Scaling the Depths: Measuring Earthquakes and Reading Comprehension
“Reading comprehension, in the way we currently study, describe, and teach it, typically gets at what texts say…and what texts mean…. Occasionally, reading comprehension instruction…engag[es] students in conversations about how texts work…and even how language works. Rarely, comprehension instruction engages students in learning about what texts do (when we analyze and evaluate how texts and authors position readers [emphasis added] and their cultural assets and perspectives, privileging some and marginalizing others, or how we can use and apply the insights and knowledge we gain from our understanding to DO [caps in original] something out in the world)” (Cervetti and Pearson, 2023).
In the article quoted above Cervetti and Pearson expand a model of reading instruction developed by Peter Freebody and Allan Luke in the late 1980s called the Four Resources Model. Allan Luke was part of the New Basics Project in Queensland, an initiative focused on rethinking traditional subject areas, including reading, in order to build a curriculum of real-world problem-solving, integrating literacy practices into all of learning from the very beginning.
Peter Freebody, a native Australian who completed his doctoral degree at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1980, worked to bridge the gap between literacy research and policy-making. In a figured world of a developing reader as an agent rather than a subject, his model co-created with Luke was built for policy-makers and school personnel to imagine readers in real-world settings to counteract an inherited perspective on readers in a boot camp of sorts, learning subservience as a prerequisite for taking on the real world.
Research into reading comprehension at the University of Illinois in 1980 during Freebody’s time was in high gear. The Center for the Study of Reading began there in 1976 under the auspices of researchers like Richard Anderson and P. David Pearson and others. They published together a seminal paper on the role of prior knowledge in understanding texts (cf: Anderson and Pearson, 1984) which has become a touchstone in literacy studies. A sustained emphasis on decoding in the forefront of research extended from Huey (1908) to Jean Chall at Harvard in the 1960s and 70s and has been resurrected as the Science of Reading (SoR ©️) in the 21st century. The search for a single unifying theory of reading comprehension as a distinct part of literacy is nonetheless alive and well as near as I can see from the literature. Its importance as the North Star of pedagogical assessment is crucial.
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In the late 1970s, a noteworthy U.S. federal investment in reading comprehension research established the Center in central Illinois. A remarkable convergence of reading scholars worked together for a remarkably long period of time to research and develop insights into higher-order comprehension involving cognitive movement in, through, and beyond texts; into vocabulary and its growth during and consequent to reading; into methods for teaching early reading; into the role of psycholinguistic aspects in comprehension processes; and into promising pedagogical principles and models.
Anderson and Pearson (1984) respectfully acknowledged the value of decades of previous research in reading while asserting that not much progress had been made in creating theoretical models of reading comprehension grounded in empirical evidence. In a poignant example of dialogue among scholars across distant spans of history, they speak with Huey (1908) to point out something important between the lines as I read the text: The obsession with early reading, standardized testing, and silver bullets holding back the tide of research in reading comprehension was beginning to dissolve:
Inch by inch to the mountaintop.
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The New Basics program in Australia in which Luke and Freebody worked grew from a whole of government effort to change the trajectory of public schools to better serve the needs of high-poverty children. This effort began with the Karmel Report (1973) prepared for the Australian government in much the same way the Coleman Report (1966) was prepared for the United States government with the same finding and recommendation: First, children who most needed schools had less access to well-resourced schools than children from affluent families, who predictably achieved higher test scores leading to more economic and symbolic capital; second, resources dedicated to improved access to high-quality schools would benefit everyone in myriad ways. For a flavor of the times witness a brief excerpt from the Karmel Report of 1973 with its emphasis on quality and equality in schooling to improve the lives of indigenous people:
Given the spirit of the Karmel Report and the resources that followed, including funds for exploration of innovations, what better question could Luke and Freebody ask than this: What resources do readers have available in order to make use of texts for their own purposes? This question required a paradigm shift from a Ptolemaic universe with code-breaking at its center to a Galilean system with sense-making at the core. Of course, no one would propose scrapping the code. The answer to the resources-for-readers question, they had to have known, must be pragmatic and robust enough for common understanding without prescription nor mandate and deep enough to open the bigger questions for research.
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The Four Resources model as a handy diagram has a web presence. One instantiation of it which I’ll share in a bit has variations in online graphics depicting the elements of the four resource model as it was proposed in the 1990, but the parts are always unmistakable. Cervetti and Pearson (2023) build on this original conceptual model by emphasizing the next step, the fifth resource (or role) once the puzzle is complete, the “DOing” part—taking action to give children the opportunity to use these reading resources as a springboard to help fix a world of problems with solutions bigger than long vowels, consonant blends, and think-and-search questions.
The 2023 article on “DOing” discussed published evidence from across grade levels and subject areas to illuminate the kind of reading instruction that some schools of today are accomplishing. This post can’t capture the nuances of the analysis, but the following excerpt provides a glimpse into the substance of the piece:
Notice that the following diagram with puzzle pieces interconnected in a holistic act verges on action—political, epistemological, personal growth, goal-setting, etc. Reading in its full scope engages readers as technicians with intentions and agency evoking participation authentically in their living world, aspects historically beyond the boundary of reading instruction before the dawn of the Age of Comprehension. Its left corner references language as a “code” and the reader as a decipherer. The remaining pieces reference language as a “text” and the reader as a motivated agent. The center piece references the coming together of language, text, context, and agent into what we can now call a DOer, a text actor, where each of the four resources are required to alchemize texts from a mental construct into social and community impact in the physical and social world, breathing life into words.
