Jill Speering, a retired teacher and reading specialist, is a member of the Metro Nashville school board and its most outspoken critic of high-stakes testing. She led a successful effort to block a Pearson contract to test reading by use of nonsense words. The test was intended to test decoding skills without the need for understanding. Speering pointed out that the committee that approved the contract contained no classroom teachers.
“In outlining her disapproval, Speering said a panel of 23 administrators used to recommend the assessment included no classroom teachers. “That’s one more reason why we have low teacher morale, ” she said. “When we ask teachers to administer an assessment we give them no voice in choosing the assessment.”
“She also took aim at the assessment’s definition of fluency — which emphasizes reading with speed — and its use of what are known as “nonsense words.” Those call on students to identify the phonetics and sounds of words not found in the dictionary. Speering believes employing them is a poor way to evaluate how well a child is understanding what he or she reads.”
The contract was deferred, not defeated. It is worth $357,200 to Pearson.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Seems to me that the questions are not based on any principles or research theory. Teachers in the know realize that “reading IS comprehension”!!! Questions need to be written by teacher experts.
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“. . . teacher experts.”
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
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at least according to the edudeformers.
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That is pure nonsense! Decoding is one thing. Words with no meaning used to determine fluency? Nonsense. Fluency without comprehension is not a useful tool for testing.
I have had students (4th grade) who could decode (word call) very well but who didn’t understand what the words, let alone phrases or sentences, meant. Some parents think that that is reading and they don’t realize that without comprehension their child’s skills are dead-ended with the decoding.
I am shocked that administrators and Pearson would sign off on such wasteful piece of “testing”. This is frightening.
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Are you seriously “shocked” at Pear$on? Pear$on has the monopoly on wasting taxpayer dollars that rightfully belong to our public schools. Also, deb, you’ve written comments before, so I’m thinking you’re a follower of this blog–if you haven’t read about the “Pineapple Question,” score juking (including incompetent scorers hired by Pear$on–read Todd Farley’s book, Making the Grade) & other such Pear$on debacles, do a blog search–Pear$on has quite the history of egregious errors.
Parents, please OPT OUT of all testing NOW, and put this incompetent, money grubbing company out of business!
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We put our heads together and realized that the AIMSweb test doesn’t correspond to the way the Wilson Reading program teaches sounds, which our district mandates for Tier 3 students. We had to boot that test (but only our school – the rest of the district is in the dark about this issue).
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but wait, if there can be no nonsense, then I’d say all of Ed Reform is in trouble . . . good!
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“Mark Daniel, senior scientist for research innovation at Pearson, said AIMSweb draws on more than 30 years of research to accurately predict achievement and growth. The company defends the use of “nonsense words.”
Anyone have an idea what the citations might be?
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“to accurately predict achievement and growth”
Ha, ha haa ha ah ha ha ah je je je je hee heee heehaw!
Anyone wanna bet on that accuracy??
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Nashville could save a lot of money by assigning Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and direct students to “The Jabberwocky” followed by Alice’s commentary afterward.
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DIBELS has a similar component. Anecdotally speaking, when administering this assessment to kids (kindergarten) they would often cry, look pleadingly at me with angst, and a host of other non-verbal communication conveying angst and frustration. Their own young recognition of a meaningless and confusing task was enough for me to speak against its use. There is significant research about assessing spelling knowledge based on patterns, or word family recognition. The brain, after all, is good at recognizing patterns naturally. Our delivery of curriculum should be based on human development and brain research knowledge, nothing else makes much sense.
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It must have been terribly frustrating for those little people. I fully believe (from my personal experiences as a student) that frustration greatly impedes learning. Someone was paid to come up with this tregmurtishment?
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We also have to administer DIBELS. It is an incredible time suck – each student has to be tested individually, while the rest of the class has to do “quiet” work, which means unchallenging review sheets. It takes at least ten minutes a kid. My sis-in-law had to do it in her New York State district for years, and they finally dumped it because there was poor correlation between the scores and future reading level. It is administered because it is one of the tests approved by the Dept. of Ed. that meets that on-going assessment aspect of NCLB, carried over into Rttt. I believe the guy who developed the test was also on the committee to find appropriate tests for NCLB. It reminds me of the Dick Cheney vice-presidential search.
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Sounds worse that the Math Tests.
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A bunch of dortonsty amd hringglekisk. Pearson is obviously snoofling the district and the stimpertled administrators.
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Love this, MathVale! This could only come from a math nerd!!!
(& I use the term “nerd” lovingly!)
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Replacing DIBELS with the Pearson version of DIBELS, I doubt because the district would be saving any money.
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Nonsense word fluency assessments are used to evaluate whether a student can decode or whether they have good sight word vocabularies but can not decode well. It can be confusing to students to read words that they know do not have meanings, but it is used because it is a quick way to assess decoding vs. sight word vocabulary. It is not specific to Pearson’s AIMSweb. DIBELS has a nonsense word fluency measure too as a previous poster noted. Not all early literacy assessments use nonsense word measures, however.
I would not administer a nonsense word measure as a universal reading screener, but it may be appropriate in some cases as a progress monitoring measure when the student struggles with decoding and is receiving additional instruction on decoding.
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If the test were used as you describe, but in my experience it was used for far more than monitoring. Students are grouped into intervention groups because of the nonsense word test. For ELL students it’s double learning and confusing.
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You are right. Many districts use the nonsense word measures in AIMSweb and DIBELS are part of their universal screening system. Others use it only for progress monitoring.
For all of the controversy over CCSS, accountability, charters, TFA, and other aspects of the reform agenda, I am surprised at how little discussion there is regarding RtI. Maybe it’s me, but I feel that RtI has prompted more changes, for better and for worse, in public schools than all of the above combined over the last several years.
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Thanks! Lots of students hit that fourth grade wall because they memorized enough words to get by…
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I gave assessed children’s ability to decode words using nonsense words in some form or another since I began teaching almost thirty years ago, especially in grades k-2. It has its place, as you have well described.
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Good for her – I live in Colorado where we are in DIBELs and AIMS Web la-la land because 12 years ago the architects of NCLB and Reading First required districts use these “short” tests to assess reading or they wouldn’t qualify for $ from the DOE (sound familiar?). The literacy folks in our State Dept and the researchers who like these tests (mostly Spec Ed folks) subscribe to a simple, bottom up theory of reading acquisition. Researchers who subscribe to an “interactive” approach to reading which includes comprehension at every stage of reading acquisition (so, while decoding develops not after it develops) would favor a test of real text reading. The DRA2 is such an assessment and it is published by…Pearson! Pearson, like most publishers, are just trying to make what will sell. BTW, our State Dept. has refused to put the DRA2 on their list of “approved” assessments because it’s not DIBELs, I mean because it’s not “scientific.”
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Too bad they wish to deemphasize literature; they could just use Jabberwocky.
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Whoops, Cindy Wolff beat me to it! Great minds…
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Ditto.
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Also–using a test made up of nonsense words alone will most certainly not make for any valid & reliable (whoops! Those words again–seems like Pear$on is incapable of publishing ANY tests with these attributes) results/data. In our Illinois school district, we used the very good Lexia program, whereby the Quick Test (which is the short test) very accurately (determined after months & years of use in our schools) predicted current reading levels/decoding skills, by using BOTH a nonsense word section AND a real word section (with–to the best of my recollection–sentence frags & short sentences). Both are needed for an accurate determination. Colorado Teacher’s comments are spot on.
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When my kids read the list of nonsense words on DIBELs they would turn them into real words because they couldn’t believe I would give them nonsense to read! The DIBELs expert that observed me said the kids didn’t know their short vowel sounds and needed practice with worksheets of short vowel words. When I pointed out to her that the kids were able to read ALL the CVC words in the books they were reading in my group she told me that they weren’t “decoding” those words – they were guessing!! Oh boy – I finally taught the kids how to “do” the nonsense word test – consonant sound + short vowel sound + consonant sound – put them together and you get a goofy thing that isn’t a word but you have to say it out loud so you get a point. I do have to say that I worked with below grade level readers so pretty much all the stuff they were told to read in the classroom was nonsense to them because it was so hard they couldn’t really read it and thus it didn’t make any sense!
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Sometimes you have to explain it, especially to a young child. For example, a reading test given to first graders (the Terra Nova) had a silly story. They didn’t get it because they had not been exposed to silly stories. To them that section did not make sense – so I started including a unit on silly stories so at least they had a point of reference. There was also a selection which had the words cupboard and root cellar. These were inner city kids. After that, I would be sure to include Old Mother Hubbard into my Nursery Rhyme unit. You have to give the kids a fighting chance with some sort of frame of reference. If they are reading goofy words – they should be told it’s a game. If this were a word, what would it sound like? Problem solved.
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I like the “it’s a game” approach. Come to think of it that’s what my principal used to tell me about all the mandates, standards and tests coming from people who had never taught a child to read – “it’s a game” – close your door and teach your children well…
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Smart principal.
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CT,
“. . . teach your children well.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx4AATLY7L8
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If it was *intended* to test decoding, then the actual fact is that nonsense words are a good way to test that. If decoding was all they were testing, that’s a different problem. It’s selectively unpopular, but just as musicians practice scales, which don’t have a whole lot of “musicality,” it makes a lot of sense to be able to read “nonsense” syllables, especially since an awful lot of them show up as syllables in real words.
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No, it doesn’t make sense. Reading something in the real world NEVER involves reading one word by itself without a context that brings meaning to that word. For example if suddenly a red sign with the single word “stop” on it was in the middle of a block you’d be confused. It wouldn’t make sense. You might even say, “That’s nonsense!” Kids practice decoding every time they read something that is easy enough for them to read and understand. Why have kids read nonsense words if we can have them read and make sense of texts with real words or longer real words with more syllables? Scales aren’t nonsense. They are “real” things that help the musician “hear” notes or play or compose a song.
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I’m sorry you feel that way. Nonsense words are also real. They certainly aren’t imaginary.
I doubt I can open your closed mind, but try thinking about this: “nonsense” words help students “hear” the phonemes much as scales help musicians hear notes. Again, a syllable like ‘treme’ isn’t imaginary — it is every. bit. as. real. as a scale.
Always teaching the whole thing means that students who learn something naturally will keep up; students who don’t will simply think they *can’t* do the task. I’ve had too many students ask me “why didn’t anybody *tell* me this was how it worked?” to think that it’s “nonsense.”
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Follow the royalties generated by the Texas Reading Initiative (Reading First/NCLB) and the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) one of the K-3 “scientific reading diagnostic assessments” required for the Reading First billion dollar boondoggle.
Prior to the USDOE Reading First K-3 assessment mandate, the Texas Education Agency funneled grant money to the UT System for entrepreneurial “researchers” to develop and commercialize K-3 reading diagnostic “intellectual property.” – The same academics who bashed Reading Recovery worked together to manufacture a third grade reading crisis to grow their own royalty checks.
FOIA requests prove that the Texas Education Agency, University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston, University of Houston, and at least five current and former employees of the UT System receive royalty checks for developing and commercializing the TPRI. Additional royalties are received from Wireless Generation if the TPRI assessments are digitized.
Those receiving royalties (kickbacks) without disclosure as a result of the Reading First catastrophe should have been prosecuted by abusing federal funds for personal profit. In my view, there was a cover-up leading back to Texas.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2002/06/05/39read.h21.html?qs=jack+fletcher
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Wow – Thanks for the link. I’ve done a lot of digging into the Reading First mess (google Louisa Moats Literacy to see what’s she’s up to nowadays!) but I’ve never seen this article. Thanks to her influence in CO Reading First was deemed “unscientific” by our experts at the CDE. The former head of CO RF is now on the State Board of Education = ou-vey!
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As with everything else in [fed] state-imposed standards, the problems arise from trying to ‘scale up’ a concept designed for a specific issue in a specific context. Kudos to the Nashville reading specialist for requiring a second look at whether this one actually works for the locale.
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I hope that this portion of the test gets dropped permanently. My school system does not use DIBELS but we receive students from systems that do. Many of them can call out words but not really read. Then, there parents have a hard time understanding that their children are struggling with reading because the children always did well on their DIBELS tests. Way to go to this school board member!
shame on Pearson for calling this type of test a good way to assess real reading.
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I have been giving this test for years. It is NOT intended to test reading comprehension. It is NOT diagnostic, It is a TOOL to use to determine whether or not a child has problems with phonics, Yes it can be abused. Yes, it can be beneficial. It can tell you if a student has difficulty with beginning, middle, or ending sounds. I reiterate I have given this test for years, and have NEVER had a child cry. I am in NO way endorsing Pear$on. I am disgusted by what they have done to education. I am defending a quick and easy check for understanding that when used properly gives you a large amount of data in a very short time. Not all tests are bad. It is all in how they are used.
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Agree. DIBELS is a screener. It’s all about cvc and short vowels, and it is useful as kids begin to learn decoding. Students can read the word sound by sound until they are ready to blend. It is a useful tool for diagnostic purposes and that is its intent. We have 100 Kinders, fifty of them ELLs, and no one cries when we test.
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If it is used for screening, why do the Buffalo teachers have to dibel so often? (At least two to three times a marking period).
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I agree with this comment.
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I thought this test was stupid. I have my BA in English, 27 hours towards my MA in English and my M.Ed. in Reading. I did poorly on this test. I think it would be frustrating for competent readers. By the way, I live in Nashville. We Tennessee teachers have been beaten down by our legislature, so it was refreshing to see Jill stand up for us.
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I agree – stupid and a waste of time I might add. Her’s a child taking this test:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u81_iyFqlnw
The teacher is kind and the child is not crying but what did the teacher learn that she didn’t already know?
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It’s the students whose teachers teach them to always read in context with clues who do just fine until … oops, now they’re in that remedial reading course in college because there are an awful lot of complicated words in more advanced reading. Usually though, by then, their academic expectations have been pretty well squashed (since they didn’t figure this stuff out by themselves, they just not be that smart), so … nobody really notices… except some *very* frustrated college teachers who recognize the potential.
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The premise is so asinine it is beyond words; nonsense or otherwise.
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My kinders are forced by my state to take the DIBELS nonsense word test via mClass (Amplify). And I do not get ANY information from this test that I don’t already know from reading books with each child.
Some kids have no trouble spouting off the sounds that each letter makes. This seems to be especially easy for kids who have just learned letter sounds. Often they cannot blend the sounds together which is NORMAL for many 5 year olds, but the test does not require blending – even though more points are given for blending a nonsense word rather than just naming the sounds. Of course, these same kids have extreme difficulty with other non-developmentally appropriate portions of the DIBELS tests, like segmentation of words.
Higher readers can experience great difficulty with the nonsense word task because they have more experience with the ridiculous sounds that letter combinations make in English. They are inferring what they know with what they see. And they hesitate when they read the nonsense words as they try to make sense of the combinations.
ELL kids have a similar reaction but for an entirely different reason. They do NOT know all of the various sounds that letter combinations make in English. Even if they have learned the basic sound that each individual letter makes, they want so very badly to make the letters on this test into familiar words. But what are these crazy words? Are they crazier than all the other words ELL kids encounter that are unfamiliar to them? Aren’t all new words nonsense words to ELL kids?
Many ELL kids, early readers, shy kids and others hesitate when testing. And this test (and all mClass or AIMSweb tests) are timed. Imagine trying to get as many “right” answers as possible in 60 seconds. Imagine having the directions read to you — not explained, simply read from a script — in a foreign language. Imagine that the tester is not your teacher, but the principal or a reading specialist that you have never met.
I’ll use a couple of “s” words to describe this task (and the entire cadre of mClass and AIMSweb tasks). Not those “s” words. The kinder “s” words. These tests are STUPID and SILLY.
Rock on, Jill Speering.
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I was at an early literacy training years ago, and the use of nonsense words as a decoding exercise was promoted. I said then, and I say now, why the heck are we wasting our students’ time???? There are so many real words in our language that I don’t understand the need to use words that have no meaning. Decoding is merely a tool to access meaning. It is not an end in itself. Reading is a skill for accessing meaning and information, and a skill to access pleasure and enjoyment. Perhaps if the teaching of reading started with that perspective, the use of nonsense words would be dismissed as utter nonsense.
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The English language is confusing enough. The word “wow” does not rhyme with “tow”, “low”, or one version of “sow” or “bow”. Who decides what the correct pronunciation of a made up word is?
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Yep, I’m glad I learned English as my first language. Can’t imagine trying to learn it as a second language. I keep telling my students that in comparison to learning English, learning Spanish is a cake walk (and they still look at me like I’m crazy, oh well, what’s new).
Learning any language whether first, second or fifth is an amazing thing.
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As a Speech-Langauge Pathologist working with many children with learning disabilities and auditory processing disorders. Use of nonsense words to assess decoding and phonologcial processing skills is very important, and needed to distinguish from sight word vocabulary. Phonological processing skills would definitately affect reading fluency (as measured by rate and accuracy), which would then affect comprehension. I cannot personally vouch for the test in question, but I do know that use of nonsense words in assessing oral reading skills is best practice and evidence based, and supported by ASHA and the National Reading Panel Report.
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This is an interesting debate. It seems like there are two legitimate sides to the discussion. Is there some common ground?
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Reading nonsense words = exercise of futility.
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Thanks to SLP Reader, xiousgeonz, and Matt Loomis for asserting the legitimacy of using nonsense words to assess young readers’ phonemic awareness. I had written a long post in attempt to add to the defense of this tool, but I think it got too long to be of interest to the readers of this blog.
I do find it distressing that some commenters have dismissed nonsense word reading as “stupid.” Maybe I would have found it so a few years ago, but over the past couple of years I’ve done a fair amount of reading about how young people learn to read, and I now think the tool does have value.
This year I used a number of tests of phonemic awareness with a small group of stuggling 8th grade readers, and none of them cried or found the tests foolish – not even the nonsense word test. I found that the students who performed the poorest on our state standardized reading test as 7th graders also seemed to have the hardest time with segmenting and blending phonemes and with decoding nonsense words. Granted, I’m talking about a very small group of students, but I’ve seen enough to know I am going to pursue the use of these tests to see if I can get better at identifying barriers to my students reading fluency (and my definition of fluency includes comprehension, not just reading rate, accuracy, inflection, and intonation).
I think it is vitally important, as SLP Reader notes, to distinguish those young readers who can actually decode from those who have memorized a decent-sized list of sight words. Diane McGuiness, Ph.D., wrote a number of thought-provoking books in which she asserted that an excessive reliance on teaching sight words in many elementary reading programs produced what she called “word guessers,” who guessed words based on their general shape and length and the words’ initial and final letters. I feel pretty sure I’ve seen lots of word guessers in my remedial reading classes, so McGuinness may be on to something.
There is evidence that the phonological part of the brain is activated even when we read silently. I think it’s at least possible that phonemic awareness is an important step along the path to accurate and fluent decoding and therefore to comprehension. I don’t believe, therefore, that using tests like nonsense words to assess the phonemic awareness of young students is at all stupid.
Please note that I am not at all defending Pearson nor Aimsweb, a system which my division uses and places far too much faith in. I think it is ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars for a nonsense word reading test when perfectly fine and inexpensive versions can be found. But let’s not be like those reformers who reject evidence from solid research.
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Well I looked up Diane McGuiness and it looks like she’s a psychologist who has done a lot of work with Dyslexic children. I happened on a rather interesting site – http://www.readamerica.net/Page13FAQ6.asp
I think we should be careful not to take what might be used for disabled readers who truly see something different on a page of print than most of us and think it will work with struggling readers or ELLs. I have been teaching reading for almost 30 years and I think the field of Special Education has been informed by psychologists, linguists, and others that, to try to understand how one learns to read a symbol system, study and carefully articulate the way the symbols themselves work/interact then devise programs to teach young children all the stuff they learned. Wilson is one such program. After trying to get children to use a phonics “rule” to decode a word – what are those 2 letters…vowels…yes and what is the rule if there are 2 vowels together in a word…the first vowel says it’s name…yes…now try that on this word (read)…good, you read the word read – BTW this “rule” only works 48% of the time. The way a reader knows whether to ultimately read the word “read” as /reed/ or /red/ is by meaning. Decoding and sight recognition of words is necessary (you can’t read without the symbols) but not sufficient.
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An excellent article. Thanks for sharing. My son learned to read using the Wilson technique, and Orton Gillingham also works. This description sounded similar to those programs.
If the districts want to help kids who are having difficulty learning how to read, why don’t they use these proven programs instead of the “new and improved” programs which have not been properly vetted?
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Ken:
Nicely said. There may well be room for discussion as to when, how and with whom to use nonsense words, but it makes little sense not to ask questions and to ignore or denigrate relevant research.
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SLP Reader…I agree that the use of nonsense words serve an important function. . I use the decoding of nonsense words to practice the child’s process of sequential letter sound associations. moving them from from phoneme to morpheme formations. The use of nonsense words eliminates the bad habit (that young readers make) of decoding the first letter and then immediately guessing the rest of the letters. They can’t guess these words…they must systematically decode inorder to correctly say the morpheme. It also helps to separate the decoding process from the word recognition process….they can’t guess what the letters say …because these sound combinations are not a part of their prior auditory memory. It is purely sounding out letter-sound sequences. It is a very important phase in my reading instruction….and my kids all become ace readers….eventually reading above grade level. I make sure they fully understand that the letter sequences are ‘make-believe’ words and that we are just practicing the sequencing of sounds…they get it. When we shift to real words, they immediately ‘feel’ the difference because with decoding of real words they get that ‘aha’ moment where auditory memory kicks in…and recognize the familiar sound of the word. Nonsense word decoding (and encoding) are included in most lessons of the Wilson Readers, which my kids love and ask for. But I do not give grades for it…because it is strictly a developmental skill…the assessments are strictly for the student and I to gauge automaticity.
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I went to find information on Google for Dibels and Aimsweb. I am familiar with Dibels because it is used in a Buffalo. It is a big time suck, as someone said, as each child has to be tested individually (but I don’t necessarily think one on one time with the students is a bad thing ). At least the Dibels site gives some explanation to its purpose and lists numerous articles from peer reviewed sources. Aimsweb has a slick presentation which focuses on the administrative aspect of the program and not the content. I honestly couldn’t identify the focus of the program. The sample ” video clip” also wasn’t helpful. I’m not sure if the teacher works one on one, or if all the students are on the computer at the same time, or if the only one using the computer is the teacher to administer the results. I also didn’t see any articles or statistics about their success rate. Hopefully, the administrators looked at samples of the actual product which they investigated before they recommended this program and didn’t rely on the slick advertising Pearson developed to sell their product, untested and sight unseen.
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I think the use of nonsense word decoding was invented by Victor Borge as part of his “inflationary language”. I’ll let the educators debate the merits of it’s use.
Howard
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We were once required to use Dibels because of government funds for title schools. Remember when the rule was “data drives instruction”. The cliche still exist in many forms, but the program lasted only a couple years.
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I am a certified Orton-Gillingham teacher. O-G is the foundation method for teaching dyslexics to read. We use “nonsense words” sparingly and for a purpose–to check on decoding skills. They are not ever used for comprehension. We tell the students ahead of time, “These are nonsense words. It’s just to see if you can pronounce the letters without guessing because you already know a lot of words.” It’s a small part of the lesson, and it isn’t used regularlly.
Maybe if they let teachers who know what they are doing do the assessments. . . .
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(continued). . . because, again, any time you take one method out of context, out of the hands of a competent and trained teacher who knows the class, where the class is, what the class can use, it isn’t going to work. These things are just tools. A hammer can build, and a hammer can destroy. It depends on how it’s used.
