IYKYK: Good readers know stuff

Students who can't read very well are taught to use the strategies of good readers, writes Robert Pondiscio. "Good readers create pictures in their mind," they're told. "Good readers make connections." Perhaps the teacher will do a "think-aloud," reading to students and stopping to made predictions and inferences. It's "cargo-cult reading," he writes. What matters is what good readers know.

Good readers understand thousands of words almost instantly. "Beneath it all lies an immense store of background knowledge, silently supplying context, filling gaps, resolving ambiguities, and allowing the reader to make inferences without consciously deciding to make them."

"Knowledge is what we think with," writes Pondiscio. "A student cannot think critically about the causes of the Civil War without knowing a great deal about slavery, federalism, westward expansion, the Constitution, and sectional politics."

Attempts to teach students to “think like a scientist” or “think like a historian” are doomed to fail, he argues. "Because they possess enormous stores of historical knowledge, experienced historians know which facts are significant, which sources deserve skepticism, what precedents may illuminate an event, and which interpretations are reasonable." Students are novices. They don't know enough to think like experts.

Teachers need to spend less time on comprehension strategies, more time on building knowledge and vocabulary, Pondiscio writes.

Every additional hour spent practicing finding the main idea, making connections, and identifying an author’s purpose is an hour that is lost learning about the solar system, ancient civilizations, ecosystems, mythology, music, art, and literature — the knowledge that will make future texts more comprehensible.

Individual teachers can't do this alone. Administrators need to select a coherent curriculum and make time in the day for science and social studies.

"Children from knowledge-rich homes have many opportunities to acquire vocabulary and background knowledge through books, conversations, travel, museums, extracurricular activities, and countless informal experiences," Pondiscio writes. Children whose parents can't provide are dependent on their school to develop "the vast, largely invisible infrastructure of knowledge and vocabulary that makes proficient reading possible."

There's strong evidence that combining literacy, science and social studies instruction builds reading comprehension, writes Olivia Mullins. "The question is not “should we focus on knowledge-building” but rather “how do we best integrate content and literacy?”"

All teachers should be literacy teachers, writes Natalie Wexler. "That’s especially true at higher grade levels," when science and social studies students need to deal with more complex vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure. Even in math, students may need help with understanding word problems.