Cervetti and Pearson chose to capitalize DO, I believe, because the coming storm the United States faces is not just Johnny Can’t Read. Oh, Johnny can read. But what can Johnny DO as a good citizen under shared governance in the economy, college or career ready? Covid and Trump with AI in the classroom have made the leaves of grass under our feet shiver, making four resources plus one instead of just two more critical today than ever. Now what do we do with text in a discourse of distortion where anything is true if it comes from the right digitized tribe? Find new algorithms?
Literacy education for purposes of academic engagement in knowledge production needs a good, pragmatic, theoretical earthquake. Going back to basic phonics and handwriting means turning away from a future rapidly incorporating artificial intelligence, instead looking for a warm beach into which heads can be stuck. Answering multiple choice questions about a passage selected because it means very little to you personally accept you might be able to ‘read’ it, a facsimile of a text in your world, has worked for sorting and ranking since the roaring Twenties. Humans have grown beyond the Knight of the Right Answer. The aging Knight no longer has the agility to guard the kingdom.
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During the 1960s Australian linguist Michael Halliday, who defined language as “a meaning potential,” developed a pragmatic model of language-in-use called SFL, systematic functional linguistics, which has become a central cross-disciplinary research focus in linguistics, looking at how language, in this case English, functions as a sign system in society to accomplish things in the real world (Almurashi, 2016)—to obligate, to speculate, to promise, to request, to require, to offer, to inform, to name, to communicate, etc.
Linguists continue to explore language as an object or in relation to an individual’s cognition, inner psychological subjective processes of the sort Huey (1908) thought of as the grail of reading research, the “acme of a psychologist’s dream.” This is the stuff that happens in and to your brain when you read. Indeed, reading researchers who explored reading comprehension followed the trail to the borders of psychology when they identified “prior knowledge” as the key ingredient in reading comprehension. From whence comes prior knowledge if not from participation in social, physical, and cultural worlds?
SFL had tremendous downstream impact on both AI and on pedagogy in language and literacy. Genre, for example, has been incorporated into teacher discourse to the degree it’s become almost invisible. Modality as linguistic traces and cues that signal attitudes and perspectives toward reality, possibility, manipulation, etc. is part of AI training protocols. The impact of SFL appears in our understandings of subtle yet powerful effects from mundane speech acts or reading events to participation as a contributor in a community. The following diagram (accessed from Almurashi, 2016) overlays (or underlays) the Four Resources puzzle and represents how Halliday’s insistence on studying situated language has entered scholarly thinking:
Reflecting on Cervetti and Pearson’s (2023) call to “DO” something for heaven’s sakes, one might now reflect on the ways in which this set of SFL circles compares and contrasts with the inner parts of the Earth:
In this context please focus attention on the solid inner core, the part almost as hot as the sun from which seismic waves arise. Think of this core as cognition in a reading brain where waves of literacy signals are both received and sent back. Entering in a stream of graphemes, these signals are made molten at the core and then sent forth through layers of context to emerge and disrupt the surface. As seismic waves pass through the liquid outer core and the mantle to reach the crust of the Earth, they push and pull on layers of rocks, minerals, and compounds floating on molten matter. Inside the layer above the brain we might call consciousness (metaphysically speaking), the waves coming from the brain pass through well-worn chambers of competing voices and across overpasses to communicate and change cognitive schemas and cultural models in novel ways. Ultimately, seismic waves reach the crust and result in everything from unremarkable—literally—shivers to mammoth buildings and bridges tossed like children’s toys. These are earthquakes, and they happen every day.
Reading comprehension happens everyday, too. Students process streams of graphemes, make sense of them, even study them analytically. Measurements are taken to determine how closely the processing of text matches the expected outcome. Educators can measure such low levels of comprehension fairly accurately. In earthquake terms, these moments of comprehension are barely detectable, small waves that make you wonder if the Earth had moved or if. you imagined it. But thanks to statistics we are able to scale them into percentile ranks. We have mastered the technique of measuring reading comprehension assuming that all of us agree on what texts mean all the time. Earthquakes aren’t like that. Each eruption is unique in power and consequences.
According to Bakhtin (translated from the Russian by Godzich, 1984, pp. 15-161“mathematics and natural sciences do not acknowledge discourse as an object of inquiry…. The entire methodological apparatus…is directed at reified objects that do not reveal themselves in discourse.” This same apparatus applied to subjective and intersubjective matters like reading comprehension which do reveal themselves led to distortions in the subject under study, namely, reading comprehension, to render it quantifiable. The Four Resources model with Text Actor appended fleshes out reading comprehension not as a reified object but as human behavior. Creating a new paradigm will of necessity require applications of sociocultural, qualitative methodologies. But a metaphor like earthquakes might nonetheless inform future assessment.
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As a matter of theory, the four resources model draws on semantic, phonological-orthographic, and syntactic language systems in interaction with cognition. But readers who get a daily diet of Code and Convergent Cognition (resource 1 and 2) remain autonomous in relation to the author and the outside world. In other words, if a reader is asking “how do I pronounce these words” and “what does this text mean,” the reader is a technician and a translator, revoicing the words of the text in their own inner register.
