Core Knowledge Foundation

For the Australian student collective, see Core Knowledge. For the educational press in the United Kingdom, see Core Knowledge UK.

Core Knowledge Foundation

Formation	1986
Founder	E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Headquarters	Charlottesville, Virginia
President	Linda Bevilacqua

The Core Knowledge Foundation is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan educational foundation founded in 1986 by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The Foundation is dedicated to encouraging increased factual content in primary school education.

The Role of the Core Knowledge Foundation

The Foundation staff serves as the support system for Core Knowledge schools, educators, and parents. The Foundation conducts research on curricula; develops books and other materials for students, parents, and teachers; and serves as a training and communications hub for schools using Core Knowledge.

The Foundation has developed a number of publications, including general information packets about Core Knowledge, the Sequences, textbooks, and other supplementary materials for use in conjunction with the Sequence.

The Core Knowledge Foundation also offers a variety of staff development workshops to facilitate the process of implementing the Core Knowledge program in schools and hosts conferences, which focus on the sharing of ideas between educators at every level

Implementation of Core Knowledge in Schools

The Core Knowledge Curriculum begins in preschool and continues through eighth grade. Fundamental to the curriculum is the Core Knowledge Sequence, a document formed by convening hundreds of educators tasked to choose what is important for students to learn. From that Sequence, the Core Knowledge Foundation forms its curriculum.

The Foundation fundamentally believes that schools should follow a cumulative and coherent Sequence of topics organized by grade, and then presents its Sequence as one such example. Since its launch, the Core Knowledge Sequence has solicited revisions from hundreds of educators and subject matter experts to ensure that the knowledge and skills chosen do not reflect just one group of educator's views. While the Foundation encourages schools to teach at least 80% of the topics for each grade level within the Sequence, the Foundation encourages the addition of topics not listed, but are inherent to the local culture of specific communities. The Foundation states that they do not believe that the Core Knowledge Sequence is the only acceptable Sequence possible, but only suggests that there should be some well-designed sequence used by schools that cumulatively and coherently builds Knowledge and Skills; the Foundation presents its Sequence as one such example. Implementation of the Core Knowledge Curriculum and the process required necessitates cooperation between teachers, administrators, and parents. Implementation often occurs over a two- to three-year period, with schools phasing in topics subject-by-subject or adding additional grade levels each year.

The Core Knowledge Curriculum Series

The Core Knowledge Curriculum Series provides comprehensive, content-rich curricula based on the framework of the Core Knowledge Sequence. Student readers, teacher guides, activity books, and other materials are available for Language Arts and History and Geography. Materials for Science, Music, and Visual Arts are in development. While Core Knowledge Curriculum is used by schools in the Core Knowledge network, it is also used by thousands of other schools that do not identify themselves as Core Knowledge Schools. For instance, Core Knowledge Language Arts is on the recommended or approved list of many states.

Free Downloadable Curriculum

The Foundation attempts to make its curricular materials freely available, whenever possible, based on the its mission of equity and excellence, thereby enabling every child access to shared knowledge. The Foundation has primarily used the Creative Commons Non Commercial License, which allows others to use, remix and otherwise create adaptations of the Foundation's work for non-commercial use, with the only requirement of attribution of the the original work to the Core Knowledge Foundation. For instance, the Foundation provides it curriculum to EngageNY, a widely used open educational resource curriculum. Curriculum on EngageNY has been downloaded in excess of 66 million times.

Recent Efficacy Research

A $3.3 million dollar grant from the Institute of Education Sciences was received by researchers at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. The grant was to test the widely adopted Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA): Listening and Learning read‐aloud program for grades K-2. The researchers will conduct a longitudinal study of children from kindergarten to second grade, investigating the effects of the reading curriculum on vocabulary skills, domain knowledge, listening comprehension, and ultimately the endpoint of reading comprehension at the second grade. 1,400 children in 48 schools will comprise the study. Schools will begin implementing in Fall 2017.

New York City Pilot

The Core Knowledge Language Arts NYC Pilot was a longitudinal research study of 10 public schools in New York City and an additional 7 schools throughout the country. These schools comprised 172 classrooms, 200 teachers and 4,466 students, in urban, suburban and rural Districts. The percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch ranged from 30 to 99%, and the percentage of students for whom English is a second language ranged from 15 to 60%. Extensive professional development was undertaken by teachers who participated in the program. This training ensured that teachers understood the synthetic phonics of CKLA’s Skills strand. The training also focused on teaching techniques to build students’ background knowledge and vocabulary during read-alouds, which is fundamental to the success of CKLA Listening & Learning strand.

Positive results from the three-year pilot of CKLA in the 10 New York City public schools show that students in the schools using CKLA outperformed their peers on measures of reading, science, and social studies.,

Core Knowledge Language Arts: A Two Strand Approach

The Listening and Learning strand and the Skills strand are fundamental to CKLA's approach. The Listening and Learning strand develops comprehension skills using knowledge-rich content. The curriculum relies heavily on the read-aloud, exposing children to complex texts beyond their reading levels, in a systematically ordered and cumulative set of topics called domains. The materials build knowledge in history, geography, science, literature, and the arts. The lesson activities emphasize vocabulary acquisition, building comprehension through interactive discussions and activities before, during, and after each reading. Writing lessons are designed to extend exploration of ideas presented in the texts. This approach is in contrast to many ELA programs that seek to put as many texts in children's hands as soon as they develop reading skills, leaving little time for the read-aloud. For example, a recent study of twenty-seven third grade classrooms found that students received small group instruction in which teachers supported vocabulary and comprehension instruction for an average of four minutes each day. (Connor, et al., 2014, JEP). In contrast, CKLA program maintains forty-five to sixty minutes of instruction daily that includes the read aloud, as well as discussion for text recall and extension of thought regarding the text, writing and explicit vocabulary instruction.

