Handbook of Reading Research, Volume V

Elizabeth Birr Moje, Peter P. Afflerbach, Patricia Enciso, Nonie K Lesaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317384762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In a time of pressures, challenges, and threats to public education, teacher preparation, and funding for educational research, the fifth volume of the Handbook of Reading Research takes a hard look at why we undertake reading research, how school structures, contexts and policies shape students' learning, and, most importantly, how we can realize greater impact from the research conducted. A comprehensive volume, with a "gaps and game changers" frame, this handbook not only synthesizes current reading research literature, but also informs promising directions for research, pushing readers to address problems and challenges in research design or method.

Bringing the field authoritatively and comprehensively up-to-date since the publication of the Handbook of Reading Research, Volume IV, this volume presents multiple perspectives that will facilitate new research development, tackling topics including:

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• Diverse student populations and sociocultural perspectives on reading development

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• Digital innovation, literacies, and platforms

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• Conceptions of teachers, reading, readers, and texts, and the role of affect, cognition, and social-emotional learning in the reading process

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• New methods for researching reading instruction, with attention to equity, inclusion, and education policies

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• Language development and reading comprehension

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• Instructional practices to promote reading development and comprehension for diverse groups of readers

Each volume of this handbook has come to define the field for the period of time it covers, and this volume is no exception, providing a definitive compilation of current reading research. This is a must-have resource for all students, teachers, reading specialists, and researchers focused on and interested in reading and literacy research, and improving both instruction and programs to cultivate strong readers and teachers.

Part I

Game Changers in Reading Research

Setting the Stage

1

Game Changers in Reading Research

Elizabeth Birr Moje, Peter P. Afflerbach, Patricia Enciso, and Nonie K. Lesaux

To frame Volume V of the Handbook of Reading Research, we situate the examination of reading research in today’s contexts of reading, learning to read, teaching reading, and using what we read in the world. In thinking about how reading is studied and practiced, however, we focus on uncovering some of the social, economic, and political conditions of research, teaching, and learning contexts—conditions that shape how reading occurs; develops; and is learned, taught, and studied. These contextual conditions also contribute to widening, mediating, and/or shrinking the gaps highlighted across the volume. Specifically, we interrogate the factors that change the game, in ways that may be positive or negative, for students, teachers, leaders, and researchers.

Whether researchers are concerned with examining the relationships between knowledge and comprehension processes, documenting the social and cultural practices that shape meaning making, or analyzing the impact of digital technologies on reading, they invoke interrelated systems with different levels and loci of influence, from macro (state and societal systems), to meso (school and education policies and systems), to micro (classrooms, informal learning spaces, homes, and families). The graphic in Figure 1.1 represents just some of the conditions that are changing the game for teachers, school leaders, families, policy makers, and reading researchers. Beyond state and national systems, researchers also recognize the influence of global inequalities, economies, and migrations requiring new approaches to educational practice and research that value diverse ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Figure 1.1 Conditions of education contexts that shape reading research and practice

Many demands press on and push out of these systems, posing challenges both to teaching reading and to the conduct of reading research within the real conditions of schooling. These game-changing demands necessitate that we work as a field to close the gaps. Intersecting conditions across interlocking systems make intervening in any one condition—or outcome of a condition—in any given space incredibly difficult for teachers, leaders, policy makers, and researchers, especially if these players are not attempting to reach across the gaps. This volume highlights gaps in reading education and research that have widened and, we argue, must be addressed by our field. In particular, educators and researchers are increasingly aware of the responsibility to understand readers more fully—as social, emotional, cognitive, and cultural beings whose quality of life depends, in part, on supportive and informed learning environments. Taking up this responsibility, we identify the game-changing conditions that have shaped contemporary contexts for reading research and have influenced the organization of this volume and the research reviews that follow.

Describing the Game Changers

Some of the conditions or game changers we outline below are familiar to those who have followed 21st-century literacies work in which education is shaped by an increasingly global, information-oriented “fast times” economy (c.f. Gee, 2000). Increasing availability of information—both filtered and unfiltered, edited and unedited, accurate and questionable—for example, is a game changer in terms of our thinking about what and how students need to learn, and especially about how they learn to read. Availability of information has also intensified in the sense that information is delivered constantly and in multiple forms (image, word, sound). Sometimes one bit of information delivered in a particular medium conflicts with other bits, delivered in different media, requiring readers to make sense of these various forms simultaneously, and at a speed not required in reading print on paper. The speed of access to that information has also changed how we think about literacy, and reading, in particular. Children and youth, some argue, do not only need to learn to read for meaning but also need to learn how to seek, sort, and evaluate the information they read because so much information is produced so quickly, and often with little verification or editing.

At the national level, other demands were ushered in with the education reforms of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The disaggregating of test data promoted by every presidential administration since the Clinton administration revealed the ways that many children were, actually, being left behind. Disaggregation of data also illuminated the fact that who got left behind depended a great deal on race, socioeconomic status, and language skill (see Proctor and Chang-Bacon, Chapter 2, this volume, for specific analysis of these demographic challenges to learning literacy and to academic and economic success writ large). Moreover, many U.S. policy makers argued that no child was learning at the levels necessary to ensure U.S. success in a global market; similar trends in global policy contexts—especially in Western developed countries—can also be seen as more and more countries sought increased learning outcomes for their children and youth (World Bank, 2019).

Coupled with decreasing economic prominence and increasing trade imbalances, the United States responded similarly in the late 1990s and early 2000s as it did in the Sputnik era of the 1950s, casting the education system as one in crisis, and demanding new standards and new accountability. The fear of being left behind globally inspired discourses of competition (“race to the top”) as an antidote to the pending “crisis.” Competition discourses worldwide revolve around what are variously referred to as “market-based education reforms” that purport to make the work of educating children more competitive, thus allowing the market (i.e., parents, and in some cases, youth) to decide on education practices by choosing the best options for their children or themselves (Plank & Sykes, 2003). The notion of choice is meant to give people options on a variety of dimensions, from quality of offerings and pedagogy; to the perspectives or values espoused in a given school setting; to the size, location, safety, schedule, and other dimensions of school operation. The fact that opportunities to choose are mediated by social, economic, and political realities of people’s lives (Hanushek, Kain, Rivkin, & Branch, 2007) is often overlooked in the discourses of choice and competition, creating game-changing conditions in a range of school contexts (Bifulco & Ladd, 2006; Saporito, 2014). These market-based reforms are often associated with public charters, voucher movements, and alternative routes to teacher certification.

In addition to thinking about these demands, we approached this handbook focused on the ways in which a new global economy produces material effects on education practice, policy, and research. A dominant theme throughout the handbook, therefore, is the question of how reading researchers need to account for these effects in their work. What some might think of as distal influences on reading, learning to read, teaching reading, and conducting reading research, we actually posit as game changers—ones that demand reading researchers do a better job of closing gaps. In what follows, we describe several of these game changers, noting that some chapters in this volume take these game changers on in very specific ways. For those game changers not addressed in the handbook as independent chapters, we draw attention to the conditions they produce and the questions these changes should raise for reading researchers.

A Changing Ethnic, Racial, and Socioeconomic Landscape

Increasing migration across national and local boundaries has dramatically shaped the composition of not only U.S. classrooms, but also classrooms around the world. As Proctor and Chang-Bacon (this volume, Chapter 2) describe, the U.S. student population is increasingly diverse, even in locations outside major cities. What has not changed radically, however, is the teaching workforce, which remains largely homogeneous. The contrast between the racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of predominantly monolingual, white, female teachers and their plurilingual, racialized, religiously and culturally diverse student populations is a game changer, especially when considering that reading instruction and research can be skewed toward assumptions of universal childhoods (Bloch, Kennedy, Lightfoot, & Weyenberg 2006; Dumas & Nelson, 2016) and equitably resourced learning environments (Cook-Harvey, Darling-Hammond, Lam, Mercer, & Roc, 2016).

In their chapter, Proctor and Chang-Bacon explicitly address the demands and implications of forging research and educational change within the context of widening demographic and economic differences in school and community contexts. Recognizing demographic changes as well as long histories of racialization, Lee (this volume, Chapter 3) and other authors outline precisely how researchers and educators might realize new relations of trust and engagement with youth who desire and deserve more robust learning environments. The gap among theory, research, and teaching, however, remains and demands cross-system investment in a vision of equity and change.

Workforce and Changes in the U.S. and Global Economy

A global economy has changed the way people in any country think about educating children, youth, and adults for the world of work and for active community participation. Although often cast as the effects of a more technological, information-based economy, the reality is that the diminished U.S. manufacturing and labor portfolio has simply reduced options for our students. It is worth noting that service jobs actually still exist in large numbers in our society, but that wages for those jobs have not kept pace with inflation (Bailey & Belfield, 2019; Krugman, 1997, 2017), suggesting that the demand for “knowledge workers” might be overstated.

Despite these economic analyses that call attention to wage rather than knowledge disparities, it remains the case that attention to literacy—and reading in particular—is a crucial need in a society whose “game” has changed in these ways. Given that the U.S. economy is no longer based on manufacturing, learning to read is a necessary ingredient of full participation in a society that depends on and demands literacy. “Learning to read” signifies more than the ability to call out words or to answer multiple choice questions on a test. It involves reading widely and deeply for meaning, and using what one reads to do real work in the real world, and sifting through the welter of information that comes to individuals in an information economy. It also refers to developing the skills and competencies that allow a reader to question and challenge received knowledge in a given text, or taken-for-granted assumptions about how the world works, that shape disciplines and other domains of practice. In sum, 8th or 10th grade basic literacy skills are insufficient for life; it is more difficult than ever before to be successful in a society in which the great majority of high-paying jobs require at least a college education and, typically, advanced degrees, which has implications for reading research and educational practice.

New Forms of Text and New Communication Practices

In this knowledge economy, for better and for worse, youth and adults communicate identity, knowledge, and aspiration across digital platforms offering boundless exposure to and interaction with texts, images, and sounds. Although communication is the primary driver for digital connectivity, youth and teachers are also reading and interpreting a continuously changing flow of new textual forms. This scenario produces both generative change in the conceptualization of text and challenging gaps in identifying when, what, and how reading is happening.

Bråten, Braasch, and Salmerón (this volume, Chapter 5), Mackey, (this volume, Chapter 6), and Baron (this volume, Chapter 7), all frame and address the question of “what is a text” in terms of the container. Does it matter if the text is read online or in hard copy? As a fundamental focus for basic reading research this question of text form is a game changer: Where, when and how does reading happen if the text is not sourced and vetted? What happens when readers are searching for information and constructing meaning across platforms with multiple online and offline texts? What is happening to readers, by readers, and with readers as they read and create texts for new purposes?

Some of the greatest implementation gaps between research and schools appear to lie in teachers’ and school leaders’ assumptions about what new text forms do and do not do, and in how to use different media to enhance learning, rather than to distract from it. Many researchers are creating, evaluating, and/or implementing digital platforms to support comprehension (c.f. Allen & McNamara, this volume, Chapter 14), community reading with youth (Noguéron-Liu and Lammers, this volume, Chapter 21) and disciplinary literacy in science education (Greenleaf and Hinchman, this volume, Chapter 20). Importantly, many researchers address the problem of “the text” across different domains of reading and literacy education. As their research suggests, reading researchers will continue to need rigorous, open-minded, and systematic cross-domain research on texts and the power of texts in all their forms in a new decade.

Testing

Within education systems, and throughout society, testing exerts both obvious and nuanced influence on reading theory, practice, and research. Tests have an impact on how students, teachers, parents, administrators, legislators, and the general public conceptualize growth in literacy, the appropriateness of curriculum and instruction, suitable assessment, and learning outcomes. It is difficult to overstate the influence of testing on how reading curriculum, instruction, and student learning occur in the everyday. In some respects, 21st-century schooling has been marked by an ever-escalating race to teach and learn at an ever faster, development-defying pace, so that youth will eventually be competitive in a fast-paced global economy. Testing mediates the discourse between reading research and reading practice, and therefore is responsible for connections and gaps in how the two communicate. For decades, testing has been—and likely will continue to be—a game changer.

Reading assessment, as part of the overall testing context, has been addressed in multiple chapters as a game changer for researchers who have developed inn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: Game Changers in Reading Research: Setting the Stage
• PART II: How Increasingly Diversified Populations Change the Game for Readers, Teachers, Leaders, and Reading Researchers
• PART III: How Do Expanding Forms of Texts and Everyday Communication Change the Game for Readers, Teachers, Leaders, and Reading Researchers?
• PART IV: How Do Expanding Conceptualizations of Readers Change the Game for Teachers, Leaders, and Reading Researchers?
• PART V: How Do Expanding Conceptions of Teacher, Reader, and Text Interaction Change the Game for Reading Researchers, Teachers, Leaders, and Policy Makers?
• PART VI: How Do Research Methods Change the Game for Reading Researchers and Policy Makers
• PART VII: Minding the Gaps: Translating Reading Research as the Game is Changing
• Contributor Biographies
• Index