea?” but we talk quite a bit about about the books we read. The idea that he doesn’t understand what he’s reading is silly. Moreover, the whole idea of “reading comprehension questions” per se, or exercises specifically about reading comprehension, or “reading” books like I had as a child (like this: http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Grade-4-Spectrum/dp/0769638643) all seem silly and unnecessary.
When I want him to retain a piece of information, I put it into SuperMemo, which he reviews twice a day, total about an hour a day. He does that instead of “homework” and “tests.” He remembers a lot, as a result.
When I want to scare him, I threaten to send him to school.
I’m reading his little 3-year-old brother “Charlotte’s Web” at bedtime these days; he can decode at the third grade level, as his older brother could at the same age.
I’m a Hirsch fan. I believe strongly in knowledge (my Ph.D. is in epistemology, for what it’s worth), as he does.
First:
n = 2
Second:
All we need is every child to have a parent who is as thoughtful about what their children learn as you are. Unfortunately…
Are there any good studies that show learning transfer working well? Everything I have read shows that transfer is essentially impossible and not just for reading. I see Hirsch’s point. Learning how to find the main ideas of a short story, probably gives you no benefit in trying to find the main idea of a published study in theoretical physics. He may be overstating his case, but he does have a point. What would help a student interpret a theoretical physics work better: physics instruction and practice or clues to identify the main idea of short stories?
You should read Chapter 3 in How People Learn for a summary on the transfer research. You set up a straw man interpret physics vs. main idea of hsort stories is not my point or the point of the research on transfer. Transfer demands attention to big ideas that facilitate transfer, practice in transfer without teaching prompting. Cf. Eric Mazur’s work in physics in many blog postings here.
Do you think our students fail to learn what is taught because we fail at letting our students stumble, fall and then renegotiate their application of knowledge and try again? Shouldn’t transfer involve a kind of mental “sweat” factor? It seems we must never allow failure. What about the power of not yet?
So if it’s the instruction that is failing to teach students to learn, and beyond that transfer both near and far, why can’t we create more rigorous teaching institutions? Recently CNN had its Morgan Spurlock explore education in Finland and though we do have unique differences we could share the powerful notion of a rigorous and valued teacher education. Now that could be impactful!
Thank you for recognizing when critical educational “emperors” aren’t wearing their clothes. We need more logic and less insubstantial gaseous outbursts. Mr EH could and should be better.
How much of this also goes at the question of student motivation. I wonder if reading is truly being taught, but also I wonder how much the students really want to read what they are given. I am constantly appalled at teacher book choices.
I honestly think this reading problem boils down to processing. Students are often asked superficial and generic questions, but rarely have deep discussions about the text. I really love the idea of classroom book clubs (Lit Circles) where students can get together and talk about the book/text. With some guidance, it’s amazing what they can do.
I have concerns about how strategy usage is taught. It seems like strategy usage just boils down to an assembly line approach with students using the “strategy of the week” until the next strategy rolls around. I think teacher education really fails at teaching teachers that scaffolding is great, but you have to have standards/expectations, teach students to internalize the strategies (and each student may use a different set of strategies), and those scaffolds need to be removed eventually or they are not scaffolds anymore. Maybe we are teaching the wrong thing? Maybe we need to stop teaching strategies and start focusing on teaching/guiding students to generate meaning from text (using strategies to do this). Kind of like Art class: you have an idea and then you go looking for tools to help create your idea. “Here is a reading passage” now lets find the tools we need to understand it, but we do need to remember that the goal is understanding – the goal is not strategy usage. The strategy tools still need to be explicitly taught, but they are not the focus – understanding the text is the focus. Reading is rarely taught this way. If reading instruction today was like woodshop, we’d be testing the students on tools and not products (Who cares what your project looks like, do you know your tools?). Who buys furniture based on the tools that were used? You gotta do something with those tools or they are pretty worthless!
But…students need more time to discuss what they are reading – whether that is with peers or with the teacher (or both). Maybe we should also, gasp, ask students what they would like to read and spend more time generating meaning and applying that meaning?
I have watched a local teacher do a masterful job of helping kids choose books, turning non-readers into avid readers. She also does a ncie job of helping kids practice a skill/tactic/strategy then use it independently. She gets the best scores in her building.
