Boys Flying High in Early Literacy at Camp Hill Infants State School
In contrast with concerns elsewhere that many boys in the earliest of school experiences lose their way with literacy, those at one school in Queensland, Australia, have consistently performed well. In comparison with Statewide average scores on tests (The Year 2 Diagnostic Net), designed to identify those children with need for additional attention in their early reading, writing or numeracy, boys of Camp Hill State Infants School have been outstanding. In this presentation, educators from the school and a critical friend speak to the phenomenon of gender-different achievement in early phase education, and to their beliefs about what is happening in their school.
Researching Caped Crusaders: The Boys Flying High Project in Early Literacy at Camp Hill
Boys at Camp Hill Infants State School have not yet learned to fail. Their superior performances in reading, writing and numeracy on The Year 2 Diagnostic Net in relation to State averages for Year 2 children generally, and for other boys particularly, are indicative of a sturdy resistance to factors seemingly inflicting their peers across the State and nationally. Newspapers, TV and radio, sensitive to public interest in the phenomenon, have interviewed the school's children, teachers, principal and university associates, all of whom speak positively about this result and the learning environment in which the boys have done so well. In this presentation, the principal, a critical friend and his critical colleague consider recent research of the management practices used at the school, pedagogical adaptations made to better suit boys, how Camp Hill SIS's boys appear to become engaged in the education process, and how school and home sustain boys' interest in learning.
What We Know about Correlates of Reading
This research analyzed the combined results of three meta-analyses which examined the extent to which a variety of measures of specific abilities related to reading. More than 450 studies were reviewed and almost 11,000 different coefficients were analyzed. The best predictors of reading proved to be other written language abilities (i.e., abilities involving print). The implications were: (1) professionals interested in improving literacy skills should focus on teaching written language abilities such as print awareness and book handling, letters, phoneme-letter correspondences, word recognition, alphabet knowledge, and comprehension and (2) the current interest in the role of nonprint abilities in reading such as phonological awareness, rapid naming, intelligence, and memory might be overemphasized.