Read More about our Faculty's Work to Further Literacy

Content-driven Literacy

by Margaret S. Crocco, Ph.D.

Margaret S Crocco

Researchers, educators, and parents all know that literacy problems span the school years. By high school, being unable to read at grade level undermines a student’s ability to engage in higher-order thinking, especially critical thinking in the disciplinary-based subject matter that lies at the core of the high school experience (Heller & Greenleaf, 2007). In fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007) has reported that three-quarters of twelfth graders demonstrate rudimentary reading skills, with only 35 percent of twelfth graders nationwide reading proficiently.

For students from ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds, who are a growing percentage of the school-aged population both in Iowa and across the nation, literacy challenges become major hurdles in mastering conceptually oriented subjects such as science and social studies. Literacy problems among English-language learners contribute to elevated school dropout rates, with far-reaching consequences for earning capacity across the lifespan (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004).

Most teacher education programs emphasize literacy preparation for pre-service teachers at both the elementary and secondary levels. In research I did with a team from Teachers College, Columbia University (Marri et al., 2011), we found that pre-service teachers used six strategies successfully for teaching science and social studies to students in New York City’s public high schools: developing literacy strategies aligned with disciplinary content; focusing on explicit instruction of these strategies; planning and modifying literacy approaches that get fine-tuned through ongoing formative assessment; grounding literacy instruction in strategies whose efficacy is based on empirical evidence; and using diverse content-area texts in teaching subject matter.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York supported our work in developing a new model for what we called “content-driven literacy” in the preparation of these pre-service teachers. As many readers no doubt know, the Carnegie Corporation has been a leader in promoting research-based literacy instruction through its Reading Next (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004) and Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) publications, among others.

Bibliography

Biancarosa, G. & Snow, C.E. (2004). Reading next—A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Graham, S. & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools: A report from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Grigg, W., Donahue, P. & Dion, G. (2007). The nation’s report card: 12th grade reading and mathematics. NCES 2007-469. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Heller, R. & Greenleaf, C. (2007). Literacy instruction in the content areas: Getting to the core of middle and high school improvement. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Marri, A.R., Perin, D., Crocco, M.S., Riccio, J.F., Rivet, A. & Chase, B.J. (2011): Content-driven literacy: One approach to urban secondary teacher education. The New Educator, 7:4, 325-351.