Philippine Basic Education

 A new spotlight from Education Week  is now available and it is about the Science of Reading . A registration form is required to access the above spotlight. It has been several decades yet schools are still not tuned to what science suggests regarding how we should teach reading to young children. Schools often exert effort on encouraging children to read books that they find interesting. Parents are asked to read to their children. Unfortunately, there is no focus on the method science tells us is most effective. Even here in Fairfax county, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) recently wrote to the school superintendent of the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS): "Literacy is a human right. Without it, we are condemned to a life of greater struggle and fewer opportunities. We have waited long enough, and we refuse to wait even one more day." The NAACP provided a litany that shows how FCPS has neglected black children for the past 14 ye...

There are a lot of things to be learned about ourselves and the world we live in. There are zoos and museums where we could bring our children. While children see these wonderful things with their own eyes coupled with our own interests and excitement, knowledge is, without any doubt, gained. And knowledge counts, especially in reading. We often confuse reading comprehension with literacy. These two are not identical. Reading comprehension is so much more than being able to read words. Reading comprehension requires us to derive meaning from text. Such process requires us to draw from what we already know. With the poor performance of students in the Philippines in reading comprehension exams, there is unsurprisingly a greater call for "learning to read". Some even go as far as blaming the mother tongue - multilingual based education. All of these fail to see that reading comprehension is not equivalent to being proficient in English. Reading comprehension relies on backgroun...

It is likely that there is more than one factor behind the dramatic drop in scores in all subjects in the National Achievement Test taken by six grade students in the Philippines. Still, it is also possible that there is one dominant factor. There is the notion that drills are boring and schools must jump right away into whole language,  critical thinking, and discovery-based learning. In reading, for instance, there is an emphasis on developing "literacy", instead of first simply honing skills. Schools are making the wrong assumption that these skills are innate. As another example, in mathematics, while addition maybe intrinsic, multiplication is definitely not. And with literacy, it has long been known that learning to read is not a natural process. Our brains are simply not wired for both reading and multiplying. And we already know this from research yet we insist on skipping this important stage. In a post on this blog three years ago, Learning to Read: One of D...

I was reading an article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer that asked the question, "Why Can't Our Students Read?" And somewhere in the article, another question was offered, "Are teachers themselves competent readers?" In 2017, more than half of elementary school children in the Philippines were apparently "frustrated readers". Almost a quarter could not comprehend and seven percent were completely illiterate. Indeed, "Why Can't Our Students Read?" is an important question to ask. To answer this question, one should probably look at instances where we find students reading. One instance was shared by the principal at the school my daughter attends. My daughter's principal wrote, "We caught a very special patrol going above and beyond the call of duty this week. Amelia was not only keeping our kindergarteners safe--she was keeping them engaged as they waited for their bus." My daughter is reading a book to kindergarte...

The previous Aquino administration in the Philippines had this dream, " Every Child a Reader by Grade 1 ". Dreams, however, become reality only with correct actions and genuine effort. And in education, such goals can only be reached with adequate resources. For instance, when schools are forced into multiple shifts because of congestion, instructional time is severely compromised. The shortage can be exacerbated by adding more years to basic education and at the same time, imposing a performance merit system based on mass promotion. Years after the introduction of K to 12, Kara David documents a disconcerting situation in one of the high schools in the capital region of the Philippines: Students currently enrolled in seventh grade cannot read. The documentary  shows high school students who are struggling in phonetics in their mother tongue. Above taken from GMA Documentary One child tells the story of lessons on basic reading being rushed through third grade as...

The American Academy of Special Education Professionals lists ten roles and responsibilities of a special education teacher.  Most of these roles especially those that pertain to a classroom no doubt require something in addition to what we expect from a general education teacher. It follows then that a special education teacher not only knows content and pedagogy that apply to all students in general but also specific strategies or toolkits that help address challenges and strengths special students have. Foremost, a special education teacher must be aware of the Golem effect, where lower expectations simply lead to poor performance. Special students after all do not simply have challenges. They also have strengths. With the additional responsibilities, it does seem that special educators should be the cream of the crop among teachers. What is disconcerting at the moment, as reported by the National Council on Teacher Quality , is that some states in the United States of America...

It is not easy to be multilingual. While it is important that young children are encouraged to maintain and develop their mother tongue, neglecting the learning of English can have serious ramifications in the future. GetRealPhilippines  has several recent posts on this topic of language, all of which are pointing to the current sad state of communication in the Philippines. Competency in English, however, is not just a matter of will. It is now becoming clear that English comprehension, if not attained on time, is extremely challenging to address even with the best interventions. Above copied from Get Real Philippines A research article scheduled to be published in the Journal of Educational Psychology reports that it is exceedingly difficult to improve English reading comprehension among students who spoke a language other than English at home and had underdeveloped vocabulary in English by the time they enter secondary school. A two-year intensive reading intervention de...

Learning to read is very important in basic education. Reading and listening are ways by which we can receive information and build knowledge. How we process what we hear or read and derive meaning is comprehension. How well an individual can visualize the text is important in both engagement and comprehension especially with children who are just beginning to learn to read.  Experiments performed decades ago by Brooks decades ago have shown "a conflict between reading verbal messages and imagining the spatial relations described by those messages." Clearly, connecting reading and imagination does not occur readily. Like other children, my son and daughter like seeing pictures in the books that they read. I likewise enjoy reading cartoon strips. Who doesn't? Illustrations help. With the internet and television, these illustrations can be animated. That makes it even more attractive. Recent research , however, shows that with regard to helping children with language proce...

