Reading Skills and Strategies

P. David PearsonUC Berkeley

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Maryland

Berkeley

Peter Afflerbach

University of Maryland

P. David Pearson

University of California Berkeley

Scott Paris

University of Michigan

Peter Afflerbach, P. David Pearson, Scott G. Paris (2008). Clarifying Differences Between Reading Skills and Reading Strategies. The Reading Teacher, 61(5), pp. 364–373.

How to think about today’s presentation…

• Won’t pretend to have all the answers, so….

• But if you’d like to be involved in sharing a public “think aloud”…

• This is the place to be• A strategic account of the relationship between skills and strategies????

What’s the difference between primary,

secondary, and college teachers?• Their kids

• Their subject matter• Themselves

A little pre-test…

Phonemic Awareness is…

1.The ability to discern separate sounds in the stream of speech

2.The process by which a unit of sound can experience self-actualization

3.Something a person needs to practice a bit more IF he consistently says NUCULAR for NUCLEAR.

Reading Recovery is…

1. A much missed part of our current portfolio of early interventions

2. The only early intervention endorsed by the federal What Works Clearinghouse

3. A 12 step program designed to assist 1st graders who have overdosed on Accelerated Reader

Reading First…1. Is the Reading part of NCLB2. Has provided more resources for

compensatory reading than any previous piece of legislation in our history

3. Is what keeps us all employed4. Is what you should have done

before you walked into the wrong-gendered rest room.

What do you think?

• What’s a skill? • What’s a strategy? • How are they different?• How are they related?

Some answers we get when we ask

• “Skills make up strategies.”• “Strategies lead to skills.”• “Skill is the destination, strategy is the journey.”

• “We learn strategies to do a skill.”• “Skills are automatic, strategies are effortful and mediated.”

• “We use strategies as tools.”• “Strategies that work require a skill set.”• “We have to pay attention in learning skills, but eventually we use them automatically.”

What the dictionary says

• skill n. 1. an acquired ability to perform well; proficiency. Note: The term often refers to finely-coordinated, complex motor acts that are the result of perceptual-motor learning, as handwriting, golf, or pottery. However, skill is also used to refer to parts of acts that are primarily intellectual, as those involved in comprehension or thinking. See also basic skills. 2. a craft or activity requiring a high degree of competence, as the skill of making fine jewelry.

• strategy n. in education, a systematic plan, consciously adapted and monitored, to improve one’s performance in learning.

• Harris, T., & Hodges, R. (Eds.) (1995). The literacy dictionary: The vocabulary of reading and writing. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

What we find in school curricula

• Skill: Can’t find a definition, but we found lots of listsphonics skillsvocabulary skillscomprehension skillsStudy skills

• Strategy:A systematic plan, consciously adapted and monitored, to improve one's performance in learningMontgomery County Public Schools (MD)

Desperately seeking clarity…

The rationale for the explicit teaching of comprehension skills is that comprehension can be improved by teaching students to use specific cognitive strategies or to reason strategically when they encounter barriers to understanding what they are reading.

– National Reading Panel Summary Report (April, 2000)

Skills: A short Skills: A short historyhistory

• There have always been reading skills– Davis, 1944: Test to validate independent

skills– Where did Davis get his candidate skills to

test?• Reading series scope and sequence charts from 1930s

– Basal proliferation through the 40s-60s

• late 1960s: Bloom’s notion of mastery learning– identify the components– measure each– teach it to mastery and measure it again– reteach and, if necessary, recyle– go on to the next skill and repeat

• led to skills management systems– Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development– Fountain Valley– Basals in the early 1970s

Skills: A short history, continued

Skill 1

Skill 2

Teach Assess Conclude

Teach Assess Conclude

The 1970s Skills management mentality: Teach a skill, assess it for mastery, reteach it if necessary, and then go onto the next skill.

Historical relationships between instruction and assessment

Foundation: Benjamin Bloom’s ideas of mastery learning

Skill 2

Skill 3

Skill 1

Teach Assess Conclude

Teach Assess Conclude

Teach Assess Conclude

Skill 4

Skill 6

Teach Assess Conclude

Skill 5

Teach Assess Conclude

Teach Assess Conclude

The 1970s, cont.

And we taught each of these skills until we had covered the entire curriculum for a grade level.

We rejected this view in the 1980s: seductive but simplistic• Order

• Simplicity• Systematicity

• Clarity

• Weak evidence of independence

• Complexity• Some evidence of comingling

• Weak evidence about order

• Muddiness

Skills: A short history, continued

• The constructivist response in the

• K. Goodman: Who skilled Cock Robin?– Engage kids in authentic, meaningful

encounters with text and the “skills” will take care of themselves: KIds will become “skilled” without teaching “skills”.

Skills: A short history, continued

• Early 1990s: Skills took a basal sabbatical for about 6 years– Got moved to the appendix– Literature ruled the day

• Mid 1990s: Balanced Literacy: Skills are a means to the end of authentic reading and writing… (still alive in some places)

Skills: A short history, continuedSkills: A short

history, continued

• Mid to late 1990s: Re-emergence of skills as the staple of literacy curriculum

• Today: Back in the saddle again• New layer: They are now sanctioned by SBRR, in Reading First and in our assessment systems for monitoring and diagnosis

Skills: A short history, continuedSkills: A short

history, continued

Strategies: An even shorter history

• 1970s: We discovered “meta”• Metalinguistics: Knowing about linguistic elements like word, sentence, phoneme, grapheme, syllable, morph

• Metacomprehension: Knowing about our understanding

• Metacognition: Knowing about our cognitive processes (the overarching term)

• Metapoker: Kenny Rogers…

Instructional research on strategies

• Late 1970s through the early 90s in regular education (CSR, Pressley et al, Paris and others)

• Steady stream from late 1970s through today in Special Education (e.g., Deshler and Graham/Harris)

• General finding: if you teach it, they will learn it and do it

• Weakness: never studied how to curricularize all this stuff– Do you do all four RT strategies for every text you read?

Forever?

Why distinguish between skill and

strategy• Why not just moosh them together, teach them all to mastery, and be done with the debate?

• They are very different animals…

Comparing Skills and Strategies

Skills Strategies

automatic deliberate

unconscious conscious

context free context bound, situated

effortless: just do it!

effortful, mindful

abstract concrete

rule-like, principled

heuristic-like, precedent

We teach them differently: coping

with complexity•Skills

•Remove from context

•Decompose it into a set of component steps

•Teach then practice each step to mastery

•Practice in simple contexts (worksheets)

• Apply to real reading situations

•Strategies

•Find contextualized instances

•Model application through think-alouds

•Guide, scaffold student application

•Gradually release more responsibility

•Ask students to guide application

One way to bridge the divide

• Think of comprehension processes or tasks that we ask kids to perform

• These are largely discerning relationships between ideas– A caused B: The wind blew the roof off– A came after B: I did my homework after dinner– A is a B: A dog is a mammal.– If A, then B: If you do your homework, you can

watch TV.

• Any process or task can be under – automatic controla skill!– or– deliberate controla strategy

One way to bridge the divide

One way to bridge the divide

Thinking about the curriculum

Process or Task Strategy Skill

Inferring Characters’ Motives √ √

Distinguishing Fact from Opinion √ √

Reading Fluently (expression and speed)

√ √

Inferring word meanings √ √

Word reading √ √

Just about any task can be both √ √

• It has been used a lot

• The text is easy

• Knowledge is robust

• Requires little teacher scaffolding

A process is likely to be skilled when…

• it is new to the learner

• the text is hard

• knowledge is meager

• requires lots of teacher scaffolding

A process is likely to be strategic

when…

Cognitive apprenticeship

Teacher Responsibility100

00

100Student Responsibility

With any luck, we move this way (----->) over time.But we are always prepared to slide up and

down the diagonal.

Gradual Release of Responsibility

Likely to be under strategic control

Likely to be under skilled control

But you always have to be prepared to move up and down this

scale. Why because things change: today a skill, tomorrow a strategy

Another useful distinction

• Skills (or skilled behavior) are what we do when we just do it!

• Strategies (or strategic behavior) are what we invoke when the going gets tough.

• So whether they are the same or different doesn’t matter so much--the context will tell us when to do which.

So….

• If I regularly summarize each page in a science text, more or less as a matter of course, then summarization is a skill for me.

• If I come to the end of a page and say, “My goodness, I don’t remember a thing! I’d better get my act together, let’s see, how do I start?...”, then it is a strategy for me.

• Skills just happen but strategies solve problems

Are skills once upon a time strategies?

• How we learn to sound out initial consonants…involves strategies of connecting print and speech

• We then learn and overlearn this process, the strategy of determining initial consonants becomes skilled and automatic recognition

A useful distinction for thinking about skills…after Jim

Squire• Growth processes versus mastery processes

• Mastery: once you acquire them, we feel good and go on.

• Growth processes: show me that you have mastered the process and I’ll show you you haven’t

Distinguish between mastery and growth processes

What do we really need to watch out for?

• Skills: – Assumptive teaching– Practice makes perfect.

• Strategies– Metacognitive morasses– The frog and the centipede

What are sensible ideas for thinking about skill and strategy instruction in the service of helping students achieve in reading?• We are not likely to expunge skills from state and district curricula even if we wanted to…

• Even if we had strong evidence that they were harmful or irrelevant– highly entrenched

• Standards• Assessments• Basal Curricula

– “Old friends!”

What are sensible ideas for thinking about skill and strategy instruction in the service of helping students achieve in reading?• What sort of rapprochement or peaceful co-existence could we achieve?

• By no means have we settled this issue today.

• Even so…

Are Skills and Strategies Different?

• More different than alike• Some processes really do move from effortful to effortless– Breaking the Code

• Some processes seldom reach a skilled stage– Monitoring and fix-up

• For most processes, we toggle back and forth between skilled and strategic application– context bound (text, task, goal)

Are skills and

•Two sides of the same coin– Skills are strategies that have become

automated– Strategies are skills slowed down to a

speed where we can deconstruct and examine them meticulously

Are Skills and Strategies Alike?

Instruction

• Instruction will vary according to the way we conceptualize a given process…– If skill, then practice to mastery to

application– If strategy, then model, think-alouds,

gradual release, flexible application

• In their skilled aspect– By just doing it. – Probably with a task that is pretty

comfortable for that individual

• In their strategic aspect– By watching it in action– Probably with a task that is difficult for that

individual

Assessment Processes

The End• However we choose to frame this distinction, it is important to establish

– the normative characteristics of each• Automatic• Deliberate

– the normative approach to teaching each• decomposition and practice• scaffolding

• If we are both skillful and strategic in framing this distinction…– we will find ways to meet kids where they are– and move them a new level in their capacity to use skills and

strategies to cope with the complexities of reading comprehension.

Why we need to celebrate coaching

• Coach• Roach• Reach• Teach

We can get there in more than one way

• Teach• Peach• Poach• Coach

The real end

•Something old•Something new

•Something borrowed•Nothing blue!