Summary of Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 In 2016, Gaby Arredondo was trying to teach her class of twenty first-graders about captions. She had taught them that a caption is a label that describes a picture, but many of them had chosen the title of the passage instead.

#2 The American approach to elementary education is to teach reading skills completely disconnected from content. It doesn’t matter what students are reading, as long as they can identify captions in a simple text.

#3 The focus on reading in the early grades has led to a huge amount of time being spent on it. This has led to other subjects being neglected, especially social studies.

#4 There are many arguments in favor of testing, but most teachers don’t like the emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum. They would rather spend more time on social studies and science, but they are required to test students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669395898

IRB Media

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Insights on Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 2016, Gaby Arredondo was trying to teach her class of twenty first-graders about captions. She had taught them that a caption is a label that describes a picture, but many of them had chosen the title of the passage instead.

#2

The American approach to elementary education is to teach reading skills completely disconnected from content. It doesn’t matter what students are reading, as long as they can identify captions in a simple text.

#3

The focus on reading in the early grades has led to a huge amount of time being spent on it. This has led to other subjects being neglected, especially social studies.

#4

There are many arguments in favor of testing, but most teachers don’t like the emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum. They would rather spend more time on social studies and science, but they are required to test students.

#5

American students have a weak grasp of history and government. In 2014, students chosen at random on the campus of Texas Tech University were unable to answer questions such as who won the Civil War, who the vice president is, and what country we gained our independence from.

#6

In American classrooms, teachers are left to their own devices to figure out what to teach their students. They may look to the reading assessments that are administered every few weeks to see what skill will be tested next.

#7

The literacy block is typically spent on center time, where each group of students spends approximately twenty minutes doing activities such as reading and practicing their comprehension skills. The A-to-Z scale is used to measure students’ reading levels, and each student has a copy of the same just right book: hard enough to be challenging but not so hard as to be frustrating.

#8

The Common Core states that 50 percent of the students’ reading should be nonfiction. However, the fundamental approach hasn’t changed: