What the Experts Say: Ted Hasselbring
“Our early research led us to the conclusion that students who are not reading by middle school have two significant problems with respect to reading:
· Inability to decode and read connected text fluently
· Inability to create mental models from text.
“If mental models cannot be constructed from text and language, it is extremely difficult to develop knowledge and understanding. Sally Shaywitz tells us that, ‘by adolescence, good readers have built huge storehouses of word representations and are reading thousands of words instantly. Decoding is not a problem for them, so their energies can be devoted to thinking about what they read.’
“One approach proposed by the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt is the use of video to help create accurate mental models and to provide the necessary background knowledge for building deep understanding. Video ‘anchors’ the learner with the necessary background knowledge to make sense out of new knowledge.”
—Ted Hasselbring, Ph.D., Peabody Institute of Learning, Vanderbilt University
Two Thumbs Up!
Academic Award for Best Use of Literacy
by Jerry Stemach and Carol Seibert
Yes, this is a movie review — of sorts. The idea that you are expecting a movie review says quite a lot about you as a reader. You read Two Thumbs Up with such fluency and comprehension that your brain has selectively opened up the MOVIES file and made all of your stored knowledge about film and related topics available for you to draw upon, add to, and modify.
Suppose I say ‘Mel Gibson’. Now you are making a movie. Your brain is going crazy retrieving images you have stored about this string of letters: m-e-l—g-i-b-s-o-n and suddenly you ‘see’ the actor, Braveheart, Lethal Weapon, People magazine’s sexiest man alive, a DUI charge, a headline about politically insensitive remarks…
If I am a good reader, I am in the business of making movies that are a faithful representation of the text I read. If I am a struggling reader whose background knowledge is either absent or wrong, I may not be making a movie at all or, if I am, I may be in the monkey business of making science fiction. I may be reading Academy award, not Academic award.
Creating Mental Models
Dr. Ted Hasselbring (researcher for and consultant to Scholastic’s Read 180, Don Johnston’s Start-to-Finish books, Simon S.I.O., and Incite! Learning Series) refers to this phenomenon of movie-making as the ‘mental model theory of comprehension’ in which each of us, while reading, retrieves previously learned information or background knowledge, then maintains and updates a remarkably complex working ‘mental model’ of the text.
Engaging Video
Since a large part of comprehension is tied to the ability to construct meaning from text, Ted and his colleagues focused on ways of teaching reading that supported meaning construction. They did this by combining visual information — video — with text. “When background knowledge doesn’t exist,” Ted says, “it is necessary to provide that knowledge as a starting point for deepening understanding.”
In Ted’s research, each video was less than 10 minutes long. After viewing the video, students then read a piece of text related to the same topic. “Students find the videos so engaging,” Ted explains, “that they want to sit there and learn. The video gives the students the beginnings of the mental model they need in order to comprehend and make sense of new knowledge.”
A Classroom Experience for all Learners
Ted believes that this use of technology offers advantages to all students. First, video provides an easy opportunity for students to respond to and make some connection with self and the world. There are no right or wrong answers here. For struggling readers, video can give them a common experience with the best students (think UDL: Universal Design for Learning).
Suddenly, all students find themselves in a motivating learning environment that is age-appropriate. And teachers who are not reading specialists (and who do not believe they should be) have a simple instructional strategy for quickly creating common ground at the beginning of a lesson.
Commercially Available
Short videos are now commercially available to support a standards-driven curriculum. They are not an end to learning, but a powerful starting place that can deepen a student’s understanding of text be it grade-level textbooks for the best readers or more considerate text for those who require additional support.
Continue to the Universally Designed lesson, including FREE book chapter, audio file and link to view an Incite! Learning Series video,
American Revolution: Causes of War.
