Gender & Diversity Issues
Articles in this section examine differences among various subgroups of students, i.e., boys, girls, students of color.
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Pre-Reading Activities for ELLs
Pre-reading activities may be designed to motivate student interest, activate prior knowledge, or pre-teach potentially difficult concepts and vocabulary. This is also a great opportunity to introduce comprehension components such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, personification, main idea, sequencing, and others.
Teaching Writing to Diverse Student Populations
Writing is a complex operation requiring knowledge of text structure, syntax, vocabulary, and topic, and sensitivity to audience needs; so it is not surprising that many teens find writing challenging. This article identifies the qualities of strong writing instruction, and offers advice to teachers for incorporating writing instruction into their practice, using tools like notebooks and journals, and sharing strategies that reinforce the importance of pre-writing and revision.
Recommendations for Research to Improve Reading Achievement for African American Students
This article includes research recommendations in the areas of standardized testing, teacher quality, after-school programs, parent involvement, reading and study skills, and computer games and simulations.
Connect Students' Background Knowledge to Content in the ELL Classroom
As you teach content areas to ELLs of diverse backgrounds, you may find that they struggle to grasp the content, and that they approach the content from very different perspectives. Drawing on your students’ background knowledge and experiences, can be an effective way to bridge those gaps and to make the content more accessible. This article offers a number of suggestions to classroom teachers as they find ways to tap into the background knowledge that students bring with them.
African-American Students and U.S. High Schools
This fact sheet, prepared by the Alliance for Excellent Education, looks at statistics related to the graduation rates and college readiness of African-American students, as well as the quality of the teachers and schools that serve them.
Urgent but Overlooked: The Literacy Crisis Among Adolescent English Language Learners
English language learners represent more than 10% of the national pre-K through 12th grade enrollment. Also, over 70% of ELLs fail to develop strong literacy skills. To increase this group's educational, college, and job opportunities, policymakers must address the unique ELL literacy questions.
Demography as Destiny: How America Can Build a Better Future
Barely 50% of minority students graduate from high school on time. If this trend continues and the minority student populations increase as projected, the economic strength of the U.S. will be undermined. But if 78% of all student populations graduate on time by 2020, the U.S. can realize stunning potential benefits: conservatively, more than $310 billion would be added to the national economy.
The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: The Truth About Boys and Girls
The media has latched on to the story that American boys are falling behind girls academically and are increasingly outnumbered in college. But what do the numbers show? Referencing more than 30 years of test scores and current research, the author debunks the notion of a gender gap and demonstrates that gaps in educational achievement and attainment are less a function of gender than of racial and economic inequities.
Literacy as a Leisure Activity: Free-Time Preferences of Older Children and Young Adolescents
Despite the importance of reading for lexical development, little is known about the pleasure reading habits of today's youth. This investigation examines the preferences of older children and young adolescents with respect to reading as a leisure-time activity and its relationship to other free-time options likely to compete for their attention, the amount of time that young people spend reading for pleasure each day, and the types of materials they most enjoy reading. The study also attempts to determine if preferences for free-time activities and reading materials would evince age- and gender-related differences. The findings could serve as a reference point for understanding what is reasonable to expect of students at this age.
Boys and Books
The statistics are consistent: Young male readers lag behind their female counterparts in literacy skills. This article looks at the social, psychological, and developmental reasons why, and suggests solutions — including the need for more men to become role models for reading.
