**INTRODUCTION**

Grace Air: My name is Grace Air and I am with the Office of Vocational
and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education and I want to
thank you for being here this morning. The response that we\'ve had to
this workshop and to the conference series has been truly heartening and
I think that I can safely say that when people are willing to travel
from as far as Washington State, Montana, California that we\'ve chosen
an auspicious moment to talk about a very important topic.

I\'d like to thank each of the co-sponsors of this workshop and before I
name the long list of co-sponsors, I will say that it\'s truly been the
diversity of the planning group and diversity of interests that has
contributed to the quality of this conference series. And each of the
co-sponsors are: the National Institute for Literacy, the National
Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the American
Speech Language Hearing Association, the International Reading
Association, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the
Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the Office of Special
Education and Rehabilitative Services and, of course, the National
Institute for Child Health and Human Development and, most especially,
Peggy McCardle and Tonya Shy \[sp\], whose unfailing effort and optimism
has just been a truly\-- has been an inspiration to me and to everyone.

I\'d also like to thank the Capital Consulting Group, Sandra Bromberg
\[sp\] and her team, whose attention to detail and perseverance have
been just phenomenal and, of course, thank you to all of the hotel staff
who have prepared this lovely room for us.

Moving down my thank you list I cannot neglect to thank and commend our
four panels of presenters and respondents. They have put in hours of
work preparing for today\'s workshop and I want to thank them personally
for their effort, their eagerness and their enthusiasm and their
willingness to share their experience and their expertise.

Before I move on, I do have a couple of housekeeping issues that I\'d
like to mention. As you can see, with all the cameras around the room,
that today\'s event is going to be videotaped so that anyone who wasn\'t
fortunate enough to be here with us will still be able to learn from the
proceedings. If you would prefer not to appear on tape if you stand and
issue a statement or ask a question, if you would please just signal to
say please cut the tape and we\'ll make sure that cameramen stop running
the video.

Secondly, as you can see, we are located just on top of a mall. This is
a somewhat public place and there will be quite a bit of traffic
throughout the day, so we please ask that you keep your purses,
briefcases, laptops with you at all times. We want to make sure that you
leave today with everything that you arrived with \-- maybe a little bit
extra knowledge, as well, of course, but we\'ll make sure all of your
belongings are safe.

With that, before I introduce our distinguished opening speaker, I do
want to take a moment to restate our main objective for today and for
the conference series. The conference series has been put together for a
two-fold purpose. First, to assess the existing knowledge base on the
unique needs of adolescent learners and the best instructional practices
for supporting literacy at the secondary level and secondly, to chart a
course for future research in the area.

Today we intend to gather input from practitioners and model developers
on instructional strategies that have had positive impacts on student
achievement and literacy development and to identify directions for
future research that will further validate these frameworks in all such
models.

Peggy McCardle will speak with you in greater depth about these
objectives and your role in helping us to advance the conversation today
in just a short while. Now I have the great pleasure of introducing our
opening speaker.

Hans Meeder is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of
Vocational and Adult Education, where he directs research and
dissemination activities in support of career and technical education,
adult basic education and English language acquisition. He also has
principal responsibility for policy development in the administrative of
the Carl Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act and the Adult
Education and Family Literacy Act.

Before coming to the Department, Mr. Meeder held a number of
distinguished positions, including the post of Senior Vice President for
Workforce Development and Post-Secondary Learning at the National
Alliance of Business and also Executive Director of the 21st Century
Workforce Commission. OVAE is the very fortunate beneficiary of his
leadership.

And with that, I will defer to Mr. Hans Meeder.

Hans Meeder: Good morning. Thank you, Grace. Anyone that\'s been working
closely on this project knows how much recognition Grace Air deserves,
as well, in putting this workshop together. So thank you, Grace, and the
team at the Department of Ed that worked with her. We\'re very fortunate
to have a lot of talented and hard-working people.

As we get started this morning, I feel like to some degree I\'m going to
be preaching to the converted, but we can\'t restate the importance of
our objective today enough that every high schooler needs to be able to
read at a high level of proficiency and fluency because the\-- what they
need to learn in high school will not be available to them unless they
are reading at that high level of reading and it\'s really kind of the
next frontier, I think, of education reform and instructional practice.

So I\'m going to start by reminding us of some of the global aspects of
what we\'re dealing with today because we know that the development of a
research-based agenda is so important because of the\-- right now the
very low performance of many, many high schoolers. Since 1992 the
performance of 12th graders on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress in reading has actually declined slightly. Twenty-three percent
of 17-year-olds are reading below basic levels in this\-- in the NAEP.
They\'re not able to search for information, understand informational
passages or extend ideas in text. And I asked the natural question,
well, what does 23 percent equate to? And when you look at the number of
17-year-olds in our schools, that\'s 800,000 high schoolers right now
are reading at a very low level and that doesn\'t even account for the
1.4 million youth who drop out of school between ninth and 12th grades.
So when you think about the societal implications of that number,
800,000 and another 1.4 million, that is a serious national problem.

And even of the students that go on to college, we know that one out of
10 college students needs some sort of remediation or developmental
courses in reading. Now that\'s the tip of the iceberg because when you
look at the\-- the achievement gap between middle class white students
and their African-American and Latin\-- Latino peers and economically
disadvantaged peers this becomes even more concerning.

Seventeen percent of African-American students and 24 percent of Latino
12th graders achieve at this level of proficiency needed for college and
for the work place compared to 46 percent of their white peers. And,
according to NAEP data, the average 12th grader, African-American or
Latino student, is reading at the same level as the average 8th grade
white student.