So I got what the text says, I think I know what it means. To reach more distant circles or layers, I must make clear to myself what the text was designed to do to or for me, and I how it might affects me and others. I’m still operating in my own head. Now what? What might I DO with the text? In the doing I break the invisible fourth wall keeping me apart from other actors in my world and enter the context of culture and finally ideology. This new level of activity is becoming a Text Actor.
Essentially, Halliday and his colleagues took language out of the laboratory into the light of day. Rather than do an autopsy on a dead body, treating text as a linguistic artifact and readers as mummies, they wanted to see the living body doing what it does in natural settings. What does a text do to and for readers? What do readers do with text? These questions address coding and construction resources.
In a paper written for the Disadvantaged Schools Program of the New South Wales Department of Schools, Feez and White (1994) reported on the nuts and bolts of a functional approach to mapping texts as signal systems cueing reading comprehension, that is to say, how readers work to make use of textual resources using the “given-new contract” otherwise known as the “theme” followed by “new.”
In functional theory, a basic assumption is that two people must begin to communicate by establishing a given, that is, an idea or theme that both know beforehand or that is identified up front. Then as the discourse moves forward, new ideas are brought into the exchange. It appears that the intention of the 1994 report was to educate others about changes in theory which must occur to reconfigure the traditional reading comprehension construct from “extracting meaning from a nicely structured text” to “making meaning in the reader’s mind from whatever the text throws at you.” Witness Exhibit 1 taken for the report from a piece of journalism. Here, the nucleus is given (the core of the text around which satellites orbit). Circled are nodes in the through line; rectangles locate new nodes active in satellite 1 and 2:
Exhibit 2 provides a text seemingly functioning as a statement of a position but which shifts function, attempting to trap the reader into making a false choice. Like the journalistic text, it begins with a nucleus of sorts, the “coalition approach,” a nucleus requiring considerable elaboration functioning as informative text. Following verse 1 (cf: Gee, 2014) the text is obligated to enumerate and define each promised point. Readers are expected to make sense of this constellation before getting the author’s evaluation of the approach by viewing the author as credible.
Lines 2-6 are informative only in that they spell out the author’s opinion and put the reader in the awkward position of being either loyal to democracy or a renegade. By the concluding line, the speaker demands that the reader “comprehend” the logically inevitable conclusion that democracy is gone when workers are forced to join a union. It’s clear that the text seeks to position the reader as either a righteous believer in democracy or a lousy socialist. Right?
On a traditional comprehension test, an evaluator might ask a reader to choose the option which best expresses the author’s views on the Coalition approach or to choose the option that best restates the purpose of the author. Select the choice that best describes the author’s purpose: a) to prove that collective bargaining threatens the working class: b) to insult anyone who disagrees with him; c) to express his opinion about union membership; or d) to provide an example of a closed mind. From a functional perspective, the test might ask “What is the text trying to do to you? How is it designed to work this way?” Or “How might you use this text to think about the role of government in relation to unions?”
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Freebody and Luke (1989) provided three reasons for making their model. First, by the late 1980s scientists had studied reading comprehension in theory and practice, accumulating practical models of reading processes and a wide repertoire of instructional techniques with evidence of efficacy of improved comprehension. Yet there was no unified approach to using this knowledge base holistically to inform authentic reading assignments. The gulf between theory and practice loomed large.
Second, practitioners were hungry for the right instructional method, a grave danger in the minds of pragmatists. Freebody and Luke argued that using a broad spectrum of literacy practices in classrooms grounded in place-based pedagogies would support the economic and social development of children wherever they lived. There could be no silver bullet. Ironically, today’s zeitgeist seems to have doubled down on the quest for an easy panacea.
Third, they insisted that teachers are curriculum developers, not curriculum deliverers, planning instruction according to the interests and needs of children in their local community. This reason perhaps may have been the most daunting. They needed a functional instructional organizer, not a cookbook.2
Halliday had identified seven functions that children become skilled in as they transition from the crib to the classroom. Developing pedagogy to foster growth in using language as a tool to serve these functions seemed promising to Freebody and Luke (1989) and to a legion of literacy researchers who came later.
Used instrumentally to satisfy desires or needs, language is a tool to make requests or or provide instructions or to make a case. Rules governing actions and behaviors expressed linguistically serve a regulatory purpose. Interactions are functions of language ranging from small talk and greeting cards to seminar discussions. As a heuristic, language works like a can opener to ask and answer questions, to speculate, to analyze a set of options, and the like. The imaginative function opens doors to worlds beyond reality ranging from literature to dreaming up different scenarios of a future (cf: C. Wright Mills, the “sociological imagination” from the 1950s). The informative function is exemplified by textbooks, lectures and news reports.
Cervetti and Pearson (2023) critiqued the typically surface nature of reading assignments in contemporary classrooms and urged teachers to guide children well beyond code-breaking and meaning-making, even beyond using texts to fulfill a purpose, often an assigned rather than a self-motivated purpose. In their extension of the Four Resources model every reader is positioned to ask “What is this text trying to do to me?” They flipped the script—What can I do with this text? Here’s my reading of the quote cited at the start of this essay, a less diplomatic rendition but reading between the lines…:
We reading educators have been talking about and teaching and assessing reading comprehension in a self-limiting way for decades now, and we’ve learned a lot, but we have to come up for air. It’s as if we’re teaching them to swim, but we never let them in the water without a life jacket. It’s not cool that we’ve been holding kids back, requiring them to stick to the surface of the text, to take it in and let it sit in cold storage until they grow up. Oh, we want them to get the meaning, but it has to match the meaning in our heads. So it’s kind of a double whammy. They chase after the meaning in the text and then face the prospect of being evaluated according to their teacher’s meaning. We seem to care more about the meanings of words in the dictionary or teacher manual than about the meaning of texts in the minds of kids. If we as researchers had the luxury of speaking from our hearts and not so much our heads, we would shout it from the rooftops, but the most we can do in this article is capitalize one tiny word: DO… WHAT DO TEXTS DO TO ME??? WHAT CAN I DO WITH THEM? WHY DON’T WE TEACH THAT?