Surrounding ourselves with books we have not read has been recommended as a way to remind us of how much more we need to know or how little we actually know. Friends at Facebook have made me aware of an article in Inc. written by Jessica Stillman : Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You'll Ever Have Time to Read. An overstuffed bookcase (or e-reader) says good things about your mind. Stillman's article has been shared hundreds of thousands times. Of course, there are a lot more ways that are a lot cheaper that may keep ourselves honest about how much we realy know. Still, I have a feeling that some are actually sharing the article because of their belief that having books help motivate people to read. After all, even education researchers have correlated the presence of books at home with academic achievement. Thus, it is important to ask the question of whether surrounding ourselves with books really help us learn. This thinking obviously distills the probl...

The statistics are widely known, a child growing up in a poor family has heard tens of million words less than a privileged child. This advantage translates to a poor child working his brain a lot harder just to keep up with his or her more fortunate classmates. The inequity sadly does not cease at the beginning of formal schooling. Children from poor families tend to enroll in the same school with income segregation of neighborhoods. Lacking resources and facing mounting challenges, schools that serve low income families are often unable to provide what these children desperately need to thrive in their classrooms. In addition, due to mounting pressure to perform well in standardized tests in reading and math, equally important subjects such as music, arts and physical education are often sacrificed. Such policy actually goes against what we now know from research in neuroscience. For example, " Music lessons may boost poor kids' brainpower, study suggests " by Linda Car...

There remains the serious concern that about 60 million children in the world are out of school . Both former and current secretaries of education in the Philippines have raised the importance of addressing out-of-school youth. There is, however, an equally serious plague in basic education. " More than 617 million children and adolescents are not achieving minimum proficiency levels (MPLs) in reading and mathematics, according to new estimates from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). " That is 6 out of 10 children who are in school and yet, are not learning. And in every region of the world, most children who are not learning are actually in school and not out of school. Above copied from UNESCO's Fact Sheet No. 46, September 2017, UIS/FS/2017/ED/46 There are about 75 million children from Eastern and South-Eastern Asia who fail to reach proficiency levels in math and reading. More than sixty percent of children in school in this region fail in math and re...

For a classroom teacher who is not actively engaged in education research, it is not easy to digest information from primary literature. Scientists often write articles not with the intention of reaching non experts. A book that attempts to bring recent advances in the science of learning into much more readable nuggets can therefore be very useful. One example is Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum (2014) from the American Psychological Association, and this book is FREE . I have only browsed through the content, it has about 300 pages and 24 chapters, but each chapter is a stand-alone. And, of course, the first chapter I chose to read is on General Chemistry. Surprisingly, what is described in this chapter can easily apply to other subjects. Above copied from Samuel Pazicni and Daniel T. Pyburn (2014). Intervening on Behalf of Low-Skilled Comprehenders in a University General Chemistry Course. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Ov...

Representatives of countries around the world when they met in Paris seemed to be united in acknowledging the perils of a continuing rise in carbon dioxide emissions. Although we are beginning to feel the consequences of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, next generations are much more likely to face the new challenges climate change brings. How we teach young children regarding this issue is therefore an important task to address. Victoria Hermann in US News   offers some advice: "Doomsday narratives about climate change don't work." Above copied from US News Hermann is responding to a New York Magazine   article by David Wallace-Wells: Above copied from New York Magazine Hermann cites a study by Haeffel and coworkers that links hopelessness to a decrease in goal-directed behavior. In this work, depression is shown to correlate with a decrease in our desire to find solutions and make decisions. This is basically what hopeless...

Reading a science article from a primary source is not that easy. I remember one scientist I worked with at the National Institutes of Health. He often emphasized the importance of figures in an article to his students during group meetings. A well-written piece in a journal is one whose figures allow for a reader to digest the main findings of an article without reading fully the text. For learning materials in basic education, pictures may have other purposes than figures do in a science journal article. Pictures may be present in a child's textbook not only to help explain a text, but also to elicit positive emotions. Figures therefore can be decorative as well as instructive. Pictures like baby animals can elicit positive emotions. Above copied from the Denver Post One can imagine having the above photo accompany a text that discusses endangered species. This picture is both relevant and positive. In contrast, a photo of maggots does not. Above copied from The Sh...

Reading is taught in the early elementary years. Reading difficulties during the early years can arise from lack of fluency, limited vocabulary, or poor word recognition. Interventions are often designed to address these various components of reading. Going further, however, students also need to understand what they are reading. Students should be able to derive meaning from text. This is how reading becomes a vehicle for further learning. One might therefore ask whether students with reading difficulties can benefit from interventions that focus on reading comprehension. The answer, according to research, is "yes". A paper scheduled to be published in the Journal of Educational Psychology  specifically looks at an intervention called Passport to Literacy  and finds significant improvements in reading comprehension for fourth grade students that have reading difficulties. The intervention is done daily for 30 minutes over 25 weeks. How this intervention differs from othe...

Making inferences is an important part of reading comprehension. An author does not necessarily put everything in print for everyone to read. Yes, you may infer at this moment and extrapolate that doing so requires too many words and simply leads to a wordy or long-winded article. Readers prefer concise sentences. Consequently, as early as the elementary years, students need to be taught to make inferences. Inferences should not be equated to guessing or reading too much between the lines. Extending too much from what is either directly stated or implied in text can be misleading when it comes to reading non fiction especially science literature. Inferences must be based on what one actually has read. Testing for reading comprehension often falls under three categories (Factual Recall, Bridging Inference, Pragmatic Inference) as decsribed in a previous post on this blog, Stress, Working Memory, and Reading Comprehension . As an example, given the following passage: "The waite...