About GOLD - School Road Publishing

What is GOLD?
Research Background to the Program
Reading GOLD is an evidence-based approach to developing literacy skills. The program draws on work from three different research traditions. The first tradition is related to research and theory on learning; the second relates to research on motivation and student engagement; and the third relates to efficacy studies on approaches to curriculum and effective teaching.

Research and Theory on Learning shows that the human brain is remarkably flexible. It can grow and develop or atrophy and decline depending on the intellectual activity to which it is exposed. In order to undertake intellectual activity individuals need to store information in memory. One key factor in promoting capacity to think and learn is the knowledge which the individuals acquire over their lifetime.

Studies of expertise show that highly competent individuals have large, complex knowledge-bases that are organised in complex interrelated networks of concepts and ideas. Experts have large amounts of this knowledge available to them at a level of automaticity. Automaticity refers to the ability to recall information quickly, accurately and effortlessly. In other words, experts have knowledge of fundamental skills stored in long term memory in a way that they can execute tasks quickly, accurately and effortlessly. This is referred to automaticity. Experts have a large proportion of their knowledge available to them at a level of automaticity.

Research shows that allocation of attention in intellectual tasks is important. Attention is required to execute any conscious intellectual task. However, humans have only sufficient attention to execute one conscious intellectual task at a time. This has important implications for how individuals can undertake complex tasks. While people can only think about one thing at a time, they can in fact, do many things at a time. Automaticity allows individuals to execute tasks, quickly, accurately and effortlessly (without using attention). Thus, automaticity in low-level subcomponents of complex tasks allows individuals focus all their attention on the most demanding and sophisticated aspects of tasks. The experts’ large automated knowledge bases allows them to execute low-level skills without consuming attention, then focusing all their cognitive resources on higher-order skills.

GOLD provides a carefully structured sequence of experiences so that children gradually build mastery of each skill in the sequence. Like experts, they will acquire automaticity in essential skills so that they have all their cognitive resources available for the most complex and demanding aspects of tasks.

Research on Motivation. Beginning with White in 1959 researchers have found that a sense of competence is a key human motivator. Humans have a basic need to feel competent and capable. This is known as self-efficacy. A sense of self-efficacy is built by providing children with experiences where they are intellectually challenged but highly successful. Providing students with challenging but achievable tasks where they experience high levels of success is one key to developing intrinsic motivation and high levels of engagement in tasks with consequent impacts on achievement.

GOLD provides structured activities where students progress from their current developmental level to proficiency in complex skills while experiencing continual challenge and success. By using GOLD assessment, teachers can identify the students’ current level of achievement and the appropriate skills which students need to master to continue to grow and develop.

Efficacy Studies in Curriculum Areas. Over the last several decades, research has been particularly productive in identifying curriculum and teaching practices that promote students’ learning and achievement. In the area of literacy there is very strong consensus on curriculum that results in maximum gains in achievement in reading and writing.

This curriculum can be organised into a developmental sequence:

Oral Language provides the foundation for all other literacy development. There is a very strong relationship between a child’s exposure to spoken language and his or her achievement throughout school. For example, Hart and Risley found that an infant’s exposure to spoken language from as early as 3 months of age, had profound and enduring effects on his or her intellectual development throughout school.

Hart and Risley found that, as they grew older, infants who had parents who spoke extensively to them, had higher achievement in schools generally, higher levels of literacy, higher IQ scores and heavier, more developed brains. Thus, it appears that exposure to spoken language promotes the physical development of the brain which increases children’s intelligence test scores and results in higher school achievement.
In school it is crucial to provide children explicit activities that build competence in spoken language.

Phonological Awareness refers to the awareness of the sound structure of language. When infants first encounter language, they focus only on the meaning of what they hear. It is not until they grow older (often around 3-5 years old) that they become aware of the idea that language exists as an object separate from the meaning that it conveys. This ability to separate a concept of ‘language’ as distinct from meaning is a key step in becoming literate.

Phonological awareness is one aspect of a general awareness of language. Of all the linguistic awareness skills, phonological awareness is particularly critical in achievement in literacy. The ability to rhyme and identify initial sounds is an essential prerequisite in learning to read. Research has found that there is a strong relationship between measures of phonological awareness and achievement in reading. Researchers have also found that developing phonological skills in young children before they learn to read results in a dramatic reduction in the number of children identified as learning disabled, dyslexic or having learning difficulties.

Reading GOLD provides a comprehensive set of carefully sequenced and structured activities for students so that they master key aspects of phonological awareness and are ready to learning to read.

