Pathways to Information: Accessing Knowledge by Leveraging Language (Part 3)

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"--E. M. Forster. How do we teach students to write about complex text so they know what they think about what they've read?

Part 3: The Effort of Explanation

Part 2: Tricks of the Trade—or the Trade Itself? discussed Daniel Willingham’s 2006 article on reading strategy instruction: what it’s for and who it can help. It’s complicated! Comprehension is directly related to the language of the text under examination, so any impediments to accessing that language will degrade the quality of the information extracted from the text. That’s why the teacher’s task is to help students navigate reading roadblocks.

Note: In a recent email exchange, Daniel Willingham remarked that he wished he had not used the term ‘tricks’—perhaps ‘tactics’ or ‘techniques’ would have been better. I like ‘tactics’ because it denotes the act of strategizing when dealing with complex text, so I’ll use it going forward.

Drawing Clowns: I became aware of Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap through an article in The Atlantic that appeared shortly before the book was published. It began with an anecdote of a first grader industriously completing a worksheet at her desk. The girl’s response when asked what she was doing: drawing clowns.

As it turned out, the lesson wasn’t aimed at practicing visualization but rather a more widely taught comprehension strategy—drawing conclusions—which the diligent drawer assumed she was faithfully executing with her row of clowns. While amusing, this anecdote sadly singles out the ubiquitous worksheet intended to practice comprehension strategies by applying them to random passages—even in the primary grades!

I first became aware of visualization as a comprehension strategy a decade earlier during a summer clinic as part of my reading specialist credential program where I tutored a second grader over a six-week period. A fellow interventionist working with an older student asked me what I knew about this strategy. “Nothing,” I replied. “Absolutely nothing.”

The truth is that reading comprehension wasn’t a topic in my single subject English teaching credential program, which focused more on general pedagogy rather than targeted literacy instruction. Without quality courses related to comprehension—and/or principles of cognitive science related to how we learn—it’s difficult for a teacher to judge the value of the strategy instruction that became embedded in elementary school curricula in a strategy-of-the-week format: This week we’re drawing clowns.

In the 2006 article on comprehension strategies for the American Federation of Teachers, Daniel Willingham includes a very helpful chart listing fifteen strategies, the number of studies conducted for each one, and the evidence of effectiveness. For mental imagery, which involves creating a mental visual image based on the text, there is inconclusive evidence.

The reason why I developed my own version of visualization was simply because I wanted to introduce my students to the importance of recognizing literary imagery to assist them (dare I say it) in drawing conclusions about events, places, and characters—since choice of detail matters. Of course, any language-based lesson provides an opportunity to teach new vocabulary, so this activity served that purpose as well, in addition to emphasizing the importance of descriptive detail in their own writing.

For example, I had my students draw and annotate the Inventing Room in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as I slowly read the description in order to help them see what the words were saying, how writers deploy adjectives and verbs to make their stories ‘stop’ and ‘go’ through static description and narrative action.

The place was like a witch’s kitchen! All about him black metal pots were boiling and bubbling on huge stoves, and kettles were hissing and pans were sizzling, and strange iron machines were clanking and sputtering, and there were pipes running all over the ceilings and walls, and the whole place was filled with smoke and steam and delicious rich smells.

Willy Wonka’s character comes to life with these vivid verbs: lifted, rushed, dipped, skipped, turned, peered, rubbing, cackling. The point is that alerting students to pay attention to a writer’s word choice reveals how an author is shaping the reader’s perception of what is being described. Thus, visualizing descriptive language can have value, but there are other strategies that pack a more effective pedagogical punch.

Elaboration, Elaboration, Elaboration: Unlike real estate, what matters most in thinking (and writing) isn’t location but elaboration (though location does matter when studying syntax!). If we don’t elaborate upon a claim or proposition with supporting details, then thinking remains at the level of generalities, and as Robert Pondiscio notes: What happens in vagueness stays in vagueness.

The recent newsletter from How Teaching & Learning Happens (HTLH), the Science of Learning Spotlight, doesn’t mention drawing conclusions, but it does focus on the importance of elaborative questioning in order to facilitate understanding:

The power of elaborative questioning lies in how it disrupts the "illusion of knowing" that often characterizes passive learning. When students silently read or listen to information, they may mistake familiarity for understanding. Elaborative questions pierce this illusion by requiring students to reconstruct knowledge in their own words, revealing gaps in understanding and strengthening neural pathways through the effort of explanation . . . The cognitive effort of elaboration is precisely what strengthens learning, even when initial responses are imperfect.

This technique of elaborative questioning is grounded in research:

We explore elaborative questioning - a powerful cognitive strategy that transforms passive learning into active meaning-making. As Charles Reigeluth's Elaboration Theory suggests, learning progresses from simplified wholes to increasingly complex elaborations.

When I asked ChatGPT to apply Reigeluth’s theory to reading complex text, it emphasized summarizing and synthesizing:

Summarize key points after each section or paragraph; synthesize by connecting new information to what has already been learned. This helps reinforce memory and deeper understanding.

I don’t know whether this is an accurate application of Reigeluth’s theory, but I do know that this recommendation aligns with the Institute of Education Sciences Practice Guide (IES) about the importance of teaching students to get the gist; the research on Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) from Vanderbilt University supporting a sister strategy, paragraph shrinking; and Steve Graham’s emphasis on writing to read.

In Part 1: Types of Knowledge Carl Hendrick emphasized:

We want students to have to retrieve something in a range of different ways, across a range of different times and to apply it in a range of new ways.

What follows is one possible way to aid retrieval and application as related to reading complex text.

Determining Importance: In our haste to accelerate instructional change, we sometimes discard babies with bath water, and we run the risk of abandoning what can work simply because it keeps company with what definitely doesn’t work. Jennifer Serravallo’s past relationship with Lucy Calkins and Teachers College doesn’t mean all of her work has been discredited—just as some proponents of structured literacy may make recommendations that lead to inefficient foundational skills instruction (Bursting with Knowledge: Are We Overteaching Phonics?) even though most of what they say is valid. It means we must approach each and every recommendation by all educational influencers with caution (When the Experts Get It Wrong).

When my elementary school principal distributed Jennifer Serravallo’s The Reading Strategies Book to the whole staff, it turned out that having access to 300 reading strategies was overwhelming for many teachers. Choice overload occurs when we are presented with too many options—oftentimes disconnected—which can be confusing and impede our decision-making. But the atrociously ineffective strategy-of-the-week lesson structure found in many ELA programs is not the answer to giving teachers the support they need. In fact, the only thing this skill-based activity accomplished was giving strategy instruction a bad name.

But if we are motivated by the need to help students map out what matters, we can help them develop a plan of action to approach complex text. For example, if we teach students how to use titles, headings and subheadings to come up with a focus question to guide their reading (providing one for them until they can do this independently), then the activities that follow can be formulated as an elaboration of that question. Solving the problem of determining importance in the material read and eventually mastered becomes a more manageable task in the service of discussing the text, writing summaries, and extracting evidence for longer pieces of writing—all part of the effort of elaboration.

Basically, students can ask themselves:

Does the information directly relate to answering the focus question, thereby signaling importance? Or does the information provide interesting (or the equivalent of “cool” in student-speak) details that don’t directly pertain to the focus question?

Serravallo’s important vs. interesting strategy, which I modified to provide more scaffolding for my students, didn’t give me a script, but it did give me a hook to hang my knowledge-building hat on. Can we access content knowledge by facilitating strategic knowledge through the following steps:

(1) Code information in the reading as important or interesting with personalized symbols that are serviceable (and motivating).

(2) Discuss choices with partners and/or groups and eventually share with the whole class for further discussion.

(3) Revise choices as necessary.

(4) Highlight what has been determined to be important (ELA programs with ‘consumables’ make this possible).

(5) Summarize by using the focus question along with the highlighted words and phrases to shrink the paragraphs into sentences of 15 words or less.

(6) Synthesize an overall response to the text that elaborates on the important points and/or synthesize information from multiple sources to elaborate on the topic.