The Skills strand, sixty minutes of instruction daily, is a complete explicit and systematic phonics program that builds decoding, writing and spelling skills. Children are taught a specific set of letter and sound patterns within each unit that averages two weeks. Students practice these patterns within word, sentence, and reading exercises, as well as using these sound and letter patterns throughout their writing tasks. Unique to CKLA is fully decodable books that are grade appropriate based on complexity metrics (MetaMetrics Lexile Ratings, 2014). Children read books as long as one hundred pages that utilize the sound-spelling patterns that have already been taught. Unlike typical basal programs that similarly control preset sound spelling patterns, CKLA readers were written by commissioned authors to be authentic stories of interesting and engaging subjects to children, such as travel, friendship, their community, pets and family relationships. Fundamental to the CKLA approach is a unique database that sequences words based on frequency and complexity. The most common and least complex words become building blocks for more difficult words, a progression that leads the child from learning to read to reading to learn.

Research Basis of Two Strand Approach

The Simple View of Reading (Hoover and Gough, 1990) highlights the importance of a reading curriculum that supports both children’s decoding and comprehension development. Developmental research, however, demonstrates that there is a trade-off between focusing on decoding versus comprehension, and this balance should shift as a child moves toward reading to learn (Kendeou, van den Broek, White, and Lynch, 2009; Vellutino, Tunmer, Jaccard, and Chen, 2007). The skilled reader who has mastered decoding should increasingly focus on comprehension, an automatic connection of information within the texts that relies on background knowledge to form a coherent understanding (Gernsbacher, 1990; Graesser, Millis, and Graesser, 2011; Kintsch, 1994, 1998; Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998). For a child still learning to read, the focus should be decoding the words they see. (Vellutino et al., 2007). Cognitive research has demonstrated that children make fewer connections than adults when reading. (van den Broek, Kendeou, Kremer, Lynch, Butler, White, & Lorch, 2005). But when listening, young children actually show more adult-like comprehension skills . Their listening skills lead to late reading compression skills through the elementary grades. (Biemiller, 2003; van den Broek, et al., 2005).

CKLA’s two-strand approach is designed based on the theoretical premise of the Simple View of Reading, as well as cognitive science research studying reading development. The result is CKLA, a program with dual tracks that balances decoding and comprehension within the ELA block for the early elementary grades.

The Importance of Listening and Learning

The Listening and Learning Strand is a language based approach designed to coherently and cumulatively build knowledge; thereby increasing reading comprehension. lines of research underpin the design of the Listening and Learning strand. The first relates the importance of language-based classroom experiences to children’s reading development. (Hogan, Adlof, and Alonzo, 2014; Lonigan and Shanahan, 2009; Vellutino, et al., 2007). However, elementary curricula has not consistently followed this understanding (Pianta, Belsky, Houts, and Morrison, 2007). Studies of instructional time find that classroom instruction underemphasizes language and listening skills, which are linked to later reading ability (Connor, Spencer, Day, Guiliani, Ingebrand, McLean, and Morrison, 2014). This lack of emphasis of oral language development has an outsized negative impact on children entering school with less exposure to oral language and vocabulary, thus deepening inequalities in reading achievement (Wright & Neuman, 2014). The second body of research shows that the development of vocabulary and comprehension is interrelated with knowledge development; knowledge is necessary for comprehension. General and specific domain knowledge is critical to memory of what one reads, as well as the ability to make textual connections relating the events within different parts of a text, and higher order inference about a text (Kintsch, 1998; see also Cervetti and Hiebert, 2015). Studies show that background knowledge relates to differences in comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. (Kaefer, Neuman, and Pinkham, 2015). Further studies show a benefit to vocabulary learning within a content or knowledge-oriented, context (Neuman, Newman, and Dwyer, 2010; Pollard-Durodola, Gonzalez, Simmons, Davis, Simmons, and Nava-Walichowski, 2011; Spycher, 2009).

Criticisms

The Core Knowledge system of education has been accused of not encouraging students to think deeply, compose meaningful questions, or develop reasoning skills.

Failing to Teach Creativity

It is argued that creativity can be hindered by the type of information taught. The Core Knowledge model focuses on clear facts with right or wrong answers. This type of information is easy to teach and test, but does not prepare students to be able to think “outside the box” in the way of the real world, which is a messy place without concrete answers. This method keeps the teacher in the active, “expert” role, and the student remains passive. A passive role does not encourage creative thought.

Research has shown that the Core Knowledge Curriculum does not necessarily depress creativity, and may even have a positive impact in increasing students' creativity in some areas. https://3o83ip44005z3mk17t31679f-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/CKLA-Research-Overview-2016.pdf</ref>

Biased curriculum

The curriculum has also received criticism because one group has decided what is “best” for all students which could end up leaving minorities at a disadvantage (Oliva, 2009).

However, Core Knowledge resources and educational materials are particularly effective in reducing educational inequalities, and research has shown that the fact that Core Knowledge "schools with higher percentages of non-Caucasian students consistently scored well above the national average (at or above the 60th percentile) sets these schools apart from their non-Core Knowledge counterparts".

There is also an argument that by using this method of teaching, the main focus of education becomes creating students that can simply reproduce the culture of the day; this method simply “preserves the status quo”.<ref name=Kohn>Kohn, Alfie. "What Does it Mean to be Well-Educated?". Retrieved Oct 13, 2012.<ref>

References

Oliva, P.F. (2009). Developing the curriculum, (7th edition). New York: Pearson Allyn and Bacon.

External links

• Core Knowledge Foundation
• Engage NY