Tap, Click, Read

Growing Readers in a World of Screens

Lisa Guernsey, Michael H. Levine

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119092001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden für Lesekompetenz

A guide to promoting literacy in the digital age

With young children gaining access to a dizzying array of games, videos, and other digital media, will they ever learn to read? The answer is yes—if they are surrounded by adults who know how to help and if they are introduced to media designed to promote literacy, instead of undermining it. Tap, Click, Read gives educators and parents the tools and information they need to help children grow into strong, passionate readers who are skilled at using media and technology of all kinds—print, digital, and everything in between.

In Tap, Click, Read authors Lisa Guernsey and Michael H. Levine envision a future that is human-centered first and tech-assisted second. They document how educators and parents can lead a new path to a place they call 'Readialand'—a literacy-rich world that marries reading and digital media to bring knowledge, skills, and critical thinking to all of our children. This approach is driven by the urgent need for low-income children and parents to have access to the same 21st-century literacy opportunities already at the fingertips of today's affluent families.With stories from homes, classrooms and cutting edge tech labs, plus accessible translation of new research and compelling videos, Guernsey and Levine help educators, parents, and America's leaders tackle the questions that arise as digital media plays a larger and larger role in children's lives, starting in their very first years of life.

Tap, Click, Read includes an analysis of the exploding app marketplace and provides useful information on new review sites and valuable curation tools. It shows what to avoid and what to demand in today's apps and e-books—as well as what to seek in community preschools, elementary schools and libraries. Peppered with the latest research from fields as diverse as neuroscience and behavioral economics and richly documented examples of best practices from schools and early childhood programs around the country, Tap, Click, Read will show you how to:

• Promote the adult-child interactions that help kids grow into strong readers
• Learn how to use digital media to build a foundation for reading and success
• Discover new tools that open up avenues for creativity, critical thinking, and knowledge-building that today's children need

The book's accompanying website keeps you updated on new research and provides vital resources to help parents, schools and community organizations.

Part 1

Imagining the Class of 2030

Chapter 1
The Quiet Crisis

It's graduation day, 2030. High school students and their families are filing into stadiums and auditoriums around the United States, awaiting the chant-like announcements of hundreds of students receiving their diplomas.

It seems like only yesterday these students were babies. They arrived in the world at a time of immense change in how people communicated and learned—days that began to include smartphone apps, on-the-fly video making, instant photo sharing, text messaging, blogging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Some of these students have become focused, careful readers with skills in filtering, creating, and making sense of the continual streams of information coming their way. Guided by a community of parents and educators who recognized the potential of new tools and mentors, they have become über readers, literate in a way that was almost unimaginable in the days before they were born.

Others are flailing. Some didn't make it to this graduation moment at all. Never given consistent attention and disconnected from tools and teaching strategies that could help, they have failed to master the habits of mind and the requisite skills to succeed in a global and digital age. This waste of their potential will have been, tragically, wholly preventable.

The digital age brings a paradox: as workplaces become increasingly dependent on the exchange of information, good reading skills are more important than ever. And yet children and their families are increasingly surrounded by new tools and digital distractions that affect the act of reading and communication. How will children ever learn to read?

That question is what prompted this book. For many, it is a question uttered in fear. The paradigm for instilling reading skills feels like it is crumbling away, as bedtime books morph into bedtime videos and daily routines leave no time for solitary, uninterrupted hours to read and think. The percentage of children who say they read books for fun every day or at least five days a week has dropped since 2010, according to Scholastic.¹ The National Endowment for the Arts has spotlighted what it calls a “general decline in reading,” with data showing that nearly half of young adults read no books for pleasure.² Publishers are reporting declines in print book sales and slowed rates of growth in e-books.³ Some business leaders say it is difficult to find employees who can read and write at even a high school level.⁴

Adding to the worry is the newfound recognition that over the course of human history, our brains have had to be trained to read. “In the evolution of our brain's capacity to learn, the act of reading is not natural,” writes cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf. “We were never born to read.”⁵ It's the plasticity of our brains—the ability of neurons to create new connections every time we challenge ourselves in new ways—that has enabled our species to advance from utterances to words, to symbols, to print, to the fluency that enables you to read this last sentence without even having to think about it. Once it sinks in that we really are what we experience, the always-humming experiences of the digital age should give us pause. In her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Wolf puts the fear this way: “Will the present generation become so accustomed to immediate access to on-screen information that the range of attentional, inferential, and reflective capacities in the present reading brain become less developed?”⁶

The Sorry State of Reading Today

For us, the question of how twenty-first-century children will learn to read is not spoken with fear as much as urgency. In essence our nation is facing a “quiet crisis”: an alarming number of children in the United States never become good readers. Some never really learn to read at all. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a biannual record of children's abilities published by the US Department of Education, more than two-thirds of American fourth graders are not reading at a “proficient” level.

