Confusing Ignorance With Illiteracy
Tom Sticht – One of the major purposes of having people learn to read is so that they may be able to increase their knowledge about a subject. For instance, if you want to find out what someone knows about a subject, you might give them a simple multiple choice test in a written format, and then ask questions about the subject matter of interest.
But this confounds the assessment of the person’s knowledge about the subject with their ability to read.
Often in what are called reading tests, knowledge and reading skill are confounded. For instance, in a vocabulary test, it may be unclear whether a person does not know the meaning of a word, or the person lacks the word recognition skill to decode the word.
In the National Assessments of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading skills and knowledge assessment are confounded in tests of science, mathematics, or other content areas because the latter assessments are given largely using the printed language and require good reading skills which some students may not have. Generally there is no attempt to separately determine a student’s knowledge in the content area separately from the person’s ability to read in the content area in an unskilled or skilled manner.
In work for the U.S. Navy, colleagues and I developed a 45 hour reading development program to help sailors improve their reading ability while increasing their knowledge needed for upward mobility in their career progression. In this program, reading instruction was integrated with Navy career progression knowledge. In assessing learning outcomes in this course we considered both improvements in Navy career progression knowledge and increases in reading skill. We did this by developing two separate assessments.
The Navy Knowledge assessment presented questions about the career progression information taught in the course and required the personnel to answer the questions drawing upon the knowledge they had in their long term memories. The Navy Functional Reading assessment presented questions for answering, along with paragraphs of written information that contained the answers to the questions. The idea here was to find out how well the personnel could read the written language to increment whatever internal knowledge they had in long term memory stored in their brains, by extracting it from the external “long term memory” formed by the written passages. By comparing the Navy Knowledge and Navy Functional Reading assessment results in pre-and post-program assessments we could determine separately the extent to which personnel had increased their Navy knowledge as well as their reading skill for incrementing their long term knowledge store using an external knowledge store.
In additional work for the U.S. Navy we developed separate readability formula for determining how much general reading ability as measured by a standardized, normed reading test a person needed to be able to comprehend Navy material with 70 percent accuracy. We developed formulas for those with high and low prior knowledge about the Navy. We found that with low background Navy knowledge, a person needed a general reading ability of about the eleventh grade to comprehend with 70 percent accuracy. But highly knowledgeable personnel needed only a sixth grade level of general reading to comprehend Navy-related material with 70 percent accuracy. In this case, then, high levels of background knowledge substituted for some five grade levels of general reading ability.
The Armed Services have long understood the difference between general reading ability and specialized bodies of knowledge in developing their Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). This assessment battery assesses both general reading vocabulary and paragraph comprehension, but also includes assessments of specialized bodies of knowledge such as Auto and Shop, General Science, Electricity and Electronics, and others. When selecting people for service, lower general reading ability scores may be offset by higher scores in specialized bodies of knowledge.
The failure to attend to differences in knowledge and literacy is a problem for the National Assessments of Educational Progress and the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. It contributes to a serious underestimation of the intellectual abilities of America’s children, youth, and adults, and it leads to the egregious error of confusing ignorance with illiteracy.
Subscribe
Enter your email to subscribe to daily Education News!
Hot Topics
- Education Technology
- Teachers Unions
- Charter Schools
- California Education
- Education Research
- Online Education
- New York Education
- UK Education
- STEM Education
- School Choice
- Cost of College
- Education Funding
- New York City Schools
- Julia Steiny
- Florida Education
- Education Reform
- Parent Involvement
- Texas Education
- Los Angeles Schools
- Math Education
- C. M. Rubin
- Obama Administration
- Chicago Schools
- Testing
- Vouchers
- 2012 Election
- Pennsylvania Education
- New Jersey Education
- Tennessee Education
- Teaching
- UK Higher Education
- Teacher Training
- College Admissions
- Early Childhood Education
- Louisiana Education
- School Health
- Ohio Education
- Teacher Evaluations
- Illinois Education
- Literacy
- MOOCs
- Cheating
- Michigan Education
- Arne Duncan
- UK Politics
Career Index
Plan your career as an educator using our free online datacase of useful information.
- Select a City Subject
- Advertising Schools in Costa Mesa
- Advertising Schools in Fresno
- Advertising Schools in Fullerton
- Advertising Schools in Huntington Beach
- Advertising Schools in Long Beach
- Advertising Schools in Los Angeles
- Advertising Schools in Orange
- Advertising Schools in Oxnard
- Advertising Schools in Pasadena
- Advertising Schools in Riverside
- Advertising Schools in Sacramento
- Advertising Schools in San Francisco
- Advertising Schools in San Jose
- Advertising Schools in San Marcos
- Advertising Schools in Santa Ana
Comments
One can readily rig a reading comprehension test. I have known for the length of my career that background knowledge impacts reading comprehension substantially. I have often stated that reading comprehension may be more about what you bring to the reading act than what you do during it. I see bright student,s who have reading disabilities, from middle class homes outperform their word recognition scores on comprehension measures for this very reason.
This very situation that you acknowledge has much to do with the achievement gap many bemoan and insist can be eliminated through good teaching.
What these folks don't understand, though many of us do, is that this achievement gap is carefully built over years and years of exposure to knowledge. Home environments and communities can, and often do, expose children to significant amounts of information and experiences, all of which add up to knowledge and are then utilized in both reading and listening comprehension.
Children raised in low SES homes and communities usually lack virtually all experience with a broad information and experience base. Good teaching is not able to replace this, and what is more, homes that furnish broad information and experience to preschoolers, continue to furnish the very same stimulating conditions throughout the life of the child, so the gap widens.
Thank you for quantifying this knowledge gap.
In my own experience, I can attest to the enormous challenges presented when I attempt to read and comprehend something that is well outside my own areas of knowledge and experience. Even with good reading skills, which I believe I possess, I often must read/reread/reread again to begin to achieve some degree of comprehension, and some knowledge gaps cannot be compensated for merely with good reading skills.
I agree wholeheartedly with Concerned Teacher. What breaks my heart about the achievement gap is the fact that we live in a world where so much information about so many things is available, often free of charge on the internet, and yet children affected by the gap continue to lack access to the material, not because they can't afford it (after all, their families somehow manage to have get their hands on the latest in gaming equipment and most possess cell phones, etc.), but because they either or unaware or unconcerned about exposing their children to the type of knowledge that will be required of them once they enter school. As I tell my colleagues all the time, the achievement gap is really a cultural gap–and how do you close a cultural gap without the cooperation of the affected communities? As a friend of mine recently quipped, "You can't push a wagon up hill with a rope!"
I wonder whether anyone has done research on the impact preschools and teachers can have on providing some of the background knowledge kids need but may not get at home. Two out of two commenters seem to provide anecdotal evidence, but they don’t say what methods they tried and found ineffective.