Low Reading Comprehension but Good Accuracy Rate

 I hear the chatter from elementary school teachers:

• They can't look for reading!
• Oh, they honey to read!
• When nosotros have to abolish reading, they are so disappointed.

Nevertheless, what happens when I go the ninth graders in my class? I hear:

• Reading is and then boring.
• I hate to read.
• I don't like reading.

What acquired the change in students' attitude towards reading?

Reading Speed Limit?

I take been attention graduate courses on reading didactics for pre-K-half dozen in order to observe out the reason for the shift in attitudes. Ane of the textbooks used wasGuiding Readers and Writers (Grades iii-6), a 672 folio tome packed with datawritten by authors Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. The 2001 edition reflected the ideal reading and writing workshop schedule; 3.five hours of uninterrupted reading and writing daily.So, how did the instructional strategies for elementary students in the Fountas and Pinnell book fix students for grades 7-12 ?

The Fountas and Pinnell strategies utilise a Criterion Assessment System that allowed for leveled literacy intervention for very early readers. Texts were rated (A to Chiliad) on their difficulty for the reader in fluency and comprehension at instructional or independent levels. Each level suggests a percentage of accuracy that a pupil should reach before moving to the side by side level, for example:

 For levels A to K, a text read at 90%-94% accuracy (with satisfactory or excellent comprehension) is considered an instructional level text. That means that the pupil can read it effectively with teacher help–a good introduction, prompting, and give-and-take).

For levels A to K, a text read at 95%-100% accuracy (with satisfactory or excellent comprehension) is considered to be an independent level text. That means that the student tin can read it without assist. Reading at the contained level is extremely valuable because the reader gains fluency, reading "mileage," new vocabulary, and experience thinking about what texts hateful (comprehension).

Fountas and Pinnel are very articulate that these percentages should not be fixed, stating:

We wouldn't want anyone to translate these percentages in a rigid mode, of grade. A kid might read ane text at 91% and then experience a few catchy words in the next book and read information technology with 89%.

They also note that reading broadly increases a student'southward vocabulary, and they advise that schools could mandate their own policies in insuring that students reading smoothly and easily with satisfactory accurateness and comprehension before moving to the next level.

I heard, however, a number of literacy specialists/instructors from uncomplicated schools in my classes representing different districts in the state explaining, "We hold students to a 97% accuracy rate before moving them on" or "I would non motion a student who isn't reading at a 95%-97% accurateness charge per unit." Are these literacy specialists/instructors misreading the Fountas and Pinnell book? Furthermore, is a district'due south adherence to this 97% accurateness dominion hurting students as they transition to the higher course levels? If a student is directed to read only those books that can be read at 97% or fifty-fifty a 91% or 89% accuracy, what happens when he or she is handed a required text that is higher up his or her reading level?

The problems in reading accurateness are clearly evident in when students enter centre schoolhouse, and they are handed textbooks and whole course novels from the literary canon. Richard Allington, a past president of the International Reading Association and the National Reading Briefing, wrote an commodity that directly addressed the problem of difficult texts for the periodicalVoices from the Middle (May 2007, NCTE) titled, "Intervention All Day Long: New Hope for Struggling Readers " In this article, Allington makes the argument that districts should not mandate the same grade level texts for readers of varying power:

This ways that districts cannot continue to rely on ane-size-fits-all curriculum plans and a unmarried-period, daily supplemental intervention to advance struggling readers' academic evolution. Districts cannot but purchase grade-level sets of materials—literature anthologies, science books, social studies books—and hope to accelerate the bookish evolution of students who struggle with schooling. There is no scientific evi- dence that distributing 25 copies of a grade-level text to all students will result in anything other than many students being left behind.

He argues for an extension of the 97% accuracy rate using easier texts and explains that the more hard texts at the middle and high school levels will have many more words per page than the texts in elementary school. He notes that in a book of 250 and 300 running words on each page, 97% accuracy would hateful 7–9 words will be misread or unreadable on every page:

 In a 20-page chapter, the student would encounter 140–180 words he or she cannot read. And typical middle school textbooks have twice as many words per page, creating the possibility that a reader reading at 97% accuracy would be unable to correctly read 14–20 words per page or 250–400 words per chapter.

As a result, Allington argues that struggling readers will not be helped by reading these texts, regardless as to the amount of support.
The very texts that are supposed to be a resource for a discipline's content, "won't assist them learn to read."  Many upper grade level texts are  textbooks are  heavy, difficult to read with all the subject specific vocabulary embedded in passages; the different fonts, pictures, and data boxes may misfile a poor reader.

I am, even so, a trivial skeptical about Allington'southward point regarding students who miss words in texts. I am not certain that the multiplication factor Allington uses to summate the number of words missed since words are repeated in a novel.  Yes, a pupil may miss "purloined" on page 12, and on page 17, simply should that word exist counted twice? There is a context that eventually brings nearly an understanding; by the tertiary "purloined" a student may accept a better understanding of the word because of that context. As an additional concern, requiring a 97% accuracy rate would end virtually heart/high school literature programs that use whole grade texts. For instance, nosotros teach Romeo and Juliet to our 9th graders, and the accuracy rate for Shakespeare, even for teachers with Primary degrees in English, is about 80%. Nonetheless, year later on year, as we read the play aloud, students do empathise generally what is going on. Perhaps some literature is as the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, "Poetry communicates earlier it is understood."

On the other paw, Allington has every reason to be concerned that students inbound middle school and high schoolhouse volition encounter texts that are complex with high exile levels.  These texts will not be modified to accommodate struggling readers, instead the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are moving in the opposite direction with Lexile levels being raised at all course levels. Allington's concerns are not the concerns for publishers who want to encounter the CCSS in order to sell as many textbooks as possible. Ultimately, a 97% accuracy rate is not realistic with the materials in each subject area at the centre school and high schoolhouse levels.

The students who have been swimming in the shallow finish of the reading pool throughout their unproblematic school experience are suddenly tossed into the deep end of literature and informational texts when they hit middle school. The aforementioned elementary literacy specialists/instructor's adherence to the 97% accuracy with Fountas and Pinnell benchmark assessments limit students to highly filtered reading experiences as opposed to challenging students to develop their ain strategies when they see difficult texts. More do with difficult reading materials should be role of an simple school literacy regimen, simply like a batter at the plate who must learn how to swing at a number of different kinds of pitches; not every pitch comes in the strike zone over the plate, and not every book is at a prescribed accurateness charge per unit.

Requiring every educatee read at a 97% accuracy rate was not the intention of the Fountas and Pinnell directives, but the directives of others may be contributing to the comments I hear from my grade 9 students that " Reading is so ho-hum" or "I  hate to read." A steady diet of the same level of reading caused by requirements to achieve a 97% (or A+) accuracy may hem in or deaden a student's independent nature or curiosity. Furthermore, when a student gets to centre school, the requirement to read at 97%, or any literacy rate, is not enforced in all disciplines; students who take been spoon-fed reading materials may feel betrayed. Their 97% or A+ reading excellence is of a sudden plunged to lower percentiles, which ultimately results in much lower grades. Any confidence or trust a struggling reader may take developed with purified texts is apace lost, and "I detest to read" is the event.

Maybe they don't detest to read; maybe with years of grooming at 97%, they are unprepared for any other speed.

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Source: https://usedbooksinclass.com/2013/06/05/the-97-reading-accuracy-rate-now-may-mean-reading-problems-later/

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