In high-poverty schools the problem is even more bleak. In high-poverty,
urban schools the average 9th grader is coming into school reading at
three to four years below grade level. And in colleges that have a high
minority enrollment, 25 percent of entering freshmen need some sort of
remediation in reading. So even among the college-bound students,
there\'s a serious reading problem.

So that\-- and we see this\-- the implications for this are both
economic and personal. When we look at the adult reading statistics, 40
million\-- 40 to 60\-- 40 million adults are reading at a very low
level. Up to 90 million adults in America read at a level that is not
sufficient to really keep them on pace with the changing nature of the
economy and to have self-supporting incomes. And among those 90 million
are many college graduates. So it says something about the whole idea of
social promotion that somehow people that are reading at a low level
keep on moving up the educational ladder without mastering the skills
that they really need for success.

We know that employers\-- survey after survey indicate that employers
are not able to find employees that have a strong mix of skills and
employers feel that this is definitely holding them back and we know
that it\'s holding individuals back from being able to earn
self-supporting, family-supporting incomes and to change from one career
to the next because in this economy jobs become obsolete relatively
quickly and you\'ve got to be able to obtain\-- acquire new skills and
if you don\'t have the gateway skill of reading, your ability to
transition is very limited.

So what can be done? How can we take action so that all high school
students are prepared? No Child Left Behind puts a very strong emphasis
on reading achievement in the early grades and that\'s very appropriate
and on accountability of grades K through 8. There is accountability, as
well, that\'s a little less closely defined in the high school years.

But the reading principles that are implicit in Reading First, we
believe, can be applied in the high school setting. Those principles are
all but a very small number of students can be proficient readers.
Prevention and remediation of reading problems is far less costly than
perpetuation of an unskilled citizenry. And reading instruction can be
improved and failure prevented through developing extensive\-- an
extensive research base in effective practice and the unique needs of
adolescent learners.

So it\'s essential that we begin by identifying what works. The
advantage of research practice is that\-- research-based practice is
that it is not subject to the fads and fashions of education. It makes
teaching more efficient, effective and productive and it builds a
foundation for developing knowledge about learning.

Knowing what works will enable us to assist educators in surmounting the
challenges that they face every day. Some of those challenges are that
most high school teachers are not reading specialists, have not been
trained in reading theory and practice. The time constraints placed upon
high school teachers put a strong emphasis on content and very little
time is allowed or even anticipated for reading and the high school
curricula assumes that it\'s dealing with a skilled reader. And then
there\'s the challenge of the diversity of student needs. We see the
same challenge in adult education programs where you have students
coming in who may be reading far below grade level but there may be many
different reasons for why they are below grade level, so needing to
understand the diversity of the roots of those reading problems.

So our objective within the Department of Education, working with the
National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the
National Institute for Literacy, is to create a much stronger approach
to rigorous evaluation of high school reading programs with a larger
number of students than has been done in the past so that we can
determine whether or not or under what circumstances different
approaches can be replicated.

The first workshop in this series was held in March, which was primarily
an assemblage of researchers, and they began to formulate a research
agenda and some of the items that were identified in that first
conference, which will be, then, discussed further today, are what are
the effects of the high school environment on student learning and
achievement, inquiry into the roots of the achievement gap, the role of
technology in improving literacy, inquiry into how literacy can be
supported across the curriculum of an entire high school, not just in
isolated reading programs, trying to better understand which populations
are most affected by reading difficulty so that resources can be better
targeted and identifying effective models for professional development.

The findings from this research will enable the Department of Education
to provide better leadership and resources to states and local districts
and teachers as they work to implement appropriate strategies. And one
of the most important things we need to think about is the role of the
teacher and teacher quality.

You know that No Child Left Behind right now, as they implement the
Reading First initiative, they are putting together a series of
Secretary Academies on reading and so that may well be the kind of model
that, over time, we consider to do with high\-- to use with high school
reading. No Child Left Behind requires by 2005-2006 that there be a
highly qualified teacher in every classroom. Well, that\'s a major
challenge across the board and, you know, we had to take that seriously.
It\'s not going to happen just by saying it. It\'s going to happen by
figuring out how to\-- how to work toward that end, how to gather
research in professional development strategies and, obviously, reading
is an important component of having a highly qualified teacher in every
classroom.

Some school districts, notably San Diego, Boston, Denver and Miami-Dade,
have implemented comprehensive professional development strategies
around reading and writing throughout their high schools. So those\--
those sort of professional development strategies we need to look at and
within the research\-- within the Department of Education we are looking
at two levels of research and this is actually several federal agencies
collaborating together. One is basic research on instructional practice.
Secondly is implementation research. If you know an instructional
practice works within a classroom, maybe within the school, then how
does that become implemented more widely throughout a school district or
throughout a state?

So really we need to consider both levels of research. Now how does this
tie in, specifically, with our office, which is one of many offices in
the Department of Ed that\'s leading, but we\'re specifically sponsoring
today\'s event?

Our office is the Office of Vocational and Adult Education and we
traditionally have had responsibility for the career and technical
education programs that are in many high schools. The Secretary has
asked Assistant Secretary Carol D\'Amico, who\'s my direct boss, to lead
the effort within the Department of Education on high school reform
generally and thinking about how to improve the achievement of all high
school students, close achievement gaps, improve the rigor of the high
school curriculum and the graduation rates. You can\'t improve the rigor
of the curriculum if students can\'t learn that curriculum. So reading
is a critical point of making high school reform meaningful.

