Academic Literacy Nov. 13 and 16, 2006 Kathi Swanson, Jack Decker, Deb Keeler

Course Agenda Day 1 Background and Introductions Personal Reading Histories RPA Reading Demands Some startling statistics

Agenda, cont. Day 2: (don’t forget to come back!) Think Aloud Talking to Text Analyzing your text… what do your students actually do with it? Problems and Questions

What is academic literacy? Why do we need to know about it? How is it different from what we’re already doing? What difference can it make to us as teachers? To students??

Personal Reading History What do you remember reading as a child? What do you read now as an adult? What changed?

What kind of reader are you? Corandic Father’s Butterflies RPA

Think about your class… What do students need to read in your class? What happens if they don’t, or can’t, read the requirements? What do students in your class need to be successful? What prevents kids from understanding your textbook?

Some Startling Statistics

From beginning readers to adult, the skills and processes required for reading do not change, only the complexity of the text itself. Without skills to manage text and find meaning, readers can not succeed. They will merely regurgitate the presented content.

According to the results of the 1998 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)… 33% of eighth-grade students and 40% of twelfth-grade students performed at or above the “proficient” level (solid academic performance at their grade level). This means that 67% of students entering 9 th grade and 60% of twelfth graders can be considered as reading below grade level.

“ Approximately 8 million young people between fourth and twelfth grade struggle to read at grade level. 70% of older readers require some form of remediation. Very few of these older readers need help to read the actual words on the page; their most common problem is they are not able to comprehend what they read.” Reading Next: A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy (Report to the Carnegie Corporation) 2004

In the NCES report in 2001, “53% of all college students need to take remedial courses because they did not gain the skills they should have in their secondary schools.”

The average amount of time spent reading for all grades is 7.1 minutes a day in public schools. The peak reading years are the 4 th and 5 th grades. By the time students reach high school, they are spending about as much time on literature based reading as kindergartners.

Students in the top 5% of national reading scores read 144 times more than students in the bottom 5%. Students in the highest-performing states in the NAEP reading study engaged in 59% more reading than those the bottom quartile.

The More You Know… The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the smarter you’ll grow. The smarter you are, the longer you’ll stay in school and the more diplomas you’ll earn. The more diplomas you’ll have, the more your children will achieve in school. The more diplomas you’ll have, the longer you will live.

The less you read, the less you’ll know. The less you know, the sooner you will drop out of school. The sooner you drop out of school, the sooner and longer you’ll be unemployed. The sooner you drop out of school, the greater your chances are of being incarcerated. (Trelease, 2001)

Teachers need to stop hiding the hard parts of reading!

Today’s Exit Card… Record a question, a wow, a connection, or an opinion about today’s session. Post it in the appropriate quadrant… See you all on next time!!