Pre-Application Meeting Videos and TranscriptsApril 22, 2002
DR. SWEET: Welcome to OERI. I know some of you are traveling from quite a distance and we're glad you made it here safely. There are thousands of people in town in case you did not know that, it's protest weekend. So, I'm glad you're here.
Most of you probably already know that we have new leadership here in OERI and before I launch into the program specifics I want to take this opportunity to introduce them to you and let you know a little bit about who they are and where they came from.
We have a new Assistant Secretary, his name is Russ Whitehurst and he was Leading Professor of Psychology in Pediatrics and the Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before his appointment here in D.C. as Assistant Secretary. He also served on the faculty of the University of New South Wales in Australia and as Academic Vice President of the Merrill-Palmer Institute in Detroit. He has been Editor in Chief of the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly and Developmental Review and you, I know, know that he's published quite widely. He's known for his research on language, reading and pre-reading development in preschool children.
And he's probably best known for having developed the technique that's known as diologic reading. It's a validated technique and it's used very widely and it's a method of shared picture book reading that enhances children's language development. So, I am very privileged and pleased to introduce you to OERI's new Assistant Secretary, Russ.
DR. WHITEHURST: Well, I'm glad you're here. I hope we do have some folks who stream in because we have some money to give away and we'd like lots of competitors for it. I'm very excited that we are able to launch this new initiative. It will be, if our funding requests for the '03 year is approved, will be our largest single investment in research in OERI. We have budgeted $4.5 million for it this year and have asked for $20 million for next year with the idea that that amount would be invested over at least a ten year period to move this research initiative forward.
Why do we need research in reading comprehension? Presumably I'm preaching to the choir because you're here thinking that you're just the right people to do it, but I do think we have a significant educational problem that needs to be faced in this area of reading. We have now developed a large and, I think, persuasive research base having to do with the processes by which children come to break the reading code and we certainly have a fair amount of research and reading comprehension, but the reading comprehension research has not had associated with it the power and leverage on education as has been the case for the code breaking research.
And we certainly have challenges to face in the area of reading comprehension. I was taking a look at the National Assessment for Education Progress Results just before I came down here. The most recent full test that looked at 4th graders, 8th graders and 12th graders was conducted in 1998. We find that among white 4th graders 49 percent perform at the proficient level or the advanced level in terms of reading comprehension. Black kids, that figure is 11 percent.
Well, there are two interesting numbers there. 49 percent, that is only half of Caucasian children at the 4th grade are reading proficiently and then just the, I think for a nation, embarrassing number of 89 percent of black kids are not. That represents a problem that I think we have to face as a nation and that we need to do something about. Very similar figures at the 8th grade, 45 percent proficient or advanced for white kids, 12 percent for black kids. Grade 12, 54 percent versus 19 percent.
If you look inside the NAEP you'll find that it is largely an assessment of reading comprehension and in some cases quite challenging reading comprehension for the age ranges that are tested. Example, for 4th graders a piece of narrative called Blue Crabs, I won't read it all for you, it goes on for a couple of pages. Nearly every day last summer my nephew Keith and I went crabbing in a creek on the New Jersey coast. We used a wire trap baited with scraps of fish and meat. Each time a crab entered the trap to eat we pulled the doors closed. We cooked and ate the crabs we caught. It goes on for paragraph and paragraph after that.
Fairly challenging material after which children are asked to construct answers, open-ended, answers to open-ended questions such as what's the most interesting thing you learned about crabs from reading this material. Clearly, simply being able to decode text, to sound out words, will not get you through this material.
And as I was looking at this before I came in I remembered a picture book that I had read to my older child when he was five years old. It was called Miss Rumfius and there was a passage in there, a sentence in there that caught my eye and I still remember it. It was this: She sent away to the very best seed house for five bushels of lupine seed. Who is the she, what's a seed house and, for goodness sakes, what is lupine? I didn't know that one, myself, I had to look it up.
So, the point here is that there's a lot that children need to be able to do cognitively in order to comprehend text. Significant numbers of children are not able to do that proficiently with the proportion of children who are able to do that very much biased in terms of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background.
The performance of children in terms of reading comprehension nationally has been static for the last ten years. So, whatever we know about reading comprehension, and we do know some things about it, we don't know enough and whatever we know has not been translated sufficiently into educational practice to have an impact on these very real problems. That's why in the context of the Rand Report that was sponsored by OERI on reading comprehension we decided to launch this initiative. And the question will be, can those of you here and those of you who are not here but will apply for this money, use these funds to establish a program of research that will answer both fundamental and applied questions about reading comprehension in a way that is translatable into practice, that has an impact in classrooms and other learning situations so that were I to be here 15 years from now, God forbid, and were called to task by Congress on how we spent this $20 million a year and what we got from it, we would be able to pull up the NAEP results and say, look, it was only about two years after we started funding this that the gaps started decreasing.
I say that not entirely tongue in cheek as I am very ambitious about this research initiative, both what you can do as researchers as well as what that knowledge can do in terms of changing educational practice and that's the challenge we all have. My challenge is to continue to give you the money to do this research and to provide some guidance here in OERI to see it is well spent and your job is to do that research and do it in such a way that it is a very high quality, very high relevance and, in fact, has an impact on the learning of children. So, thank you. I'm very pleased that you're here and I'm sure you'll have an interesting afternoon.
Thank you, again.
Pre-Application Meeting Videos and Transcripts
This page last modified May 30, 2002 (jer)