Is that the norm? I think we as teachers really need to look at our instruction and be constantly looking at “the big picture” to see if we are sticking to the point. I too would love to learn more about transference and would welcome your input.
It’s easy to say no (or wrong), but harder to give transference ideas. Maybe we need some good ideas…?
I have written extensively about transfer on this blog and UbD is based on the literature. Start with Chapter 3 in How People Learn, search on ‘trnasfer’ in the search field for the blog.
A school with a great librarian can turn all kids onto reading.
Hmmm. I need to think more about your passionate cri de couer, Grant, but this strikes me after my first 1-2 reads as an overly broad interpretation of both Hirsch and Willingham. Yes, the Reading Panel says “strategies work” but a more complete understanding of why they “work” seems to indicate they don’t work for the reasons we assume or teach (transferability) but rather that they help underscore the point that there is communicative value to a text, and may cue the reader in thinking through a text when comprehension fails. But Hirsch’s broader point, that strategies have no value in the absence of background knowledge seems unassailable. Likewise, you’re correct that no one seriously questions the importance of background knowledge, but again that’s really not Hirsch’s point. One of the areas where the content knowledge crowd (I consider myself a member in good standing) and constructivists talk past each other is not on whether knowledge matters (it does) but whether an appropriate aim of schooling is to impart knowledge in a *coherent and sequential* manner. My work in inner city schools over the past decade, where comprehension fails not because of a failure of metacognition but a lack of “schema” and vocabulary leads me to conclude if you’re not building knowledge, you’re not teaching reading.
Your mileage may vary.
Robert Pondiscio
I certainly agree with you that schemas and other big ideas are key to transfer, as is practice and feedback in attempts to transfer. But even your own words highlight the problem with Hirsch’ drumbeat: “Strategies have no value in the absence of background knowledge seems unassailable.” A straw man, no? You might just as well have said “Knowledge has no value in the absence of the ability to skillfully use it” and it would be the same truism. I could equally say to your last sentence: “If you are not teaching for transfer of learning than you are not teaching reading, math, or history properly.”
What all the released tests show is that American kids are incredibly literal as readers. They have really weak inferential abilities and they seem to fail to grasp the essence of comprehension as the goal. The NAEP results have made this clear for decades. Hirsch is silent on this problem.
And, as always, I would say that you make a graver error when you talk about ‘imparting’ knowledge. The goal is to cause it to be learned – a very different question. We both agree that a coherent, sequenced curriculum is needed, but Hirsch’ work is naive about the psychology and pedagogy of intellectual engagement and developed understanding. Everything we know about learning is that a clear, coherent, and logically sequenced ‘imparting’ is nowhere near sufficient to educate people properly. That’s what the misconception literature, the formative assessment literature, the power of meta-cognition, and the cognitive science of the past 30 years is all about.
What the Panel said and what I said is closer to the non straw-man truth: effective learning requires transferable ideas, knowledge, and skills framed in a learning system that makes clear that transfer, not mere spitting back, is the goal of learning; and that genuine comprehension requires strong meta-cognitive and critical skills that are typically not taught either by traditionalists or constructivists.
Despite your sensible post, Hirsch has almost always written in strident either-or terms about the primacy of knowledge.
<<<Despite your sensible post, Hirsch has almost always written in strident either-or terms about the primacy of knowledge
Reasonable people disagree. I think I have a pretty solid grasp of Hirsch's work and beliefs (one of the quotes you cite above is from a piece we co-wrote). I don't his work as reductive as you portray it. Interestingly, I became an unapologetic Hirschean long before I met and worked with him. His observations perfectly described what I was seeing every day in my South Bronx 5th grade classroom. I remember bringing him up in my ed school classroom (he was *not* on the syllabus) and the professor chortling, "That dead white guy stuff? Nobody takes that seriously."
