Invisibility: An unintended consequence of standards, tests, and mandates

Abstract As elementary and middle school teachers and students face standards, high-stakes testing, accountability, and one-size-fits all curricula, concerns have arisen that these practices limit the relevance and efficacy of teaching and learning. In this paper, we argue that such practices exact personal costs on students and the teachers expected to implement them. With data from a series of studies implemented across several years, we show how such practices too often create an instructional climate that, in effect, renders teachers and students invisible and nonessential to the literacy instruction that occurs in the classroom. First, we discuss the research that grounds our thinking. Then, we describe three approaches that can overcome invisibility for both students and teachers: teaching with students' hearts and heads in mind, promoting culturally responsive pedagogy, and creating a productive literacy environment. We conclude with portraits of three teachers, who in spite of external pressures create literacy instruction that makes their students' capabilities visible in their classroom instruction

Specialized Literacy Professionals as Literacy Leaders: Results of a National Survey

This large-scale national survey of specialized literacy professionals was designed to answer questions about responsibilities, including leadership, and preparation for these roles. Questionnaires, completed by over 2,500 respondents, indicated that respondents had multiple responsibilities that included both instruction of struggling readers and support for teachers. Four distinct role-groups were identified: instructional/literacy coaches, reading/literacy specialists, reading teachers/interventionists, and supervisors. The findings indicated a need for more precise definitions of the roles of these professionals and for preparation programs to include experiences that address the tasks required. Themes discussed included: roles have changed and require more focus on leadership, specialists must be nimble, and they require more in-depth preparation to handle the leadership demands of their positions

A Conversation-Based Intelligent Tutoring System Benefits Adult Readers with Low Literacy Skills

This article introduces three distinctive features of a conversation-based intelligent tutoring system called AutoTutor. AutoTutor was designed to teach low literacy adult learners comprehension strategies across different levels of discourse processing. In AutoTutor, three-way conversations take place between two computers agents (a teacher agent and a peer agent) and a human learner. Computer agents scaffold learning by asking questions and providing feedback. The interface of AutoTutor is simple and easy to use and addresses the special technology needs of adult learners. One of AutoTutor’s strengths is that it is adaptive and as such can provide individualized instruction for the diverse population of adult literacy students. The adaptivity of AutoTutor is achieved by assessing learners’ performance and branching them into conditions with different difficulty level. Data from a reading comprehension intervention suggest that adult literacy students benefit from using AutoTutor. Such learning benefits may be increased by enhancing the adaptivity of AutoTutor. This may be accomplished by tailoring instruction and materials to meet the various needs of the individuals with low literacy skills

Surface, Deep, and Transfer? Considering the Role of Content Literacy Instructional Strategies

This article provides an organizational review of content literacy instructional strategies to forward a claim that some strategies work better for surface learning, whereas others are more effective for deep learning and still others for transfer learning. The authors argue that the failure to adopt content literacy strategies by disciplinary teachers may be due, in part, to the mismatch between the approach and the level of learning expected