Today, two states—Florida and North Carolina—are observing International Literacy Day and National Literacy Month by encouraging educators, librarians and families to use Lexile measures to help all readers strengthen their literacy skills.
In Florida, Lt. Governor Jeff Kottkamp will celebrate International Literacy Day as part of the Florida Departments of Education’s and Environmental Protection’s recognition of September as National Literacy Month. With over 20 percent of the state’s adults experiencing literacy issues that impact their families and their lives, Florida Literacy Month aims to help family members of all ages improve literacy skills to help build self-sufficiency. (more…)
“Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens.” - President Clinton on International Literacy Day, September 8th, 1994
Tomorrow is International Literacy Day, and MetaMetrics is proud to be a supporter of this noble effort to draw attention to the crippling effects of illiteracy. Too many children and adults throughout the world are marginalized and shut out by not having basic literacy skills. According to the United Nations:
…and some 776 million people lack minimum literacy skills, that means one in five adults are yet to literate; 75 million children did not attend school and many more attend irregularly or are drop outs. Almost 35 countries have a literacy rate of less than 50% and a population of more than 10 million people who are illiterate. 85% percent of the world’s illiterate population dwells in these countries…
Building on Dr. Martin Luther King’s observation that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, we maintain that “illiteracy anywhere is a threat to literacy everywhere”. We live in a globally connected world in which our overall success, health, and well being is best served when everyone is literate and has complete access to education and information. We’ve written before on organizations like Room to Read, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing educational materials for students around the globe. There are dozens of similar organizations committed to ending illiteracy throughout the world. Let’s join together with these organizations to make sure this mission becomes a reality.
Tony Schwartz over at Harvard Business Review gets it exactly right: the key to excellence is practice. Specifically, deliberate practice. Building on the work of Anders Ericsson, Schwartz argues that whatever role our genetic inheritance plays, it is the type of effort we put into an endeavor that determines how good we become:
Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it’s not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we’re willing to work — something he calls “deliberate practice.” Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice as the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.
Ericsson’s research on human performance and what it takes to move from novice to expert has informed our own research here at MetaMetrics and has recently been popularized by writers like Geoffrey Colvin and Malcom Gladwell. As Malbert Smith has written in ‘Education Reform: Making this the ‘Best of Times’: (more…)
Across the U.S., incoming university students are preparing for the rigors of academic life. Unfortunately, many may find themselves unprepared for even first year college coursework. As this recent Wall Street Journal article makes clear, of the 1.6 million students in the 2010 graduating class who sat for the ACT “only 29% met college-readiness standards on all four subjects. [In addition,] 28% of students didn’t score high enough on even one subject-matter exam to ensure college readiness.”
This is disappointing news. As the article points out:
President Obama has said that the nation’s long-term prosperity depends on fixing the nation’s high schools and preparing students to compete in a global economy. A recent study found the U.S. ranks only 12th in the percentage of adults aged 25 to 34 who hold college degrees, and Mr. Obama has set a goal of becoming No.1.
Preparing students for the challenges of life after high school is no small feat. In fact, our own Dr. Malbert Smith has written on the importance of facing these challenges and has offered the way toward some solutions. As Dr. Smith explains:
The basic goals are twofold: first, we need to ensure that all high school students graduate college- and career-ready; and second, we need to improve our performance relative to other countries as measured by international benchmarks. (more…)
Congratulations are in order. The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that California students have once again raised their standardized test scores:
Standardized test results released today show scores inched up for the eighth year in a row in the state’s public schools. They rose across most demographics and grade levels, an indication that state schools are headed in the right direction.
…Since 2003, 731,133 more students have become proficient in English, a 17 percentage point gain, and 586,765 more are scoring better in math, up 13 percentage points, state education officials said.
As we’ve mentioned before, the California Standards Test (CST) is linked to the Lexile scale and reports a CRL (California Reading List number), which denotes a student’s Lexile range. It’s good to see California making solid gains.
As you’re gearing up for the school year, you may need an end-of-summer reading boost to jump start your child’s reading activities. And if you’re a teacher, you may need some beginning-of-year readings to jump start the school year. In either case, Summer Reads are a terrific option for students entering 3rd, 4th, or 5thgrades. Developed by Dr. Freddy Hiebert, Summer Reads selections and activities incorporate solid research on what works to develop reading skills and presents it in fun, engaging material.
Summer Reads offers short, nonfiction readings on interesting summertime topics and are FREE to download. Each piece includes a brief letter to the student explaining how to do the reading activities. At the end of each selection, Hiebert includes a chart where the student can rate his/her reading and thinking. The chart will help students step through the full reading activity and will also help them become more aware of their own reading process and skills. Each Summer Reads selection also includes several short comprehension questions that students are instructed to answer independently. The answers can be found at the TExT project web site. As an added bonus for struggling readers, an audio version of the selection is available for free download. Be sure to check out Summer Reads!
