by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 4, 2020 | Blog
The updated version of The Critical Reader: AP® English Language and Composition Edition is now available.
The guide provides a comprehensive review of all the reading and writing skills tested on the revised 2020 version of the exam. It includes a complete chapter dedicated to each type of multiple-choice reading question; a new multiple-choice writing section; and a section devoted to the three essays, with real student samples and detailed scoring analyses based on the new College Board rubric.
Click here to read a preview.
Please note: The primary changes involve the elimination of vocabulary-based, multiple-answer (I, II, III), and rhetoric questions from the reading section; the addition of a multiple-choice writing section; and a switch from a 9- to a 6-point essay-scoring rubric (essays themselves remain the same).
If you already have the 2018/2019 version of this book, we recommend supplementing it with rhetoric questions from SAT Writing and Language passages, ACT English passages, or the Fixing Paragraphs section of the pre-2016. Click here for examples of real essays scored according to the new rubric.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 29, 2020 | Blog, Issues in Education, Phonics
As I alluded to my previous post, the U. Wisconsin-Madison cognitive psychologist and reading specialist Mark Seidenberg has posted a rebuttal to Lucy Calkins’s manifesto “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘Science of Reading’” on his blog. For anyone interested in understanding the most recent front in the reading wars, I strongly recommend both pieces.
What I’d like to focus on here, however, are the ways in which Calkins’s discussion of phonics reveal a startlingly compromised understanding of the subject for someone of her influence and stature.
In recent years, and largely—as Seidenberg explains—in response to threats to her personal reading-instruction empire, Calkins has insisted that she really believes in the importance of systematic phonics, a claim that comes off as somewhat dubious given the obvious emphasis she places on alternate decoding methods, e.g., covering up letters, using context clues, etc. (Claude Goldenberg, the emeritus Stanford Ed School professor who helped author the recent report on Units of Study, also does a good job of showing how Calkins attempts to play to both sides of the reading debate while clearly holding tight to three-cueing methods.)
That’s obviously a problem, but I think the real question is even more fundamental: not just whether Calkins truly supports the teaching of phonics, but whether she understands what phonics is. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 26, 2020 | Blog, Issues in Education, Phonics
I’ve been so wrapped up in trying to finish my AP English book updates these last few weeks that I somehow missed a new front in the reading wars: Emily Hanford recently published another American Public Media article, this one casting a critical look at Columbia University Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins and her enormously lucrative and influential Units of Study program.
Although Calkins claims to be in favor of phonics (when appropriate, as long as it doesn’t interfere with children’s love of reading), her guides for teachers promote a series of methods that effectively embody the three-cueing system.
The cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg, a specialist in reading problems who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has an excellent blog post in which he methodically dismantles Calkins’s attempts to distance herself from three-cueing methods, and demonstrates the extent to which Calkins engages in semantic game-playing. His reading of Calkins’s work also hints at the depth of her misunderstandings about phonics, some of which are rather astounding. I think they’re very important to highlight, and I’d like to do so in another post. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 23, 2020 | Blog
In July of 2015, the math teacher and author of the Truth in American Education blog Barry Garelick wrote an article in which he described the convoluted explanations to simple math problems that students were expected to produce under Common Core, the logic being that the ability to describe one’s mathematical thinking in detail was a sign of “deep understanding.”
As Barry pointed out, however, the process of describing one’s thinking became an end in itself rather a sign of actual comprehension. Essentially, students were being trained to display a set of behaviors that made it appear as if they were thinking deeply, whether or not they truly understood—a phenomenon he termed “rote understanding.”
I still think this is one of the most brilliant phrases I’ve come across in the edu-blogosphere; it perfectly captures the superficial, performative quality that is often held up as a signal of “true education” or “authentic learning.”
So with Barry as my inspiration, allow me to propose a term of my own: ladies and gentlemen, I give you “rote creativity.” (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 18, 2020 | Phonics
Attention! This post has moved.
It can now be found at: https://www.breakingthecode.com/names-places-and-phonics/
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 5, 2020 | Blog, College Admissions, SAT II
I was browsing through the admissions section of Inside Higher Ed recently when I came across a brief article announcing that Caltech had decided to move from requiring two SAT IIs (one math and one science) to making the exams optional. Now, over the last few years virtually every selective college—with the exception of a few engineering schools—has downgraded SAT from “required” to “recommended.” The fact that one more school is jumping on the bandwagon might not seem particularly noteworthy, just one incidence of the backlash against standardized testing.
