The release of NAPLAN test results always sparks conversations and debates about the state of education and student performance. The 2023 results are no exception, but this year’s results come with a twist that makes comparisons even more intriguing. With NAPLAN testing shifting to two months earlier in the school year (from May to March), it was expected that student results would be lower than in previous years (when students had two months of additional learning to influence test preparation). Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to compare the test results in 2023 with any of the previous tests (which began in 2008), since we would be comparing ripe apples with slightly less ripe apples. But I decided to go ahead and compare the 2023 results with the 2022 results anyway, just for fun, split up by gender. Some of the findings were definitely unexpected!
Reading and Writing: A Mixed Bag
The 2023 reading results for male and female students in every tested year level (i.e., Years 3, 5, 7, and 9) all showed a downward trend compared to the 2022 results. This can likely be attributed to the earlier testing date, with 2023 students having less time to develop reading skills before the test.
There was a dip in writing results among primary school males and females that mirrored this trend, as was expected. However, in a fascinating twist, writing scores actually improved for male and female students in Year 7 and Year 9. In fact, compared to all NAPLAN writing tests since it was modified in 2011, the 2023 scores were the highest ever for Year 7 males and females and Year 9 males, while for Year 9 females it was their second highest. How is this possible? Could something have changed in the marking process? This is unlikely since nothing like this has been discussed by ACARA. Did secondary school students find the 2023 writing prompt easier to address in the limited test time? This is somewhat plausible. Could secondary school students be feeling more positive about NAPLAN testing in March than in May? Without more information, it’s not possible to know what has driven this marked increase in secondary writing test scores. But it’s certainly odd that students with two fewer months of preparation would perform higher on a test that, for all intents and purposes, seems equivalent to all recent writing tests.
Despite the positive news for secondary students, it should be pointed out that Year 9 males are still performing at a level equivalent to Year 7 females, demonstrating a persistent gender gap that merits further investigation. Year 9 males performed more than two years of equivalent learning behind Year 9 females (i.e., 24.12 months – yikes!).
Spelling and Grammar: Heading Down
Like reading, spelling scores were down for males and females in all tested year levels. Again, this was expected given the shift to earlier testing.
Grammar and punctuation results mostly followed the same downward pattern, with Year 3, Year 5, and Year 9 males and females all achieving lower scores than the 2022 students. Strangely, grammar and punctuation scores for Year 7 students from each gender were higher than Year 7 students who sat the test in 2022.
As a noteworthy point from the data, Year 7 females outperformed Year 9 males for the first time in any NAPLAN grammar and punctuation test (or any NAPLAN literacy test). This can be explained by the considerable (but expected) decline in Year 9 male scores, while Year 7 female performance was somehow largely consistent with recent years, even with the earlier testing.
Numeracy: A Glint of Improvement
In terms of numeracy, all primary school males and females somehow scored higher than their 2022 counterparts (except for Year 5 females whose scores in 2023 were slightly down). Surely the numeracy test and its marking procedures haven’t changed, so it’s unclear why there would be clear improvements. Year 3 males managed to achieve their highest mean score of any previous NAPLAN numeracy test. With two fewer months of class time 🤷‍♂️
On the other hand, secondary school students, regardless of gender, scored lower than the 2022 students. But again, this was expected, so no alarm bells yet.
Final Thoughts: Beyond the Numbers
While the 2023 NAPLAN results might not be directly comparable to previous years due to the changed testing timeline, they offer valuable insights into the dynamics of education and student performance. The interplay of gender, year levels, and subject areas provides a rich tapestry of information that policymakers, educators, and researchers can draw from to tailor interventions and strategies.
It was kind of shocking to see that in specific areas, the earlier 2023 testing procedure resulted in higher scores (i.e., secondary writing and primary numeracy). That said, all students would clearly benefit from the additional two months of learning about reading, spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
The 2023 results highlight the importance of considering the broader context surrounding NAPLAN test scores. As we move forward with this whole new world of NAPLAN testing, complete with four shiny new proficiency standards that replace the previous bands, it will be as intriguing as ever to see the rise and fall of student results across the country. These broad pictures of student achievement would not be possible without NAPLAN testing.
This post provides the key points of a journal article I recently had published in The Australian Educational Researcher, co-written with Belinda Hopwood (UTAS), Vesife Hatisaru (ECU), and David Hicks (UTAS). You can read the whole article here
Girls better at literacy, boys better at numeracy?
In recent years, there has been increased attention on gender gaps in literacy and numeracy achievement. This is due in part to international assessments of students’ reading achievement such as PIRLS and PISA (Lynn & Mikk, 2009) that have found gender differences in reading are universal, with girls from all participating countries significantly and meaningfully outperforming boys. Previous research has shown that girls score higher on reading tests and are more likely to be in advanced reading groups at school (Hek et al., 2019), while those who fall below the minimum standards for reading are more likely to be boys (Reilly et al., 2019). Large-scale assessments of numeracy have seen similarly consistent results, though with boys outperforming girls. So, what’s the situation in Australia?