In today’s economic climate, it is rare to hear big banks and hedge fund groups described as “some of the most generous people”. But that is exactly how John Wood, founder and executive chairman of Room to Read, describes members of such groups like Goldman Sachs and Cardiff Swiss – groups that have helped fund this admirable literacy initiative.
Wood, a former senior executive with Microsoft, was recently interviewed on CNN.com about his literacy venture. About 10 years ago, he visited rural Nepal and was astonished by the lack of reading material and access to educational materials. He saw an empty library that was responsible for serving over 500 students. A Nepalese headmaster told him, “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.” This was the driving force behind his leaving Microsoft and starting Room to Read, a non-profit organization providing educational access to millions of children across the world. (more…)
Last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of e-readers and the fact that many Americans may be reading more because of these new technologies. As the National Endowment for the Arts has reported, the last few years have seen a decline in the amount of time spent reading, particularly among Americans ages 18-24 who report reading zero books over the last year. That’s why it is encouraging to see that out of 1,200 e-reader owners, 40% now read more than they did when they had access only to print material. With Forrester Research estimating that 11 million Americans will own an e-reader by the end of September, we can infer that the percentage of Americans reading regularly will likely rise. And Amazon reported that customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle.
But are we truly reading more? It may not be quite that simple. Are the statistics misleading, obscuring the fact that people may buy these gadgets and impulsively buy a number of e-books in the excitement of trying out their new toy? Did they initially buy the e-reader simply because it was the hottest new technology out there? Even On Our Minds blogger, Ivy Li reported that while she was an early adopter of e-readers, and has since constantly filled her spare time with reading, she isn’t reading more and certainly not as well! Though the portability of the e-book devices is certainly attractive, reading in short spurts may prove difficult for total immersion in certain texts. She admits she ‘book-hops’ and gets caught up in the millions of books available for her to buy.
It’s too soon to tell what long-term impact e-readers will have on our overall reading habits. Consumers appear to have a strong desire for digitized content, whatever the delivery device. It’s our hope that Americans continue to read in increasing numbers – whether through electronic devices or in print.
Scholastic’s Jennifer Chintala shares her insight that the Common Core State Standards offer educators a sense of uniformity across states’ curricular expectations in both English and mathematics. Chintala argues that as families move across state lines, educators will find a strong degree of continuity between the curriculum standards of each state.
That’s welcome news. Correspondence to a shared set of curriculum standards ensures that educators are able to compare student performance across state lines, as well as assess which students are on track for college and career readiness – and which are not. A common scale is an important tool for analyzing student performance and matching students to targeted resources. As Appendix A of the Common Cores Standards in English Language Arts makes clear, the Lexile Framework provides an excellent way of determining the complexity of the quantitative dimensions of a text. By accessing Lexile measures for both students and resources, educators are better able to match students to appropriate levels of reading material. More than just a measure of growth, the Lexile measure provides classroom teachers something actionable: a way to get targeted materials in the hands of young readers.
Incoming freshman have already been warned of the long lines they’ll likely face as college students – lines for dorm showers, lines in the cafeteria, lines for athletic event tickets, even lines for the relative quiet of the library’s study rooms. One line they may no longer have to stand in is the line for purchasing textbooks. Breaking from the traditional pattern of purchasing textbooks from the campus bookstore at the beginning of the semester and then selling them all back a few months later, many students are finding new options. Whether checking out textbooks from library reserves, purchasing used books from other students via the internet, purchasing online textbooks for a fraction of their traditional costs, or even using open-source texts, students are finding creative and cost-effective ways to obtain the course content they need.
As Eric Gorski of the Associated Press explains:
Like the music and media businesses, the textbook industry has been revolutionized by the Internet. Although used books have long been an option for students, the Web opened up a world of bargain hunting beyond the campus bookstore.
A robust online marketplace of used books and recent inroads by textbook rental programs give students more options than ever. The prospect of digital books and slow-but-steady growth in free online ‘open’ content loom as developments that could upend the textbook landscape and alleviate the perennial problem of rising prices.
As we’ve mentioned before, e-readers have been growing both in number and usage. That ubiquity has not gone unnoticed. Many publishers have already begun the work of making e-content more widely available; and a number of retailers have developed business models around the idea that students may no longer be satisfied purchasing the materials they need from one expensive retailer. Companies such as Chegg, BookRenter, CollegeBookRenter, and textbook publisher Cengage Learning, to name just a few, have all taken notice of this trend and are now renting textbooks directly to students. Other companies have gone a step further and ventured into the open-source textbook market. (more…)
