As we’ve been working with teachers to implement the Common Core Standards, we’ve been helping teachers grapple with how to integrate literacy into the content areas. With the amount of text in social studies, science, and math, this hasn’t been difficult to figure out how to consider literacy during content area instruction. Looking at content through the lens of literacy has given us many new things to think about when it comes to how children process the content we are trying to teach them.
Recently, Kim shared the following word problem with a group of second grade students:
Littletown was little but it was busy with activity! Of the 256 students who attended Littletown Elementary School, 195 of them had activities like soccer, piano, dance, and karate, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday! On Thursday, 203 students participated in after-school activities. On Friday, however, the people of Littletown liked things to slow down. Only 106 students went to after-school activities. All of the other children went home to relax!
Assuming that if students understood the “story” better they would probably be better equipped to tackle the math problems within it, Kim set to work helping children read the text closely and carefully. First, she asked students, What does the author mean by the phrase “busy with activity?”
At first, the second graders were rather vague and said things like, They do stuff after school or It means they’re busy, like they’re doing a lot of stuff. Kim pushed the children to look back in the text to find the words that proved what the author meant by this phrase. Eventually, they honed in on “soccer, piano, dance, and karate” and discussed how “after-school activities” was plural, indicating that there were many things going on in the town of Littletown.
Next, Kim asked them to consider whether soccer, piano, dance, and karate were the only activities in which the children of Littletown participated. The student responses were fascinating. At first, the class seemed split, with half saying, No, the children of LIttletown participated in other activities, too and half saying, Yep, that’s all they offer in Littletown.
When she probed children to find out why they thought this, Kim got an extraordinary glimpse into their meaning making processes. The group that said “yes” cited the list of activities as proof. The word like, which preceded the list of activities, didn’t matter; students just didn’t notice it. They thought they had hard and fast evidence to support their thinking, simply because the specific activities were explicitly stated in the text.
Kim thought that the other faction would hone in on the word like, but when she asked them to share how they knew there were other activities, she was surprised when they said things like, They’re kids. What if they don’t want to do those things? I’m sure they have other things too. I do gymnastics. They probably have that there. They were using their background knowledge and logical reasoning to help them make sense of the text. While they had the right answer, they had the wrong evidence…
Because nobody in the class saw the subtlety of the word like as it was used in this context, Kim asked students to underline the following sentence and reread it carefully: Of the 256 students who attended Littletown Elementary School, 195 of them had activities like soccer, piano, dance, and karate, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday! She directed them again to find the proof that other activities were offered in Littletown.
The children began to go through the sentence word by word. As Kim listened to them talk through the word like, she learned that they didn’t recognize like as a comparative word; they saw it as a word that means “to enjoy.” Their interpretation of this sentence was that children did soccer, piano, dance, and karate because they “liked” it!
This was a fascinating revelation that has caused us to reconsider the Common Core standards that directly address developing and understanding language. There are both reading and language standards that address the “connotative” meanings of words and the ways in which words are used “in context” (RS 4, L3, L6). Realizing that a simple word such as like stood in the way of deeply understanding this text makes us wonder what else are we taking for granted with our students’ language understandings? And more importantly, how are we going to teach children to take note of the subtleties of language?
Wow. This is soooo important to have noticed. I’ve been finding that often the struggles my third graders have with making meaning come down to a misunderstood word to two. This is especially important in extremely “information-dense” (one might say, cryptic) passages like directions, or word problems. I’ve suspected that standardized tests sort young kids mostly on how well they are able to deal with the questions than how well they can think towards the answers.
So, what does one answer or the other on a question like that tell us about thinking? Knowledge? And, perhaps the best “data” that can be gathered from a question like that is just the kind of “ethnographic” data you gathered, something that is impossible in a traditional testing format. It appears the answer to the question wouldn’t tell you much of anything about what the kids knew or not. Incredible.
Agree completely, Steve. It’s frustrating.
I would wonder about the results for third graders or even fourth graders – would their understanding of “like” help them or hinder them? Interesting, this kindergarten sight word, causes confusion for second graders.
The most important learning from this math “problem” is that students do need to have lots of conversation around their “understanding” or “thinking” as they progress throughout each school day and in every content area.
(And of course as Steve said, “The answer doesn’t tell you much of anything about what the students knew.”
THANKS!
I just did a quick check in the dictionary that comes with my computer. “Like” has two entries: Entry 1 can be a preposition, an informal conjunction, an adjective, and an adverb. Entry 2 can be a verb or, as “likes”, a noun. That’s a lot of linguistic real estate to cover in one little word! How does one pick up on all that subtlety? Experience, I’m sure. But understanding all those shades of meaning in such an abstract word must take A LOT of experience.
Here’s my very quick reaction due to time constraint…..just think of the kids who said no, there were no other activities. And if this was a real question. Then the TEACHER would be held accountable for the fact that what seemed an obvious question (given basic thinking skills) was missed by a substantial (significant) number of her students…..when, in fact, there is a developmental issue in place here. A quick story. When my son was little, around 3, my husband went to Miami. At home I said, “I wonder if Dad got to Miami yet.” My son replied, “he didn’t go to Miami, he went to His-ami!” I did all my motherly best to explain, then got out the map of Florida, showed him where it said Miami (he knew letters and had some early reading skills), but…..it did NO good whatsoever!! Dad went to “His-ami” because, only Andrew, my son, could possibly have gone to “My-ami”!! Having read Glenda Bissex’s Genius at Work book on invented spelling plus other studies of linguistic development, I knew that my son was forming his knowledge of pronouns and thus was confused. Writ large, I wonder if we have considered what psycholinguistic research and possibly sociolinguistic research says about when (stage-wise) children understand those comparative words such as “like” in a sentence and from that…..exactly how can we require this on tests. Yes, use Vygotskian teaching and pull them through their ZOPEDs, but……there was no arguing with my son at that point. There was no way my husband could have gone to Miami, Florida….map or no map, test or no test. And he was/is one very bright kid. Also as teachers and former students, didn’t we have the right to accept/argure for an answer explaining to a teacher how we had INTERPRETED a question and how our answer, even if the not the correct one, made sense? We appealed to our teachers with logic and we were sometimes given credit. Gifted kid research talks about divergent thinking. Bright kids look way beyond and way into a question sometimes seeing things the test-makers can’t even predict. Begging the question, though, how do we help our students to grow in a happy, eager, fulfilling manner as readers and learners and citizens. Student engagement in the process is so important. That is why the discussion (Vygotsky’s Thought and Language explains this….talking and knowledge link) is so important for kids. I am recommending Opening Minds by Peter Johnston to everyone I know and don’t recall if you have mentioned it lately. This combined with What Readers Really Do by Vinton and Barnhouse can help. Though who knows how it will translate into a test score.