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Comprehension design specifications for test makers and validators don’t involve items such as asking readers to speculate about why an author might have chosen a compound sentence structure instead of a single clause subordinating one of the ideas (e.g., how language works). No multiple-choice test maker would ask readers to identify the right answer to a question like this: Why do Cervetti and Pearson publish the word DO instead of do? McGraw-Hill doesn’t build in items to see how competently fourth graders, say, assume a COMMAND stance as a reader, demanding to understand how the text is trying to construct a position for them to occupy, reading to find out what they can DO with a text in their world vs. our world.
Constructing meaning with text as a blueprint (traditional comprehension) stops with “say” and “mean.” If deconstructing a text means looking not just at what it says, but also at what it does not say, full comprehension means constructing and deconstructing a text, following the blueprint, then figuring out what the architect intended you to do and what was left in silence.
Those in policy making positions shaping comprehension assessment (e.g., NAEP) are speaking with deafening silence about how well readers do (con)textual things with, to, and on behalf of themselves and others with texts. Textbooks do not come out and say “You are to assume that the content of this message is factual, authoritative, and true, whether it is or not” yet they position readers as receptacles and, in a conspiracy with teachers, expect compliance. This term will be on the exam. It’s up to you, dear reader, if you want to do more than follow the blueprint and memorize the meaning. By all means, do—for “extra credit.”
Texts ‘construct’ readers—if readers complete the “say and mean” steps and then “stop”—by coercing them into fulfilling the cognitive demands of the text fortified and modified by directions from teachers. Standardized texts constructed by professionals on committees and approved by politicians are designed to construct readers and put them in shipping containers.
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“Fault line” as a term earns its slot in English dictionaries by way of the Old French "faute," which derives from the Latin "fallere," meaning "to deceive or to fail,” for example, “medias fallunt sermonibus horas (Ovid, M. 8, 652). Both meanings of “fault”—deception and failure—adhere philosophically and scientifically to the context of fault lines and earthquakes. Earth deceives all living beings geologically by teaching us to believe we’re standing on or planted in solid ground, a false belief existentialist thinkers took to the bank, arguing that one day there is an earthquake, our ground will fail in its promise miserably like Jean Paul Sartre’s character’s tongue turning into a centipede in his mouth in the novel Nausea, the ordinary state of the stomach of the nihilist.
Texts are deceptive in their promise of stable, determinate meaning. According to the deception, each reader is destined to arrive at the same shores of meaning that everyone else sees is right thinking, undistracted by expertly designed and calibrated optional shores, in a world where naive perspectives on text are taken at face validity. Reading to grasp and hold a meaning and then shoehorn the meaning into a schema your teacher requires you to build in order to pass a test promotes the illusion that cognitive earthquakes can’t happen. Meaning makes it safely home.
“Line” is intriguing as a partner word. From the Old English "line,” derived from the Latin "linea” meaning "flaxen cord" or "string," line came to refer to a "mark or stroke of the pen.” I made an appointment with an online artificial philologist for an ointment to salve the itch to know how flaxen cords became lines of print. Such therapy ought to be covered by health insurance. Once upon a time, a line was a flaxen cord; all of a sudden it became a collection of words in a row on a page: Act II, Scene iii, Lines 317-321. Suddenly, a fault line means a line etched in blocks of rock by primal forces emerging from the Earth’s core. By the way, the URL cited above in this paragraph links to a map to buried treasure.
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The field of geology claimed the term fault line in the early 19th century. Its exact provenance is unknown. Sir Charles Lyell, a Scottish geologist whose work “Principles of Geology" (1833) was seminal in the field, may have used the term in conversations with colleagues, liked it, and thereby bestowed credence upon it by using it himself. Looking at what the phrase says, what it means and has meant, and how the phrase works, one discerns poetry in a a metaphor tied with a flaxen cord, a box inside of which are tongues and centipedes.
Lyell’s idea of ‘uniformitarianism’ emerged during geology’s formative stage in the 1830s in opposition to the conventional school of thought called ‘catastrophism.’ The conventional theory of earthquakes at the time explained that the variety of shapes of rock formations on the surface of the Earth and discovered in excavations was a product of random chance. This view was at least an improvement on the ancient view that quakes were messaging from a displeased god. Reading comprehension theories of measurement have an element of catastrophism in them. When misunderstanding or non-understanding occur, it must have resulted from a random derailment, an accident, a mistake.
Lyell thought the idea of catastrophism rooted in nihilistic chaos on one hand or supernatural forces on the other was a disaster as an explanation. He proposed the idea that earthquakes are knowable, that the Earth exists in a “steady state.” Uniformitarianism meant that the Earth’s shaking represents a breach of equilibrium with causes understandable through scientific research. The Earth is anything but chaotic. Fault lines were for him as natural—and as right—as the rain that falls from the sky unto the Earth below.
