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• Still celebrating Patrick and the Irish love of literature, language, libraries

  3/18/2010 9:27:43 AM

  Why should we celebrate the Irish?

  No doubt, several reasons could be proffered. But for me one answer stands out. Long, long ago the Irish pulled off a remarkable feat: They saved the books of the Western world and left them as gifts for all humanity. It was the Irish who were around to pick up the pieces when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West under the increasing assaults of Germanic tribes.

  It is hard to overstate the momentousness of that collapse. By the early sixth century, Western Europe had become largely illiterate, its teachers dead, its students on the run, its libraries turned into kindling. Ireland, however, had just settled down, thanks to a tough old bird named Patrick, a Roman citizen raised in the province of Britain who had been grabbed by Irish slavers when he was a teenager.

  The Irish fanned out across Europe, salvaging books wherever they could, making copies, reassembling libraries and teaching the newly settled barbarians of the continent to read and write. 

  Read more of this piece by Thomas Cahill in The New York Times online.

  Feature

  Libraries Writing

• "How Well Are American Students Learning?" report released

  3/18/2010 9:18:44 AM

  The 2009 Brown Center on Education Policy annual report, "How Well Are American Students Learning?", analyzes the state of American education using the latest measures of student learning, uncovers and explains important trends in achievement test scores, and identifies promising and disappointing educational reforms. The 2009 research shows the persistence of test scores and school performance, as well as examines the narrowing gap between high and low-achievers. Read the full report at the Brookings website.

  Research and Reports

  Issues in the News Struggling Readers Methodology Socioeconomic Factors Low Literacy

• Study: Digital media affect early childhood literacy

  3/18/2010 9:00:00 AM

  The Pearson Foundation recently released “The Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy,” a research white paper on the effects of digital media on young children’s learning, at the annual Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) International Symposium.

  Authored by early childhood education experts Jay Blanchard and Terry Moore from Arizona State University, the white paper examines the latest research on how young children learn using increasingly personalized and mobile media, including cell phones, television, video games, smart devices, and computers. The report focuses on the impact of these new ways of learning and highlights the degree to which these emergent literacies are rooted in young people’s use of common-place mobile devices--especially in developing and least-developed nations.  

  Blanchard’s and Moore’s research finds that developmental milestones are changing as a new generation of young children approach learning and literacy in ways not thought possible in the past. According to this new report, digital media is already transforming the language and cultural practices that enable early literacy development, making possible a new kind of personal and global interconnectedness.  

  The full report, as well as an executive summary of the study, can be accessed online.  

  Research and Reports

  Early Childhood Literacy Research Literacy and Technology

• New IRA book spotlights boys and reading

  3/18/2010 8:45:00 AM

  According to a new study from the Center on Educational Policy that analyzed state test scores in reading and math, “the lagging performance by boys in reading is the most pressing gender-gap issue facing our schools.” In some states, boys are scoring a full 10 percentage points below girls on standardized reading tests.

  These statistics reaffirm what noted expert William Brozo has been telling us for years. In his second edition of To Be a Boy, To Be a Reader: Engaging Teen and Preteen Boys in Active Literacy, Brozo sheds light on “the boy crisis” and offers solutions. Brozo emphasizes that “engaged readers have a much greater chance of staying in school, expanding career and life options, and maturing into self-actualized adults.” The premise is simple—meet boys where they are, then help them get to where they need to be. But the ideas offered in Brozo’s book are crucial, providing exactly the framework needed to motivate, inspire, and truly reach boys before it’s too late.

  To Be a Boy, To Be a Reader centers on engaging boys with books that contain positive male archetypes. Readers will get full descriptions—with literature examples—of all 10 archetypes, as well as a new chapter that focuses on using alternative texts such as graphic novels and comic books. In addition, the book offers fresh ideas for involving parents and community leaders in boys’ literacy growth and an expansive, fully updated young adult literature list, organized by the 10 archetypes.

  To Be a Boy, To Be a Reader will be available from IRA in late April at a cost of $22.95 for IRA members and $28.95 for others. To find out more or to pre-order, visit the book's page on the IRA website.  

  IRA Publications

• Report: Girls outperforming boys on standardized reading tests

  3/17/2010 9:17:32 AM

  Girls are outperforming boys in every state in the nation on standardized reading tests, according to a new national report. And in Utah, girls score as well or better than boys in math -- until they reach high school.The study, by the Washington D.C.-based Center on Education Policy (CEP), examined 2008 state test scores for boys and girls in fourth, eighth and 10th grades.

  "We have good news for girls, but bad news for boys," Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the CEP, said in a phone interview with reporters. "In no state in the country are boys doing better than girls in reading at the elementary, middle or high-school level. This trend of boys lagging behind girls in reading is no fluke."

  The gap between percentages of boys and girls who were proficient in reading was larger than 10 points in many states. Read this story in The Salt Lake Tribune or see the report at the Center's website.

  Research and Reports

  Early Childhood Literacy Adolescent Literacy Gender Issues

• Poverty-stricken school in South Africa performs "miracle" in pass rates

  3/17/2010 9:07:45 AM

  Ethembeni Enrichment Centre, a school in a run-down part of Port Elizabeth, the largest city in Eastern Cape, South Africa's poorest province, has achieved a remarkable 100% pass rate for a dozen years.

  It is the first day of applications for the 2011 school year and a woman in traditional Xhosa attire is filling out a form for her child. Ethembeni only accepts pupils whose mother tongue is Xhosa, which generally translates into poor and black. The annual school fees are R3,800 (US$506), excluding stationery. Many poor parents make sacrifices to keep their children in school, but school principal Elbe Malherbe Malherbe believes in affordable -- not free -- education, because it is an "investment by pupils, parents and teachers [that] everyone must buy into".
  
  The language of instruction is English, class attendance is compulsory, homework must be completed, pupils must clean the classrooms and grounds every day, and parents must be involved in their child's education.
  "The classrooms were barely furnished. The driveway to the school was a rocky, narrow passage ... The school hall was packed with a few hundred eager faces, the children virtually sitting on top of one another on the floor ... I saw struggle, hunger and poverty etched into each child's countenance," educationist and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, Jonathan Jansen, recounted after a recent visit.
  
  "For any child to pass under these difficult circumstances, it would take a miracle," he wrote. Yet nearly two-thirds of the 70 pupils in Ethembeni's 2009 matric, or final year, class achieved a university-entrance pass, while other financially comparable schools hung on at the bottom of the academic achievement ladder. Read more at IRIN News online.

  Global Literacy

  Teacher Training Socioeconomic Factors Low Literacy Curriculum

• Phoenix Award winner named

  3/17/2010 8:45:00 AM

  Presented by the Children's Literature Association, the Phoenix Award is given to the author, or the estate of the author, of a book for children published originally in English that did not win a major award at the time of its publication twenty years earlier. The award is intended to recognize books of high literary merit. Like the fabled bird that rose from its ashes with renewed life and beauty, Phoenix Award books once again touch the imaginations and enrich the lives of those who read them. The 2010 winner is The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Bodley Head, 1990).

  For further information about the book and the award, visit the Phoenix Award page on the Children's Literature Association website.

   

  Childrens Literature

  Awards and grants

• "Born-digital" materials proving difficult, costly to preserve

  3/17/2010 8:00:00 AM

  Research libraries and archives are discovering “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

  Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

  Imagine having a record but no record player.

  All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible. Read more in The New York Times online.

  Literacy and Technology

  Libraries Technology

• Study: Boys who played video games had lower reading, writing scores

  3/16/2010 10:00:31 AM

  Parents of young boys may want to encourage moderation when it comes to their kids' video game habits. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, owning a video-game system may hamper academic development in some children.

  The results of this study showed that boys who received a video-game system at the start of a study spent more time playing video games and less time engaged in after-school academic activities than boys who received the video-game system at the end of the experiment. Furthermore, the boys who received the video-game system at the beginning of the study had significantly lower reading and writing scores four months later compared with the boys receiving the video-game system later on.

  Read more about the study in ScienceDaily News online.

  Early Childhood Literacy

  Technology Research Socioeconomic Factors Literacy and Technology

• Should e-books be cheaper than printed books?

  3/16/2010 9:46:26 AM

  The growing popularity of e-books has raised a difficult question in the publishing marketplace that used to have an easy answer: What's a book worth?

  Because they cost less to produce, consumers think e-books should be cheap. But publishers are afraid that if the price goes too low, they may never recover from the diminished expectations.  Jason Epstein, a well-known editor, publisher and author who has worked in the business for more than a half-century, in a recent article on the future of publishing in The New York Review of Books, wrote that many publishers fear that transformation will make their current model obsolete.

  "There will be no inventory. There will simply be digital files, and they'll be available worldwide at the click of a mouse. This makes much of what publishers now do irrelevant: creating inventory, putting it in the warehouse, keeping track of it, selling it, shipping it. All that's going to go," Epstein says. Each of these elements cost publishers money, which in turn increases the price of a paper book. But despite radical changes to the industry, Epstein says it's a mistake for consumers to assume that e-books should necessarily cost less than their printed counterparts, at least for the time being. Read or listen to the story at NPR.org.

  Technology

  Feature Literacy and Technology

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