Because the story involves Caltech in particular, however, it’s somewhat more interesting than it might at first appear. Not only because Caltech has traditionally been seen as a bastion of uncompromising rigor, but also because it’s difficult to see the move as separable from the school’s downward trajectory in the US News and World Report Ranking over the past 20 years, especially over the last decade. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jan 1, 2020 | Issues in Education
A while back, a colleague recounted to me the following story: On the train to school one morning she found herself sitting next to a fellow teacher, one who taught AP® Government. They chatted about their classes and upcoming exams, and at one point her colleague began lamenting the fact that he was forced to make students learn facts like, say, the number of members in the House of Representatives. As he explained, his former students wrote to him with great enthusiasm about the political science courses they were taking in college. Why, he wondered, couldn’t he teach a course that generated that kind of excitement in students? Why couldn’t he just skip to the good stuff and focus on “real learning”?
I can’t say I was surprised by their conversation: I’m perfectly familiar with the trope of the teacher who proudly proclaims that it doesn’t matter whether students remember whatthey learned in his class—what really counts is the love of the subject and perhaps the habits of mind they acquired, not all those pesky little facts. But the incident stuck in my mind, and it also prompted me to finally try to put down some things that I’ve been trying to find a way to convey in less than a book-length post for a very, very long time now.
When I first discovered E.D. Hirsch’s work back about seven or eight years ago, I was already well acquainted with the deep-seated anti-intellectualism that runs through American society, but I did not fully grasp the extent to which facts themselves were maligned within the educational system. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 14, 2019 | Blog, Phonics
Let me start here.
A while back, a colleague told me the following anecdote: a college classmate of her partner was visiting from San Francisco, and the three of them had dinner together. At some point, the conversation turned toward the classmate’s middle school-aged son, who had an interest in STEM, and the classmate said something along the lines of, “Isn’t it great that schools count computer science as a language now?”
“Wait,” my colleague replied. “Languages have four main components: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. CS has the reading and writing aspects but not the other two pieces. It’s not really a language in that sense.”
The classmate was taken aback. No one in the Bay Area had ever challenged him on that point—it was just taken as an article of faith that learning to code was an acceptable (and likely superior) alternative to learning, say, Spanish.
“Whoa,” he said, “I’ll have to think about that one.”
That’s part one.
Part two is that last November, Richard was kind enough to let me observe at the Fluency Factory, and as I observed him and his tutors work, that story kept coming back to me.
On my first day there, before I watched any actual teaching, I got into a conversation with a tutor who also worked as classroom teacher. As we talked about the kinds of reading issues she encountered, she mentioned that at the international school in South America where she had student-taught, the teacher she worked with required students to stop and think before speaking.
Initially, the kids were baffled, the tutor explained. They weren’t angry, just perplexed. They were accustomed to just sounding off automatically about whatever happened to pop into their heads; no one had ever insisted that they consider their thoughts carefully before talking. But they learned to do it. These kids were six and seven years old, and reading/writing really well in both Spanish and English.
Over the next few days, I watched the Fluency Factory tutors work valiantly with lots of struggling readers, generally between the ages of seven and thirteen. In a lot of ways, it was like a redux of all of the issues I saw as a tutor: misreading words, skipping words, skipping lines, guessing at unfamiliar words, vocabulary problems, background-knowledge problems…
I was consistently stunned by the similarities between these younger students and some of my own former students, who were high school juniors and seniors. I had known in some abstract sense that they were reading at perhaps a seventh-grade level, but watching those tutors have the exact same conversations I had had with my students, except with actual middle-schoolers (and again, a mostly affluent group), drove home the extent to which those students had been stunted academically. It also made me wonder about how bad things were with the kids who weren’t getting any intervention.
The other thing that repeatedly struck me was the students’ difficulty in reading aloud.
During the last couple of years that I tutored, after I had learned a certain amount about phonics and gotten a decent sense of what sorts of problems to look out for, I began asking new students scoring below a certain threshold—usually about 550 on the SAT, 24 or so on the ACT—to read out loud for me so that I could see whether they omitted/inserted/confused words, or guessed on unfamiliar terms. What I didn’t really focus on, however, was prosody—that is, whether they could read with conversational intonation.