Recently, three colleagues and I found out what 13 years of NAPLAN reading and numeracy testing might show about boys’ and girls’ performance in the Australian context. Something that has been lacking from international research has been a clear picture of how reading and numeracy gender gaps become wider or more narrow across the primary and secondary school years. To provide this picture, we drew on publicly available NAPLAN results from the NAPLAN website (ACARA, 2021) and The Grattan Institute’s (Goss & Sonnemann, 2018) equivalent year level technique.
Findings: Gender gap in reading
We looked at the average reading performance of boys and girls across the four tested year levels of NAPLAN (i.e., Years 3, 5, 7, and 9) between 2008 and 2021. Girls improved consistently from Year 3 to Year 9, with approximately two years of progress made between each test. Boys progressed to a similar extent between Years 3 and 5, yet they fell behind the girls at a faster rate between Year 5 and Year 7. Specifically, boys made 1.95 years of progress between Year 3 and Year 5 and 1.92 years between Year 7 and Year 9, but only managed 1.73 years of progress between Year 5 and Year 7 (i.e., in the transition between primary and secondary school).
The average gap between boys and girls was wider for each increase in year level, with Year 3 males around 4 months of equivalent learning behind Year 3 females, Year 5 males 5 months behind, Year 7 males 7 months behind, and Year 9 males around 10 months of learning behind Year 9 females. While boys made more progress between Year 7 and Year 9, this was also when girls made most progress. While boys seem to keep up with girls reasonably well in the primary school years, more boys struggle with reading as they transition into secondary school.
Findings: Gender gap in numeracy
The overall picture for numeracy is similar to reading, though with boys outperforming girls and the gender gap increasing across each tested year level. Boys made approximately two years of progress between each numeracy test, while girls consistently made just over 1.8 years of progress between each test, leading to a gender gap that grew wider at a consistent rate over time. Put differently, boys and girls made consistent progress between each numeracy test, though the rate of progress was higher for males, leading to a neatly widening gender gap over time.
What about the writing gender gap?
In 2020, I conducted a similar study that looked into the NAPLAN writing results, finding that on average, boys performed around 8 months of equivalent learning behind girls in Year 3, a full year of learning behind in Year 5, 20 months behind in Year 7, and a little over two years of learning behind in Year 9. Boys fell further behind girls with writing at every tested year level, yet the rate at which girls outperformed boys was greatest between Years 5 and 7. Our study into reading and numeracy has found that similar gaps exist in these domains too, though not to the same extent as writing. For ease of comparison, the following graph shows the extent and development of the gender gaps in numeracy, reading, and writing.
Gender gaps in numeracy, reading, and writing (2008-2021)
Why do more boys struggle with literacy as they transition into secondary school? For most Australian students, Year 7 is when many (most?) will move physically from their primary school campus to a secondary school campus. This physical transition has been shown to impact student reading achievement, particularly for boys (Hopwood et al., 2017). For some students, their reading achievement stalls in this transition, or in serious cases, declines to levels below that of their primary school years (Hanewald, 2013). Some students entering secondary school have failed to acquire the necessary and basic reading skills in primary school required for secondary school learning (Lonsdale & McCurry, 2004) stifling their future reading development (Culican, 2005). The secondary school curriculum is more demanding and students are expected to be independent readers, able to decode and comprehend a range of complex texts (Duke et al., 2011; Hay, 2014). As argued by Heller and Greenleaf (2007), schools cannot settle for a modest level of reading instruction, given the importance of reading for education, work, and civic engagement. We need to know more about why this stage of schooling is difficult for many boys and how they can be better supported.
The analysis of the numeracy gender gap was quite different from both the reading and writing results. While previous international studies have suggested that the gender gap in numeracy only becomes apparent in secondary school (Heyman & Legare, 2004), this study showed that average scores for boys were higher than those of girls on every NAPLAN numeracy test, though to a lesser extent than the other domains. The widest numeracy gender gap of a little over 6 months of learning in Year 9 was smaller than the smallest writing gender gap of 8 months in Year 3.
Implications of gender gaps in literacy and numeracy
The findings suggest links between reading and writing development, in that more boys struggle with both aspects of literacy in the transition from primary to secondary school. While other researchers have looked at the numeracy gap over time using NAPLAN scale scores (e.g., Leder & Forgasz, 2018), by using the equivalent year level values, we’ve been able to show how the gender gap widens gradually from roughly 2 months of learning in Year 3 to 6 months of learning in Year 9. While this supports the general argument that, on average, boys outperform girls in numeracy and girls outperform boys in literacy tests, it also shows how the gaps are not equal.
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2021). NAPLAN national report for 2021. https://bit.ly/3q6NaC4
Culican, S. J. (2005). Learning to read: Reading to learn – A middle years literacy intervention research project. Final Report 2003–4. Catholic Education Office.
Goss, P., & Sonnemann, J. (2018). Measuring student progress: A state-by-state report card. https://bit.ly/2UVNxy5
Hanewald, R. (2013). Transition between primary and secondary school: Why it is important and how it can be supported. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 38(1), 62–74.
Hek, M., Buchman, C., & Kraaykamp, G. (2019). Educational systems and gender differences in reading: A comparative multilevel analysis. European Sociological Review, 35(2), 169-186.
Heller, R. & Greenleaf, C. (2007). Literacy instruction in the content areas: Getting to the core of middle and high school improvement. Alliance for Excellent Education.
Heyman, G. D., & Legare, C. H. (2004). Children’s beliefs about gender differences in the academic and social domains. Sex Roles, 50(3/4), 227-236. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SERS.0000015554.12336.30
Hopwood, B., Hay, I., & Dyment, J. (2017). Students’ reading achievement during the transition from primary to secondary school. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 40(1), 46-58.
Leder, G. C., & Forgasz, H. (2018). Measuring who counts: Gender and mathematics assessment. ZDM, 50, 687–697. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-018-0939-z
Lonsdale, M. & McCurry, D. (2004). Literacy in the new millennium. Australian Government, Department of Education, Science and Training.
Lynn, R., & Mikk, J. (2009). Sex differences in reading achievement. Trames, 13, 3-13.
Reilly, D., Neuman, D., & Andrews, G. (2019). Gender differences in reading and writing achievement: Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). American Psychologist, 74(4), 445-458.
The full NAPLAN results for 2021 were released by ACARA today. There were concerns that student performance would be negatively impacted by COVID, but my analysis of gender differences suggests there is a LOT to be optimistic about, particularly for primary school leaders, teachers, students, and parents.
(NOTE: To calculate months of equivalent learning, I used the Grattan Institute’s Equivalent Year Levels approach, which you can read about here)
YEAR 3: For reading, Year 3 boys and girls did better than ever on any previous NAPLAN test. The gender gap was also the widest ever at 5.16 months of equivalent learning in favour of girls. For numeracy, the Year 3 gender gap was the widest of any previous test in favour of boys at 2.52 months. For writing, boys and girls did better than any previous NAPLAN test. The gender gap was the same as last year at 7.2 months in favour of girls.
YEAR 5: For reading, boys had their equal best performance on any test and girls did their best ever. The gender gap was the largest ever for reading at 5.76 months in favour of girls. For numeracy, boys had their equal best performance while females were similar to 2019 leading to the widest ever gender gap of 4.68 months in favour of boys. For writing, boys had their best performance since 2010 and females did their best since 2015. The gender gap was the lowest ever at 9.72 months in favour of girls.
YEAR 7: For reading, boys and girls were down slightly from last year. The gender gap was 8.04 months in favour of girls. For numeracy, boys had their equal second-best performance while girls were down slightly. The gender gap was 5.52 months in favour of boys. For writing, boys and girls had their best performance since 2011. The gender gap was the second-lowest at 18.12 months.
YEAR 9: For reading, boys and girls performed lower than in 2019. The gender gap was 9.96 months. For numeracy, boys and girls were down from last year. The gender gap was 5.64 months. For Year 9 writing, males had their best performance since 2011, and females performed higher than in 2018 and 2019. The gender gap was the second-lowest ever at 20.52 months.
READING SUMMARY: Outstanding outcomes for primary students with their best ever performances on any NAPLAN reading test. Secondary reading was down from recent tests. With increased performance, the gender gap appears to be widening at the primary end.
NUMERACY SUMMARY: Primary school boys and girls did reasonably well on the numeracy test. Other than Year 7 males, numeracy performance was down for secondary school students compared to recent tests. The gender gap appears to be widening at the primary end in favour of boys though the gap is still considerably smaller than reading and writing.
WRITING SUMMARY: Outstanding outcomes for primary and secondary males and females with notable improvement over previous tests. The gender gap in favour of girls appears to be closing at all year levels but is still considerably wider than any other NAPLAN test.
Key messages to take from the 2021 NAPLAN tests
Something is clearly working in Australia’s primary schools, particularly when thinking about reading and writing. At the primary end, the gender gaps are widening for reading and numeracy and closing for writing. As has been the case in all NAPLAN tests, girls are ahead on the literacy tests and boys are ahead on the numeracy test. The widest gender gap is still clearly associated with the writing test, with girls performing 7.2 months ahead in Year 3, 9.72 months in Year 5, 18.12 months in Year 7, and (a still concerning) 20.52 months in Year 9! Boys appear to be struggling to keep up with the increased writing demands in the transition from primary to secondary school.
While secondary students’ writing performance was higher than in previous tests, their reading and numeracy performances were down. In this sense, NAPLAN for 2021 might be a cause for celebration in primary schools and a cause for reflection in secondary schools.
As with every tertiary field, assessment plays a major role in what initial teacher education (ITE) students learn in their teacher training. As part of my design of a new reading-focused course at the University of Queensland (UQ), which I introduced here, I’m thinking about the best ways of designing assessment tasks that will prepare ITE students for the realities of primary school reading instruction. In this post, I’ll outline important considerations when designing assessment tasks for tertiary contexts, my preliminary assessment ideas for the new reading course, and some things I’m still wondering about, which you might like to weigh in on.
Designing assessment tasks for a new reading course
First, here are six points I consider important when thinking about assessment task design in tertiary contexts:
1. Assessment tasks should accurately and reliably assess ITE students understandings and skills;
2. Assessment tasks should be practically useful for ITE students;
3. Assessment tasks should replicate the sorts of practices of effective classroom teachers;
4. Assessment tasks should include opportunities for planning for, teaching, assessing, and reflecting on student outcomes in that area (e.g., reading in this case);
5. Assessment tasks related to reading instruction should assess ITE students' knowledge and skills of all essential elements of reading - not just phonics and comprehension;
6. Assessment task expectations should be clearly communicated to ITE students through weekly lectures and tutorials and assessment-specific supports such as task walkthroughs or video conferences.
If assessment tasks are accurate and reliable, practically useful, similar to the practices of effective classroom teachers, focused on the core aspects of teaching and learning, based on all essential elements of reading, and clearly communicated, they should be well-received by ITE students as worthy of considerable time and effort.
Most university courses run for 13 weeks. While some courses may only have two assignments, it’s now common practice for course designers to include an early, low-stakes assignment. This means courses usually have three or four assignments in total. At UQ, lecturers are not allowed to include more than four assignments in a course, though we can have assignments that include multiple components.
I think it’s safe to say that marking assignments is not the most enjoyed aspect of teaching for educators in many contexts. While teacher educators don’t teach nearly as often as classroom teachers, they commonly mark assignments from upwards of 100 or more ITE students every semester. With courses usually including three or four assignments, and with these often being written tasks with 1,000 to 2,000 words per assignment, marking can become a major part of a lecturer’s job in no time.
Preliminary assessment schedule for the new reading course
With this context out of the way, here’s my thinking so far for assessment in the reading course. For students to demonstrate their understandings of all essential elements of reading, I have to assess them more than four times (something I’m not allowed to do if these are standalone assignments). To get around this issue, the ITE students will complete six smaller tasks that will combine to become a reading instruction resource portfolio (i.e., Assessment Task 1). Then, they will design two early and upper primary reading lesson and assessment plans (i.e., Assessment Task 2). I’ve explained my thinking for these tasks below.
I’d like the ITE students to spend the semester creating a portfolio of reading learning experiences and resources they’ll be able to use on their placements. If they see these portfolio resources as useful, I’m hoping the students will continue reflecting on and adding to these once they start teaching a class of their own.
The portfolio will include a shorter task for each essential element of reading (i.e., phonological awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency, plus oral language). These tasks will require ITE students to engage in a variety of practical activities, such as using the IPA to identify phonemes and graphemes in words and sentences, assessing elements of reading as they listen to children reading, critiquing and improving examples of problematic reading instruction, interpreting and making decisions based on reading data, and creating reading teaching resources.
Assessment Task 2: Early and upper primary reading lesson and assessment plans
The second assignment would involve ITE students planning two standalone lessons, with one focused on early primary and the other on upper primary. Students could base these lessons on any two of the essential elements of reading. They would be required to complement their lesson plans with assessment plans, detailing how they would integrate assessment opportunities into their learning experiences, and a theoretical rationale, justifying their choices.
These lessons would be designed with reference to key concepts underpinning the course, such as Rosenshine’s principles of explicit instruction (2012), the gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983), and the Response to Intervention approach (e.g., Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006) to explicitly support student learning about phonics and comprehension. ITE students would be expected to include learning intentions and success criteria in child-friendly language and examples of teacher talk, think-alouds, and modelling with one or several mentor texts. Their lesson plans would be written in the genre of procedural texts that could be picked up and used by other teachers if needed.
The ITE students’ lessons would be based on developmentally appropriate elements of reading. For instance, I’d expect them to plan phonological awareness or phonics lessons for early primary but not for upper primary, since the majority of school students will have mastered the decoding side of the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) by upper primary school if teachers focus on approaches like systematic synthetic phonics in the early primary years. I’m excited to assess upper primary lesson plans on traditionally underrepresented elements of reading, such as fluency and vocabulary.
Three things I’m still wondering about
1. Have I missed anything that really should be here? I’ve tried to design practically useful tasks that involve the creation of teaching materials, assessment of children’s reading, the demonstration of knowledge of reading concepts, and decision-making based on reading data. Since this will be the only course dedicated to early reading in the degree, it’s important to include all major practices but also to go deep enough with what matters most
2. Having shorter assessment tasks mapped against the weekly content should mean most students engage well each week AND that I can assess them for each essential element of reading. I’m slightly worried about the workload though for teaching staff. We would need to think carefully about how to efficiently provide personalised and useful feedback to avoid an overwhelming marking load.
3. For the second assignment, I thought ITE students could find a child, assess an element of their reading, design a learning experience to support their development, teach and assess it, and reflect on the experience. This would be an authentic experience, but I’m also aware that they need to plan whole-class experiences and that they could be teaching any class from Foundation to Year 6, so planning early and upper primary lessons seems important. I would include authentic tasks in the portfolio of resources. Does this all sound reasonable?
As a side note, I would love to integrate practical videos from actual teachers in actual classrooms for each essential element of reading throughout the course. ITE students often want to know about how to set up the classroom for literacy blocks, how to assess on the fly in busy classroom environments, and what reading programs and resources are most useful for different aspects of reading (and how long should be spent teaching different aspects of reading each day). These kinds of questions are best answered by expert, practising teachers. It would be excellent to have a short practical video to complement the lecture and tutorial content each week (such as this wonderful example of phonics instruction from Saint Augustine’s primary school originally shared by AITSL that I’m sure many of you would have seen). Imagine having something like this on fluency, and vocabulary, and phonological awareness, and so on!
It’s been extremely helpful to write about this process and receive ideas and support from many in the education community. I’ll shift back to translating key literacy research for my next post, but if you have any suggestions for how designing assessment tasks in a new reading course could drive ITE student engagement, and give them opportunities to practise key practices of reading teachers, it would be great to hear them.
References
Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2006). Introduction to Response to Intervention: What, why, and how valid is it? Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.41.1.4
Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104
Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8, 317-344
Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, Spring 2012, 12-39. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Rosenshine.pdf
This post outlines my initial design of a new, 13-week early reading course that will be completed by all BEd Primary and MTeach Primary initial teacher education (ITE) students at the University of Queensland (UQ).
In a recent post, I wrote about the opportunity for teacher educators to be transparent about their course (i.e., unit) design. Explaining what and how we teach, and seeking feedback from the wider education community, has the potential to support other teacher educators providing similar courses at other institutions, while also building confidence in how teacher educators prepare ITE students for careers in the classroom.
I’d like to invite you to be part of this kind of course design process at UQ for the new reading course.
My hope is that some of you will take me up on this offer and that this will improve how I prepare ITE students to plan for, teach, and assess reading in primary classrooms.
What helped me to design this initial outline
The new course’s design had four sources of inspiration: reading experts who have written about reading development and instruction from the science of reading perspective; the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), the education community, and my previous teaching at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). I’ll briefly explain how they informed the course design before introducing the course’s key underpinning theories/concepts and weekly topics.
Reading experts
In the past four years, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time skilling myself up in terms of my knowledge about reading development and instruction. This knowledge building had occurred, largely, through reading. Reading books by well-known cognitive scientists like Stanislas Dehaene, Maryanne Wolf, Daniel T. Willingham, and Mark Seidenberg helped me learn about the complexities and importance of reading development.
I’ve also engaged regularly with the scholarly literature on reading instruction from the likes of Castles, Rastle, and Nation; Beck and McKeown; Rasinski; Stainthorp; Ehri; Moats; Rupley; Snow; Oakley, Cain, and Elbro; and many more. New research papers about what works in the teaching of all elements of reading are published all the time, so keeping up with the evolving research landscape is important for every educator interested in teaching reading well.
Other reading experts are also having a major impact through the translation of reading research into practical guidance and training for teachers. It built my confidence to see that the topics covered by Pam Snow and Tanya Serry in their Science of language and reading introductory course were very similar to the sorts of topics I included in my teaching at UTAS. If you’re a teacher who never really learnt the ins and outs of reading development and key theories like the simple view of reading, Pam and Tanya’s courses are well worth the (very reasonable) price of admission.
Websites like Five from five and (FREE) professional learning offered through Think Forward Educators have also helped many teachers engage with and gain confidence in the teaching of reading from the SoR perspective. Many talented teachers and researchers are giving a great deal of time and energy to support others in this space for the sake of the children in today’s and tomorrow’s classrooms. With free resources and PL opportunities, every teacher has the opportunity to learn to teach reading effectively.
AITSL
Due to changing accreditation standards (explained here), it’s likely that teacher education providers will soon be adding considerably more reading content into their programs. At universities like UQ, new 13-week courses on reading and reading instruction are being developed and introduced, which is brilliant for everyone involved. But since English education is a broad field, and since most teacher educators are not experts in every element of English and its teaching, there are lecturers out there who would not consider themselves as experts in reading instruction. Clearly, this is a problem when a key part of the job is preparing beginning teachers to teach reading.
To help all teacher educators meet the new accreditation standards, AITSL has published a lofty 166-page document outlining in detail the sorts of English education topics they believe should be included in teacher education programs. They have outlined:
Sample program outlines, indicating several options for the flow of topics across multiple courses
32 detailed modules (e.g., Language development) with suggested program year levels (i.e., should it be in the first, second, third, or fourth year of a degree), descriptions of content, suggestions for tutorial activites, key learning outcomes, references to build teacher educators’ knowledge of module content, and resources that can be used with initial teacher education students to support their learning.
It’s quite amazing how much useful information is in this AITSL document. Even if a lecturer is not an expert in reading, the guidance offered here means every university should be providing a first-rate experience when preparing ITE students to teach reading. I actually think any educator interested in reading instruction would gain from looking through this document and reading some of the many excellent references it lists. Think of it as a cheat sheet for all things reading instruction.
The education community
Recently, I posted the following question on Twitter:
Nearly 400 people interacted with this tweet and a very generous 24 took the time to share their thoughts. The wonderful Tina Daniel-Zitzlaff also reposted the question on her Facebook group, Reading Teachers Australia, and sent me the feedback since I’m not a Facebook user. On the whole, the responses highlighted the importance of: specific elements of reading not traditionally taught (well?) in teacher education; assessment and data literacy; and reading models/frameworks such as Scarborough’s Reading Rope. This was very helpful feedback, so thanks to those who shared their ideas and experiences.
My previous teaching at the University of Tasmania
As a final source of inspiration, I’ve been teaching early reading instruction at UTAS since taking over the second core English course there in 2016 (prior to that I was coordinating the first core English course). At UTAS, I covered early reading and writing in one 13-week course, which I split into 7 weeks for reading and 6 weeks for writing.
With only 7 weeks, I had an initial overview of reading, followed by the five essential elements of reading, and a week on explicit reading instruction. While there were bits and pieces missing from this approach, it still allowed me to cover many important concepts and set me up well to prepare a full course for UQ.
Some points to bear in mind while looking at the new course design
This is a 13-week course, so I have one extra week to either cover a current topic over two weeks OR add something new into the mix. Have I missed anything or should something be spread out?
For each element of reading noted below, I will provide an introduction, key teaching practices, and key assessment practices.
While many teacher education programs prepare ITE students to become early childhood educators, BEd and MTeach ITE students at UQ are all training to become primary school teachers.
Key underpinning theories/concepts
For this new course, the following theories and concepts will underpin the weekly content:
The simple view of reading (Gough & Tumner, 1986)
Scarborough’s reading rope (Scarborough, 2001)
The dual route cascaded model (Coltheart et al., 2001)
Rosenshine’s principles of explicit instruction (Rosenshine, 2012)
Response to Intervention (e.g., Fuchs and Fuchs, 2006)
Without further ado, here is the initial plan of weekly content:
Weekly topics for new early reading course
1. Overview and history of reading and reading instruction
2. Explicit reading instruction
3. Oral language (introduction, teaching, assessment)
12. Course reflection: Managing the elements of reading
13. ?
How you can help inform the design and refinement of this reading course
At this stage, I’m looking for feedback from teachers and other education professionals about: (1) the selected underpinning theories/concepts, (2) the general flow of weekly topics, and (3) whether I should cover a current topic over two weeks or introduce another topic for the 13th week (the topic can be slotted in at any point in the course).
If you have any thoughts to share, you are most welcome to leave a comment below or reply to my initial tweet promoting this post on Twitter.
What’s next?
With key theories and weekly topics outlined, the next step will be designing the assessment tasks that will provide ITE students with opportunities to demonstrate their understandings of reading concepts and how to plan for, teach, and assess reading in classroom contexts.
Thank you to those who support me in designing (what I hope will be) a first-rate experience for ITE students at UQ. If any other teacher educators are currently designing or fleshing out reading-focused courses, I would like to support you in that process. Please reach out via Twitter or email and let’s talk about it (damon.thomas@uq.edu.au).
References
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108(1), 204-56 https://www.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.108.1.204
Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2006). Introduction to Response to Intervention: What, why, and how valid is it? Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.41.1.4
Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104
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It feels like every day we read about issues in teacher education, especially in the important field of English education. In this post, I’m going to discuss this trend from an insider’s perspective and will finish by responding to (the most personally relevant parts of) Federal Minister for Education Alan Tudge’s recent Roaring Back speech.
This will be my last blog post as a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). After completing a Bachelor of Education (BEd) degree, honours, a PhD, and (almost) eight years as a lecturer and then senior lecturer, UTAS has felt like a second home for an extended period. I will fondly remember my time at UTAS and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to get started as a teacher educator and researcher in English education.
Next week I will be busy relocating from Launceston to Brisbane. On the 15th of November, I’ll start working as a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland (UQ). To win this position, I spoke about the critical need to promote evidence-based approaches to reading instruction as a core element of all teacher education courses. While lecturers in English education should be well-versed in all areas of language, literacy, and literature, I believe my strong desire to design and deliver a first-rate reading instruction experience for pre-service teachers at UQ was key to my appointment.
How Australian universities typically prepare new teachers to teach English
A key challenge in teacher education is the extremely limited time teacher educators have to work with pre-service teachers. In the past, time constraints have meant Australian universities have only included three core (i.e., compulsory) 13-week English courses in their four-year BEd degrees, and only two in their two-year MTeach degrees. This matches the number of courses usually dedicated to mathematics, while other content areas (e.g., Science, ICT, HASS, etc.) receive even fewer courses. Intensifying this challenge for people in my position, the Australian Curriculum: English has almost twice as many content descriptions as the next largest curriculum document (mathematics). In my opinion, two or three English courses in a new teacher’s training is really not enough time to fully prepare them for the complexities of English teaching.
With two or three courses only, it’s a struggle for teacher educators to cover all the important ideas of language, literacy, and literature in any real depth. At UTAS, it has been my job to truncate the explicit teaching of reading and writing into one rather cramped course. If you had only 13 weeks to cover basically everything on the teaching of early reading and writing from birth to Year 6, how would you divvy things up?
Working in teacher education
It’s quite common to read social media posts, online blogs, newspaper articles, and occasional political speeches that criticise, mistrust, and blame teacher educators for many educational issues. Given the immense responsibility teacher educators have for preparing every new generation of teachers, I think it’s fair to hold them to account and take an interest in the quality of education provided at our universities. Every misguided decision in teacher education has the potential to negatively impact the classroom teaching and learning of hundreds if not thousands of teachers and students.
At the same time, it’s important for people working at other levels of education to recognise that teacher educators operate in oftentimes challenging circumstances. The time constraints I alluded to above are intensified in English education with its jampacked curriculum. This can be coupled with difficulties getting pre-service teachers to engage fully in the learning opportunities provided. Many are frankly overloaded with life commitments, juggling studies with part-time jobs, families, voluntary work in schools, sporting responsibilities, and many other things. When they can engage, it’s sometimes difficult for pre-service teachers to fully grasp the importance of what’s being taught when they have had limited time with students in classrooms and typically complete four courses every semester on different topics, usually with little connection.
If pre-service teachers don’t engage in a given week, it might mean they miss some crucial aspect of English teaching, like spelling, or phonics, or written genres. It’s up to teacher educators to ensure that university assessments require pre-service teachers to demonstrate understandings and skills for everything that will be an important part of their jobs as teachers.
While there is almost certainly no magic-bullet solution for the issues in teacher education, in my view, simply having more time to prepare pre-service teachers for the complexities of English teaching seems essential and exciting. This is especially the case with early reading and writing.
Who decides what’s taught in Australian teacher education courses?
These Standards and Procedures reflect high expectations of initial teacher education and the interest of all Australian governments in maximising our collective investment in the development of pre-service and graduate teachers. They also represent a collective sense of accountability and acknowledge that evaluation of initial teacher education is a shared responsibility. Quality assurance of teacher education programs is essential to ensure every program is preparing classroom ready teachers with the skills they need to make a positive impact on school student learning. They are designed to ensure that all graduates of initial teacher education meet the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at the Graduate career stage. This is the foundation of the accreditation process. (AITSL, 2019, p. 3)
While teacher education is clearly important for building each pre-service teacher’s foundational knowledge and skills, the Professional Standards don’t stop at the Graduate career stage. Instead, teachers are expected to continue learning about the profession throughout their careers, supported by school leadership and overarching bodies like Departments of Education, Catholic Education Offices, and Independent Schools groups.
The Standards have been updated in minor ways over time, but 2019 marked a very important change in relation to English education. In response to concerns about pre-service teachers’ preparation for the teaching of reading, AITSL made it compulsory for every undergraduate program (e.g., BEd degree) to dedicate at least one-half of a year (equivalent full-time student load) to English/literacy courses, and one-eighth of a year to early reading instruction. Since full-time BEd students at Australian universities typically complete eight courses per year (four per semester), this means AITSL are requiring that their degrees include four compulsory English courses, with one of these dedicated to early reading instruction. In their words, “early reading instruction should address evidence-based practice across the following elements: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and oral language” (AITSL, 2019, p. 16).
This single change to the Accreditation Standards has major implications for Schools of Education around the country. Since accreditation occurs every five years, every Australian university will need to demonstrate that their undergraduates receive a full course dedicated to the essential elements of reading by 2024 or sooner (depending on when their accreditation rolls around). I consider this to be fantastic news for every Australian child, parent, and future teacher. Anyone with an interest in the quality of reading instruction in Australia’s primary schools should be grateful to the people who brought about this change to the Standards.
The new Standards have already made a difference. In 2022, I’ve been asked to develop a new, 13-week, early reading-focused course for UQ, which will be a core unit for all pre-service teachers completing a UQ Bachelor of Education (BEd) Primary or Master of Teaching (MTeach) Primary degree. Being able to dedicate a full course to early reading is a dream come true. The decision by UQ School of Education leadership to add this new course to the existing suite of courses will go a long way to preparing more confident, capable teachers of reading and English more broadly. The recent changes to the Accreditation Standards suggest it’s quite likely that other Australian universities will follow in UQ’s footsteps.
What does teacher education have to do with Alan Tudge’s speech?
On October 22, 2021, Alan Tudge, Australia’s Federal Minister for Education, offered a speech entitled Roaring back: My priorities for schools as students return to classrooms. There was quite a bit of backlash from many in the Australian education community regarding Tudge’s comments about the Australian History Curriculum.
You might be happy to hear, I have nothing to say about this.
Instead, I’d like to turn to some comments in the speech that were, as Greg Ashman described them, crowded out. For instance, roughly halfway through the speech, Tudge said this:
The second aspect of my quality teaching agenda is ensuring that every student training to be a teacher is equipped with the toolkit to be highly impactful in the classroom. If anything, this is my top priority.
He went on to make clear why teacher training is his top priority, with comments about the quality of degrees offered by Australian universities:
Over the last twenty to thirty years, we have seen ideology and fads dominate instructional practice in our universities’ education faculties, instead of evidence-based practices. The lack of transparency in these courses mean we do not have all the information we should. But what we do know should trouble us greatly, especially when it comes to two highly effective teaching methods – explicit instruction and phonics. The evidence is crystal clear on these, and yet we have seen ideological resistance which has limited their use in classrooms.
Tudge made several other thought-provoking points in this speech related to teacher education, but I’m going to pause here to focus on the key idea of transparency. I agree that, in the past, Australian teacher educators have not been as transparent about course content as they could with the wider education community. Admittedly, I’m not sure whether any other group of educators has, on the whole, been notably more transparent about the content they teach, and most teacher educators are likely willing to share what they do if you ask them.
The lack of public information about what’s in teacher education courses has meant pretty well anyone has been able to say whatever they like about what these courses do or do not include, or even about the expertise and abilities of the teacher educators who provide them. While online course descriptions hint at what’s in these units, such descriptions were never intended to provide a blow-by-blow account of every concept, theory, and approach a course includes. The only reliable way to find out what’s actually in these courses has been to speak with teacher educators directly.
I can’t speak for other teacher educators, but I’ve promoted both explicit instruction and phonics in my lecturing at UTAS since I started in 2014. In my new co-edited book, Teaching and learning primary English, explicit instruction is the topic of Chapter 2 and presented as the book’s main pedagogical approach for teaching reading, writing, and children’s literature. The essential elements of reading are also given a chapter each, with the chapter on phonics contributed by international phonics expert Emerita Professor Rhona Stainthorp from the University of Reading in the UK. But I think it’s important for teacher educators to do more to renew the wider education community’s confidence in how universities prepare pre-service teachers to teach English (and everything else, really). Being able to design the new reading-focused course at UQ presents a useful opportunity for this.
The Transparent Reading Course Experiment
I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of Emina Mclean and Greg Clement who have been entirely transparent about how they transformed their schools’ approaches to reading instruction. As I design the content of the new reading course at UQ, I plan to provide regular updates via Twitter and this blog, encouraging feedback and input from the wider education community. This will provide the many reading experts I follow a rare chance to inform the design of (what I hope to be) a cutting-edge, evidence-based course on reading. I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but my hope is that the increased transparency of the process will help other teacher educators who also have the opportunity to design new reading-focused courses.
Like Alan Tudge, my top priority is to provide those who wish to become teachers with the best possible start through high-quality teacher training. As I move from UTAS to UQ, it will be exciting to have you come along on the journey. And before you mention it, yes, I have heard it’s very hot up there (it’s OK – I’ve packed the sunscreen).
