New Understanding about Reading Achievement

by INFOhio Staff 9 months, 1 week ago

Choose one of the following quotes and respond to it.

  • "To their surprise, Recht and Leslie found that reading ability had little impact on how well kids understood the story. But knowledge of baseball did. In fact, those who were weaker readers did as well as strong readers if they had knowledge of baseball." The Baseball Experiment
  • "But it wasn’t until 2000 when anyone even bothered to examine the value of the instructional level using a randomized control trial. Then things got really interesting, since those studies found either that it made no difference—in terms of reading achievement—whether kids were matched to texts at their so-called instructional level, or the frustration level kids far outperformed the instructional level ones. In other words, it was either a waste of time to match kids to books or it was hurting kids!" Timothy Shanahan
Ryan Winkleman 4 months ago

While the baseball study comes as a bit of a surprise at first, the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Background knowledge and accompanying vocabulary is critical in supporting reading and reading comprehension. And the longer student's struggle go without proper intervention, the more this problem compounds as the student continues to miss out on building background knowledge and making connections in many areas.