As I listened to Fluency Factory students read, however, I couldn’t help but notice how jerky their speech was: they paid almost no attention to punctuation, nor did they seem to recognize where the pauses and emphases within a sentence would naturally occur.
They were opening their mouths and words were coming out, but the act had nothing to do with real speech.
It was as.
If they had.
No.
Concept of where thoughts.
Began and.
Ended.
Or, for that matter, that written language was even intended to convey thoughts.
For the youngest/weakest students, I chalked this up to the fact that the mere act of decoding required so much brainpower that they had nothing left over to make sense of what they were reading, never mind doing the two simultaneously.
But the older kids mostly read this way too, and it started to freak me out a little.
It was as if, at some level, they did not really grasp that reading is written speech.
Assuming that their out-loud reading was a general approximation of their silent reading, that certainly explained a lot of their comprehension problems.
Of course, I understood intellectually that they were not reading this way on purpose, that what I was hearing was a result of their cognitive overload, but on a visceral level I found it really disturbing to hear language fragmented in that particular manner.
On multiple occasions, I realized that the jerkiness had become so ingrained in my ear that I almost started talking that way.
At any rate, it was striking to watch how their reading immediately became more fluent when they took turns reading with a tutor. They seemed to absorb the more conversational tone by osmosis. Had decoding been the only issue, that wouldn’t have happened—it wasn’t as if they were merely repeating the same words after the tutor. Yet when they reread the passage aloud again, this time entirely on their own, those gains inevitably evaporated after a couple of sentences.
I’ve written a fair amount about the connection between reading and listening, but until now, I haven’t thought quite so much about the connection between reading and speaking. I think, however, that it’s yet another piece of the reading puzzle—and a seriously neglected one at that.
As I’ve pointed out before, the language that appears in written texts is often very different from spoken language. It tends to be more syntactically complex and to contain vocabulary that students don’t necessarily encounter in everyday life. As a result, it’s hardly a surprise that even very competent decoders can have difficulty recognizing how a given line of text would be spoken (as I saw constantly when I was tutoring the SAT). And as texts become increasingly complex as students advance through the middle grades, they become increasingly divorced from spoken language.
When I wrote about this issue before, I approached it only in terms of listening: my question was whether the denigration (and in some cases the outright prohibition) of direct, teacher-led instruction, and the obsessive emphasis on student-centered groupwork, had inadvertently inhibited students’ exposure to the kind of formal, structured adult speech that bridges the gap to more sophisticated written language.
I still think that’s a major problem, but now I have to wonder whether the type of speech students are expected to produce isn’t also playing a role. If students generally have little opportunity to listen to the type of speech that overlaps with written language, then they have even less experience creating it.
In other words, if students are primarily addressing their peers informally during class—and rarely or never required to, say, give structured presentations to their entire class or (horror of horrors) sit for oral exams—then they are also not getting practice in producing the type of speech that approximates writing. And if the spoken-written connection is never fully made and/or reinforced, students then have difficulty translating words on a page into something resembling conversational speech. Lack of exposure to sophisticated texts in turn further inhibits the development of their speech, and a vicious cycle ensues.
When this idea occurred to me, I couldn’t help but contrast the pedagogies that currently dominate in the American educational system with those of France and especially Italy, countries where there is a significant emphasis on oral presentations and exams at the secondary level. (I don’t have the same level of familiarity with any other country’s school system, so I can’t comment on what it’s like elsewhere.) Students are expected to address their classmates as well as adults using formal, structured language, and to present their ideas orally with a striking degree of eloquence using—this is key—linguistic features otherwise found only in academic writing (e.g., “We have seen x and will now turn to a consideration of y…”).
That’s not to say that French teenagers don’t still mumble incomprehensibly sometimes (and boy can they mumble!), but at a systemic level, it’s a different mindset and set of expectations. And regardless of the drawbacks these systems may have—and I am by no means suggesting they are above reproach—it’s hard to deny that they are set up, on a broad scale, to systematically inculcate a particular set of verbal capacities from multiple angles and in mutually reinforcing ways.
Indeed, when listening to French adults discuss, say, politics or philosophy (or wine), it’s hard not to notice how closely their speech contains what are often only written constructions. The relationship between the various aspects of reading and speaking and, ultimately, thinking is evident, in a way that makes the links impossible to ignore.
