Zinc Conscious-Reading Skills Lead to Massive Growth
It’s not easy to move adolescents’ reading levels. It takes targeted instruction of key skills and students’ attention and effort. We’re thrilled to see that our Reading Ignition Unit is achieving this.
Since launching Ignition 2.0 in August, we’ve been closely tracking results, and the prognosis is clear: when students master our Zinc-ing and Tracking conscious-reading skills, their reading levels improve. Two-thirds of students who scored at least 85% on our “Show What You Know” assessments of Zinc-ing and Tracking skills went up at least one Zinc reading level from the start of the Ignition Unit to the end. In just a few hours of work over two or three weeks, that’s growth of about 150 Lexiles, which typically takes months!
Last year, the College Board affirmed the Ignition Unit’s efficacy when in a randomized, controlled trial study, they found that it had a significant effect on PSAT reading scores.
Why does Ignition work?
Ignition’s secret sauce is the conscious-reading skills that we teach. It’s common to instruct students to annotate and go to the text to support inferences and answers, but we teach the skills that need to precede those practices in order for them to be effective. There are two sets of skills, Zinc-ing and Tracking.
What is Zinc-ing?
Zinc-ing is making meaning out of the words and bringing them to life. This involves two processes. We call the first, “Use Your Senses.” The easiest words to understand appeal directly to our senses. Always look for sensory details you can imagine. If you read the phrase, “a concert on the beach,” feel the sand, hear the music, smell the ocean breeze, and taste the salty air.
The second Zinc-ing skill we teach is “Make It Real.” It’s easy to imagine sand on a beach, but more abstract words and phrases trip students up. ”Love of freedom” or “striving for excellence,” are harder to process. To comprehend these phrases, our brains connect them with vague or specific examples. “Love of freedom” may make us think of the excitement of getting a first car. “Striving for excellence” conjures a soccer player kicking the ball against the curb and running hills.
What is Tracking?
Tracking skills keep us connected with the writer’s meaning as we progress through a text. We pick up important signals from transition words and punctuation, and track pronouns to keep comprehension going. When students miss transition word that signal contrast, like “however” and “but,” or those signaling continuation of an idea, like “thus” and “therefore,” they often lose the writer’s thread. Punctuation marks also offer clues on what’s to come. Not only colons but also dashes, semicolons and even commas, often alert us to expect an explanation. This may all seem obvious to you, presumably a strong reader yourself, who probably knows all of this and acknowledges it unconsciously while reading. But for most students, explicit instruction in how to navigate a text with these transitions and punctuations is required.
The second part of Tracking is using pronouns. A common way students lose the thread of meaning is by failing to connect a pronoun to its antecedent. Most students comfortably navigate pronouns like “she,” “he” and “they,” connecting them to the people they represent. But pronouns get a lot more complex in secondary-level texts. There are over 100 of them! Often, students miss identifying less common pronouns, and even more frequently, they lose a text’s meaning when they miss connecting a pronoun back to its antecedent. “You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength,” philosopher Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. Students need to note the pronoun “this” in that quote, and connect it back to its antecedent, that “you have power over your mind.” Only then can they make meaning out of this excerpt.
Want to try Ignition with your students?
Email partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com to learn more about getting started. In the meantime, try an Ignition excerpt here.