What I find particularly helpful about this routine is Step Five: Summarize by shrinking the paragraphs. Using the gradual release of responsibility model, students begin by shrinking paragraphs in groups that produce a summary sentence of 15 words or less which they present to the whole class for analysis. This provides the teacher with several scripts that they can use to guide the lesson by applying the Goldilocks Goal for group analysis:

Which statements are too broad, emphasizing generalities; which are too narrow dealing with a few selected details; and which are just right, capturing the essence of the paragraph?

Can we call paragraph shrinking a tactic that gives students a plan of action, one that (1) provides them with opportunities to identify and isolate what’s important in a text; (2) captures this importance in summary sentences; and (3) draws upon these summary statements to synthesize a response to the text that elaborates upon the important elements?

In fact, teaching students a routine like this one for determining the gist is listed in the IES Practice Guide as having strong evidence along with:

building world and word knowledge, providing opportunities to ask and answer questions, and self-monitoring comprehension.

This is not surprising because teaching students to determine importance allows them to access knowledge by analyzing the language that embeds it. The learning comes in the doing, in confronting each new complex text with a plan of action for teacher and student alike. We are building knowledge-extraction skills through strategy work related to vocabulary, syntax, and paragraph/text structure that could be applied to any knowledge-building text: access through analysis.

In an updated strategy instruction article, Beyond Comprehension (2023), Daniel Willingham explains how applying reading strategies aids comprehension:

By asking students to answer questions, create a summary, or engage in some other research-tested comprehension strategy, we might be nudging them toward recognizing the benefit of coordinating meaning across sentences and paragraphs. In this sense, the benefit is similar to encouraging students to check their work in math; double checking doesn’t make them more capable in math—it makes them apply the math they know more carefully. Likewise, comprehension ­strategies might teach students to deploy the comprehension processes they have already learned more consistently in their reading.

The importance of deploying comprehension processes is also emphasized by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert in their Carnegie Report, Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading, in which they recommend teaching the process of writing, text structures for writing, and paragraph or sentence construction skills to improve reading comprehension. What we might call composing to comprehend. They state:

Having students write about a text should enhance reading comprehension because it affords greater opportunities to think about ideas in a text, requires them to organize and integrate those ideas into a coherent whole, fosters explicitness, facilitates reflection, encourages personal involvement with texts, and involves students transforming ideas into their own words.

Furthermore:

Extended writing produced greater comprehension gains than simply reading the text, reading and rereading it, reading and studying it, reading and discussing it, and receiving reading instruction . . . While summary writing significantly improved middle and high school students’ comprehension of text (average weighted effect size = 0.33 based on eleven studies), it had an even stronger effect on elementary students’ comprehension (average weighted effect size = 0.79 based on four studies).

The elaborative thinking that accompanies the process of summarizing and synthesizing allows students to reconstruct knowledge in their own words and strengthen neural pathways through the effort of explanation, which in turn strengthens learning. Anyone who has engaged in guiding elementary students through complex text knows how effortful this can be. We teach tactics to help students strategize an approach to complex text, providing a plan of action to aid their comprehension—though at times it feels as though what we really need are truckloads of instructional cement to make abstract concepts concrete and allow new knowledge to stick.

These tactics are for the purpose of coordinating a methodical extraction of information focused on analyzing text and synthesizing a response to it. Though effortful, this effort is a feature, not a bug precisely because it can strengthen neural pathways as students reconstruct knowledge in their own words. The misguided approach of strategy-of-the-week instruction not only robs students of the opportunity to build knowledge through rich text, but also fails to build any kind of stamina for approaching this kind of text when it is made available to them. The opportunity costs are steep.

This is why time in text, what Daniel Willingham calls deep reading practice, is so important:

Reading-comprehension strategies target one aspect of comprehension—a basic understanding of the facts the author meant to convey. We want our students to understand and be able to analyze what they read far more deeply. And for that, more practice will likely yield better results.

The final section, Part 4: Patterns of Language on Parade, explores the relationship between knowledge and language and how knowledge acquisition related to reading is dependent upon language comprehension.

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.