What does proficient mean? It is the marker of whether a student has, in the words of the authors of the NAEP, “demonstrated competency” in reading texts deemed appropriate for their grade level.⁷ There are other labels too, such as “advanced,” which means being better than proficient, and “basic,” which is a level below proficient and means that a student has only partially mastered the skills needed for competency. Research shows that proficient readers are on track to success in school and life.⁸ They are two-and-a-half times as likely as basic readers to be earning $850 or more a week, or $44,200 or more a year. And a study in 2011 showed that children who have not reached proficiency by the time they finish third grade are at higher risk of dropping out of high school.⁹ Third graders who are not proficient and who are also growing up in poverty are even more likely to drop out. Shockingly, the rates of nonproficient fourth graders among children of color, and children in poverty, are more than 80 percent.¹⁰

Not everyone agrees with the NAEP's definition of proficiency.¹¹ Some education researchers say it is too high a bar and argue that children with basic reading skills might look like proficient readers on other types of tests. Yet even on other tests of reading, large proportions of American children are not doing well. Each spring every state, for example, administers standardized tests. The test items and cut scores vary considerably (a problem that understandably irritates education reformers), but even given those variations, there is no question literacy rates are troubling. Take Massachusetts, a state that gets high marks for its education system.¹² In that state, 43 percent of third graders are not hitting Massachusetts's proficient mark in reading. That is a high number of children who are likely to have a hard time doing simple things like completing their homework. They struggle to understand the writing prompts, they can't read the five-paragraph assignment on ecosystems, or the Civil War, or how to create a line graph, and they will, without intervention, lag further and further behind.

Reading achievement scores are even more distressing when put in context over decades. Low reading skills have characterized America's nine-year-olds since they began taking national tests in 1971. Reading scores climbed in the late 1990s, but between 2004 and today, the average score has stayed relatively flat. The average score among nine-year-olds—all nine-year-olds, not just those in poverty—hovers around 220 on a 500-point scale.¹³ They are not even getting halfway to the top score.

Educators have tried valiantly to fix this. Reading and literacy have been on the radar of experts for decades as the science on how children learn to read has become more and more settled. Years ago, it wasn't unusual to find people (sometimes grouped as “whole language” advocates) who believed children learned to read almost automatically as long as they were exposed to books in one way or another. But these days, you'd be hard-pressed to find a reading expert who thinks reading happens by osmosis. Consensus has formed around a two-pronged, skills-plus-knowledge strategy: teach letters and sounds and help children practice the “de-coding” of written words while also immersing them in stories and back-and-forth dialogues that introduce new vocabulary and show them the multilayered worlds of science, art, history, literature, different cultures, and more. This two-pronged strategy should be at the heart of literacy learning everywhere.

Polls show the majority of the public recognizes the importance of starting early and investing in programs to help families when children are very young.¹⁴ This recognition should also be working in children's favor. Society is starting to realize that learning to become literate starts earlier than kindergarten or first grade. The building blocks of literacy start with the smiles and gurgles of babies looking at their parents and caregivers while those adults return the smiles and coo in response. As babies point to what they want and utter their first words, they learn to communicate, then speak, and then, over time, build upon that experience to develop as readers and writers. That framework sets them up for reading those words years later, written on a page or etched across a screen.

Our government has tried to help. The US Department of Education put considerable attention on reading for most of the 1990s and 2000s with public engagement campaigns like America Reads and well-funded programs such as Reading First, a $6-billion grant program. The administration of President Barack Obama awarded millions to “scale up” reading programs with evidence of good results, such as the Children's Literacy Initiative, Reading Recovery, and Success for All. Officials for Head Start, the federal government's early learning program for children in poverty, have required teachers to focus on early literacy skills for more than a decade. Many governors and mayors have launched early education initiatives and passed legislation devoted to get everyone reading. And a coalition of nonprofit organizations, philanthropies, business leaders, and more than 150 communities, organized b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Imagining the Class of 2030
• Part 2: Surveying the New Literacy Landscape
• Part 3: The Pioneers
• Part 4: Homesteading for the Next Generation
• Resources
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement