Arlington Parents for Education

"Watch a fluent reader glide through a page, and you see almost none of what makes comprehension possible. Decoding has become so automatic that the reader scarcely experiences it as decoding. Thousands of words are recognized and understood almost instantly. And beneath it all lies an immense store of background knowledge, silently supplying context, filling gaps, resolving ambiguities, and allowing the reader to make inferences without consciously deciding to make them. None of this is visible in the way that asking a question, making a prediction, or stopping to summarize is visible. And therein lies the fatal instructional mistake that has held back reading achievement for decades: We observed what good readers do and tried to teach struggling readers to imitate those behaviors, while paying far less attention to what good readers know. Said differently, reading comprehension is not a skill we teach. It is a condition we create." No one explains this better than @rpondiscio.

As today's grim PISA results fill your feed, don't miss @C_Hendrick's insights on the increase in "hasty readers": '“Hasty reading” doesn’t mean kids who read quicker or students who get wrong answers but rather a kind of deadly combination of the two. It means students who are giving answers to questions that they haven’t really spent enough time on to answer them correctly or accurately. (This I think raises massive questions about the validity of PISA assessments but that is for another day.) It says a lot about what kids value as much as their ability to focus. A poor reading of this will be some version of the ‘kids today’ argument which will take a behavioural measure and pathologize it onto ‘kids cant concentrate any more because screens’ or they all have “TikTok brain” and cannot concentrate on anything for more than 2 seconds. This might be true at some level but the hasty reader metric cannot tell you that because it’s a measure of behaviour not a brain scan. What it can tell you however is that a particular strategy has become very common now with 15 year olds: scan and skim for a plausible answer, click and then on to the next question. Rinse and repeat. Interestingly, this behaviour seems to have now generalised. Between 2018 and 2025, scores on the reading test declined the most on test items which used longer source texts (evaluate and reflect tasks) and ones with simple MCQs. Hasty responses are also evident in the Maths test where there is a paragraph setting up a problem. For me, this is what you get when you base a whole educational model on skills rather than knowledge. If what you are reading is less important than how you read it, then the act of reading becomes a procedure to be executed on whatever happens to be in front of you. For decades now, the way in which we have taught kids to read, (and the way in which we have taught teachers to teach kids how to read) has been defined by a set of nameable, transferable strategies or skills in which the reader is encouraged to use the question stem to skim for the ‘main idea’, scan for key words, infer meaning, and ‘compare and contrast themes’. Is it any wonder then that we have cultivated a generation of “hasty” readers?"'