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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 4 page
report discusses and reviews “The Reading Crisis: Why Poor
Children Fall Behind.” The 1990 book addresses the issues
associated with reading achievement in children and why children
from lower-income homes may be disadvantaged intellectually
because of their home environment despite the fact that they
started in school with the same level of ability as a so-called
“mainstream” child. Bibliography lists 2 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_BWreadin.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
same level of ability as a so-called "mainstream" child. Bibliography lists 2 sources. BWreadin.rtf "The Reading Crisis" By: C.B. Rodgers
- November 2001 -- for more information on using this paper properly! Introduction In 1984, reading expert Jeanne Chall discovered a correlation between textbook
quality and learning. She saw a direct relationship between the years in which textbooks were edited to make them less complex, SAT scores also went down. In an interview for
Time (12/3/84), she notes "They made the curriculum easier, and they made it easier, and they made it easier" (pp. 68) The principal way of making the curriculum easier was
to focus on the textbook, the single item that provides between 70 and 90 percent of the content of a class curriculum. It is the process which has come to
be known as "dumbing down." Bowen (1984) explains: "The roots of dumbing down go back to the 1920s, when schools began systematic testing of students and concluded that the curriculum
was too hard. ...A key instrument was a set of readability formulas designed to measure the difficulty of a text. Most of the formulas are based on three factors: word
length, sentence length and the number of uncommon words. For example, a 15-word sentence or a three-syllable word may be rated too tough for first grade" (pp. 68). "The Reading
Crisis" The fundamental Chall and Baldwin ask in "The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind" is how can America, as a collective society afford to not teach children
to read? Their book reconsiders the issue that has often been referred to in educational circles as the "fourth-grade slump" in reading achievement. The point they make is that the
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