Edpuzzle and Core Knowledge Sequence

Abstract

Results of the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading testing indicated that 67% of fourth graders were not proficient readers and 37% were reading below basic reading levels. Owing to the lack of growth in reading skills for a number of years, increasing attention is being given to what is termed the science of reading (SOR), an interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading. Although much of the SOR attention has been on word recognition (decoding and encoding) strategies, SOR approaches to teaching reading incorporate research on both word recognition/phonological component of reading and the language comprehension component of reading. The language comprehension element includes explicit teaching of vocabulary, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, inferring AND retrieving and building background knowledge. In recent years, the structure of the school curriculum has given greater time and attention to explicit teaching of the decoding and language structure aspects of reading, but as a result, less attention is being given to learning content in science, social studies/history, geography, and literature. Decoding words and understanding words and sentence structures in passages is not sufficient for comprehending a passage. For example, consider this sentence: Jones sacrifices and knocked in a run. Many Americans would understand the sentence but many British people would not. Understanding this sentence requires considerable knowledge of baseball. Readers need to recognize that Jones was at bat. They need to be aware of the baseball inning system and the three-outs system. They also need to know the size and shape of the baseball field (necessary to the concept of a sacrifice fly or bunt) and knowledge of what a fly or a bunt is. Readers would also have to have a sense of the layout of the bases and what a run is. In his books, such as Cultural Literacy (1987) and Why Knowledge Matters (2016), E. D. Hirsch claimed that a well-rounded, knowledge-specific curriculum can give children the knowledge essential for overcoming inequality of opportunity. Hirsch (2006) makes several arguments regarding the necessity of attending to students’ knowledge base: • The model currently used to improve reading comprehension teaches comprehension strategies—for example, determining vocabulary meaning from context, identifying main idea, identifying genre structure, visualizing text content, summarizing, making predictions. But strategies provide minimal help in comprehending when students do not have a knowledge base on which to use the strategies. • A more scientifically accurate picture of reading comprehension puts background knowledge and vocabulary, along with fluent decoding ability, at the center of reading comprehension. • The knowledge that is most useful to reading comprehension can be identified. • If educators accept these premises, they are obliged to revise the early grades curriculum so that we can impart to all students, in language arts classes and throughout the day, the knowledge that will enable them to read with strong comprehension. • Educators will help students become strong comprehenders if they ensure that students are exposed to science, social studies, and literature content.