Reading and Writing Are “It” When it Comes to Learning

There isn’t enough time devoted to improving reading and writing skills with our traditional public school system.

I saw it time and time again on the high school level when students struggled with content because they didn’t have the required reading and writing skills to master the assigned curriculum.

Recently, Stephen Sawchuk from EducationWeek online wrote an article titled “4 Ways Reading and Writing Interlock: What the Research Says”. Here is what Sawchuk and his team found out regarding the latest research:

“Reading and writing are intimately connected.”

“Research on the connections between the two disciplines began in the early 1980’s and has grown more robust with time. Although there are elements specific to each, like handwriting, that need to be practiced on their own, reading and writing instruction appear to be effective when combined.”

“Among the newest and most important additions are three research syntheses conducted by Steve Graham, a professor at the University of Arizona, and his research partners. One of them examined whether writing instruction also led to improvements in students’ reading ability; a second examined the inverse question. Both found significant positive effects for reading and writing.”

“A third meta-analysis get one step closer to classroom instruction. Graham and partners examined 47 studies of instructional programs that balanced both reading and writing – no program could feature more than 60 percent of one or the other. The results showed generally positive effects on both reading and writing measures.”

“Writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read.”

“Studies show that the prewriting students do in early education carries meaningful signals about their decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension later on.”

“Reading experts say that students should be supported in writing almost as soon as they begin reading, and evidence suggests that both spelling and handwriting are linked to the ability to connect speech to print – a process known as encoding – and to oral language development.”

“Like reading, writing must be taught explicitly.”

“Writing is a complex task that demands much of students’ cognitive resources. Researchers generally agree that writing must be explicitly taught – rather than left up to students to ‘figure out’ the rules on their own. That way, they can spend more time focusing on what they want to say, rather than trying to determine how to say it effectively.”

“There isn’t as much research about how precisely to do this. One 2019 review, in fact, found significant overlap among the dozen writing programs studies and concluded that all showed signs of boosting learning. Debates abound about the amount of structure students needs and in what sequence, such as whether they need to master sentence construction before moving onto paragraphs and lengthier texts.”

“But in general, students should be guided on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, and they should have access to models and exemplars, the research suggests. They also need to understand the iterative nature of writing, including how to draft and revise.”

“A number of different writing frameworks incorporating various degrees of structure and modeling are available, though most of them have not been studies empirically.”

“Writing can help students learn content – and make sense of it.”

“Much of reading comprehension depends on helping students absorb ‘world knowledge’ – think arts, ancient cultures, literature, and science – so that they can make sense of increasingly sophisticated texts and ideas as their reading improves. Writing can enhance students’ absorption of this background knowledge, and should be emphasized rather than taking a back seat to the more commonly taught exercise, such as stories and personal reflections.”

“Graham and colleagues conducted another meta-analysis of nearly 60 studies looking at this idea of ‘writing to learn’ in mathematics, science, and social studies. The studies included a mix of high-order assignments, like analyses, and argumentative writing, and lower-level ones, like summarizing and explaining.”

It’s not likely the traditional system will give more time to building strong readers and writers. They seem locked into their schedules based on legislative and school board expectations.

We know what types of readers and writers we are producing within our traditional system – most weaker than they should be – especially when it comes to black, brown, and poor kids.

So, how do we improve reading and writing abilities? We need to create a new system of learning, one that will offer large chunks of time for young learners to improve their skills, like reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development.

To me, that’s the only way we’re going to improve our young learners’ ability to learn.

Til tomorrow. SVB