Knowing how we learn may help inspire students

In 1978, researcher Dolores Durkin published a study describing how teachers taught students to understand what they read (“What Classroom Observations Reveal About Reading Comprehension Instruction”). Her finding: They didn’t. Durkin concluded that the teachers she studied offered almost no comprehension instruction. Instead of showing students how to understand what they read, teachers assigned and tested. Often, education research doesn’t have a direct and immediate effect on what actually goes on in classrooms, but this study did. Educators began to consider more carefully how to teach students what skilled readers, writers and thinkers do when they read, write and think. Read more of this commentary by Eileen Landay in The Providence Journal.