Article Review

I just finished reading an article from the American Educator magazine entitled "Sparks Fade, Knowledge Stays". It discussed the findings from a report written by the National Early Literacy Panel that stated that the key to learning how to read is knowledge of phonological awareness and phonics. The authors of the article agreed that these components were important but there were many other factos to consider. Code-based interventions are necessary but the area that we are missing (especially with kids who struggle) is teaching the desire to learn. The authors feel that kids want to become experts in different areas (e.g. whales, dinosaurs, etc) and this, more than learning letters and sounds, drives their ambition to come to school to learn. "Knowledge is the headline star, and conventional literacy skills are the supporting cast members." Through many studies that were done, these authors found that background knowledge was extremely important when reading and answering comprehension questions. One study had a combination of soccer experts and novices read a story about soccer and had them memorize details, make inferences and detect basic contradictions (the story included some facts that were not true). The experts were found to have done far better than their peers who did not have the same background knowledge. What they also found was that "the high-and-low aptitude experts did not differ from one another". Also, "high-aptitude novices did no better than the low-aptitude novices". This article has been very eye-opening to me as a special education teacher. I spend so much time working on individual skills but sometimes neglect to also look at the big picture of reading. As it is stated in the article, "code and content learning must be emphasized simultaneously".