Reading in Public No. 75: How can you tell if someone is a skilled reader?
Namwali Serpell, Charles Dickens, and making reading visible
It’s common educational parlance that in the first years of school students learn to read and then spend the rest of their education reading to learn. This has always been over-simplistic, but in recent years I think we’re really seeing that we need to be spending a lot more time helping middle and high school students become skilled readers. Direct instruction aimed at advanced reading is difficult, though. Most good readers become good readers by reading a lot. As a high school teacher, it was extremely difficult—if not impossible—to catch my non-reader students up to my reader students in either analytical reading or writing skills. It’s also quite tricky to assess reading ability.
We’re probably all familiar with the typical ways of assessing student reading comprehension and interpretation: answering questions about a passage of text or writing a literary analysis essay. These are tried and true, and they aren’t necessarily wrong—but both come with a lot of flaws. Multiple choice questions can sometimes come down to test taking ability more than reading comprehension, and even open ended questions are leading in some way. Essays are tricky because you have to have a very firm grasp on an topic to write about it well. High school students are still emerging writers and analytical readers so assessing them on both things in one essay can be quite challenging.
Which brings me to the AP Language and Composition exam, which has been in the news this week. If you’re unfamiliar with this test, it’s a three hour exam created and implemented by College Board that—with a high enough score—can earn high school students college composition credit. In the first hour of the test, students read 4-5 nonfiction, persuasive passages and answer multiple choice questions about them. The passages vary across time periods and the questions range from asking about the overall meaning of the passage to specific rhetorical tactics to advanced analysis of the piece. After a short break, students commence the essay portion. They have two hours to write three essays. In one essay, they are give a piece of persuasive writing and asked to analyze the choices the author made to achieve their purposes, which means they must first, of course, identify the rhetorical purpose of the passage. In the other two essays, students write argumentative pieces of their own. In one of the prompts, they are provided with documents they can use to form their argument and compile as evidence. In the other, they must come up with evidence straight from their brains. None of the prompts are seen in advance.
It’s a grueling test. I taught AP Lang and I sometimes struggled to explain to my students why one multiple choice answer was better than another. It’s designed to be difficult, although I don’t think that passing the test means students have the same skills as those who finish a college level composition course.
This year, students took to Goodreads after finishing their exam to look up and pan the book College Board excerpted for the required analysis essay, Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell. In an intriguing turn of events, Serpell noticed the spike in activity on Goodreads and, after reading through reviews, pieced together what had happened. The whole thing is a a fascinating story that I highly recommend reading, but what it boils down to is that Serpell is convinced that the passage College Board used was actually a strawman argument she set up for rhetorical purposes in the introduction to her work and that its use not only misrepresents her book but sets students up for failure by presenting them with a faux argument to analyze. She goes on to express her disdain for standardized tests and suggest that CB grant all students full marks on this essay (not going to happen, of course).
I am not a huge fan of standardized tests in general, and I despise how much power College Board—a for profit entity—has on determining curriculum around the country purely because they create these tests. While there are certainly worse ways to test students’ reading comprehension and writing skills than this test, I’ve spend a lot of time thinking about my ideal alternatives if I had full control and no time or staffing issues.
So I was interested to see this post circulate Substack over the last week. The essay examines a study released last year that “analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities.” I’m not going to go into the results of the study—you can read a brief recap in the Substack post or the entire thing through Project Muse—but I want to highlight the concept of the “think-aloud” because its a vastly underutilized tool for literary learning.
I learned about think-alouds in my teacher training program, but I had never seen them used to model advanced reading skills until grad school. A philosophy professor named John Rakestraw put on workshops for graduate students to help build their teaching practices (something more grad schools should do, in my opinion). The think-aloud was one of his favorite teaching methods because, as he said, students rarely had an opportunity to see what thinking actually looks like. For this exercise, he would take a piece of philosophical writing that he hadn’t read before and read it aloud to his class. As he read, he would pause to highlight what he noticed, ask the questions forming in his mind, make connections to other texts, etc. In other words, he would narrate everything he was thinking aloud to his students. Because some of my English professors worked with John, I also had instructors do this with fiction in my lit courses, and oh my gosh was it formative! Not only could I finally really see how an expert reader arrived at an interpretation for a text, I started being able to understand more clearly how I arrived at interpretations for text. This method became a major part of my own pedagogical practice teaching high schoolers, and it was the inspiration for Reading in Public.
So I think that the idea of using a think-aloud to assess student understanding of a piece of writing is a great idea. But there were two huge problems with what happened with this study. First, according to the study itself, “[s]ubjects were asked to read out loud and then translate each sentence of the passage from Bleak House.” The emphasis on translate is mine, because that is such a poor choice of words!! I mean…reading literature—even archaic literature—is not about translation. It makes absolutely no sense to ask students to word-for-word translate a Victorian text into modern English! None of us do that in our heads while reading. Asking students to explain their thinking, summarize the passage, or point out what they noticed as they read, would have been a much better—if less clear cut—assessment. Second, I don’t believe many people (even English majors) have this kind of activity modeled for them. It wasn’t until grad school that someone did this for me! So while I think the term “translate” needs to be thrown out, this kind of activity—thinking aloud while reading—is something I believe more English teachers need to be doing at all levels of schooling.
I also believe that think-alouds would be a great way to assess reading comprehension. This would have to come with ample modeling and opportunity for practice. It would also be nearly impossible to fit into the average English teacher’s schedule, but I think with the rise of AI, we’re going to need more solutions like this that give students a chance to practice real thinking skills and teachers a chance to see how their progressing.
So, I’m curious…did any of your teachers every do this kind of think-aloud with you? How were you assessed on your reading comprehension? And how do you know when you’ve read something well?
If you like the concept of the think-aloud, I’m excited to start sharing my new Margin Notes series with you this summer where I’ll be writing think-aloud style essays complete with my literal margin notes. It’s partly for you and partly for me because I need to engage with this sort of deep reading and deep thinking—it’s keeping me sane and keeping me human.
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Happy reading!
Sara
I appreciate the thoughts on developing reading skills in older students and adults. So much of the literature on reading instruction focuses on how essential it is to develop reading skills in elementary school. While true, it is discouraging to those of who first encounter our students at the age of 14 or 15. I really like the idea of using the think-aloud as an assessment. Not only does it give teachers a chance to dialogue and get at what students really know (often they don’t capture it well in writing), but it also an authentic task. I share my thoughts about reading with friends and colleagues. I don’t make them a Power Point or a diorama. Let’s not kill the love of reading with cumbersome assignments. Thought for another day.
After reading these pieces on reading comprehension, I’m planning to model “thinking out loud” using primary sources (and scholarly analysis) in my history classes. I feel very frustrated with students’ use of AI in basic writing assignments, and am not willing to embrace it like some colleagues (in English!), so this may be another tool to engage students’ rotting brains. Sigh.