Donald J. Leu - New Literacies Research Lab

Donald J. Leu is the John and Maria Neag Endowed Chair in Literacy and Technology at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Leu directs the New Literacies Research Lab. He is an international authority on literacy education, especially the new skills required to read, write, and learn with internet technologies and the best practices that prepare students for these new literacies.

Hi there.

My name is Don Leu.

I hold the Neag Endowed Chair in
Literacy and Technology here at

the University of Connecticut and
direct the New Literacies Research Lab.

We do work in new literacies
in school classrooms K-12 here

in the US anyway from about ages
5 through 18 internationally.

And so the issue then is what
are these new literacies,

and why are they so important?

Well, I guess the take we make on
this is that the Internet is really

a literacy issue, using information,
reading and writing and

communicating, and so forth,
is really a literacy issue.

And we see these as new literacies that
are somewhat different from traditional

reading and writing skills.

Because new tools, new technologies, new
social practices are all involved in them.

And in addition to that,
it's not just that they're new today.

They're new every single day of our
lives because things keep changing on

the Internet.

And this notion of change
is central to our work,

both in the theories we've been
developing, as well as in the research and

in the instructional
practices that we have.

It's a real challenge from a theoretical
and research point of view, for example,

that the thing that we
study keeps changing on us.

That is literacy today is different from

what it's gonna be tomorrow
because there'll be a new tool,

a new technology that will be available
for us for reading and writing.

So what are these new literacies?

Well to us,
these new literacies are the skills,

the strategies, the social practices,

the dispositions that are required to use
online information effectively to learn.

Now there are many different definitions
of what new literacies are, but to us,

we're concerned about learning.

And we're concerned about preparing our
youngsters for these skills, strategies,

social practices, and dispositions that
will enable them to use online information

to learn new things about
the world around them.

We focus on one particular
aspect of new literacies,

in what we refer to as online research and
comprehension.

And what we mean by that is students'
ability to conduct independent and

collaborative research to learn
new things on the Internet.

We see it as comprised of several
different elements, locating skills,

evaluating skills,

evaluating the reliability of information
that you find on the Internet.

Synthesizing skills or putting together
information from multiple sources, and

then communication skills which includes
all kinds of new technologies that

are required to pick people's brains,
see what they know, look for ideas.

And then, also finally to communicate
what you've learned with other people.

So we've been spending the last five
years developing a performance-based

assessment on a large federal research
grant called The Online Research and

Comprehension Assessment or ORCAs.

And so
we've developed about 24 different ORCAs,

performance-based assessments, that
give students a problem to solve online.

And then we evaluate their ability at
every step of the way, takes place in

a simulation the Internet with a search
engine and web pages and wikis and emails.

And it's driven by an avatar that
text messages into the student to

sort of direct them and
ask them different questions and

engage them in the research project and
so forth.

So anyway, we've developed these
assessments that are highly reliable and

valid, but they're also performance-based.

They're not multiple choice.

And so they actually ask students to do a
research project, and now we're looking at

a lot of the data we've collected in
two states, a laptop state main, and

a non laptop state and evaluating
students abilities in this area.

So what have we found in
the work that we've been doing?

Well, a number of things, one

important concern that we have in one
of our studies between a wealthy and

an economically challenged school
districts is that kids in the two

districts appear to
manifest a separate and

independent achievement gap in
the ability to conduct online research.

Separate and independent from reading and
writing skills, traditional reading and

writing skills which we've controlled, and

found a separate achievement gap on
the ability to conduct online research.

Largely because the schools in the poor
school districts are so constrained

by state assessments, assessments that
have none of these skills on them.

So those schools are under great
pressure to raise test scores, and

that's what they teach.

They teach none of these new
online reading and writing skills.

Whereas in wealthier districts,
they have many more degrees of freedom and

flexibility about what
they're going to teach.

They certainly feel the press of
state assessment and test scores,

but they experiment and include
a lot more innovative practices, and

as a result, their kids get opportunities.

Kids get opportunities also differently
at home, of course, but in schools,

it's a very clear
difference between the two.

We've also found that students, and

we tend to look at seventh graders,
middle school students.

The weakest area for
them is critical evaluation.

They don't think very critically
about the information they read.

And as a result, they tend to
believe much of what they read.

