Create an inviting, literacy rich, and motivating classroom that supports reading, while students actively engage with text, peers, and others. Engineer your classroom as an environment where students are enticed to learn to read, discuss their reading, and consequently, become motivated by their own reading successes.
Research
To improve reading skills, students must read. Students who struggle with reading tend to read less and often begin to dislike reading, leading them to avoidance behaviors and falling further and further behind their classmates. The Matthew Effect is a term devised by Dr. Keith Stanovich, Canada’s Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, referring to the circumstances of struggling readers described above. That is, good readers improve reading by engaging in reading and weak readers, who avoid reading, get weaker over time and miss out on reading’s advantages such as building vocabulary (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998).
Application
Create an inviting, literacy rich, and motivating classroom that supports reading, while students actively engage with text, peers, and others. Engineer your classroom as an environment where students are enticed to learn to read, discuss their reading, and consequently, become motivated by their own reading successes.
Professional Learning Resources
- Complete the Classroom Literacy Environment Checklist at the Get Ready to Read website and find out how “literacy-friendly” your classroom is; from the NCLDNCLD
- Classroom Literacy Environment Checklist
- Go to the ASCD article, Every Child, Every Day, by Allington & Gabriel (2012) outlines six research based practices that are important to include in classrooms every school day.
References
Allington, R., & Gabriel, R. ( 2012). Every child,every day. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 10-15.
Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovitch, K. (1998). What reading does for the mind. American Educator, Spring/Summer, 8-15.