So in our office, we\'ve launched an effort called Preparing America\'s
Future, which is our organizing project to think through how to\-- how
to lead and envision what the high school of the future should be and
how we\'re going to move from where we are today toward that vision. And
we will be considering legislative proposals with the Perkins Act, which
is the Career Technical Education Act, how that interfaces with No Child
Left Behind, and whether any additional programs or strategies are
needed.

So today, again, restating the obvious, but this is\-- we see this as a
linchpin issue for improving America\'s high schools is getting\-- is
making serious, sustained progress in reading. And we know that, as
important as the long-term reading research will be to developing a
strong foundation and convergence among the research, we also need to
think about how to take action as quickly as possible because we know
from these data I shared earlier that millions of high school students
or American youth are not prepared for the future, but our goal is
working together with a determined effort to make every high school
student a successful reader, a reader that\'s prepared for continuing
education and the workplace of the 21st Century.

So thank you for joining us today. Our work is important; your work is
more important because you deal with students every day and you are the
ones that are testing and learning what works, what doesn\'t work and we
really are glad that you\'re part of this process to help us make good
decisions.

Next I would like to turn the podium over to Mary Beth Curtis, who is
going to present the synthesis that she\'s prepared on what we know
about high school reading right now. Mary Beth is currently the Director
of the Center for Special Education at Lesley University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and she previously was the Director of the Reading Center
at Girls and Boys Town in Nebraska, where she helped develop the Boys
Town Reading Program.

She\'s the Associate Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School
of Education and the Associate Director of the Harvard Reading Lab.
She\'s the author of numerous books and articles on struggling
adolescent readers and we\'re delighted to have Mary Beth with us today.

All right. Thank you very much.

Mary Beth Curtis: Thank you. I\'m delighted to be here, as well.

I am going to talk about the background paper that Peggy and Sandra
\[sp\] asked me to prepare for this conference, but I do want to start
out with a story. I know I only have 20 minutes, but I\'m going to use
the first couple of minutes to tell you a story about an adolescent
literacy encounter that I had.

I was in a classroom observing some students and a teacher and the
teacher came over to me, Mrs. McCart \[sp\], and she said to me, "Dr.
Curtis, I want you to go over and sit with Ed for a while. I\'m a little
confused about what\'s going on with him. He seems to be struggling with
the material that he\'s working on. Could you sit with him and work with
him and maybe you can give me some suggestions about the kinds of things
that might be helpful?"

So I did. I went over and I sat down and introduced myself to Ed and
looked at what he had in front of him there. He had an article and there
were some questions that followed that article. So we dove right in and
Ed and I read that article together and we summarized back and forth and
we talked about what pieces we didn\'t understand and then we got to the
questions and we worked our way through the questions and by the time
Mrs. McCart \[sp\] came back, Ed and I had finished all the answers to
all those questions and I was feeling pretty good, you know, like I
might know a little bit about what I was doing.

And Mrs. McCart \[sp\] looked at me and she looked at Ed and she looked
down at the paper and she said, "Ed, why didn\'t you tell Dr. Curtis
that you had already done this article?" And Ed looked at her and he
looked at me and he kind of shrugged and he said, "She never asked me."

To me that is a typical adolescent experience. It\'s something that you
wouldn\'t find a younger child doing and it\'s something that you
wouldn\'t find an adult doing when you\'re working with them. So if you
ever have any questions about whether adolescence is a unique stage of
development, those are the kinds of stories, I think, that help us to
understand that it is a very unique stage.

But the other reason why I tell you that story is that it was
particularly important for me, as I was looking at the literature and
trying to figure out what it is we know about adolescent literacy.
Because I think much of what we know about adolescent literacy is a
function of the questions that we\'ve asked. And what we don\'t know is
often the result of us not asking those questions. And so as I looked
through the literature, I tried to think not only about what answers
were there, but what questions we\'ve asked and, maybe more importantly,
about what questions we\'ve forgotten to ask and maybe want to ask in
the future.

There\'s a number of different ways to slice this body of literature and
I think from the first conference there were a number of different
interesting ways of thinking about which factors are most important. As
I started to review the literature, the ones that really stuck out for
me were the following.

It really seemed that most of what I was seeing could be summarized in
terms of four different factors, the first factor being studies that had
to do with trying to understand how students dealt with print, how they
dealt with the words on the page when they were reading. The second
factor had to do with language factors, how they dealt with the meaning
of what they were reading. The third, cognition, how they dealt with
trying to use that information, apply that information, extend that
information, act on that information. And the fourth factor,
acknowledging that all three of these, in fact, always take place within
a context. They\'re situated.

Now the print language and cognition factors are ones that Jack Carroll
\[sp\] identified 25 years ago as the developmental parameters of
reading comprehension and it may say more about me than it says about
the field, but I still find those to be very useful ways of thinking
about reading development. The fourth one, I think, is a more recent
acknowledgement that we have to think about these things being situated
and the factors that affect that situation.

As I looked through, my task was to go back 10 years, so I went back to
1990 and I went to the ERIC and the PsychINFO databases and I searched
those by hand, looking for any empirical articles, any reports of
research, technical reports, that were done with students who were in
sixth grade or beyond and which had something to do with their reading.
And after going through and doing that for 10 years, grades six through
12, I ended up with 155 articles. Now that doesn\'t sound like very much
research over a 10-year period, but I have to tell you, quite honestly,
it was more than I thought I was going to come across and it was quite a
bit for one person to try to see their way through.

When I looked at how the various articles fell into these different
categories, these were the kinds of numbers that occurred when I sorted
them. In addition to looking at them in terms of these four components,
I was also interested in trying to figure out were they studies that
were trying to describe what it was that each of these factors were for
adolescents or were they studies that were trying to figure out what
changes in these factors might affect\-- how they might affect their
comprehension. And you can see these breakdowns here.

