Measuring Reading Skill

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From the course by University of California, Santa Cruz

Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally

20 ratings

University of California, Santa Cruz

Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally

20 ratings

In this short course you will explore the possibility that children might acquire written language in a way that is similar to how they acquire spoken language—without instruction. You will encounter various aspects of behavioral science and technology that are relevant to this proposition. You will have the opportunity to learn the the perceptual, cognitive, and neurological capacities of children during their first years of life. You will advance your understanding of children and how they learn language. You will also be more attuned to current advances in the technology of human machine interactions, and what these phenomena imply for learning to read at an early age.

From the lesson

Week 3 Reading, Early Reading, and Technological Innovations

The nature of reading, reading myths, current approaches to teaching reading, demographics of literacy and illiteracy, and technological innovations.

Measuring Reading Skill6:24

How We Perceive Letters and Words9:22

Reading Words5:24

Search for Magical Solutions6:51

Testing Top-Down Influences6:59

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Dominic William Massaro
Research Professor
Psychology

[MUSIC]

Welcome back to our course Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally.

To pursue our inquiry, we are exploring language, speech and reading,

both in terms of how they are used and how they are acquired.

Although a society it spends huge resources with the goal of

creating a literate society, a significant number of individuals

do not learn to read adequately enough so that they can read to learn.

Although there are degrees of literacy, a minimum requirement is to read fluently

with understanding to the same degree of understanding spoken language.

Even with hours, days, and even years of instruction however,

a significant number of children have great difficulty in learning to read or

delayed significantly, or never achieve this milestone.

A challenge is defining how reading skills or literacy should be measured.

Is it simply mapping the written language to spoken language?

Understanding what is written, or

using written information to follow instructions,

such as driving to a destination, or building a household item from IKEA.

The first measure would certainly depend on what language is being read.

I can read a lot Italian,

a transparent orthography very fluently, but my understanding is poor.

Clearly people differ in their reading skill.

Here is one assessment in the United States

that grouped individuals into four categories.

Below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient.

The results don't look good.

Even the basic category is not good enough for navigating in today's world.

Only 42% of the testees could explain to the interviewer

the differences between two types of benefits described in a document.

We certainly have yet to reach the goal of universal literacy.

Acquiring literacy naturally at an early age,

might provide the same confidence as spoken language.

We know that 90% of Brain Growth occurs before age 6.

In contrast,

90% of public education spending is on children after the age of 6.

By directing public funding for literacy before age 6,

resources can be focused where they might have the most impact.

Especially on those children with limited access to print end books.

It is important for

us to inquire how a reading might be acquired without direct instruction.

A critical aspect of this puzzle is how the infant learns to understand spoken

language and whether analogous processes might occur for written language.

Before addressing how a language is learned or acquired,

we will discuss how experts understands spoken and written language.

It is easy to demonstrate some expertise in reading.

In the next slide, your task is to name aloud the eight objects

as quickly as possible, ignoring the written words.

Did you notice how the words interfered with your naming of the objects?

Here are the objects again without the words.

Naming the objects in this case is much easier.

This type of task with these stimuli or

similar ones can be used in one of your required projects

that manipulates some variable such as the reader's age or

reading in a second language.

Once mastered, we read words automatically without conscious attention.

The same holds for speech.

You've probably recognize the word or

two from another conversation even though you weren't actively listening.

A variety of research, including my own, has shown that there seems to be analogous

processes of understanding that occur in these two modalities.

By analogous processes, I mean the same principles

can be used to describe how we go from the linguistic input to understanding.

Incidentally, it was a realization of these analogous processes that led me to

the hypothesis that reading might be acquired in the same manner as speech.

This parallelism reflects the amazing plasticity of our perceptual and learning

abilities in function capably across our huge variety of communication systems.

We've already seen examples of sign language and Tadoma.

Language processing can be described as a form of pattern

recognition which takes into account multiple sources of

information to impose an interpretation of a linguistic input.

Of course, the sensory inputs, sources of information,

will necessarily differ across these different domains.

But the information processing is claimed to be analogous in each instance.

[MUSIC]

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