A new study suggests that standardized reading tests often fail to reflect what students have actually learned—and mislead educators about what to teach.
An increasing number of schools are shifting to a new kind of elementary curriculum—one that focuses on rich content, including social studies and science topics, rather than reading comprehension “skills” like finding the main idea of a text. Teachers who switch to a content-rich curriculum are often amazed by the academic knowledge their young students acquire and the sophisticated vocabulary they spout.
But skeptics argue there’s little evidence content-rich curricula boost reading comprehension. Sure, they say, kids may acquire knowledge of the topics covered in the curriculum, but does that enable them to understand texts on other topics?
“If Mrs. Smith’s third grade spends a year studying wombats,” reading researcher Tim Shanahan has written, “the kids may be superstars when reading on that topic, but what about other texts? Wombat knowledge isn’t likely to improve comprehension of texts on the U.S. Civil War, 2020 elections, or relativity.”
It’s true that kind of “transfer” should be the ultimate test of whether a knowledge-building approach boosts comprehension. But we’ve been trying to use that kind of test to measure incremental academic progress, and it’s led us down a self-defeating path.
Standardized reading tests rely on passages on random topics that aren’t tied to anything kids have learned in school. In fact, they’re designed to avoid those topics, because the idea is that the tests measure reading comprehension skills—not knowledge. When kids don’t do well on those tests, the typical diagnosis is that they need more work on the skills the tests purport to measure.
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