What New Ideas And Information Have You Generated During This Project

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We use our continually developing knowledge of students' thinking and achievement to inform our work. We are in classrooms most days of the week to observe, talk to, and work with teachers and students. We also use a number of assessment tools, the most significant of these being the SLIC diagnostic reading assessment we are developing with Mark Wilson and his team at the University of California, Berkeley.

The SLIC assessment uses content area texts around which we frame questions to test students' application of skills from the curriculum. Descriptors and exemplars of increasingly sophisticated responses enable us to score students' responses and measure improvement. Additionally, each skill has been reduced to either tactics or to sets of steps depending on the complexity Replica Tag Heuer of the skill to be undertaken. Tactics are the behaviors readers adopt to obtain relatively accessible information such as main ideas of paragraphs. When reading at deeper levels and applying complex skills such as synthesis, students must be strategic in ...
... their reading behavior and make decisions about the steps they should go through to make sense of their reading.

Although there is tremendous power in having an assessment that monitors improvement, its greatest impact is in terms of pedagogical knowledge. In specifying the skills, tactics, and steps at the level we have reached, we now have the means to direct students toward successful and skillful reading.

The original SLIC curriculum was developed as we taught lessons across the content areas, analyzed students' work, and interviewed students in focus groups about the instructional approaches that we used. Throughout this process, and as the SLIC curriculum evolved, we theorized the patterns and anomalies regarding students' literacy learning and achievement that we encountered in the data. To do this, we read from the international research literature, studied other curricula, and analyzed the demands of international literacy assessments. Similarly, as we develop more specific content for the project classes and refine our understanding of appropriate pedagogical approaches, we continue to return to available research to test our understandings and ideas.

Research is the foundation for our work, and it is central to how we refine the project. A major finding from our longitudinal study and our current research is that a student's progress is unique to the individual and that we must pay constant attention to understanding learning at that level and in relation to specific contexts. To be consistent with our original intent to understand Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches adolescent literacy from students' perspectives, we must also ensure that we provide opportunities for students to discuss the manner in which the curriculum and pedagogy are affecting their learning.

Within the project we have had to describe in detail what each element of the SLIC curriculum looks like, what it does, and why we approach the application of the research in the way we do. This process has made clear that routine is a critical element of the approach and that this must extend across lessons, texts, tasks, and content areas if we are to be successful in raising achievement. Describing this routine and its benefits for student achievement are important components of our ongoing research.

We are beginning to recognize the crucial importance of students writing about their learning as it occurs, keeping journals of their developing thinking, and recording ideas about how they can use their knowledge and skills when approaching new and challenging literacy tasks. Finally, we now are committed to investigating the power of talk and of reflection on learning as a central element in raising achievement.