In terms of the four factors, the cognitive factor resulted in the most
research, which is not surprising because if you look at adolescent
development that is the factor that you would hope the most exciting
things would be happening on. There were about an equal number of
studies in the print and the situation and then language was really the
second most investigated.

Again, there was an equal number, about of\-- not an equal number. There
were more descriptive articles than there were instructional articles,
but you can see that in cognition that number was equal whereas in
situation it was much more heavily weighted in terms of the descriptive
side.

Let me give you a little bit of flavor for what some of the aspects
within each of the factors were that I thought captured the studies that
had been done. In terms of print, there were studies that looked at both
decoding accuracy and decoding fluency, but when you looked at those
studies, the majority of the studies in print on accuracy and fluency
were studies that were done on struggling readers. There were very, very
few, if any, studies done on any kind of typical development that\'s
occurring in decoding at that time.

And I guess that\'s not that surprising because we all assume that by
the time students reach the sixth grade, if they\'re typically
developing, they should be pretty well set in terms of decoding accuracy
and fluency. I\'m not sure that we want to make that assumption. I think
we know from spelling research that there\'s some interesting things
that\'s going on in terms of encoding at those ages and certainly those
things may be affecting students\' ability to read words. Also we know
that from experience in reading one has changes occurring in decoding.
So I\'d like to see a bit more research confirming that decoding
accuracy is all through developing in sixth grade before we go ahead and
conclude that.

Also, in terms of fluency, it\'s very unusual to find a fluency article
including students over the fifth grade level. And yet we talked about
how important fluency is for struggling readers. We don\'t know how
fluent people are supposed to be beyond the fifth grade level. We have
no idea how fast is fast enough at the eighth grade level or how much
change in fluency instruction needs to occur in order to make an impact
on comprehension. So those are some areas that I think we need to ask
more questions about.

In terms of language, the studies fell into two major categories, one
having to do with meaning vocabulary, what students knew about the
meanings and conceptual connections for the words that were on the page,
and then sentence and discourse processing, how well they were at
dealing with the syntax and the textual constraints of what they were
reading. And, as you can see, many, many more studies fell into the
sentence and discourse processing than they did in the meaning
vocabulary.

The majority of the studies in meaning vocabulary had to do with
students\' typical development and although there\'s very few studies
there, there are some very exciting things happening in meaning
vocabulary development in adolescents. So I definitely think we need to
pay some more attention there.

Some of the things that we know is that students\' understanding of
words that are related to cognition are still undergoing development at
that point and so we\'re assuming that students can do these
problem-solving tasks that we give them without even making sure that
they know the meanings of the words that are involved in those
problem-solving tasks.

In terms of sentence and discourse processing, the majority of those
studies were with struggling readers. Again, that struggling readers are
better able to deal with messages if they have simpler syntax, that
struggling readers are better able to deal with messages if they\'re
narrative rather than expository and there is a pretty good-sized body
of instructional research associated with that and most of those studies
have to do with teaching students how to paraphrase through note-taking
or how to summarize in order to help them get the message.

This area, I think, is one area that we\'re going to need to see a lot
more work in. In terms of our work at Boys Town, we saw one out of two
students who came to us who were two or more years behind in their
meaning vocabulary. So it was a really critical factor, we felt, in the
comprehension problems that they were having.

In terms of print, we don\'t know how many kids are really having
difficulty in that area either. With the Boys Town population, we saw
that about one out of 10 students who came to us was reading at about
the fourth grade level in terms of decoding, so had serious decoding
problems. These were 15-year-old kids. One out of eight of them was
still having some fluency difficulties. So knowing just how many
students are represented within each of these categories, I think, would
be a great help in terms of the research.

The third area, cognition, three categories seemed to capture the
studies that were there, one having to do with content knowledge, the
declarative knowledge, what you know about the topic that you\'re
reading about, one having to do with your ability to act on that
knowledge and to regulate those actions on that knowledge. I called that
strategic. Other people have called it that, as well.

And then this third area, which I think is one of the most interesting
ones, particularly in terms of typical development in adolescents and
that is what\'s happening in terms of ways of knowing, how students\'
ways of knowing are changing during adolescence. And ways of knowing I
included studies that talked about students\' abilities to look at
evidence within a text, to weigh evidence, to handle multiple
viewpoints, because that\'s one of the most exciting things that should
be happening during typical adolescent development.

Again, not too many studies within each of these two areas, more of them
within the strategic knowledge area.

And then the fourth area, situation, two major categories seemed to
describe them \-- motivation, where we talk about it all the time.
Motivation is like the weather of adolescent literacy. It\'s something
that people talk about all the time and nobody\'s doing anything about
or very few people are doing anything about. There were very few studies
that looked at that particular factor.

Context kind of became my catch-all category. Context included all the
factors that seemed to affect students\' reading development and their
comprehension outside of themselves. So context had to do with studies
that described schooling, studies that described teachers\' knowledge,
studies that described parental influence on their development.

So, real quickly, just to sum up the major points from the review, as I
said earlier, in terms of print there were very few studies that were
concerned with understanding typical development. There may not be a lot
to say here, but I know that much of what we know about reading today we
know because we looked at adults and how they dealt with print and so I
think it may be particularly important for us to do some studies of
adolescents and the kinds of changes that could be happening,
particularly within fluency, I think, but perhaps in accuracy as well.

