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Keith Stanovich

Reading difficulty is a teaching problem not an intelligence problem

2020-02-04T14:09:03+00:00February 4th, 2016|literacy, reading|

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate I've visited a lot of schools over [...]

How do you get students to read for pleasure?

2024-06-16T12:34:57+01:00July 11th, 2015|reading|

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." Marcel Proust Reading seems to make us smarter. Here's Keith Stanovich explaining why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF6VKmMVWEc&feature=youtu.be&t=45s For most people, this is uncontroversial. We talk a lot about the power of books and the need to get more children to read for pleasure. But how do you get students to read for pleasure? I have no idea. Neither does anyone else, not really. This is an endemic conundrum which troubles most teachers and many parents. But it's a bit of an odd question [...]

Reading ability: nature or nurture?

2016-10-16T10:43:07+01:00July 14th, 2014|literacy|

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Matthew, 13:12 The Matthew Effect has become something of a truism. Those with find it easy to acquire more, whereas those without are trapped into a vicious cycle of poverty and disadvantage. Clearly this is a matter of social injustice: if only we could ensure that all were treated equally then we could do away with such asymmetry. This is something I've been particularly interested in ever since hearing Geoff Barton refer to Daniel Rigney's [...]

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