Of course Hirsch's work is not about establishing a canon. It's more accurately viewed as curatorial effort aimed at cataloguing the essential knowledge and language literate people tend to know, and take for granted that other literate people possess. Gaps and disparities in knowledge and vocabulary are what tend to disrupt comprehension. This, not attacking reading strategies, is the soul of Don's work
Like you, I have no data on the primacy of strategies instruction versus knowledge building. But one interesting litmus test is to wander the education section of your local Barnes and Noble. Alongside Don's lonely slim volumes, you will find dozens if not hundreds of books on strategies instruction (Strategies That Work, Mosaic of Thought, et many many al). It doesn't seem to me to be an overstatement at all to suggest that most of us who have trained to be teachers have been told repeatedly that teaching content is less important than not merely reading strategies, but critical thinking, problem solving, and other "21st century skills." Every one of these laudable ends of a good education is knowledge-dependent. Another critical theme of Hirsch's
In the final analysis, I quite agree that this is a false dichotomy. I would guess that I'm far more willing than others to be prescriptive about the knowledge-building function of schooling, especially in grades K-5 (maybe K-8) and most especially for low-income learners who are the least likely to come to school with the knowledge and language benefits that tend to accrue to their affluent peers. But not only do I reject the idea that Hirsch's work is overly broad, I would argue that until or unless his critical insights into cognitive processes are understood by teachers and reflected in classroom practice, our progress will be limited. One of the hardest things for educated people to wrap their head around is the degree to which their own ability to speak, listen, read and write with comprehension rests upon a body of shared and tacitly assumed knowledge and vocabulary. For teachers of low-income students, (the sweet spot of Hirsch's work) this insight is critical. Once obtained, it deeply informs classroom practice.
Robert
In my experience it is rare students retain content knowledge for the long term. So yes, we could teach Ancient Greece in grade 4, but in 5 years do we think it matters if they still remember the names of Greek Gods? Instead let the kids focus on EQs such as ” how can myths explain reality?” Or “how is contemporary America influenced by Ancient Greece?” Yes the students would need to become familiar with some names and places, but the bigger takeaway would be about influences and civilizations impact.
It amazes me that EH causes so many reasonable people to explode.
There is something going on beyond what he says.
One possible explanation — we all have investments that we hold dear and someone who calls that investment into question is nerve-making. ??????
No, in my case it bugs me that he cherry picks the data and straw mans the argument and has done so since the beginning. That he gets such a hearing on that basis is annoying to those of us who try to examine all sides of things fairly. He became famous on the basis of a very skewed and one-sided reading of Dewey, of data – and it was dear to conservative hearts.
This one really does fit “written extensively.” Can you get it down to a half sheet of paper? I know there are some good points in this. I to am” in search of excellence!”
“he criticizes as unjustified any attempt to teach reading comprehension skills (and even critical thinking). Why? Because there are no such thing as “general” reading and thinking skills. He proposes, rather, that all understanding of text is almost exclusively content-dependent.”
The first sentence above is false. In Hirsch’s book “The Knowledge Deficit”, he writes that *some* teaching of general comprehension skills is useful, though this can occur is a little as a few weeks of lessons. Hirsch cited Barak Rosenshine and Carla Meister:
“Reciprocal teaching: A Review of the Research,”
Review of Educational Research 64, 4 (Winter 1994) 479-530.
So, take care to read Hirsch thoroughly before painting him as an extremist with a disregard for educational research.
I have indeed taken care. He always down plays the importance and cherry picks the data.In the same book he brushes off that quote to condemn such teaching, invariably painting it in exagerated terms, just as in the quotes I cited.
Grant,
I have had many related discussions with colleagues and they are soon to point out that there are many Charter Schools in the area that have adopted a Hirschean view of education that have been very successful. What would your response be to this claim?
I have no doubt that a clear and coherent curriculum is better than done. The same could be said for Kipp and others. A guaranteed and viable curriculum is a huge element of achievement gains. The same gains are seen in UbD schools.
It often seems like the conversation can be reduced down to the concept of understanding, as Dewey so eloquently put it and as you have also quoted in your book,
“To grasp the meaning of a thing, an event, or a situation is to see it in its relations to other things: to see how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it, what causes it, what uses it can be put to. In contrast, what we have called the brute thing, the thing without meaning to us, is something whose relations are not grasped….The relation of means-consequence is the center and hear of all understanding.”
Hirsch does not empahsize this type of understanding and therefore promotes a model of education that is deficient in its ability to help students tranfer skills to novel problems that they will soon face as adults.