We have longitudinal and contrasted studies that show us that accuracy
and fluency are related to reading difficulties. What we don\'t know is
for how many students that holds. Are we talking about 10 percent of the
population? Are we talking about 25 percent of the population? You
sometimes go to conferences where you\'d think we\'re talking about 95
percent of the population because there\'s so much good research out
there indicating that that\'s a problem. I suspect that we\'re talking
about many fewer students than we have thought in the past.

We know that instruction produces growth in terms of the studies that we
have out there, but what we don\'t know, really, is what the
requirements for that growth are and that\'s largely because there
aren\'t any studies that compare the various programs. So each of us has
our own program and we go out there and we demonstrate that we can get
growth with that particular program, but we don\'t know what factors are
the most important and it could be that certain programs work better for
certain groups of kids. Kids who are having difficulties with syllables
may benefit from learning syllables. Kids who are having difficulties
applying the knowledge that they know may learn better from instruction
that helps them to strategically apply that. But those studies aren\'t
there now.

And we really don\'t know how much growth needs to occur before we can
get improvement in comprehension. That\'s true both in terms of accuracy
and fluency.

In terms of language, we really don\'t have very many studies that are
concerned with understanding typical development of adolescents\'
language. The contrasted studies that we have tend to focus more on
sentence and discourse processing than they do on knowledge of word
meanings and, as I said, I think knowledge of word meanings is going to
be important in terms of typical development, but also in terms of
understanding what many kids are having difficulty with when we say that
they\'re struggling.

We know that instruction produces growth, but we really don\'t know why
yet. There are a variety of reasons and we\'re going to have to look
more carefully at that.

And finally, research on minority language users is minimal to almost
non-existent. There is just so little out there to help us understand
what\'s going on there, both in terms of kids who are successful readers
and students who are having difficulty.

In terms of cognition, this was the area where there were the most
studies and also the area in which there was the most concern with
understanding typical development as well as struggling readers. The
contrasted studies focus more on strategic knowledge than they do on
content or ways of knowing and this area there really has been a lot of
work done trying to understand what the features of strategy instruction
are that actually make it work and so that we know that direct
instruction of a strategy is important. We know that modeling by a
teacher is important. We know that the opportunity to try it out and get
feedback is important. We know the chance to regulate and figure out
which situations a strategy should be used in are important.

What I\'d like to see is a lot more research, though, on ways to promote
these kinds of more generic reading-to-learn strategies and why these
more generic reading-to-learn strategies\-- they\'re the ones that I was
referring to earlier about how do you deal with multiple perspectives?
How do you deal with the fact that sometimes it appears that there\'s
more than one answer that could be correct? How do you deal with
weighing evidence to figure out which one of these answers might be
better than another? How do you deal with forming a theory and trying to
comprehend it?

And then finally, in terms of situation, the studies there have focused
mainly on students whose development is typical. So that\'s the
difference between the print, language and cognition. Print, language
and cognition have focused a lot on struggling readers whereas the
situational studies have studied mostly on typical readers. And the
majority are concerned with trying to understand the effects or the
conditions of schooling.

I think we know fairly certainly now that it\'s not enough just for
schools to be warm, friendly places for adolescents and it\'s not enough
just for schools to have strong academic press. We did have that kind of
disagreement there for a while. We had, you know, the one camp said,
"Well, we don\'t have to worry about pushing them too hard academically
as long as they feel accepted and their friends are there and we\'re all
friendly." And then we had this other set of schools that said, "Aw, the
heck with that. We just need to push the heck out of them." And we know
now, I think, that both of those factors are necessary. One by itself is
not enough.

There was very little instructional research found, though, trying to
figure out what the factors were that affect situation.

So as I just said, the studies of print, language and cognition involve
mostly students who are struggling whereas the studies of situation
involve mostly those who aren\'t.

When I first started out this review, there was a lot of discussion
about trying to establish the scientific base for these studies, the
scientific nature for these studies. What I want to say there is that
the majority of these studies are clinical in nature, rather than
experimental in approach. And I don\'t want to criticize them for that,
because they were that by design and so they did what they intended to
do.

I\'m less worried about conclusions based on these clinical studies than
I am about trying to characterize all of adolescent literacy via a focus
just on the struggling reader. I\'ve dedicated my life to the struggling
reader. I think they\'re a very important group to understand, but my
understanding of the struggling reader needs to be advanced by other
people\'s understanding of what adolescent development is about.

And when I focus just on the struggling reader, several things happen.
One thing is that I get confused about the causes and the consequences
of reading difficulty. I can\'t separate them out. Unless I have a
theory of what\'s supposed to be developing, I don\'t know which is a
cause and which is a consequence.

When I struggle just on\-- when I struggle\-- Well, when I struggle with
the struggling reader, I also miss out on these mediating influences. If
I\'ve got a student who is low in strategy use and a student who is low
in motivation and a student who is low in reading ability, I don\'t know
which one might be a mediating factor. They\'re all low for me. So,
again, I need a theory of development in order to understand that and to
sort that out.

And finally, I think when we focus just totally on the struggling
reader, we tend to get this mindset about trying to plug in what\'s
missing rather than figuring out what\'s possible. And it\'s only
through a theory of development of the adolescent reader that I\'m going
to be able to, then, figure out not only what\'s missing and how to give
a student that, but also to realize what\'s possible for that student,
as well.

So that\'s, in a short form, the review.

Oh, sure.

Unidentified Speaker: If you\'ve got questions for Mary Beth, I know
it\'s\--

Mary Beth Curtis: Let me preface the questions by saying that I got this
done and I sent it in and it was a draft and I sent it to Peggy and
Sandra \[sp\] and I said, maybe you guys could give me some feedback and
the next thing I knew was it was posted on the Web. I went\-- So,
please, you know, I invite your feedback to the draft because you will
be the first ones who have given it to me.

