Reading and Mathematics

Question 1

What are emergent literacy skills?

Answer 1

Skills and knowledge that are precursors to reading. Before children look at words and read them, but understanding what reading is about. This can develop from birth - being exposed to it early on. Children have to make crucial discoveries to determine the different parts of reading. Those who don’t have exposure to books (parents don’t read to them) they are missing out on building this foundation. Key elements of emergent literacy are missing for children who haven’t had this exposure.

Question 2

What are key elements of emergent literacy?

Answer 2

¥ Direction
¥ Spaces between letters
¥ Written words correspond to spoken words
¥ Read pages in a specific order

Question 3

What is emergent literacy linked to?

Answer 3

Assumed to be closely linked to ‘home literacy environment’ – providing that foundation, encouraging parents to read to their babies. Incorporating the home and school environment – don’t leave linguistic exposure to be an academic responsibility.

Question 4

What did Weigel et al. 2006 find about the home literacy environment?

Answer 4

Found the home-literacy environment is a predictor of reading ability. 1 year longitudinal study of 85 families with preschoolers. Parent-child literacy led to greater print knowledge, and more language activities led to more reading interest. Works on the motivation as well, which is very important for subsequent ability. Home literacy practices in turn depended on parent beliefs and values – what are their values and beliefs about what is important?

Question 5

What did Froiland et al. (2013) find?

Answer 5

551 pre-scholars attending Head Start classrooms. Starting point is what is happening in the home (home-literacy environment) - exposure to books in the family home. This is a predictor of child’s early literacy outcomes (how they are doing in literacy tests). The foundation is the neighbourhood socioeconomic wellbeing. The families in more affluent areas had a richer home literacy environment. After controlling for parents’ own education level – the neighbourhood context matters as well. But correlational data from one time point – not a prediction of change over time.

Question 6

What is the wider family context?

Answer 6

Literacy outcomes influenced not just by book exposure in the house, but also the overall quality of the home environment (e.g. responsiveness of parent). But consider general parent-child interactional style, as well as global measures of home environment (e.g., overall quality and responsiveness - HOME), e.g., Roberts et al. (2005): “HOME was the most consistent and strongest predictor of children’s language and literacy skills”.

Question 7

What are predictors of reading ability?

Answer 7

Numerous possible factors involved, but there is good evidence for:
1. Concepts of print
2. Phonemic awareness – working with the sounds of language
(segmenting, blending, manipulating, and discriminating between phonemes)
e.g., phoneme deletion task
e.g., counting out phonemes
e.g., identifying which of three words doesn’t contain the same sound
1. Rhyme awareness
2. Letter knowledge.

Question 8

What did Bradley & Bryant (1983) find?

Answer 8

Longitudinal study and training study. Sound categorisation (odd one out in list of CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words) before reading predicted later reading and spelling 3 years later – longitudinal evidence. Training in sound categorisation in 40 lessons over two years led to superior reading and spelling – experimental evidence
Supported hypothesis that early rhyme and alliteration awareness is causally important.

Question 9

What did Schatschneider et al. (2004) find?

Answer 9

Longitudinal study from kidergarten to 2nd grade. Large array of possible predictors of reading outcomes
Consistent predictive value of phonological awareness, knowledge of letter sounds, and letter naming speed (rapid automatised naming of letters, RAN).

Question 10

What are controversies about teaching reading?

Answer 10

Phonics vs. whole-word – all about whether children can be taught to read by decomposing whole words, use the context to figure out what the word could be, have a visual image of the word. Goodman (1965) – reading words in context showed 60-80% fewer errors than reading in isolation. Reading schemes vs. ‘real’ books. Synthetic phonics vs. analytic phonics – in recent years big focus around this.

Question 11

What is the UK primary framework?

Answer 11

Earlier framework for teaching set out in 1998. Focused on 4 ‘searchlights’: phonics (sounds and spelling), grammatical knowledge, word recognition and graphic knowledge, and knowledge of context.

Question 12

What did Nicholson (1991) find? (against UK primary framework)

Answer 12

But Nicholson (1991): effect of context is less robust than previously suggested, and likely to be present for only poor/average readers – you use the context when you can’t read the word: using the context as compensation. Skilled reader doesn’t need context, because they can use their phonics skills to sound out a word. Suggests it could simply be a compensation effect (Stanovich). Contrasts with substantial evidence that training in phonemic awareness leads to improved reading and spelling - meta-analysis by Ehri et al. (2001). Combining whole-language and code-oriented approaches?.

Question 13

What did Johnston and Watson (2004) find?

Answer 13

Evidence for ‘synthetic’ over ‘analytic’ phonics? ¥ 3 groups
¥ Analytic: one letter a week in onset position, followed by CVC words
¥ Analytic+phonological awareness: as above plus phoneme and rime awareness in the absence of print
¥ Synthetic: sounding out, blending, letter formation, looking at letter sounds in all positions
¥ Showed superior performance in synthetic group
¥ 7-year longitudinal study, reported to the Scottish Executive (2005)
¥ At the end, children were 3.5 years ahead of chronological age in word reading
use synthetic phonics rather than onset-rime and analogy work?

Question 14

What is evidence against just using synthetic phonics?

Answer 14

Goswami (1999) emphasises BOTH rhyme and phoneme work
¥ includes teaching the metacognitive strategy of analogy
¬ Ehri et al. (2001):
¥ systematic phonics better than unsystematic or no-phonics instruction – and it’s better to start this early
BUT
¥ different types of systematic phonics programmes (e.g., synthetic vs. larger-unit) did NOT differ in the impact on reading

Question 15

What did Togerson et al. 2006 say?

Answer 15

¥ “There is currently not strong RCT evidence that any one form of systematic phonics is more effective than any other.”
¥ aside from adding systematic phonics if not already being used, “there is little warrant in these findings for changes to existing practice.”
However, this is exactly what happened in government policy.

Question 16

What did Wyse and Styles (2007) say? (against Torgerson et al., 2006)

Answer 16

Inadequate research basis for the big policy thrust
¥ criticisms of the Clackmannanshire study
¥ concerns about “the most prescriptive, rigid and limited view of what it means to teach early reading to have appeared in England” – people worried that turning reading as a function to decode, it can lead to deduction in comprehension and motivation.

Question 17

Link between comprehension and metacognition?

Answer 17

¬ Some readers are good decoders but poor comprehenders – good at the code, but they haven’t understood what they are reading. However, in most cases the two go together, but this is not a given
¬ This introduces another set of things that can go into the ‘psychological constructs’ section - role of metacognition in skilled comprehension. Metacognitive strategies are important for comprehension skills.

Question 18

What did Crain (1999) find?

Answer 18

Poor comprehends were ¥ less likely to identify independent strategies when encountering a word they can’t read or a sentence they can’t understand
¥ less likely to identify strategies for remembering the ‘gist’ of a story
¥ less able to adapt reading style to accomplish different goals (e.g., study vs. skim)

Question 19

What did Crain, Oakhill, and Bryant (2004) find?

Answer 19

Longitudinal study of children aged 8-11:
¥ working memory predicts reading comprehension after controlling for word reading skill and verbal ability – need to be careful not to reduce reading to horizontal axis of just decoding words: e.g. need to be taught how to draw inferences, which are not written directly on the page
¥ but inference-making ability and comprehension monitoring were also significant predictors, even after controlling for working memory as well.

Question 20

What is the phonics screening check?

Answer 20

¬ “The phonics screening check is designed to confirm whether pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard. It will identify pupils who need extra help to improve their decoding skills.” (DfE, 2015)
¬ Duff et al. (2015) – confirms validity of check but raises question about added value beyond teacher judgements
¬ Is it right to have a test to check if a child has met that target – research found that results doesn’t add to teachers assessment of child ability.

Question 21

Should we promote conceptual understanding in maths?

Answer 21

¬ Focus on procedural knowledge often at the expense of conceptual knowledge – this can lead to difficulty later, e.g. when trying to apply concepts
¬ Idea of how maths should be taught - use of higher-order conceptually challenging questions, rather than just repetition
¥ focus on explanations rather than repetition/memorisation
¥ asking children to articulate problem-solving strategies
¥ going beyond problem at hand
¬ use of plausible and meaningful contexts
¬ Could explain cultural differenes in mathematics performance
¥ more computing in context and more higher-order questions in Taiwan and Japan than in US (Perry et al., 1993).

Question 22

What is the effect of gender?

Answer 22

¥ natural ability?
¥ better school grades in maths?
¥ better performance on achievement tests?

Question 23

What is the effect of self-perception, attribution, and shame?

Answer 23

¥ Stipek & Gralinski (1991): questions before and after maths test. Gave a regular maths test, and there was no difference in the average test score between males and females, but there was a difference in motivation. Children may not be different from one another, but differences in these factors causes a change in motivation
¬ higher expected performance in boys
¬ greater attribution of failure to lack of ability in girls
¬ lower belief in value of effort for success by girls
greater tendency to feel like hiding test paper by girls.

Question 24

What is the effect of parent expectations?

Answer 24

¥ Parsons et al. (1982): parents had sex-differentiated ideas about mathematics performance, despite actual similarity
¬ parent beliefs more important for shaping children’s self-perceptions than their own past performance
¬ Bleeker & Jacobs (2004) – mother’s prediction of child’s success in math-oriented career influences adolescent’s self-perception of math ability, which in turn influences adolescent’s math/science career self-efficacy. These factors have a larger effect on child self-efficacy than their test results.

Question 25

What did Brian, Leslie, and Cimpian, 2017 find about ability stereotypes?

Answer 25

¥ Found a clear gender effect
¥ who is ‘really, really, smart’?
¥ 5-year-olds: both boys and girls show an own-gender bias
¥ 6-year-olds: only boys show an own-gender bias, girls drop
¥ girls’ perceptions not correlated with beliefs about school achievement
¥ perceptions are related to choice of new games (described as for “children who are really, really smart”)
¥ If this is starting a 6 years old, how do we counter it.

Question 26

What did Huget and Raynor (2009) find?

Answer 26

¥ Boys and girls aged 11-13 years given 90 seconds to learn a complex figure and then 5 minutes to reproduce it from memory on paper
¥ Students told test would measure geometry (stereotype threat, activating stereotype) or drawing (control)
¥ Separate assessment showed that girls had counter-stereotypic beliefs about girls’ ability in geometry – they believed they were just as good as boys in terms of geometry
¥ However, when task labelled as ‘geometry’ boys outperformed girls, but when labelled ‘drawing’, girls outperformed boys – not happening at a conscious level, but taps into deep-rooted thoughts about abilities .