Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children (1995), by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley is a qualitative look at the at how parents and children interact during early childhood, as children acquire language and then develop their language skills.  This longitudinal study examined 42 families, 23 of which were middle class and the remainder which were classified as professional (high SES ) or welfare families (lowest SES ), and their verbal interactions beginning when the child was 10 months of age and ending when the child was 3 years old.  The researchers noted that the biggest cause of difference in amount of utterances in an hour was SES status, rather than gender, race, birth order, and so forth.  They observed that in any given hour, the children in professional families heard approximately 2, 153 words per hour in contrast to the children of welfare families, who heard an average of 616 words an hour.  Once this data was ext...

Beck and McKeown's   "Increasing Young Low-Income Children’s Oral Vocabulary Repertoires through Rich and Focused Instruction" (2007) details 2 studies that show the importance of rich and extended vocabulary instruction for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. Study 1 Research Question.   In study 1, the research question wa s, "How well do students in kindergarten and first grade learn vocabulary through direct instruction compared to those who are just exposed to the words in text (incidental acquisition)?"  Participants. Participants in this first study were in four kindergarten classes and four first graders from the same small, urban school district.  Although the study began with 119 students, pre -test and post-test data was collected on a total of 98 students (46 in the control condition and 53 in the experimental condition).  Further, the school was one of high poverty, and of those in the study, all were African-America...

The article "Vocabulary: A Critical Component of Comprehension" ( Joshi , 2005) explores the crucial role vocabulary knowledge plays in reading comprehension.  In this article, Joshi laments that we need more research to see how vocabulary affects reading comprehension, but explains that a synthesis of research shows that there is a causal relationship--that those with poor vocabulary knowledge also have poorer reading comprehension skills and vice versa .  Compounding the issue is what is known as the Matthew Effect --the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In reading, the better comprehenders read more widely, and their vocabulary increases.  Poorer comprehenders avoid reading (or read easier materials) and do not make gains in vocabulary.  Thus, the gulf widens. Joshi discusses ways of teaching vocabulary, though noting that most vocabulary knowledge isn't directly taught.  Rather, it is acquired with each contact with a word, a...

In this chapter from Lenses o n R eading , Tracey and Morrow discuss six of the prominent cognitive processing theories from the 1950s to the 1970s.  It is interesting to see how our understanding of cognitive processes in general, and of reading in particular, have become more sophisticated with time, though there is still much we do not know about what occurs in our brain.  Each of these models make pretty good conjecture based on the research available to the theorists, and each model helped progress our understanding of the reading process.  I particularly like that the authors discuss both the historical significance of these six theories (The Substrata-Factor The ory of Reading, 1953; Information Processing Model, 1968; Gough's Model, 1972;  Automatic Information Processing Model, 1974; Interactive Model, 1977; Rauding Theory, 1977) and the parts of the model that are still relevant to researchers and practitioners today.  For instance, LaBerge &...

○ According to Larson, what should be the unit of processing? Letter or word? LETTER ○ What is at stake with a word shape model of word recognition? UMM --it's crazy--the actual process of reading is not understood and would lead people to focus on unrelated features of the word.  Our instructional time is limited.  Struggling readers need the MOST time to spend reading and they need the highest quality of instruction--teaching word shape is ineffective and muddies the waters.  You will have students who can't read because they didn't learn to decode. ○ Should we teach typical eye-movements (of a reader) to struggling readers? I don't know where I stand on this issue.  My instincts say---maybe with the most disabled readers.  But this seems so instinctual, so tacit.  How do you teach it?  It's a slippery slope issue.  Teaching stuff like eye movement reminds me of having dyslexics focus on strengthening their eyes and their fine and gr...

"The Science of Word Recognition"  is a comprehensive rebuttal of the word shape theory of word recognition, as first posited by James Cattell in 1886.  At the time, this theory, which explains that words are recognized by their shape rather than by individual letters, was based on 4 experimental findings:  1.  the Word Superiority Effect (letters are recognized better in the context of words), 2. the fact that we read lowercase letters at a faster rate than uppercase letters, 3. misspellings are frequently overlooked when the shape of the overall word is not changed by the mistake ( tesf vs. tesc ), and 4. text that is a mix of upper and lowercase letters is difficult to read.  However, these 4 findings have other logical explanations.  For instance, the context provided by the word itself is what allows the reader to remember the letters in a word.  Take, for example, acronyms.  When acronyms are used to study, like KPCOFGS (King Philip Cam...