This is a repost from my FB page to put it on the Notice and Note Book Club page. Apologies to those who are now seeing it for a second time: Bob Probst and I surveyed 1,065 students grades 4-12 about reading nonfiction. One result was too important to wait to share in the forthcoming book on teaching with nonfiction. We asked students what were two things (from a finite list we provided) teachers could do to help them read nonfiction better. 61% asked for more interesting texts; 38% asked for more time to read (See graph). This response from kids is well worth discussing with your faculty. In another question when we asked how much time they were given to read NF in their social studies, science, and math classes, 31% said none and 43% said about 10 minutes. When we asked about reading nonfiction in language arts classes, the results were about the same. When asked students to choose the 2 sources of NF most commonly assigned by teachers, 60% responded textbooks, 53% said workbooks and worksheets, and 25% said things from the Smart Board with less than 10% choosing newspapers, magazines, trade books, and things they find on the Internet. When asked if what they were assigned to read was what they would consider interesting most said, no or usually not. These results are, of course, what 1,000+ kids from across the US said and they arent what your students in your school or in your own classroom might say. Perhaps you want to share these findings with your faculty and ask yourself how you compare and what, if anything, you might want to change. At the same time, ask the teachers in your school to define nonfiction. When we asked 2,500 teachers to define nonfiction, we saw a wide variation of answers. Weve put the definitions into a word cloud (See below). Remember, in a word cloud, the bigger the font, the more often this answer was given. It sure would be interesting to see how the faculty in your school defines nonfiction.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 21:25:12 +0000
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