It is worth noting that reading comprehension exists in a steady state as well, mental textually-based experiential or imaginative knowledge anchored in a sea of consciousness, rubbing against one another, pressuring one another, edges slipping and sliding as cognitive pressures build, erupting in gentle seismic moments, a 1.0, barely noticeable, the sort that happens all the time when one reads for meaning.
The term "tectonic" in relation to Earth's inner layers refers to the processes and features associated with the movement and deformation of the Earth's lithosphere, the outermost layer of the Earth, comprising the crust and the uppermost part of the mantle. The lithosphere is divided into large and small plates known as tectonic plates.
These plates float on the semi-fluid asthenosphere beneath them and move relative to each other powered by heat-driven convection currents or seismic waves in the mantle. The interactions between these plates leads to various geological phenomena, including the formation of mountains, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the creation of ocean basins and continents.
"Tectonic" specifically pertains to the study and understanding of these plate movements and the structures they produce, a field known as "plate tectonics." This concept explains the distribution and features of Earth's geological activity and helps in understanding the Earth's past geography and predicting future changes.
It’s interesting to import the notion of “tectonic plates” into reading theory. Since the 1980s I’ve imagined a schema-driven space in the mind where topics are connected to filaments that grow from traces of meaning stored in slots. When a text uses a cue to activate a schema, the topic node lights up, and all of the slots linked to it become available for direct access or through inferential processes. New slots can be constructed to store new information. My mental image squares with the textual invitations diagrammed for the text about the boating accident with a nucleus and satellites and the anti-union text with a theme elaborated by four points followed by a trap for the reader.
But what if the real story isn’t about topic knowledge and vocabulary but about tectonic plates that form near the surface of consciousness where topics come to adhere together? What if one of these plates is a domain that serves in interaction with other plates to support consciousness as a durable, predictable presence of mind other people can depend on—just as they depend on the ground under our feet and the sun under the sky? What happens when a cognitive quake of catastrophic proportions happens? Individual tectonic plates adjust and reconfigure to resume support of a coherent, predictable presence in the social world.
Gradually, as more text-infused traces and cues accrue on the surface, background pressures build, and thinking stiffens to attention as friction accumulates at the edges of the plated traces, raw energy demanding release, a 3.0 quakes happens—boom. One understands something new or in a new way or intriguing, a swaying lightbulb indicating more than a shiver in comprehension.
Less often, a 6.0 quake, a jolt, happens, the plates bearing potential meaning through intertextuality breaking apart or snapping or scraping, and voila! a major insight, a rush of high-level coherence, a remodeling of a perspective, a more comprehensive comprehension, something to DO something with.
Frank Smith published Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of our Classrooms (1988) broadly focused on schools in general, more specifically on reading and writing in classrooms, as a powerful wake up call that went largely unheard. I DID something with Smith’s text every time I explained his reasoning about the negative consequences of “time on task” thinking in my methods classes and workshops.
The notion of “time on task” in education was borrowed from time and motion studies in the context of factory labor practices done in the 1940s or thereabouts. Efficiency demanded reducing motions to save time and to motivate workers to stay on task. Hence, the birth of piecework—pay for each piece produced rather than for each hour spent. Big learning, big ideas, important insights—Smith argued that they happen in the blink of an eye. One could spend years on task and never have a major cognitive earthquake, one that rearranged tectonic plates in long term memory.
Fault lines can be visible on the Earth’s surface as straight or wavy lines, scarps, or offsets, but many lie deep below the surface, detectable only with geophysical methods or in the patterns of earthquakes that occur along them. A scarp or an offset or even wavy lines on the surface of the crust are evidence of past seismic activity, but the earthquake—what happened on the Oakland Bay bridge in the late afternoon in 1989 when the Loma Prieta quake broke apart a major highway like peanut brittle—the truth is in the water below. Time on task alone will not uncover truth if the task is to replicate someone else’s thoughts.
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The yoking together of two concepts with nothing in common on the surface, when carefully chosen and rigorously explored in a philosophical text, can yield insights on three planes: 1) the language plane in which lexical items can transfer from B to A, making shared understanding more memorable and nuanced; 2) the cognitive plane through which revisions in the framework of A motivated by the force of B can lead to unforeseen improvements in future autonomous decisions in activity; and 3) the historical plane where considering A in light of B can produce further exploration and development of A, even paradigm shifts.
Lyell moved the field of geology with his uniformitarianism as surely as Loma Prieta took out the Bay Bridge. Cervetti and Pearson (2023) are endeavoring to move the field of reading from a text-centric to a context-centric paradigm where reading comprehension means DOING something, shaking up one’s world.
In the 20th century Thomas Richter moved the needle in the practical world of quakes with his scale in the 1930s. His idea had such force that even today people routinely refer to the Richter scale when an earthquake happens. It’s not commonly known that the Richter scale has not been used scientifically in fifty years. I didn’t know this before I began reading on this topic.
Richter never intended to invent a scale to measure earthquakes everywhere on the planet. His aim was more modest. Richter designed his tools to measure earthquakes in California much like Freebody and Luke designed the model to work in Australia. His scale was tuned to California quakes using a machine called the seismograph to create pen and paper graphs recording the intensity of aftershocks and making observations of damages—in California. Importantly, his techniques are reliable only up to the scale point 5. Beyond 5 his approach doesn’t work. Quakes can hit 10+ on the scale.