Letter Knowledge. Once students can hear the sounds in spoken language, they are ready to learn the letter-sound correspondences. Phonological awareness is important because it gives meaning to letter-sound correspondences.
Decoding refers to the ability to translate text on a page into spoken language. In other words decoding refers to the ability to read text. Research clearly shows the key factors in facilitating children’s ability to decode text. An effective decoding program has three essential elements:

Development of the ability to work-out unfamiliar regular words based on letter-sound correspondences. Words can be divided into regular and irregular words. Regular words follow the regular rules (eg the words cat, train, complex all follow the rules of English spelling and are known as regular words). Eighty two percent of words in English are regular words.

Irregular words have unusual letter-sound relationships. For example, said, they, was are all irregular words. Irregular words cannot be decoded (or worked out) so that the reader must be able to recognise them by sight.

Teaching approaches based on use of letter-sounds to work out words are often referred to as ‘phonics’. Because the vast majority of words in English are regular words, decoding programs must have at their core, teaching students to work out regular words using their knowledge of letters and sounds.

Irregular words need to be learned and recognised by sight. Thus, the second element of an effective reading program must teach students to immediately recognise irregular words.

In addition to teaching children efficient decoding skills, children must practise these skills by reading extended text. After children have learned to decode words they should be given books that correspond to the words that they are able to decode automatically. Thus, beginning readers must be provided with sequenced structured readers that have limited and carefully selected vocabulary. Because they can decode all the words in the book they are reading to a level of automaticity, children will not need to use any attention or effort on decoding when they first read books. They will be able to focus all their attention of the meaning of the text.

In addition, automatic decoding means that reading will be highly enjoyable and engaging. If children have to struggle to decode individual words when they are given books to read, then the process of reading becomes demanding and unpleasant. By providing children with books that they can decode with facility, teachers build enjoyment in reading as well as the capacity to understand text and develop the ability to acquire information and ideas from text for study.

Comprehension refers to the ability to understand what is being read. In the past people have thought of comprehension as a single, unitary process – readers could understand text or not understand it. However, this is a misconception. The ability to understand is not a single process. Rather students must execute a cascade of processes if they are to fully understand information in text.

Decoding is the first process which must be executed. It is important because if a text cannot be decoded, it cannot be understood. For example, read and understand the text below:
Jg zpv dboou efpeg ufyu, zpv dboopu voesuboe ju.
If you are having trouble understanding the sentence, that’s because it’s written in a way that you cannot decode it. However, if it’s translated into a font that you can decode, then you can understand it with no trouble. The text says:

If you cannot decode text, you cannot understand it.

Thus, the first step in understanding text is decoding. However, in order to focus all their attention on the comprehension process, they must not only be able to decode it but they must be able to decode it to a level of automaticity. If the decoding process is automated, students can focus all their attention on the meaning of text, rather than struggling with figuring out what the text says.

Background Knowledge. Although decoding is important it is not sufficient for comprehension. Some students can decode proficiently but are still unable to understand what they are reading. One essential element of the comprehension process is related to a reader’s background knowledge. All texts have some level of prerequisite knowledge needed in order to be understood. For example, a reader who has never studied calculus, is unlikely to have the background knowledge necessary to understand a university level calculus text.

There are two types of background knowledge that impact on students’ capacity to understand new information.

First, readers must have key concepts and ideas available to them. Second, they must understand vocabulary that is used to identify the concepts and ideas.

Comprehension Monitoring. In addition to understanding new information, effective readers must know that they understand the information. In other words, they must be aware whether they understand the information, or that their comprehension has broken down. This awareness is referred to as comprehension monitoring. There is a strong relationship between students’ scores on measures of comprehension monitoring and their achievement in reading comprehension.

Reciprocal teaching is an approach that has been shown to be highly effective in enhancing students comprehension monitoring. Reciprocal teaching, teaches students to use three strategies while reading. These strategies are:

To predict what’s going to come next in the text

To clarify unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts

To summarise information

To ask questions about the text

Building Mental Models. A mental model refers to the construction of some form of mental representation that corresponds to the concepts and ideas in the text. Unless readers build some form of mental representation, they will not be able to retain in memory, any of the ideas that they read about. Teaching students to create mental images is a particularly effective way of encouraging them to build mental models.

Engagement in Ideas. Effective readers actively engage with the ideas in the text. In particular, they can make inferences about the information they are given. Cain and Oakhill have found that activities that encourage readers to work with riddles can develop inferential thinking. However, many other activities also facilitate the ability to intellectually engage with text. Cloze activities, language-based puzzles, and use of codes all develop comprehension skills. Elaborative interrogation is a particularly powerful and cost-effective technique that teachers can employ to promote inferential thinking. Elaborative interrogation consists of the use of ‘why’ questions. (eg Why did John want to go shopping? Why did the sky change colour? Why was Mum annoyed with Bill?) Elaborative interrogation encourages readers to go beyond the information they are given in a text and generate inferences from the text.

Strategies to Learn and Remember Information from Text.

In addition to understanding information in text, readers need to transfer that information from working memory to long-term memory. If the information is not moved to long-term memory, the memory trace decays. There is little point in understanding information that then decays in memory.

Research shows that the capacity of individuals to remember information depends on the effectiveness with which they encode the information for memory. Students who use sophisticated strategies to transfer information to long-term memory learn more effectively and have higher levels of achievement.

Broadly, there are three kinds of strategies that students can utilise to learn information:

Rehearsal strategies are used when students repeat the information. Verbal repetition, underlining, selective verbatim notes are all examples of rehearsal strategies. In many ways, use of rehearsal strategies is a form of rote learning. While students who use rehearsal strategies achieve better than students who do not use any strategies, rehearsal is the most inefficient and ineffective of any strategy.

Organisational strategies are used when students change and reorganise the information to make it more meaningful. Using some forms of tables, hierarchies or concept maps are examples of organisational strategies. Organisational strategies lead to much greater levels of learning and achievement than rehearsal strategies. By transforming the information which is learned, students develop a more coherent understanding of the material and have more powerful ways of accessing it in memory.

Elaboration strategies are the most effective strategies. When using elaboration strategies, students not only change and transform the information but they integrate additional concepts and ideas based their existing knowledge. Using analogies, images, mnemonics, some tables and concept maps, generating rhymes and stories are examples of elaboration strategies. Elaboration strategies assist readers to assimilate the new information into their existing memory networks. Therefore, they are particularly effective in promoting learning and achievement.

Critical Analysis of Text

In addition to understanding and remembering information from text, students need to learn to critically analyse text. Critical literacy can focus on five questions:

Who is the author?

Who is the intended audience?

What are the author’s purposes – both overt and explicit purposes, and implicit purposes.

What techniques does the author use to achieve his or her intended purposes?

How is language used to achieve purposes.

Teachers can construct lessons by working with a piece of text and showing students the analytic techniques to address each of these questions.

References and Further Reading
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge: University of Illinois.

Barnes, M. A., Dennis, M., & Haefele, J. (1996). The effects of knowledge availability and knowledge accessability on coherence and elaborative inferencing in children from six to fifteen years of age. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 61, 216-241.

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Bus, A. G, van, & Jzendoorn, M, H. (1999). Phonological awareness and early reading: A meta-analysis of experimental training studies.Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 403-414

Cain, K., Oakhill, J. & Bryant, P. (2000). Investigating the causes of reading comprehension failure: The comprehension-age match design. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12, 31-40.

Cain, K., Oakhill, J., & Bryant, P. (2004). Children’s reading comprehension ability: Concurrent prediction by working memory, verbal ability, and component skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 31-42.

Christensen, C. A. & Bowey, J. (2005), The Efficacy of Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence, Rime and Whole Language Approaches to Teaching Decoding Skills. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9,327-349 Christensen, C. A. (1997). Onset, Rhymes, and Phonemes in Learning to Read. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 341-358.

Covington, M. (1992), Making the grade: A self-worth perspective on motivation and school reform. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Covington, M. (2000). Goal theory, motivation, and school achievement: An integrative review. Annual Review of Psychology, 51 171-200 Davidson, M. J., Dove, L., & Weltz, J. (2007). Mental models and usability, http://www.lauradove.info/reports/mentalmodels%20models.html.

Dewitz, P., Carr, E. M., & Patberg, J. P. (1987). Effects of Inference Training on Comprehension and Comprehension Monitoring. Reading Research Quarterly,22, 99-121.

Gillon G. T. (2000). The efficacy of phonological awareness intervention for children with spoken language impairment. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 31 126-141

Hannon, B. & Daneman, M. (2001). A new tool for measuring and understanding individual differences in the component processes of reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 103-138.

Hart, B, & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Brookes.

Harter, S. (1978) Effectance Motivation Reconsidered. Toward a Developmental Model. Human Development, 21, 34-64.

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