• Evidence-based writing instruction has been shown to: (De Smedt & Van Keer, 2014): • Increase students’ knowledge about writing. • Teach children strategies to plan, write, and revise drafts.
• Foster student enjoyment and motivation to write. • Teach students to set goals and plan while writing. • Engage students in collaborative writing projects. • Capitalize on technological writing tools.
Executive Function • Research shows that executive function—the mental processes that allow us to plan, focus attention, manage tasks, and achieve goals (Cartwright, 2023)—mediate and predict elementary (Altemeier et al., 2008; Wu et al., 2020), middle (Kieffer et al., 2021), and high school students’ oral language, vocabulary, and reading comprehension (Peng et al., 2022). • The three critical components of executive function—working memory (where information is processed), cognitive flexibility (the ability to switch between code- focused and meaning-focused skills), and inhibitory control (ability to control one’s attention)—play an important role in coordinating word recognition and language comprehension (Cartwright, 2023). • This is because word recognition and language comprehension require the ability to pay attention to the organizational structure of language and text (attentional control), create a schema for connecting new ideas to known ideas (working memory), focus on relevant details of a text (inhibitory control), balance code-focused and meaning- focused activities (cognitive flexibility), and come up with a plan for attempting a reading task (Duke & Cartwright, 2021). • A lack of executive function skills can undermine the comprehension process. Fortunately, data indicates that teaching organization, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control can improve reading comprehension on standardized measures (Cartwright, 2023). Learning Science While the Science of Reading movement has informed how children learn to read, we are also guided by the basic principles of how people generally learn and what conditions create the best opportunities for children to absorb and consolidate the new information. Explicit instruction represents a research-verified approach to help master new content material (Archer & Hughes, 2011; Hughes et al., 2017; Rosenshine, 1995). Seven principles of explicit instruction contribute to student literacy achievement: • Activating students’ prior knowledge • Establishing a clear lesson purpose, goals, and expectations • Presenting instruction in small, manageable segments • Drawing student attention to important features of content through modeling and think-aloud
SCHOLASTIC LITERACY FRAMEWORK EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 9
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs