Accelerate the Learning of 4th and 5th Graders Born into Poverty

Abstract

For students born into poverty, grades 4-5 are a boundary where their learning needs change dramatically and in ways that have been consistently misunderstood throughout the many waves of well-intentioned reform over the past century. As a result, these needs have remained unaddressed, and grades 4-5 have become the boundary line where they start to fall behind at an accelerating rate. The good news is that these students have huge additional learning potential that remains untapped. In addition, once their learning needs are identified, specialized approaches can help accelerate the learning of these students--regardless of whether we're in a period of high-stakes testing. However, the needed approaches are counterintuitive. STOP THE ACADEMIC SLIDE Since 1965, when Title I was enacted, gains in the early grades have leveled around 3rd grade and declined thereafter. Why? The post-3rd-grade decline occurs because many acceleration techniques that are effective in K-2 stop working and even inhibit learning thereafter. The chief culprit is reliance on remedial basic skill/test prep instruction. In K-2, reteaching unlearned content is effective for building a reservoir of skills and raising test scores. But the widespread strategy of skill remediation/reteaching to the test is relatively ineffective after 3rd grade. Scores may go up initially but these gains quickly level off and don't transfer to other tests or tasks. (This problem is even more pernicious at middle school.) Sole reliance on reteaching basic skills and test prep loses its effectiveness after 3rd grade because curriculum is becoming more complex, integrated, and content focused. Students are asked to create ideas, synthesize, and generalize information. These are more cognitively demanding tasks. Reteaching specific discrete skills all the time creates a sense that learning means memorizing. So more advanced learning skills and cognitive processes aren't developed, and these students never understand what learning actually is--even though they have as much potential for academic success as others. While most would agree with this assessment, the absence of internalized thinking skills has another effect that isn't understood--one that is so pernicious that defeats the best of our well-intentioned efforts. When children born into poverty don't retain learned content, it's viewed as a knowledge deficit. Teachers say, What I taught went in one ear and out the other. The reality is that this is correct. That's exactly what's happening. The mind retains new information only if spontaneously links that new information to preexisting information. If this cognitive Velcro connection can't be established, it goes out the other ear. But isn't going out the ear because the student is lazy or unmotivated--it does so because students do not spontaneously generalize. Gaps in content knowledge are not the problem, but are symptoms indicating a problem in how the mind processes new information. By 4th grade, thinking skills are as essential for retaining new content as they are for applying it, and reteaching content over and over again has little impact on retaining in long-term memory. A better approach to filling content knowledge gaps is to help students internalize the thinking skills necessary for imbedding new information in long-term memory; i.e., the cognitive Velcro. This will enable them to retain more content information the first time it's taught. A number of key thinking skills are essential for both retaining and applying content, the most fundamental of which is the instinct to generalize. So the fundamental question is: How do these key fundamental thinking skills get developed and internalized? SPECIALIZED NEEDS First, teachers must understand that children born into poverty are as bright as anyone and their apparent struggles to retain and apply content and ideas have nothing to do with their cognitive or intellectual ability. …