All this is to say that I no longer believe that reading is the “three-dimensional problem” that it has traditionally been described as. Rather, I think it’s even more complex. As is true for any language, becoming truly proficient in English requires mastery of four domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—that build on and feed into one another. And the tendency to treat reading as a skill that can be acquired in isolation, without significant work on the other three domains, is even more of a fool’s errand than I understood even just a short while ago.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 1, 2019 | Blog
Just wondering if anyone out there might know the answer to this.
From what I can glean from documentsl released by the College Board as well as various online discussions, the 2020 AP Lang/Comp test will be removing two kinds of multiple-choice questions: vocabulary in context, and something referred to as “identification.”
I cannot, however, seem to find out precisely what “identification” refers to.
My best guess is that it involves identification of rhetorical devices, but I can’t exactly remove a chapter from my AP Lang/Comp book unless I’m totally sure that the material is no longer tested!
Any AP English teachers out there (or people who know AP English teachers) who might be able to shed some light on this? I’d like to get the updated book out sooner rather than later.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 1, 2019 | Blog
Complete explanations for the end-of-chapter exercises in The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar, Fifth Edition and The Complete Guide to ACT English, Third Edition, are now available online via the Books page for $4.95 each.
Click here to purchase explanations for the SAT book.
Click here to purchase explanations for the ACT book.
Please note that to access the explanations, you must return to the main item page and follow the link provided.
If you purchased one of the new editions (SAT grammar, 5th ed., ACT English, 4th ed.), this does NOT apply to you; explanations are included in the books themselves.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 16, 2019 | Issues in Education, Phonics
Update, 11/20: I realized after I posted this piece that the problem I discuss in this post—namely, that most people don’t know what the three-cueing system is—ironically made the piece hard to follow. So if you’re unfamiliar with three-cueing and want the full background, see this post first.
If you want the short version, it’s this: basically, the three-cueing system is derived from the observation that skilled use a variety of “clues,” including spelling, syntax, background knowledge, to draw meaning from texts. Over time, that idea became profoundly distorted into the notion that children should be discouraged from using all the letters in a word to determine what it literally says, and should instead look at only the first/last letters, along with other contextual clues—usually pictures—to identify it. I’m simplifying here, but that’s the gist.
Original Post
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine attended a mandatory development workshop for AP French teachers. During a discussion of the previous year’s main essay, she learned that the average score had been exceptionally low—a 1, in fact—because so many students had confused the main verb in the prompt, s’habiller (to get dressed), with habiter (to live in or inhabit).
Now, the s’ at the beginning of the former signals a reflexive verb (in French, one literally dresses oneself), whereas habiter can never be reflexive—from a logical perspective, one cannot live in oneself, and so this construction makes no sense. (Note to anyone new to this blog: I have a college degree in French and started out tutoring that language; the English thing happened more or less by accident.)
Nevertheless, an enormous number of French AP exam-takers failed to notice either these very important linguistic clues (despite the fact that students at this level should theoretically be able to recognize reflexive constructions easily) or their commonsense implications.
Beyond that, s’habiller and habiter are such incredibly common verbs that that a student sitting for the AP exam should obviously know the difference between them.
So why did so many students mix them up? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 2, 2019 | Blog, Issues in Education
Attention! This post has moved.
It can now be found here: https://www.breakingthecode.com/some-thoughts-on-the-2019-naep-reading-decline/
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 29, 2019 | Blog
I’ve received a couple of inquiries about the updated AP English Lang/Comp exam, so I’m putting this out there now: yes, I am aware that the test is being updated for 2020, and yes, I will be revising my guide for that exam. I’m aiming to get it out by around February 2020.
In the meantime, if you are self-studying for the exam and absolutely cannot live without a book now, you can use a combination of the current AP Lang/Comp book and either The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar, fourth or fifth edition OR The Complete Guide to ACT English.
The major change to the AP exam involves the introduction of SAT/ACT-style writing passages, and from the document released by the College Board, it appears that there will be a heavy focus on “is this sentence relevant?” questions. These are discussed in great detail in the grammar books. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 5, 2019 | Issues in Education, Phonics
Lest anyone should have read my last few posts and concluded that my depiction of the state of American reading instruction was exaggerated in some way, I direct you to the video below. If you’ve ever wondered why so many children struggle, this pretty much says it all; you basically get to watch reading problems being created in real time.
