Summary of Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In 2016, Gaby Arredondo was trying to teach her class of twenty first-graders about captions. She had taught them that a caption is a label that describes a picture, but many of them had chosen the title of the passage instead.
#2 The American approach to elementary education is to teach reading skills completely disconnected from content. It doesn’t matter what students are reading, as long as they can identify captions in a simple text.
#3 The focus on reading in the early grades has led to a huge amount of time being spent on it. This has led to other subjects being neglected, especially social studies.
#4 There are many arguments in favor of testing, but most teachers don’t like the emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum. They would rather spend more time on social studies and science, but they are required to test students.

Sujets

• General
• General officer

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669395898
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 2016, Gaby Arredondo was trying to teach her class of twenty first-graders about captions. She had taught them that a caption is a label that describes a picture, but many of them had chosen the title of the passage instead.

#2

The American approach to elementary education is to teach reading skills completely disconnected from content. It doesn’t matter what students are reading, as long as they can identify captions in a simple text.

#3

The focus on reading in the early grades has led to a huge amount of time being spent on it. This has led to other subjects being neglected, especially social studies.

#4

There are many arguments in favor of testing, but most teachers don’t like the emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum. They would rather spend more time on social studies and science, but they are required to test students.

#5

American students have a weak grasp of history and government. In 2014, students chosen at random on the campus of Texas Tech University were unable to answer questions such as who won the Civil War, who the vice president is, and what country we gained our independence from.

#6

In American classrooms, teachers are left to their own devices to figure out what to teach their students. They may look to the reading assessments that are administered every few weeks to see what skill will be tested next.

#7

The literacy block is typically spent on center time, where each group of students spends approximately twenty minutes doing activities such as reading and practicing their comprehension skills. The A-to-Z scale is used to measure students’ reading levels, and each student has a copy of the same just right book: hard enough to be challenging but not so hard as to be frustrating.

#8

The Common Core states that 50 percent of the students’ reading should be nonfiction. However, the fundamental approach hasn’t changed: nonfiction texts are seen as another delivery mechanism for skills.

#9

Social studies, a discipline invented in the early twentieth century, is supposed to be a combination of civics, economics, geography, and history. But in many schools, it is treated as a medium for developing skills.

#10

Americans are generally concerned about the state of education, and many parents are satisfied with the schools their own children attend. However, many parents are concerned about the amount of time spent on testing and test prep, and feel there is an inordinate focus on comprehension skills.

#11

Some parents have tried to bring more substance into the school day, but most are simply trying to get rid of or reduce testing. They don’t realize that teaching history and non-hands-on science is developmentally inappropriate.

#12

The achievement gap between low-income and high-income students is significant, and has not been closing over the past few decades.

#13

The education system in America is failing. Students are coming out of high school with enormous gaps in their knowledge, and they are not prepared to enter the workforce.

#14

Some schools have been experimenting with a new approach to education that focuses on teaching students the history and science they were supposed to be learning in school, but were instead pushed to the side in favor of reading comprehension.

#15

The Common Core is a curriculum that lists the skills students are supposed to acquire at each grade level. It doesn’t specify which texts to read, aside from a few at the high school level, and it doesn’t provide teachers with guidance on how to ensure students acquire the skills.

#16

The Core Knowledge curriculum was radically different from what teachers were used to. It focused on content, and the skills would follow. It was very difficult for many teachers to adapt, but eventually they realized how much their students were able to absorb and how much they enjoyed learning.

#17

The belief that history and non-hands-on science are inappropriate for young children is not just at odds with what many parents sense intuitively, but it’s also not supported by the evidence. Children’s development doesn’t proceed in a series of fixed, discrete stages, but depends on the child, the task, and even the day.

#18

The fact is that students can understand and enjoy the material we’ve been withholding from them. In fact, it’s good for them. The implication is clear: abstract reading ability is largely a mirage constructed by reading tests.

#19

The problem with the American approach to literacy is that it focuses on comprehension, which is the ability to understand and use information, rather than decoding, the ability to read and understand text. This leads to many students never acquiring the knowledge and analytical abilities they need to thrive in school and in life.

#20

The test-score gap is, at its core, a knowledge gap. If students read enough, they will eventually learn the skills needed to pass tests, but there is little evidence to support that theory.

#21

There are multiple reasons that lower-income children arrive at school with less knowledge and vocabulary than their higher-income peers. Children from poor families are more likely to suffer the consequences of traumatic events that can interfere with their ability to learn.

#22