Re: [Phys-l] Students' READING abilities

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 13:25 -0500 02/23/2009, Rick Tarara wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hugh Haskell" <hhaskell@mindspring.com>
>
> >  Of course one of the problems is not that they don't know how to read
> >  for comprehension, but they don't know how to read a textbook, and in
> >  particular a science textbook, since they have never been taught how
> >  to do that.
>
> I think these go together.  If you CAN read for comprehension, then you CAN
> read textbooks. If you can't read well for comprehension, then you have
> little hope of being able to read a textbook.  Knowing a bit more about HOW
> to read a textbook can certainly help, but you need the basic skills first.
> Those skills seem to be increasingly lacking and being increasingly ignored.
I agree that they go together, but not that they are necessarily the 
same thing. Understanding a paragraph in a history text in the 
context of the era being discussed is very different from 
understanding a logical development of a physics concept, with or 
without the inclusion of mathematical expressions.

I think one of the benchmarks of reading a science text is to not go 
on to the next sentence until you either (1) understand the previous 
one, or (2) are explicitly aware that any confusion will be cleared 
up soon--i.e., within a paragraph or two at most. This means that I 
will read a science text much more slowly than I can read a history 
text. I also means that the reader needs to make an honest effort to 
fill in the blanks in any mathematical development, and to try to 
work any sample problems without looking at the solution. All of this 
means that a science text cannot be read without the ready 
accessibility to a pad of paper and a writing implement.

But I do agree that the concept of reading comprehension seems not to 
be much of a priority in schools. It happened many years ago now, but 
when my eldest was in the sixth grade, he was having great 
difficulties in class and the teachers were perplexed. We had him 
tested at a university reading center and they discovered that, while 
he read at about the 9th-grade level, he was comprehending at the 
second-grade level. He could say the words, but had no idea what they 
meant. The school system reading "specialists" were mystified. They 
didn't seem to understand that saying the words and understanding the 
words were two different things. This is, of course, a sample of one, 
so I can't say that all reading specialists are this ignorant, or 
that this group was even typical, but it did alert me to the 
existence of a problem that I had not realized existed.

It does seem to me that the ability to read is so fundamental to all 
learning, except perhaps at the most basic introductory level, that 
students need to be periodically tested for both reading skill and 
reading comprehension, and when found to be lacking, everything else 
in their educational process needs to stop, and concentration put on 
bringing up the reading skills. With those skills in place most 
students should be able to quickly catch up in the other subjects. 
But without them, it is certain that they will continue to fall 
behind, becoming first a problem in class, then a problem in school 
and finally dropping out o school and likely becoming a problem in 
society. Studies have shown that a large proportion of the inmates of 
our prisons are at least functionally illiterate, and if they can be 
taught to read at an adult level, often will succeed after leaving 
prison.

Reading is truly FUNdamental.

Hugh
--
Hugh Haskell
mailto: hugh@ieer.org
mailto:hhaskell@mindspring,.com

So-called "global warming" is just a secret ploy by wacko 
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