Measuring reading comprehension using tools made according to traditional assumptions—there is but one defensible understanding of a text, such understanding is sufficiently uniform across all readers to justify its most efficient measurement tactics, readers can be ranked according to the number of correct answers they provide, etc.—is like using the Richter scale. It appears to be reliable enough when used to measure “say” and “mean” reading (construction of meaning), but it is both unreliable and invalid to measure “DO” reading (deconstructive reading to figure out what a text is DOing to me and what I can DO with it). “Say” and “mean” reading is by nature a way of converging on a shared meaning—texts do represent stable meanings to varying degrees, arguably measurable by way of pick-your-poison tests. DOing is critical, synthetic, personal and social. My option likely isn’t your option.
I don’t have to agree that a contradiction exists between supporting union collective bargaining and being loyal to democratic governance. And I can act on my conclusion.
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I assumed that you, my reader, generally have less fingertip knowledge about measuring earthquakes than you have about measuring comprehension. I understand that some readers already know as much about earthquakes as they care to know. I ask for your indulgence as I discuss the paradigm shift in earthquake measurement a) from assessing the strength of the shaking of the ground b) to assessing the seismic moment when and where two plates slip on a fault line, a new way of thinking that took place in the 1970s. Richter measures what happens when the quake is over much like current reading comprehension tests, an insult to intelligence. Since the 70s scientists have been able to measure what happens when the quake begins, the seismic moment. What happens when reading comprehension begins? Do we know? Can we measure it?
The Seismic Scale in Human Terms
In 1989 on October 17 at 5:04 p.m. local time, the Loma Prieta earthquake jolted the Santa Cruz Mountains 60 miles south of San Francisco. Shocks were felt as far south as San Diego. My brother, a former Marine, just then was driving across the Bay Bridge.
His car lost its grip on the pavement and fishtailed violently. Flailing, spinning, wrestling his steering wheel as his car careened across lanes, he saw a steep rise ahead like a draw bridge making way for a ship to pass. He was hurtling toward it.
He felt he was being thrown heavenward and then, with a thud, his car came to rest balanced atop an almost vertical slab of highway smooshed up against another slab like hands folded in prayer. He watched another car roll slowly from the bridge to the water below.
We saw footage together later that night on the evening news. We saw cars, trucks, madly scattered and battered, the broken road tossed about in pieces at ungodly angles, a medley of weirdly strewn automobiles. One clip lasted twenty seconds, the length of time the action lasted, a random camera catching the mayhem. He knew he was lucky he didn’t die. He didn’t even get hurt much.
The Loma Prieta quake without so much as a cosmic hesitation transformed a drive home from the San Francisco territory on I-80 into an action movie, a car into a toy. The Earth shook—and then stopped—the kind of thing the ancients blamed on Poseidon or Neptune.
A day earlier he was covering the Central Valley territory, Coalinga, the ammonia from cowshit thick in the air, Bakersfield and the plain vanilla bullshit from the veterinarians, to sell pharmaceuticals to big animal docs who adored him. He was a jokester and gathered off-colored jokes like flypaper.
If the gods had taken out the Bay Bridge a day earlier, he wouldn’t have been in the market for a new car. Where on the scale of damages do you put loss of innocence? How does one get on with knowledge of Sartre’s centipede once you’ve felt it in your mouth? There are no more guarantees. Frank Smith was right: Big insights happen quickly.
Widespread damage was reported. Besides the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, the Marina District suffered severe destruction due to liquefaction when soil saturated with water becomes fluid and things firmly planted begin to float on slurried ground, a risk in areas with high water tables, loosely packed, sandy soils, and a history of seismic activity. In the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay regions south on Highway 1, buildings crumbled. People died. Carmel survived unscathed.
*
The earthquake is famous for occurring during the live broadcast of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics held at Candlestick Park. Half an hour before the start of the game, Al Michaels broadcast nationally: “I think we’re having an earthquake….” Terry Kennedy, the Giants catcher, recalled the moment years later:
“We had just finished stretching and getting ready for introductions. I was in the dugout talking to Dusty…. I hear a lot of noise. I'm thinking people are stomping their feet. Dusty says, 'That's an earthquake.' I look down the tunnel…, and here comes Robby Thompson. There's seven steps to the dugout, and he jumps all seven. I look out on the field and see a big wave. I look up at the suites and see a guy who has his hands on the window and his feet on the sill, and it looked like he'd jump. He didn't, but there was pure panic on his face. Things were wiggling and shaking."
No matter how desperately we humans pray for the comfort of illusion, nature remains predictably cold, bloody in tooth and nail. I don’t like it much, either. But still we have this need to measure destruction and scale it so we can model it and follow the model to diminish Chaos, the primal force, the friend of Nyx. Pass it forward. If we can model it statistically, which requires measurement, we can better understand how to build bridges. We think, we measure, therefore, we understand and fight for a light in the darkness. We deconstruct our constructions and comprehend.
Why, then, can we not put our collective nose to the grindstone and figure out how to measure cognitive comprehension quakes of the DO! variety, the 6, 8, 9 point quakes that bring a World Series to a halt, the serious, powerful mental quakes that only deep and sustained intertextual reading produces—not to destroy the landscape like an earthquake, but to reconstruct an original perspective to act upon?
*****
At 6.9 on the seismic moment scale, the Loma Prieta quake did not have the fury of the 1906 San Francisco quake, which shook things up before the invention of the Richter scale in the 1930s and therefore could not be measured in historical terms. Estimates locate the 1906 quake at a magnitude of 7.8, a real shake and bake for sure. But even this 7.8 can’t touch the peaks on the moment magnitude scale of destruction packed into the Valdivia earthquake of 1960 at 9.3 and the Great Alaska quake of 1964 at 9.2. The Valdivia quake in Chile had a rupture zone of 611 miles, killed 1,665 people, and caused a Pacific tsunami that played havoc with coastal communities in NewZealand, Japan, and the Philippines. Then four years later Alaska was ravished at 9.2. Ground rose 8 feet in some areas. While humans used their powers to refine and apply tools to measure quakes, they had not yet turned their attention to updating the measurement of reading comprehension.
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Using the Wood-Anderson seismograph from the olden days, the Richter technique could gauge the magnitude of quakes whose epicentres were less than 600 km (373 miles) from the location of the seismograph. Recall that these miles were California miles over California terrain. Measurement tools have become far more technologically sophisticated, but this seismograph would still do in a pinch if the quake were light to moderate:
The new world moment magnitude and the seismograph approach to measurement replacing Richter’s tools correlate well with the old until magnitude rises above 5. At that point for one thing the pen dangling from the frame starts swinging so wildly that the rotating paper begins to look like Donald Trump’s signature—unreadable. A seismograph can be ripped from a table as easily as a vase can fall from a shelf in a violent quake. Distortions reduce the correlation of the old tool with the new much past 5 when the old measures are useless. Nonetheless, at the time, the Richter method was a major innovation. By the way, we are much better at measuring physical earthquakes than we are at measuring political earthquakes.
*****
Better scientific understanding of the geology of earthquakes since the mid-20th century led to improvements in measurement techniques critical for making structural improvements in buildings and bridges and in making predictions of quakes. Indeed, improved measurements increased accuracy of predictions until today, if a quake rattles Candlestick Park, early warnings will alert people to the impending danger with enough seconds to make their way to a safe location designed into the stadium. Could functional measures of how readers take up the resources available to them for reading comprehension in the service of DOing help make comprehension pedagogy stronger?
Proposed in the mid-20th century, the theory of plate tectonics changed the paradigm of thinking about the Earth's structure and the dynamics of earthquakes.
“Tectonic plates, large slabs of rock that divide Earth’s crust, move constantly to reshape the Earth’s landscape. The system of ideas behind plate tectonics theory suggests that Earth's outer shell (lithosphere) is divided into several plates that glide over the Earth’s rocky inner layer above the soft core (mantle). The plates act like a hard and rigid shell compared to Earth's mantle. The mantle sits between Earth's dense, very hot core and its thin outer layer, the crust. Plate tectonics has become the unifying theory of geology. It explains the earth’s surface movement, current and past, which has created the tallest mountain ranges and the deepest oceans.“
Before the acceptance of plate tectonics, earthquake assessments in terms of severity were based on Richter’s mixed methods, that is, observation of the extent and distribution of surface damage as well as tools to record surface ground motion, like seismographs. As we know, quakes at the low end do little damage; so a rating of “2” was pretty well correlated with very little, if any, physical damage. A rating of “6,” however, had a weak correlation with damage. Physical destruction from a 6.0 quake depends of the surrounding surfaces. Plate tectonic theory provided a framework for discerning the deeper, inner workings of earthquakes, particularly what happens at the edges of tectonic plates where slipping occurs, releasing energy in logarithmic increments. This theory also shed light on building codes grounded in empirical evidence relating magnitude of quakes with local topography and surround.
Measurement of reading comprehension now is not intended to inform understanding of precisely what should be done locally to shore up the surrounding area. These measures are general and must be interpreted using abstract norms. A score is probably best understood as more Richter scale than seismic moment. Standardized tests, which measure what texts say and what they mean, reliably capture comprehension performances from light, barely noticeable activity (20th percentile rank) to moderate activity (50th percentile rank) but lose their ability to discriminate well among the remaining half of the distribution. A reader in the middle (above basic, say) probably makes fairly good common sense of the meaning of a text, but whether this reader has the competence to reach Text Actor is unknown. But the stronger performing reader is limited by the test itself and therefore has no opportunity to reach DO. There are no items to measure “DO” reading or an approach to it because there is nothing to DO on standardized tests in the sense of community engagement or shared problem solving.
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Advances in seismograph technology and global communication have significantly improved earthquake measurement. Digital seismographs can detect and record the motion of the ground far more precisely than earlier instruments. Furthermore, you can own your very own device for the price of pair of jeans:
The deployment of multiple seismic stations spread across large geographical areas improves spatial resolution and helps in obtaining more accurate determinations of the seismic moment. Would it be possible to have access to real-time comprehension assessment data across school sites with digitally enhanced techniques using contextual probes? Could we predict future comprehension quakes or the lack of advancing pressure beforehand to preteach rather than reteach?
Advanced computational techniques determine the seismic moment tensor—a mathematical representation that describes the deformation in the source region during an earthquake. In simpler terms, scientists nowadays use very powerful computers to help them figure out exactly how the ground is shifting during an earthquake. They use a special kind of math to represent these shifts and show what happened underground where the earthquake started. This math tells them not just how much the earth moved, but also in what direction and how it twisted or turned.
GPS technologies have been increasingly used to directly measure the motion of the Earth's surface caused by seismic events, critical to estimating the seismic moment. Using radar images from satellites, complex tools can detect ground displacement with very high accuracy to help quantify seismic moments for larger earthquakes. Simulations help scientists calculate the seismic moment based on the physical properties of the Earth and the characteristics of the fault movement. Ocean Bottom Seismographs have expanded the coverage of seismic detection to areas that were previously not monitored, providing a more comprehensive measurement of seismic moments, especially for undersea earthquakes.
Moreover, the establishment of worldwide seismograph networks like the Global Seismograph Network (GSN) affords rapid data collection and sharing, enabling seismologists to quickly determine the parameters of an earthquake from multiple data points:
“The Global Seismographic Network (GSN) is a 152 station, globally distributed, state-of-the-art digital seismic network that provides free, realtime, open access data through the SAGE Facility DMC. The map above shows the distribution of the current station network with respect to network code.”
Measured improvements not just datawise but in communication crystallize actionable assessments of the size, depth, and impact potential of particular earthshaking moments. They happen all the time, I understand—literally. Just as the globe is spinning, the ground is floating under our feet. Data are then applied in research and in application from policy to strategy and tactics, updating building codes and making changes to emergency response and preparedness. Undoubtedly, matrices organized by salient factors ranging from friction, slippage, scope, geolocation scenarios, and more based on probabilistic reasoning feed into decisions like where to build an energy plant, how to rebuild the Bay Bridge, improving safety for future inhabitants on a logarithmic scale.
Europe’s global navigation satellite system is named Galileo. Consisting of 28 satellites traveling in three circular Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) planes with two control centers in Europe, the Galileo black box is interoperable with the U.S. GPS system and Glonass, Russia’s system. Launched in December, 2016, its development began in 2005 with tryout of the GIOVE-A satellite followed by GIOVE-B in 2008. In addition to testing Galileo technologies, these tryouts secured the Galileo frequencies within the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations founded 150 years ago: “From broadband networks to cutting-edge wireless technologies, aeronautical and maritime navigation, radio astronomy, oceanographic and satellite-based earth monitoring as well as converging fixed-mobile phone, Internet, and broadcasting technologies, ITU is committed to connecting the world.”
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In Ancient Times people caused earthquakes and volcanoes just as they caused plagues and famines, by offending the gods. Earthquakes are announcements: You have displeased the gods; you must butcher a goat and roast its meat to get back in favor. According to one myth, the giant Enceladus was buried under Mount Etna by Athena during the Gigantomachy, the battle between the giants and the Olympian gods. Enceladus movements under the Earth were believed to produce earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Witness this passage from Virgil:
A spreading bay is there, impregnable
to all invading storms; and Aetna's throat
with roar of frightful ruin thunders nigh.
Now to the realm of light it lifts a cloud
of pitch-black, whirling smoke, and fiery dust,
shooting out globes of flame, with monster tongues
that lick the stars; now huge crags of itself,
out of the bowels of the mountain torn,
its maw disgorges, while the molten rock
rolls screaming skyward; from the nether deep
the fathomless abyss makes ebb and flow.
Enceladus, his body lightning-scarred,
lies prisoned under all, so runs the tale:
o'er him gigantic Aetna breathes in fire
from crack and seam; and if he haply turn
to change his wearied side, Trinacria’s isle
trembles and moans, and thick fumes mantle heaven.
“A spreading bay is there, impregnable” most likely means a) Mount Aetna is near water, b) Mount Aetna is unlikely to be quelled by a storm, c) Aetna’s throat is thundering, not a storm, d) Mount Aetna is unlikely to get pregnant. The problem, of course, is that this item is not a question with a most likely answer but a problem without a standard solution: Comprehension is perhaps more an act of reasoning about a problem than answering a question. How do we measure that sort of reasoning? When? Why?
Lyell wrote three volumes over three years which lead the field of seismology away from sleeping giants rolling over in their graves to Amazon.com selling a seismometer capable of measuring quake intensity over 2,500 miles for $49.95. Blaming an earthquake on a mythical figure today would be exceedingly weird. My bet is most people today have a passing understanding of the Richter scale even though the seismic moment scale isn’t widely familiar. I’m pretty sure most people don’t have a clue about ways to measure reading comprehension. There is a plethora of strategies for preparing to take a test of comprehension, however.
There are no measurement devices on Amazon.com to measure comprehension. I’ve had experience with purchasing quantities of Stanford Achievement Tests from Primary to Advanced and the Nelson Denny and know that one must sign off on a legal document requiring that tests be stored under lock and key. I was there in 1996 when a Brinks truck delivered standardized tests to Douglass Middle School in Chicago. The city was taking draconian measures to identify and close underperforming schools. No cheating! Guarding the tests insured no teacher would get a sneak preview and taint the results.
I did find quite a selection of workbooks for grade school kids promising miraculous results on reading comprehension tests. Products offered for same day delivery like the “LSAT Reading Comprehension Bible,” however, are a bit pricey. I love the title. What I wouldn’t give to have a “powerful and comprehensive system for attacking any Reading Comprehension question.” Maybe it could help me with James Joyce. Being a survivalist it could be useful to have foreknowledge of the traps testmakers set for the gullible.
Godzich, W. (1984). Mikhail Bahktin: The Dialogical Principle. Chapter 2: Epistemology of the Human Sciences. University of Minnesota Press.
Freebody, P and Luke, A (1990) ‘Literacies ‘Programs: Debates and Demands in Cultural Context. Prospect 5(3), 85- 94