Unidentified Speaker: I noticed that\-- I\'ve read that your study was
limited to only articles and \[inaudible\] why some of the really big
names in the research are missing. I was looking for David Pearson
\[sp\], Robert Perry \[sp\], Scott Parris \[sp\]. There\'s some very big
names in reading research that I don\'t see reflected in your study, who
have certainly contributed profoundly to our understanding of how
readers or writers make sense of text.

Mary Beth Curtis: That\'s an excellent point. The study was limited just
to looking at articles published in journals. I did not include book
chapters or books and I think those authors that you\'ve just mentioned
have done much of their publishing, of late, in edited book volumes
rather than in journals. So that expanding it might bring them in, as
well.

They also\-- I think many of the authors that you mentioned have done
overviews of the problem, more than contributed to more information
about what the nature of the difficulty is in a research perspective.
Does that make sense?

Unidentified Speaker: Mary Beth, I was just wondering if you focused
just on reading to make it a doable task. I mean, is that\--?

Mary Beth Curtis: Yeah, the question was, did I just focus on reading as
opposed to writing and listening and speaking just to make it more
doable? Yes, indeed. When I started to find out how many articles were
out there, I mean, other people have done this. There\'s been whole
panels for younger children, I mean. And I don\'t know whether that
would have speeded it up or not. Sometimes when you get a committee it
slows it down, but, yeah, that\'s exactly why.

Unidentified Speaker: Yes. I really appreciated your breakdown of the\--
of the four categories into the sound/symbol relationships and the use
of language. I think you hinted at the prior experience and then, of
course, finally with the context, the relationship of the reader to
text. I was thinking\-- that was very helpful.

Mary Beth Curtis: Good.

Unidentified Speaker: I was thinking, in terms of the theme today of the
assessment\-- the assessment needs of the adolescent and supporting
their needs on the secondary level, as you found, of course, there\'s
just\-- while 155 studies are\-- it\'s more than we might expect, it\'s
still a small number when you look at all the studies.

Mary Beth Curtis: Yep.

Unidentified Speaker: But I was thinking specifically in terms of the
themes and trying to apply what you\'ve said and to get\-- with the idea
of getting reading specialists into the high schools which, of course,
there\'s quite a number of high schools do not\-- the majority do not
have reading specialists and, of course, the parental role in the high
schools and then, of course, trying to\-- trying to reconcile
high-stakes testing with developing a love of reading and then finally
and most importantly trying to get out the instruction to the teachers
so that they understand how to teach reading.

Mary Beth Curtis: That\'s an excellent point. I think\-- I think the
universities are doing a better job in terms of presenting courses that
give people background on reading and help them to see the significance
of content area reading instruction.

What we haven\'t done a good job at is figuring out how to make it
possible now for the people who have that information to actually use
it. So for whatever reason, it doesn\'t fit with the way you are going
to manage your classroom, it doesn\'t fit with the way you have to teach
your content, so it\'s great to know all of these things but until we
work in conjunction with high schools to figure out how to structure
high schools in a way that this stuff can be used, we\'re not going to
start to see the change.

Unidentified Speaker: We have a question from the floor mike before we
get to our roving mike again.

Unidentified Speaker: I was just wondering if you have a theory as to
why there\'s been so little research on motivation?

Peggy McCardle: How easy is it to measure?

Mary Beth Curtis: I think measurement is one part of it. I think that
we\'re just getting more and more comfortable with the fact that this is
a very real thing that we have to worry about.

I think that, as teachers, we haven\'t always thought this was something
that was ours to worry about. It was more something that had to do with
them. And you had the motivated kids and you were ready to teach them
and if they weren\'t motivated, well, you know, maybe they would get
motivated once they saw the motivated kids working. And so I think in a
lot of ways it hasn\'t been a factor that we\'ve taken as seriously as
we needed to, which would explain why we don\'t have good measurement
tools, either.

The other thing about motivation that\'s interesting is people will say,
"Well, these kids have low self-esteem because they\'re having
difficulty reading." We looked at the Boys Town kids to find out about
their self-esteem as readers. They were off the charts. They thought
they were terrific at it.

So any self-esteem measure that we have\-- so there was a bit of a gap,
a separation with reality, if you will, in terms of how they felt they
were doing and how we felt they were doing. So that\'s another area I
think that research\--

Unidentified Speaker: Can we hand the roving mike to John Guthrie just
for one minute? And then I promise we\'ll take your question. Because I
think he wants to make a comment on motivation. Am I right?

John Guthrie: I would like to add that there are\-- is a substantial
body of articles in peer-reviewed journals on motivation conducted from
the motivation theory perspective.

Mary Beth Curtis: OK.

John Guthrie: And they have looked at a lot of issues for adolescents
from their theoretical view, and\-- but they haven\'t put it in reading
journals and it hasn\'t necessary had reading on the title or maybe even
the abstract. But I would say there are at least 30 to 50 very powerful,
important studies. One of the things they show is that there\'s a big
shift for students as they move out of elementary into middle school,
away from intrinsic motivation, enjoyment of reading for its own sake,
into extrinsic motivation, which is to say, I\'m reading to get a grade
to get by.

And schools tend to perpetrate this by going from structures in
classrooms that support kids reading for interest to structures in
schools that support them for reading to meet goals and standards that
the school sets up. The irony is that what drives improvements is
intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation, in fact, doesn\'t drive
improvements in comprehension because students want to read to get done
the task or to get the points or escape the situation but not to
actually learn or to gain the knowledge that the text may have.

So there\'s a literature there that warrants our reading and the reason
its very hard to find with the search you took \-- which is a very
appropriate search for this enterprise \-- but it\'s really been
expressed in another literature and there\'s another society of people
talking about these issues who, in fact, would like to be participating
and contributing but, in fact, haven\'t used the language that we would
find in a retrieval like you did.

Mary Beth Curtis: Excellent point. That\'s great.

Peggy McCardle: It\'s important that we think across disciplines, so as
often as we can bring in information like that\-- Because I think if
we\'re really going to study this we need to be working with those other
disciplines and not be too insular in our approach. I\'m sorry, Mary
Beth.

Mary Beth Curtis: No, that\'s great. Yeah.

Peggy McCardle: There was one more person with a question.

Unidentified Speaker: My question is, where in this review is the
student\'s theory that drives what they do? Maybe it\'s within the
motivation, what Frank Smith \[sp\] would have called their theory of
the world, but, in other words, what their script or their schema is
that drives what they do in reading, because that seems to be a piece
that I see that\'s missing.

Mary Beth Curtis: Yeah, and I think that you\'ll find\-- there will be
studies that are throughout each of the components. A lot of it does
fall within the motivation part, but students view about vocabulary
learning, for example. There was a study that showed that as students
get older, they\'re less interested in doing that kind of thing. That\'s
certainly going to have an influence on it.

So you\'ll find\-- there\'s not that much, again \-- and I might not
have been looking in the right places \-- but there were bits and pieces
all the way through that spoke to that.

Peggy McCardle: OK. We\'re going to take one last question.

Unidentified Speaker: You spoke about some minimal research that\'s been
done on language minority students. Can you describe just what that
minimal research said?

Mary Beth Curtis: The research was to try to do a couple of things. One
was to understand what seemed to characterize the difference between
language minority students who were successful reading comprehenders and
those who were not and one of the things that characterized the
successful students were that they were able to draw across their
languages and see the commonalities, whereas the students who were less
successful saw each language that they were operating in as separate and
they weren\'t capitalizing on what the commonalities were. A specific
example of that would be using cognates in vocabulary and looking at
what you knew in one language about this particular word to help you now
learn the cognate in another language.

I can point out the studies for you in the list if you\'re interested.

Peggy McCardle: Thanks very much, Mary Beth.

We knew that Mary Beth couldn\'t do everything in the whole world, which
is one reason that we put some limits on what we did ask her to do, but
I think that she did an extraordinarily valuable job. It\'s a beginning.
We knew it would be a beginning and I would\-- I would also say, if you
have additional comments, you know, there\'s a special e-mail box listed
on the Web\-- on that website from the workshop and also you\'ve got
tablets in your packets and if there\'s something that you feel is
really crucial, because we\'re going to be putting together\-- we\'re
going to be augmenting that research priorities document that is in
draft form on the Web and that\'s going to lead to a lot more activity,
I would believe.

So please do give us your feedback. We would like to come up with a
final document that incorporates the feedback from this workshop. And
while we\'ve tried to include time for question-and-answer, discussion,
things like that, there\'s never enough of that, plus you get on the
plane or you\'re driving home and you start to think and you say, "You
know, this is really important and I didn\'t mention it and no one else
did." Send us that information. We want it.

I\'m Peggy McCardle. I\'m from the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development at the NIH. I\'m one of the many partners and
sponsors of this series of workshops and briefly I want to welcome you.
I often describe my job as, on the one hand, a coach, and on the other
hand, a cheerleader.

I coach people on research grant applications that come in to the NICHD
and many of which, I\'m happy to say, get funded, but today I\'m here in
my cheerleader role and I want to take a couple minutes to do some
cheerleading.

Last weekend I went home for Mother\'s Day to central Pennsylvania and
if you\'ve ever driven through Pennsylvania in the last \-- well, I
shouldn\'t say ever \-- in the last few months, you may have seen road
signs like this and they alternate, my mommy works here, my daddy works
here and this is to slow you down so that you will minimize the number
of highway accidents that they\'ve had where they\'ve had the road
workers getting killed by drivers going too fast. "Slow down, my mommy
works here," and if you look at this, I mean, it did help me slow down
and I think it\'s cute, but one of the reasons it\'s really cute has to
do with the development of literacy and one of the overriding sort of
organizing principles you will have noticed if I\-- and I hope that
you\'ve all looked at our draft research priorities document, is that
even in adolescence literacy is a developmental process that we seek to
understand.

So you look at, you know, the backwards S here and you say, "Oh, isn\'t
that cute. A little kid wrote that." This is a real note from an adult
that was left anonymously in someone\'s mailbox and they, then, gave it
to me because I said, "I really need that." This is what we\'re here
today and we\'re all about. This is what we can prevent because this is
an intelligent adult who is maybe barely functionally literate. This is
a not fully literate adult and I think that\'s what we can prevent.

Hans Meeder mentioned today some points from Reading First that he felt
apply to adolescents and the ones that struck me as most memorable were
that students can\-- most students, the vast majority, can become
proficient readers and writers and that includes adolescents, that
reading instruction can be improved and we know that\'s true across the
life span, from preschool through early reading, through middle school
and high school into adult. And one of the most important things for me
about this series of workshops on adolescent literacy is that it fills
in the gap that we had in life span.

Many of you know that we just closed a solicitation on adult and family
literacy and I\'m dying to get back to the office and see what came in
last week on May 15th in applications in that area. We\'ve got a
solicitation on the street right now looking at preschoolers. We\'re
always wide open to all areas, but the area that hasn\'t gotten focus
lately is adolescent and we want to focus on that.

And then that failure can be prevented and\-- I don\'t know. This is not
total failure. This is somebody who was able to write a note. OK?
Obviously is able to read, but when you look at that, this is not
complete success, either.

From the research priorities document, there are just a few things I
want to mention to you. We broke it apart into\-- as I said, we took
development as an overarching organizing principle because adolescence
is a developmental\-- I mean, we\'re still in\-- I don\'t want to call
it a phase or a stage or somebody will try to nail me on that and say,
well, when does it begin, when does it end. But throughout middle and
high school there is development still occurring and we need to remember
that, that things are changing.

We pulled out four major domains and those are learner characteristics
\-- and I would emphasize that in research those need to be carefully
described \-- learning environments that also need to be studied and
described, and then the components or dimensions of literacy and
teachers and instruction. And across those domains were three elements
that we want to see threaded throughout, which are assessment and
measurement \-- and I brought that up when somebody mentioned
motivation, because that\'s a tricky one to measure, but it can be done.
It does need to be done.

Intervention \-- we need to be looking at not only overall instruction
but also intervention or I would say not only intervention but also
overall instruction to kind of echo what Mary Beth was saying in terms
of we need to look at what kinds of literacy, reading and writing
instruction, need to be continuing throughout the adolescent period. We
get kids into middle school, it doesn\'t mean we\'re done teaching
reading and we know we\'re not done teaching writing. We may, in many
ways, only be beginning.

And then the socio-cultural issues, the language minority and the ethnic
or racial minority students who seem to be the ones where the gap is not
getting closed, where we\'re just not, somehow, meeting those needs.

So those really need to be studied. So in terms of what we need \-- and
I\'m going to be the cheerleader for the research side of it, but
there\'s a practice side of it that is the reason that you\'re here
today, because I believe very firmly that research needs to be informed
by practice and this is an opportunity for you to be heard. And, as I
said, if you don\'t get to be heard or you\'re too shy to use the mike
or there isn\'t time, write it down. We\'re going to take all that into
consideration.

We do need more basic research and when I say basic research we need to
figure out what\'s really happening and how and why in adolescent
literacy development \-- not only in the struggling readers, very
importantly in the struggling readers \-- but in\-- overall in
adolescents. We need curricula to be developed that are based on
scientific principles but we also need to know how those play out in the
classroom. We need to know how well they work, but it\'s not that
simple. We need to know how well they work for certain students, why
they work for some students and not for others, under what conditions
they work and what are the optimal environments for them, the structures
of the schools, the kinds of situations. Mary Beth highlighted
situations. I think that\'s very important.

And we need to figure out what kind of background knowledge we should be
giving teachers who are going to go out and be teaching in content areas
as well as in reading and writing very specifically and how we continue
to support them.

OK. So what are we going to do today? You\'re going to hear about four
practice models being implemented in middle or high schools. And then
there are panels that are going to respond to the presentations. There
are only four models because there was only time for four models. We
could have kept you here for a week and we probably still would have not
covered all the practice models that are out there. These are models
that have some data and I would ask you to look at these as examples.

And I would ask you think about this whole day as an example of a
process that I hope we put in place that will inform the development of
future practice models, the evaluation of models that are out there and
that will help us figure out how we go about, not just evaluating, but
researching practice models. Do they scale up well? What aspects of them
scale up well? Are they proven interventions before we try to scale them
up? Because I think that\'s very important.

So what\'s going to happen today is you\'re going to hear a presentation
of a model and then you\'re going to have three people on a panel
respond to that. We\'ve got a very diverse group here in many ways,
including philosophies of what\'s important in literacy in reading and
writing and what\'s important in education. And I said this at the
beginning and then at the end of the last workshop. It wasn\'t only
researchers. It was predominantly researchers. There were some
practitioners. There were various philosophies represented.

People were talking to each other and people were listening to each
other. There was very little\-- there was no bloodshed and there were
very few tears. I was going to say very little tears and I had to
reconstruct my sentence, right? It was not a hostile environment. It was
an open, communicative environment. That\'s what we need. That\'s what
we need to move things forward and especially in adolescent literacy,
which we\'re defining as reading and writing informed by listening and
speaking. Language is a very important part of this. OK?

The panelists are going to constructively comment. Are these models
perfect? No. If they were, if we had perfect models, we wouldn\'t be
here. They\'re not perfect. We\'re not attacking them. We\'re using
them\-- these people were considerate enough to come and present them
knowing that they\'re going to have practitioners, other model
developers or implementers, researchers critiquing and then making
comments and suggestions.

We want to know what is good about these models, what else could be
done, what are lessons we can learn about future model development,
about improving models, these models and models like these, and then
what are the next steps? They\'re not presenting them, necessarily, as
this is a research study that\'s done and finished and now you should go
out and use our model for the whole rest of the world to teach every
adolescent. They\'re presenting them as something that\'s in process and
as a basis for us to look at how we research and how we evaluate \-- and
those two are not the same thing. OK? But they both need to be done and
they can be done in conjunction and they can be done in ways that are
informed by reading specialists, master teachers, high school teachers,
principals, educators, the practitioners out there.

And so what I hope we will see today \-- and so help me, I\'m going to
be watching and listening to make sure it happens \-- is a constructive
dialogue among everyone who\'s here in a positive way to move the field
forward and I\'m going to stop there and I\'m going to ask Darion
Griffin from AFT to come up and bring up her folks who are going to be
the first session and I hope to hear from many of you today and then
over the next couple weeks if you have additional comments that you want
to get to us. Thank you.