Notice that a couple of times, children attempt to use the letters sound out words, but the teacher reminds them to focus on the pictures instead. The clear message is that sounding out words is a strategy to be avoided.
The only times she acknowledges that letters have something to do with how the words are said is when she tells children to look at the first and last letters in conjunction with the pictures; the fact that the sounds in the middle of a word also play a role in how it is said is not mentioned, ever. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 4, 2019 | Issues in Education, Phonics, Reading Wars, The Science of Reading
A couple of days ago, I got curious about the state of phonics instruction in New York City schools and started googling away. I learned all sorts of fascinating things about the respective reigns of Joel Klein and Carmen Farina, and about the ongoing and pernicious influence of Lucy Calkins/Reading Workshop and Columbia Teachers College.
I also came across a well-intentioned an article in Chalkbeat about the struggles of some Brooklyn parents to get their dyslexic children into appropriate programs. The content of the article was disheartening but fairly predictable—what I found more interesting was the semantic confusion the writers displayed in a discussion of balanced literacy vs. phonics, and it got me thinking about how the standard reading-war rhetorical tropes get wielded.
Here is the article’s more-or-less typical spiel:
Balanced literacy advocates believe learning to read is a natural process, that enjoyment of reading is paramount, and that helping students understand the meaning of text is more important than teaching them the mechanics of reading.
But experts question whether it’s the best method for struggling readers.
The opposing approach, rooted in phonics-based instruction, emphasizes decoding how letters correspond to sound and how the sounds connect to form words. It can be dry and repetitive, but many experts say the method establishes a firm base that benefits a wide array of students.
Many students can learn to read through a balanced literacy approach, particularly when it’s complemented with additional reading and vocabulary work at home, the experts say. But for those who struggle — including those with dyslexia — balanced literacy can feel like being thrown into the deep end of a pool.
There are a few things to notice here:
First of all, the (conclusively debunked) belief that learning to read is “a natural process” is primarily associated with the Whole Language movement (although it is likely held by many proponents of Balanced Literacy as well); Balanced Literacy, in contrast, represents the attempt to bring an end to the reading wars by reconciling phonics and whole language.
Although in practice it often favors the latter at the expense of the former, in theory it pays lip service to both. But if education reporters for a publication dedicated to education cannot even keep their terminology straight, how can the public at large be expected to do so?
Second, note the the both-sides-ism (some people believe x, but others believe y), which clearly comes down on the side of “Balanced Literacy.” Even if the authors do mention grudgingly that “experts question” whether balanced literacy [sic] is “the best method for struggling readers,” nothing is mentioned about other readers—only that “many students can learn to read through a balanced literacy approach.”
Given that experts believe (and in fact have ample evidence to support) that phonics is the most effective means to teach decoding period, not just for children who struggle, this is a rather serious omission—especially since the writers link to Emily Hanford’s original piece on phonics for American Public Media, which makes that viewpoint abundantly clear. But it is as if their distaste for the premise is so ingrained that they are unwilling, or perhaps even unable, to acknowledge the actual argument being made. (Perhaps they are engaged in “making meaning”?)
Again: if education reporters cannot even lay out well-established views accurately, how can the public understand what is at stake?
Even when phonics is acknowledged to be helpful, it’s presented as the educational equivalent of spinach: good for you, perhaps, but also kind of icky. In contrast, whole language is something like a slice of pizza: gooey and tasty and oh-so-satisfying.
This is fundamentally a rhetorical problem.
Traditionally, the whole language/balanced literacy faction has played the rhetorical game much more effectively than the phonics people, appropriating the lexicon of romanticism (naturalness, wholesomeness, enjoyment) to their advantage and assigning the role of artificiality (rote learning, memorization, drill ’n kill) to their opponents, who are forced into the defensive position.
What’s interesting, though, is that the reality is exactly the opposite:
English contains about 250 graphemes—letters or letter-combinations that represent specific sounds—approximately 70 of which are commonly used. That might sound like a lot to memorize, but a child who masters these correspondences can sound out literally thousands of words and take a decent stab at many more that are not perfectly phonetic.