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I use nonsense words in my classroom as a way to assess a student’s knowledge of letter sounds. A basic phonics skill students must know to decode words and eventually read. I never would have thought to use it as a measure of comprehension. We practice a new set of nonsense words each month so that the letter sounds vary each month to ensure letter sound knowledge but they become more fluent as the month goes on practicing the same ones.
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Clearly there are some legitimate reasons for using nonsense words as some form of assessment. Unfortunately, those who are here supporting that premise do not realize how DIBELS has bastardized the practice. Trust me. AIMSweb and Amplify (mClass) are not using the nonsense word test in a way that is respectful of research or best practice. Therefore, my “STUPID” and “SILLY” comment stands in context.
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The reason nonsense words are used as PART of a reading skills evaluation is NOT because they have anything to do with comprehension. (Obviously, there is NO comprehension possible if a word has no meaning!) Rather, nonsense words are only used to evaluate word decoding, and there is a lot of very sound research that shows the value of nonsense word reading for THAT purpose.
So, why would anyone suggest a nonsense word reading task as part of assessing reading comprehension?
The reason has to do with the now very well-accepted understanding of what goes in to reading comprehension. It is called The Simple View of Reading. You can read about it here: http://support.lexercise.com/entries/374902-Two-main-types-of-reading-problems-
What you would do if you were a school administrator and wanted to screen children for reading problems?
Consensus research shows that the vast majority of struggling readers don’t have basic (listening) comprehension problems; rather, most kids who struggle to understand what they read have trouble decoding unfamiliar words. They get all tripped up and confused as they struggle to read but if you read to them– they understand (comprehend) just fine! They do not have a basic comprehension problem.
To help a struggling reader we absolutely have to know where the child’s difficulties are centered, and the Simple View of Reading is a good place to begin.
Sandie Barrie Blackley, MA/CCC
Speech-Language Pathologist
ASHA Fellow
Co-Founder- http://www.lexercise.com/
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I disagree. I think Special Educators tend to subscribe to a simple view of reading because there are children who have difficulties that are very hard to address so isolating the pieces of reading to simplify and teach them helps those tangled readers. i don’t think there’s a magic bullet or a right way to teach reading but I do think reading is quite complex so I have a Complex View of Reading (many children arrive at school already reading and they have not had a program at home based on a Simple View of Reading). Richard Allington is well know in the field of Reading Education and he spent his career researching what children need in order to become successful readers (see “What Really Matters for Struggling Readers). Here is an example of his findings from Educational Leadership – http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/mar11/vol68/num06/What_At-Risk_Readers_Need.aspx
Colorado Teacher, Master’s Degree: Reading Education
member, International Reading Association
retired Title I Teacher of Reading and Adjunct Professor of Reading and Writing Education
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I find this article insulting to teachers. Of course they identify students who are behind and, of course they provide remediation, with both the classroom teacher and a resource or reading teacher. This article implies that teachers can’t recognize the needs of their own students. This is bogus. A teacher turns themselves inside out to help a child read on or above grade level. If a child obviously has difficulties, they are tested to see if they have a learning disability so they can get additional services.
That’s what sets our country apart – we actually try to educate all the children, not just the achievers. I’m not sure this will be true in the future, as testing weeds these children out, and evaluation techniques make them pariahs since they reduce a teacher’s total score.
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Her goals may be admirable, but from one reading specialist to another….as well as an someone who is certified in Orton Gillingham (method for teaching dyslexic children to read)……fluency is the best predictor of reading comprehension. Also the use of nonsense words is by far the best way to gauge a student’s automaticity and ability to manipulate the phonemes that they encounter when they read. This school board member is unhappy but needs to realize the research is sound.
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I’m also an O-G teacher, and yes, decoding nonsense words is a valuable diagnostic tool. I don’t think it should be part of a high-stakes test, and I don’t think it should be administered and scored by someone who isn’t trained to do this, and I don’t think politicians should be deciding what teachers should do.
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