I could not have said it better. It’s noteworthy that he rarely speaks of understanding and often seems to conflate it with knowledge. Yet, his statement of the goal of reading makes clear that active meaning-making is essential to successful comprehension.
It is simply wrong and bordering on dishonest to say Hirsch “rarely speaks of understanding.” His entire body of work is aimed at describing the conditions under which “skills” like critical thinking, problem solving — understanding — occur and the optimal way to create those conditions in the learner.
“I simply do not understand where these one-sided caricatures of education come from,” you write.
In this case, it’s coming from you, Mr. Wiggins.
Understanding is not a skill, it is an achievement. You misunderstand both my position and why his view is inadequate epistemologically.
It is precisely Hirsch’s point that background knowledge is needed to make sense, and that modern methods of education, whatever their virtues, do not provide background knowledge.
When I read Dewey saying that understanding requires putting facts into context, I ask myself what the most efficient way to do that is. It is rather simple, and it is perfectly in line with what Hirsch recommends: read several books on the same subject, all the way through, reflect on them, and gain knowledge thereby. Selections from books, which is what most reading teachers offer their poor students, takes knowledge out of context. Whole books puts it into context. Several books on the same subject provides useful redundancy and fills in gaps, providing understanding, which is strengthened by reflecting about the reading.
Look, I went to St. John’s College, the Great Books college. I taught English. I learned to teach reading since many HS English students do not know how to read complex texts. What you are describing is simplistic and wrong. To say that ‘modern methods of education do not provide background knowledge ‘ is just odd. My work is predicated on deep content understanding, meaning making with it and transfer of it. So is Howard Gardner’s; so is the Common Core. I simply do not understand where these one-sided caricatures of education come from, and they certainly do no reflect my experience. You ironically argue in just the way I am critical of Hirsch: it exaggerates and simplifies everything into an either-or debate, predicated on sweeping generalizations.
I encourage you to read or re-read Chapter 3 in How People learn (on transfer of learning) and Hattie’s Visible Learning and his discussion of the top effect size practices. There is very little data to support your viewpoint, as ‘common sensical’ as your views are.
I’m not referring to or judging your work, which I’m not familiar with and completely unqualified to do, so I shouldn’t have “modern methods of education” and attempted to describe all of it. Sorry about that. I should have been clearer and simply said leveled readers, still in widespread use to teach elementary school children the subject of “reading,” since that’s really what I meant.
I think sometimes people make what strike you as caricatures of education methods because the differences between them don’t really matter very much. What matters is what they don’t do.
I’m not familiar with the research. I’m merely stating my layperson’s opinion, notwithstanding your dismissals thereof, based merely on my experience teaching my children, my own education, and my limited reading of education theory. If you want children to learn to read very well, have them read a lot–whole books, all the way through–preferably classics in fiction and serious but fun books in nonfiction. Of course there’s much much more to say than that, but is that something you’re saying you disagree with? When you say, “There is very little data to support your viewpoint,” is that the viewpoint you mean, and if not, then what viewpoint, precisely, are you referring to?
I’m not aware of my disagreeing with anybody except defenders of leveled readers and people who don’t assign lots of books to elementary school kids.
It is simply wrong and bordering on dishonest to say Hirsch “rarely speaks of understanding.” His entire body of work is aimed at describing the conditions under which cognitive “skills” like critical thinking, problem solving–understanding–occur.
“I simply do not understand where these one-sided caricatures of education come from,” you insist.
In this case, it’s coming from you, Mr. Wiggins.
I think that ED Hirsch’s books could be called “Stuff I Like.” At a recent conference, we took some of the trivia from “What every 6th grader should know” and passed them out to a room full of educators. We then asked them to form groups where everyone knew the info from everyone else’s cards. Unsurprisingly, the information was NOT common to everyone. And yet somehow they all managed to be fully formed, productive individuals who could converse together and work collaboratively. We know that not everyone shares the same bits of data – in fact, we rely on it when we form teams to solve the world’s big problems. Facts are not useless (you have to have something to think about), but it seems supremely arrogant to believe that one could ‘curate’ what everyone needs. just my $.02 – thanks for the post