Overview:
Student learning is a practical endeavor centered on acquiring information and the skills to use it to achieve specific goals
Longitudinal assessments of preK-12 students’ academic achievements show minuscule progress since the now famous report, A Nation at Risk (1983), warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.” What makes these assessments even more troubling is the relentless endeavor to improve school education, at least since the early 1980s. Could it be that generations of teachers and students nationwide have been misled by incessant school reforms into seeking education in the wrong direction? The short answer is, “yes!” Student Learning is a practical endeavor centered on acquiring information and the skills to use it to achieve specific goals. However, school reforms have been promulgating a misleadingly narrow notion of academic study that focuses on gaining content knowledge but disregards the practical purpose it is intended to serve.
Practical Purpose of Student Learning
Consider, for example, a fifth-grade science lesson on the gravitational force of Earth. In numerous school districts across the United States, teachers follow the Next Generation Science Standards and center their lesson plan on the core idea that “the gravitational force of Earth acting on an object near Earth’s surface pulls that object toward the planet’s center.” This idea is intended to solve the problem of explaining how inertial bodies change their speed and direction.
As developed originally by Isaac Newton, the idea was part of the endeavor to develop a unified, quantitative theory that explains the motion of celestial and terrestrial bodies. However, students who are not taught that the idea of gravitational force is intended to serve these purposes are likely to consider it a mere statement of fact. To make sense of the idea, they use their linguistic skills and experience, thinking, perhaps, that Earth has a hidden arm by which it pulls objects to its surface, or that it pulls them in a manner analogous to the way a truck pulls a cart. Or they may realize that they just do not know how to square their everyday experiences of pulling mechanisms with the scientific idea of gravitation and choose to simply memorize it for an upcoming test.
The Pedagogy of Learning
The pedagogical disregard for the purpose of student learning ideas (and other types of information) are intended to serve is analogous to having students examine a tool without paying attention to its use. Students inevitably gain a limited understanding of the information. They develop the habit of assimilating new ideas to the knowledge they already have rather than applying their knowledge and skills to learn how new ideas enable them to achieve new goals. Their academic progress is undermined, their motivation to engage with academic life diminishes, and they become alienated from the academic culture that school education represents.
Reading Comprehension is Critical
Reading comprehension is the most critical area in which pedagogical evasion of the intended purpose of information undermines students’ education. In our society, reading is undoubtedly an indispensable skill for benefiting from science, the humanities, and language arts achievements. However, according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, two-thirds of 4th and 8th graders cannot read proficiently, and earlier national assessments show that the level of students’ reading proficiency has barely risen since the 1970s.
Among the various factors contributing to the chronic mediocrity of students’ reading skills, one has been perpetuated by efforts to reform reading pedagogy. Common pedagogical approaches center on developing students’ language skills, critical thinking, and ability to use their background knowledge to construct a mental representation of the events, situations, or scenes depicted in the text. Having a mental representation that enables the students to correctly answer questions about textual content is commonly regarded by reading experts as an indication of adequate reading comprehension.
Texts are Interpersonal Communication
However, texts are not mere conveyors of information. They are—first and foremost—media of interpersonal communication and, as such, are intended to affect readers’ emotions and behaviors. A joke, for instance, is meant to make people laugh, and the scene it depicts is a means to that end. As the example of teaching about Earth’s gravitational force suggests, an informational text does not merely state some facts.
Rather, it is meant to provide readers with the conceptual means to further examine or explain facts from a particular standpoint, solve a problem, guide behavior, develop a technology, or explain the rationale behind a policy. And a literary text is not merely a work of fiction. Rather, it conveys an imaginary situation to enable readers to reflect from a new perspective on their own behaviors and lives, to gain new insights into social situations and problems, or simply to be entertained and escape for a moment from their stressful daily lives. Reading pedagogy urges students to construct the meaning of the text, but it employs a misleadingly narrow notion of meaning that undermines students’ ability to comprehend what the text is meant to achieve.
By the time children reach school age, their conduct at home and in their community demonstrates that they know how to find information and communicate with others to achieve their everyday goals. They go to school to advance their ability to promote their well-being as individuals and members of society. But school pedagogy’s misleading view of information—especially in the context of student learning to read and reading to learn—obstructs the endeavor to provide students with the education they need.
Practical Oriented Pedagogy
What schools need, then, is not to undergo yet another reform, but rather to provide a more practically oriented pedagogy focused on student learning that helps students learn how to value and benefit from the cultural heritage the curriculum makes available to them.
Michael Ben-Chaim has a PhD degree in history and philosophy of science (University of Cambridge, UK). In addition to his research and teaching in that field, he has taught English language arts in a high school for students with moderate learning disabilities in Massachusetts and worked as a consultant to Pearson Education. He currently works as an independent scholar. His work focuses on basic issues of student learning at the elementary and secondary school grades, with special reference to reading comprehension, science education, and civic literacy.
