Thinking Foundation - Research - Case Studies - Mt. Airy

Reading and Writing: From Phonemic Awareness to Metacognitive Processes
Thinking Maps just happen! They work automatically while I am reading!
(fifth-grade student)

If you accept the premise that we mostly teach and assess using written, spoken, and numeric languages, it is easy to see how we are still caught in the dichotomous debate between phonics and whole language. This debate is nestled within the most heavily researched and publicly financed areas in education, namely, improving literacy. Teachers, researchers, major publishers, and test developers have attempted to synthesize the two sides, yet the practice in the field remains discordant and failed. Our cyclical failures to break through this dichotomy reveal that the problem lies not merely in balancing phonics and whole language or taking a radical swing to one side or the other.

How else does one explain the deficits our nation is experiencing in reading as indicated by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 1971 to 2000? NAEP has reported that our at-risk population has improved only slightly despite receiving enormous resources. For our students who are not at risk-those who have the fundamentals of decoding, fluency, and pertinent vocabulary-reading comprehension scores are not much better than they were 25 years ago. It is time to accept the minimal impact on reading comprehension that the present paradigm of research and translations into instruction have made since the 1980s. Why has there been limited change in standardized and performance assessment scores of reading comprehension despite the enormous effort over nearly two decades to overhaul reading comprehension instructional techniques?

Our work with Thinking Maps points to a third way. One missing link is the cognitive underpinnings, interconnections, and interdependencies between the processes of phonemic awareness, vocabulary learning, and meaning making. Sasha Borenstein (2000), Director of the Kelter Center for Literacy Development that serves students from the Los Angeles region,
states that

…the recent research in the area of literacy done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has documented the need for explicit, systematic instruction in "breaking the code," phonics and word study, as well as in "making meaning" strategies for comprehension. The research supports an active, thoughtful instructional approach rather than a return to repetitive, passive work. (Hyerle, 2000, pp. 108-109)

Reviewing the three areas of the Put Readitzg First (Armbruster, 2002) report distributed widely by the U.S. Department of Education reveals how Thinking Maps provide a cognitive bridge to phonemic awareness, vocabulary instruction, and text comprehension.

Phonemic Awareness
Sasha Borenstein has found that Thinking Maps are a set of tools for helping students to see, break down, and put words back together. Through her work with students who are at risk and falling behind in the Los Angeles area (for a related story from Los Angeles, see Chapter 10, A First Language for Thinking in a Multilingual School), she and her staff have found that Thinking Maps work as microcognitive tools for seeing how to work with words:

Thinking Maps are flexible, active tools for exploring literacy. The maps are student-centered, pushing learners to discern patterns and interactions in materials and concepts. Thinking Maps are used in discerning the concepts which organize the expectancies and rules of phonics. Performing the sounds of the past tense, /t/, /d/, and /id /, can lead to the understanding that the sound of this morpheme is based upon the last sound in the root word to which it is affixed. The Brace Map is used by students to identify these part-whole relationships. Finding the similarities and differences between syllable types using the Double Bubble Maps leads to the understanding that each syllable is defined by its vowel. Creating a Flow Map for sequencing the spelling of /ch/, ch or tch, /j/, ge or dge, and /k/ k or ck at the end of a word can lead to the concept that the spelling depends upon what type of vowel is in that word. (Hyerle, 2000, pp. 108-109)

The summary page for phonemic awareness research in Put Reading First recommends guiding students to categorize phonemes, see part-whole patterns in words, and put them back together through blending. These are key strategies for developing this one area of early reading development while facilitating language and cognitive skills development.

Vocabulary Instruction
A second area of Put Reading First focuses on learning vocabulary. Vocabulary learning is a networking process involving not only direct vocabulary learning through word-learning strategies and repetition but also the indirect acquisition of vocabulary in different contexts. This is because the brain is constantly networking bits of information, and the maps facilitate patterning of related words, which become a context for definitions (see Chapter 2, Linking Brain Research to Best Practices).

Returning to the above reading of How Leo Learned to Be King, Thinking Maps create multiple pathways for students and teachers to gather vocabulary from the story into several patterns. These are explicit visual patterns that show a word in context. When a student independently voiced that the Circle Map could be used, she stated that you put the topic (Leo) in the center and the details around it. The Circle Map is defined by the visual representation of a circle within a circle and by the thinking skill of defining in context. Students learn to use this tool to look for and gather in the outer circle of the map context words, building vocabulary and meaning around a key topic in the center. Contextualization requires that students attempt to give definition to a word not just by what precedes it, but often by reading ahead so that the full context may be brought to bear on the word. All eight Thinking Maps are vocabulary builders: In practical and metaphorical terms, they are the scaffolds for the building process.

Text Comprehension
Correlating with NAEP data is the national report explaining that future implications for reading comprehension include evidence-based assessments. Affirming this concern, Donald Graves (1997) asserts that educators and the public are in a frenzy over how to boost reading comprehension scores.

We must teach students how to synthesize and show their thinking. What we have needed is the physiology of reading comprehension, the actual working parts as a reader interacts with text. But what would the working parts look like? Graves writes that when a reader engages with print, in the past we have had no idea what types of thinking are in process. Over twenty years ago, Lauren Resnick (1983) noted that if we cannot produce a more substantial explanation of the internal events that produce improved comprehension, it will be difficult to develop an instructional training approach. She later suggested that research has located a psychological (metacognitive) space, in which educationally powerful effects seem to occur, but it has not yet adequately explained what happens in that space to produce the effects. A synthesis of these reading researchers (DePinto-Piercy, 1998) confirms the need to change our instructional focus. We must move from the panoramic lens of a wide variety of strategic instructional techniques to include a zoom lens for specific instruction focused directly on what students do during the process of reading.

In the document Put Readiug First (Armbruster, 2002)) proficient readers are described as active and purposeful, and strategies are suggested for guiding students to self-monitoring and metacogmtion. Central to this section of the report is the focus on graphic organizers and maps that support students in identifying text structures within fictional and nonfictional texts. The report states that these visual tools

help students focus on text structure as they read
provide students with tools they can use to examine and visually represent relationships in a text
help students write well-organized summaries of a text

Dr. Bonnie Armbriister, one of the lead authors of Put Reading First, was an early leader in the research on text structures. For example, her work showed that using a problem-solution graphic before reading gave students an advanced organizer of this key structure, and their comprehension improved on those specific texts. Of course, texts are not identified as problem-solution or chronology for students, just as quality responses to open-ended writing prompts are not completed by staying inside the lines of a graphic template (see Chapter 7, Empowering Students). Thinking Maps extend this work by having students become fluent in a cognitive and metacognitive toolset for adapting their thinking to varying contexts.




		Research - Case Studies Mt. Airy Elementary School: Case Study Mt. Airy, Maryland Reading and Writing: From Phonemic Awareness to Metacognitive Processes Thinking Maps just happen! They work automatically while I am reading! (fifth-grade student) If you accept the premise that we mostly teach and assess using written, spoken, and numeric languages, it is easy to see how we are still caught in the dichotomous debate between phonics and whole language. This debate is nestled within the most heavily researched and publicly financed areas in education, namely, improving literacy. Teachers, researchers, major publishers, and test developers have attempted to synthesize the two sides, yet the practice in the field remains discordant and failed. Our cyclical failures to break through this dichotomy reveal that the problem lies not merely in balancing phonics and whole language or taking a radical swing to one side or the other. How else does one explain the deficits our nation is experiencing in reading as indicated by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 1971 to 2000? NAEP has reported that our at-risk population has improved only slightly despite receiving enormous resources. For our students who are not at risk-those who have the fundamentals of decoding, fluency, and pertinent vocabulary-reading comprehension scores are not much better than they were 25 years ago. It is time to accept the minimal impact on reading comprehension that the present paradigm of research and translations into instruction have made since the 1980s. Why has there been limited change in standardized and performance assessment scores of reading comprehension despite the enormous effort over nearly two decades to overhaul reading comprehension instructional techniques? Our work with Thinking Maps points to a third way. One missing link is the cognitive underpinnings, interconnections, and interdependencies between the processes of phonemic awareness, vocabulary learning, and meaning making. Sasha Borenstein (2000), Director of the Kelter Center for Literacy Development that serves students from the Los Angeles region, states that …the recent research in the area of literacy done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has documented the need for explicit, systematic instruction in "breaking the code," phonics and word study, as well as in "making meaning" strategies for comprehension. The research supports an active, thoughtful instructional approach rather than a return to repetitive, passive work. (Hyerle, 2000, pp. 108-109) Reviewing the three areas of the Put Readitzg First (Armbruster, 2002) report distributed widely by the U.S. Department of Education reveals how Thinking Maps provide a cognitive bridge to phonemic awareness, vocabulary instruction, and text comprehension. Phonemic Awareness Sasha Borenstein has found that Thinking Maps are a set of tools for helping students to see, break down, and put words back together. Through her work with students who are at risk and falling behind in the Los Angeles area (for a related story from Los Angeles, see Chapter 10, A First Language for Thinking in a Multilingual School), she and her staff have found that Thinking Maps work as microcognitive tools for seeing how to work with words: Thinking Maps are flexible, active tools for exploring literacy. The maps are student-centered, pushing learners to discern patterns and interactions in materials and concepts. Thinking Maps are used in discerning the concepts which organize the expectancies and rules of phonics. Performing the sounds of the past tense, /t/, /d/, and /id /, can lead to the understanding that the sound of this morpheme is based upon the last sound in the root word to which it is affixed. The Brace Map is used by students to identify these part-whole relationships. Finding the similarities and differences between syllable types using the Double Bubble Maps leads to the understanding that each syllable is defined by its vowel. Creating a Flow Map for sequencing the spelling of /ch/, ch or tch, /j/, ge or dge, and /k/ k or ck at the end of a word can lead to the concept that the spelling depends upon what type of vowel is in that word. (Hyerle, 2000, pp. 108-109) The summary page for phonemic awareness research in Put Reading First recommends guiding students to categorize phonemes, see part-whole patterns in words, and put them back together through blending. These are key strategies for developing this one area of early reading development while facilitating language and cognitive skills development. Vocabulary Instruction A second area of Put Reading First focuses on learning vocabulary. Vocabulary learning is a networking process involving not only direct vocabulary learning through word-learning strategies and repetition but also the indirect acquisition of vocabulary in different contexts. This is because the brain is constantly networking bits of information, and the maps facilitate patterning of related words, which become a context for definitions (see Chapter 2, Linking Brain Research to Best Practices). Returning to the above reading of How Leo Learned to Be King, Thinking Maps create multiple pathways for students and teachers to gather vocabulary from the story into several patterns. These are explicit visual patterns that show a word in context. When a student independently voiced that the Circle Map could be used, she stated that you put the topic (Leo) in the center and the details around it. The Circle Map is defined by the visual representation of a circle within a circle and by the thinking skill of defining in context. Students learn to use this tool to look for and gather in the outer circle of the map context words, building vocabulary and meaning around a key topic in the center. Contextualization requires that students attempt to give definition to a word not just by what precedes it, but often by reading ahead so that the full context may be brought to bear on the word. All eight Thinking Maps are vocabulary builders: In practical and metaphorical terms, they are the scaffolds for the building process. Text Comprehension Correlating with NAEP data is the national report explaining that future implications for reading comprehension include evidence-based assessments. Affirming this concern, Donald Graves (1997) asserts that educators and the public are in a frenzy over how to boost reading comprehension scores. We must teach students how to synthesize and show their thinking. What we have needed is the physiology of reading comprehension, the actual working parts as a reader interacts with text. But what would the working parts look like? Graves writes that when a reader engages with print, in the past we have had no idea what types of thinking are in process. Over twenty years ago, Lauren Resnick (1983) noted that if we cannot produce a more substantial explanation of the internal events that produce improved comprehension, it will be difficult to develop an instructional training approach. She later suggested that research has located a psychological (metacognitive) space, in which educationally powerful effects seem to occur, but it has not yet adequately explained what happens in that space to produce the effects. A synthesis of these reading researchers (DePinto-Piercy, 1998) confirms the need to change our instructional focus. We must move from the panoramic lens of a wide variety of strategic instructional techniques to include a zoom lens for specific instruction focused directly on what students do during the process of reading. In the document Put Readiug First (Armbruster, 2002)) proficient readers are described as active and purposeful, and strategies are suggested for guiding students to self-monitoring and metacogmtion. Central to this section of the report is the focus on graphic organizers and maps that support students in identifying text structures within fictional and nonfictional texts. The report states that these visual tools help students focus on text structure as they read provide students with tools they can use to examine and visually represent relationships in a text help students write well-organized summaries of a text Dr. Bonnie Armbriister, one of the lead authors of Put Reading First, was an early leader in the research on text structures. For example, her work showed that using a problem-solution graphic before reading gave students an advanced organizer of this key structure, and their comprehension improved on those specific texts. Of course, texts are not identified as problem-solution or chronology for students, just as quality responses to open-ended writing prompts are not completed by staying inside the lines of a graphic template (see Chapter 7, Empowering Students). Thinking Maps extend this work by having students become fluent in a cognitive and metacognitive toolset for adapting their thinking to varying contexts.