In contrast, a student who never masters sound-letter correspondences will essentially need to memorize, by rote, often in a dry and repetitive fashion, every new word as a random bunch of squiggles disconnected from the sounds they make, and over the course of their educations, they will need to do this thousands upon thousands of time.
Why have members of the phonics camp not seized on this fact? Why have they not shouted it from the rooftops (or from their Facebook accounts)? Perhaps because they take it as self-evident that if they just present the science, then people will listen , particularly if said people claim to be in favor of “critical thinking.”
They assume that if method x is shown to be more effective than method y, then of course schools will want to adopt it.
They also assume that because the logic behind teaching phonics seems so obvious—you can’t focus on meaning unless you can figure out what the words say—that there is no need to explain things further.
Those are reasonable assumptions, but they rest on the notions that 1) people are moved by logical arguments; and that 2) that the desire to actually solve problems outweighs institutional inertia and/or the instinct to cling to existing beliefs, no matter how misguided.
Effectiveness is beside the point here. (Besides, what is effectiveness anyway, and how can it truly be measured? Isn’t it more important that children learn to love reading than that they know how to break words into little pieces? Isn’t learning the point of education to inspire children to love learning so that they can become lifelong learners?)
I also suspect that proponents of phonics systematically underestimate the hold that romantic ideology has on the American classroom: anything presented as natural is assumed to be good; anything presented as artificial (sometimes including school itself) is presumed to be detrimental.
These assumptions are so deeply embedded in the discourse surrounding education that they must be acknowledged and dealt with directly if any headway is to be made.
So here is my modest proposal: if proponents of phonics want to make any progress with the general public, it is necessary to flip the existing narrative on its head and insist that PHONICS = CRITICAL THINKING (applying knowledge to novel situations) whereas WHOLE LANGUAGE/BALANCED LITERACY = ROTE MEMORIZATION (random squiggles disconnected from authentic language).
This narrative needs to get repeated over and over, ad nauseam. Don’t try to sound smart, don’t go on about science, or logic, or peer-reviewed journals, just “MEMORIZING WHOLE WORDS BY ROTE IS BORING AND UNNATURAL.”
It might be too late—but still, you just might stand a fighting chance.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 2, 2019 | Issues in Education, Reading (SAT & ACT)
Of all the difficulties involved in tutoring SAT reading, the one that perplexed me the most was the inordinate difficulty certain students seemed to have in grasping the notion that the answers to the questions were *in the passage,* as opposed to in their head or somewhere on the other side of the room. As I wrote about in a fit of irritation many years ago, not long after I started this blog, it literally did not seem to occur to them to look back at the text, and I could not figure out how to get them to do otherwise.
That many tutoring programs treated the location of the answers as some kind of amazing secret baffled me even more. Where other than in the passage would the answer be? How was it possible that so many students seemed to struggle not just with understanding what various texts said, but with the idea that answers to reading questions were based on the specific words they contained? How could such absolutely fundamental notions of reading be so lacking that they could actually be packaged as tricks? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 25, 2019 | Tutoring, Tutors
1) Teach real lessons; don’t just go over practice tests
Yes, the amount of time you can spend just teaching material is obviously subject to time constraints; and yes, there is a small subset of mostly high-achieving students who just need to take practice tests and go over what they missed. However, virtually all students in the low-middle score ranges are missing specific pieces of knowledge, and getting taught the material while working through actual questions that involve additional, potentially unfamiliar pieces of knowledge, is often overly taxing for their working memories—there are just too many pieces to juggle. Unless you are very pressed for time, use the student’s diagnostic to figure out what they actually need to learn, and spend some time just teaching it to them before gradually relating it to the test. Repeat for as many concepts as necessary, gradually moving to full-length sections and then tests as students become comfortably with the material.
(more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 15, 2019 | Blog
Announcement: the new editions of The Critical Reader (4th ed.) and The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar (5th ed.) are now available. Please note that orders placed through thecriticalreader.com will have longer-than-usual shipping times (expect approximately 5-7 days for delivery) for the next couple of weeks, until the new editions are stocked at our storage/shipping facility.
If you need the books urgently in the meantime, please order from Amazon: the reading book can be found here, and the grammar book here. (As of 9/20, the books do not appear to be consistently appearing at the top of Amazon searches even when the exact titles are entered, so we recommend that you use the links provided here to navigate to them.) (more…)