Faced with these troubling statistics, organizations like the non-profit association ReadWorks are working to improve reading comprehension in children, in hopes of addressing problems before they start. To achieve this goal, ReadWorks researches, develops, and provides high-quality reading comprehension lessons and curriculum-based informational and literary passages for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The lessons are directly available to educators free of charge, and their impact on student achievement and teacher effectiveness is constantly measured and improved. To date, ReadWorks has reached over 10 million students across the country.
Literacy in the United States is at serious risk. According to statistics compiled by such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Education Association, half of all American adults cannot read above an eighth-grade level. Others fare even worse: over 20 percent of adults read at or below the fifth-grade level, which is far below the level typically required to earn a living wage. Furthermore, studies have found that students are four times more likely to drop out of high school if they have not developed proficient reading skills by the third grade. With an estimated annual cost of $20 billion to businesses and taxpayers, illiteracy and poor reading comprehension are threatening to become a full-blown social crisis.
Faced with these troubling statistics, organizations like the non-profit association ReadWorks are working to improve reading comprehension in children, in hopes of addressing problems before they start. To achieve this goal, ReadWorks researches, develops, and provides high-quality reading comprehension lessons and curriculum-based informational and literary passages for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The lessons are directly available to educators free of charge, and their impact on student achievement and teacher effectiveness is constantly measured and improved. To date, ReadWorks has reached over 10 million students across the country. A prominent national nonprofit organization dedicated to improving reading comprehension in the United States, ReadWorks delivers valuable resources and support to teachers and helps to maximize academic achievement among their students. The organization offers a broad array of educational tools, ranging from research-based lessons and units to nonfiction and literary passages. ReadWorks also formulates in-depth question sets designed to evaluate students’ understanding of complex texts.
Question sets encourage students to ask and answer questions about the texts they read, all while singling out the pertinent details and deemphasizing the less important ones. Question sets also support students’ understanding of text structures and help students make high-level inferences about the evidence presented in the text. In addition to demonstrating how contextual clues can be used to deduce the meaning of vocabulary words, question sets allow students to complete open-response answers based on a thoughtful evaluation of the text. To learn more about ReadWorks, visit the official website at www.readworks.org. |
AuthorWilson Neely Corporate lawyer and Dealmaker of the Week Archives
July 2015
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