Question: Do we really need this many questions?

ust when you think you've seen and heard it all about witless administrators, along comes a new one to sink the nadir to a new low. This one comes from a professor working near (and also with) one of the largest school districts in the U.S. The professor writes:

Some teachers tell me that with the scripted reading programs they are required to use such as Success for All or Trophies (with fidelity), it leaves them little time for reading aloud. In other areas of the school district, interactive read-alouds are now required. However, the district superintendent's definition of "interactive" involves the teacher reading the book prior to reading it aloud and preparing a list of comprehension questions to ask before, during and after. Essentially, the read-aloud becomes a whole class reading lesson rather than an enjoyable experience that allows children to share and discuss their own connections with the story and with each other.

That district superintendent's policy on tying questions to read-alouds is, unfortunately, typical of the times we live in—no child left behind—no child left untested. This the kind of person who is probably befuddled by the lack of comprehension questions at the end of chapters in Gone With the Wind or War and Peace.

He/she doesn't grasp the Oprah Effect, which, by the way, uses candid, passionate discussion to stimulate interest. Oprah doesn't give a pre-test or a post-test to her audiences, nor does she pepper them with comprehension questions, something that would surely drain the life from the reading experience. The end result has been more than 50 books arriving on the bestseller list, thanks to Oprah's impact. More lifetime readers is the goal, not higher test scores.

Not only is there no research to substantiate this, there is good evidence to refute it.

I was reading David McCullough’s 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities the other evening and he spoke glowingly of the impact that Robert Lawson’s Ben and Me had on his life as a six-year-old. I wonder if the person reading it to him asked enough questions. Lawson didn’t include any at chapter endings or at the back of the book. Too bad he didn't—McCullough could have won four times as many Pulitzers by now. Come to think of it, Mark Twain didn’t put any in his books either. How did we ever make sense of them?

I think of Bishop Desmond Tutu’s testimonial to his comic-book reading as a child in South Africa — wonder if there were any questions in them? We didn't have any in our comics here—and I know because I had the largest comic collection in my neighborhood. So did Ray Bradbury and Cynthia Rylant. How did any of us become and stay literate without those guiding questions? Must have been Divine intervention.

None of this means there isn't room for questions in the read-aloud process. My problem is with the "Captain Overboard" nature of that superintendent's theory/policy that suggests inserting "before, middle, and after" questions makes the read-aloud experience more effective. Not only is there no research to substantiate this, there is good evidence to refute it as seen below in the excerpt from my 2001 edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook.

If an author wants 15 questions in the book, most are smart enough to write and insert them into the text. Maybe the ultimate example of how far we can stray from the author's original intent can be found in the story about the recent TAKS (state assessment) test in which a Houston Chronicle columnist took the five questions on the test essay and posed them of the nationally-recognized author of the actual essay. She couldn't answer three of the five questions. For the actual article, see TAKS-Testing Texas.

I suppose that superintendent thinks I should be spending my retirement years going to my local Barnes & Noble or library to insert sheets of questions into the back of Charlotte's Web and Harry Potter. True, these books are already famous and well-read — but how much good have they done children without questions at chapter endings? So I'll sit for hours each day, constructing questions for children's books, and then duplicate these questions for insertion. Time consuming, yes, but think of the good I'm doing for some unnamed future reader. It's the least you can do in the fight for higher scores, thinks the superintendent. Maybe the President will give me one of those Medal of Freedom awards some day, though I'm not doing it for the awards. It's my civic duty and the best I can do for school superintendents across the land, especially the witless ones.

Now for the research I promised above:

Here is a study done of different teachers’ readings in twenty-five preschool classes for four-year-olds.¹ The readings were filmed, the class and teacher dialogues transcribed and analyzed to establish patterns, and then a representative group of low-income, at-risk students were tested a year later. Three distinct styles of reading were observed, with one being by far the most successful:

1. The co-constructive classes: high amounts of talk by both the teacher and students during the readings, lots of analyzing, clarifications, amplifications, and talk about characters’ emotions; but little talk before or after the sessions.

2. The didactic-interactional classes: limited amounts of talk during the story, and very little before or after the reading; when talk occurred during the story it usually was prompted by the teacher when she called for repeated predictable portions of text from the story; she often called for class responses in order to curtail disruptive or inattentive students; there were only right and wrong answers when she asked questions.

3. The performance-oriented classes: little talk during the story but some before and lots after; the pre-story conversation usually came from the teacher’s introduction of the book, her feelings about it or reasons for reading it; post-story talk often involved the teacher asking questions that prompted the students to recall portions of the story, thus reconstructing the book in their own words; sometimes the follow-up talk focused on linking the story to events in the children’s lives; because the reading was approached as a performance, there were few interruptions during the reading.

The follow-up testing of selected students (now age five) a year later showed the performance-oriented (3) approach to be most effective in supporting vocabulary development and the didactic-interactional (2) to be least successful. In reference to the latter approach, the teachers’ book choices often involved highly predictable texts with limited vocabulary and minimal plots, and follow-up analysis showed they did “little to nourish children’s literacy-related language growth.”

The researchers noted that since the overall amount of talk was not related to subsequent learning, “teachers need not feel compelled constantly to stop and discuss books at length,” but that discussion before and after are beneficial, with the post-story talk being most effective. In other words, when it’s time to read the book, don’t host a talk show.

FOOTNOTE:

David K. Dickinson and Miriam W. Smith, “Long-term Effects of Preschool Teachers’ Book Readings on Low-Income Children’s Vocabulary and Story Comprehension,” Reading Research Quarterly, April/May/June 1994, pp. 104–22.