TITLE: Reading Skills and Practice
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 28, 2006 2:12 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Few people would try to run a marathon without training
for lots and lots of miles. Few would imagine that they
could make their high school basketball team without
playing lots of ball and working on their skills. And
I doubt any of us think that we could earn a spot in
the local symphony by noodling on an instrument for five
or ten minutes a day.
Yet it seems that many grade school students expect to
succeed in school despite the habit of reading 10 minutes
a day or less.
A UNI colleague from the College of Education recently
shared this nugget from research into children's literacy.
The article he cited (Keith Stanovich, "Matthew Effects
in Reading", Reading Research Quarterly,
21:360-406, 1996) reported that fewer than 10% of sixth
graders read as much 40 minutes per day on average, and
50% of them read only 10 minutes per day.
So what? That paper is over nine years old now, right?
Well, first of all, I doubt that the trend in the last
decade has been for students to read significantly more.
The trends in
television viewing
(four hours per day?!) and computer usage have almost
certainly prevented students from reading more, and
today's students may well read less.
Second, and most immediate to a university professor,
those sixth graders are now are college students.
How can anyone become sufficiently skilled at reading
with so little practice?
I spent more time daily as a sixth grader shooting baskets
than that. No athletic coach would let her players do
so little drill work on the fundamental skills of the
sport. My piano teacher tells me that I should practice
at least 30 minutes a day if I want to make more than
glacial progress.
And I certainly want my students to get more
practice programming
than that. I know that it doesn't always happen, but in
some of my courses -- for example, programming languages,
with weekly assignments, and compilers, with the large team
project that keeps them steadily busy throughout the
semester -- students have an opportunity to practice daily,
or nearly so. My advice to students sounds a lot like what
piano teachers tell there students: program a little bit
daily, and develop habits that will serve you well the rest
of your career.
But that's programming. Many writers and writing teachers
tell folks the same thing about writing... Write daily.
Create habits. But do we tell our students the same thing
about reading?
One consequence of the difference in reading habits and
skills among sixth graders is that, over time, the gap
in reading skills and academic performance between the
better readers and the poorer readers grows larger.
This is sometimes called the
Matthew effect,
as in the title of Stanovich's paper. This name alludes
to a verse in the Christian Bible,
Matthew 25:29,
which says, "For to everyone who has, more will be
given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has
not, even what he has will be taken away." Sadly, bad
reading habits as a youngster tend to compound over
time, and the usurious interest rate that our kids pay
is a huge handicap in the classroom and workplace.
How can anyone expect to succeed in college without
being able to read really well?
I doubt some students ever think about it much. When
some do, I'm sure they figure they can just "get by"
as they always have. Later, when school suddenly seems
to be more difficult, they decide they don't like school
and aren't cut out for the nerdy stuff.
On the flip side, I think that many students think that
they don't have to be able read well to do computer
science anyway. How wrong they are. College-level
computing texts contain complex ideas, written in a
technical jargon that can feel like a foreign language
to newcomers. If you can't read the textbook I assign,
or the
lecture notes I write,
then you are left to understand ideas and implement them
in code with little support.
The guy who cited the statistics I mentioned above went
on to say, in an e-mail to a open discussion list,
I'm afraid that many of our students have read so little
that they simply do not have the experience to cope with
the textbooks used in our courses. Many of them do not
choose to read except for what informational reading is
necessary for daily survival.
The implication for us as faculty is that we cannot expect
students to succeed in our courses based on the reading
skills they bring with them. Some faculty suggest that
we should simply fail the ones who can't make the grade
-- and the numbers say that that could be half or more of
them. An alternative is that we have to teach them to
read, at least how to read, understand, and write the
material in our discipline. We will have to define words
for them, both technical jargon and words that are likely
outside their working vocabularies. Really, though, that's
just an extension of what we already do, which is to explain
the ways computer scientists and software developers see
the world and think about problems.
Most CS professors know that we have to show students
examples of how to write -- programs they can read and the
emulate in their own code. These programs grow in size
and complexity throughout their careers as students and
developers. My education colleague suggests that we might
do the same sort of thing for reading, say, by talking
aloud while 'reading' -- "stating what you are looking for,
reading passages aloud and voicing important points, then
stating questions these points raise in your mind; and
voicing your expectations of what might come next".
I do things like this with programs in class. In my
compiler course,
I did a low-grade version of this in our second week,
working through a simple compiler that I wrote a couple
of years ago. Some of my questions of the code questioned
my own design style, which could well have been more
object-oriented than it was. I've not often considered
doing this with the textbook, though I seem to run across
suggestions to do so every few years.
(I have done this in my AI course with a journal paper
-- Alan Turing's
Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
It is usually a great success, because students really
get into Turing's claims and counteracts.)
A friend sent me this cartoon yesterday, and I laughed.
But it's less funny if we think that our students may
be unable to read deep enough to understand the problems
we set before them, or to comprehend the textbook that
augments our lectures in teaching students how to solve
problems. Rather than
dumbing down
our courses or our textbooks, we may have to take new
interest in teaching our students to read -- and not just
code. The alternative is to "maintain high standards"
and depopulate our majors at a time when our country and
world desperately need more citizens educated in computing
or at least prepared to live, vote, and make decisions in
an increasingly technological world.
"Find x." Okay, it's still funny.
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