They tend to only go to a single
source and not question the author.

And they don't have skills that would
allow them to carefully evaluate

the reliability and
expertise of an author.

Communication is also
a problem at this level.

That is skills such as writing in a wiki,
writing in a blog,

writing a summary of what they found
in an email message and so forth.

Those kinds of skills are second
most difficult for our students.

They tend to do better in synthesis which
is really related to their offline skills

of summarizing that they've learned.

And then finally,
they do reasonably well on locating,

but a lot of them are clickers and
lookers.

And what we mean by that is that when
they get a set of search engine results,

they start at the top, click and
look to see what it appears like.

And then they work their way down the list
rather than reading search engine results

critically and picking on the first click,
the best choice for them.

We've done other research as well
in terms of instructional models.

And so previously, we worked and
developed an instructional model in

one-to-one laptop classrooms called IRT,
Internet Reciprocal Teaching.

There's a really interesting problem that
you face when you're trying to teach in

one-to-one laptop classrooms.

And that is that you have about 15
seconds of attention, and after that,

the kids are off on their own.

And so we tried to figure out how are we
gonna teach some of these critical

evaluation, these locating skills,
the synthesis skills,

these communication skills in
a classroom when we have 15 seconds?

And the answer we came up with that works
pretty well is that instead of teaching,

you give students a problem to solve,
and in that problem,

you embed the skill you want to teach.

And then when you see a student
manifesting that skill,

that student teaches
the rest of the class.

And if you don't see a student manifesting
that skill that you've embedded in

the problem that's important to solve it,

then you work with one of your
weaker performing students.

And you sort of scaffold their
learning until they get the idea,

and then they teach the class to do this.

So an example would be, if you're trying
to teach critical evaluation a source,

you give the students a problem like
here's a three-part problem for you today.

I want you to find the height of Mount
Fuji, we've been reading about Japan.

After you do that, that's an easy one,

then find a different answer
to the same question.

So find somebody else who says,
no, it's a different height.

Then the third part of the question
is who's right and why?

And so we give students that problem to
work collaboratively in small groups.

And then we monitor them in
a little software tool which

puts thumbnails of every
student's laptop on your laptop.

So you can watch what they're doing, and
when you see somebody evaluating source,

that is clicking on a link that says
who we are, or doing a search for

the site, the name of the site to
see what people are saying about it.

Then we ask that student to take over, and

we project their laptop
screen up on the smart board.

And then have them tell everybody else
what they were doing as they solved

the really key part of that problem,
which is who's right and why.

So Internet Reciprocal Teaching, or
IRT, is really a three-phase model.

And I described the second
phase of developing these

strategies that are important for
online research and comprehension.

The first phase is a nuts and

bolts phase, where you just go
through some of the mechanical things.

What's a wiki, what's a blog, how those
work, how different search engines work,

locating skills,
if your students need them?

Only the skills that are really
required in your classroom, of course.

And then the third phase, once the kids
have developed a pretty sophisticated

understanding of the skills
that are required for

online research and comprehension.

Then we take them into the final phase,

which is conducting an online
collaborative project with at least one

other student in another part of
the world, related to the problem,

related to the curriculum that
makes the world a better place.

Those are the criteria we have.

We build these up to this point,
by the way, by having collaborative

classroom projects throughout
the phase one and phase two.

We tend to use ePals,

a wonderful tool for connecting
classrooms from around the world.

You can quickly find teachers in many
parts of the world that are interested

in collaborating with you.

But there are other tools as well.

And so they practice this
collaboration as a whole class.

So then when we get to phase three,
when they're ready to do online research,

they've developed a network of
friends in other parts of the world.

And so they have to come up with a project
and get it approved by the teacher,

but here's an example of one.

So these students in Connecticut
shared the problem they had with other

kids around the world on their list
of friends in an email message and

said, look, we've got to do this project.

Do you have any ideas?

And a student of South Africa
actually popped up and said, yeah,

why don't you create a web
page about Gary Paulsen?

We're reading about Gary Paulsen,
author at that age, and

put a web page together with links to all
of the resources you can find online.

And then you'll have a research site for

kids who want to do research on
Gary Paulsen in their school.

And that'll make the world a better place,
and that's related to the English language

arts, the class that
you're taking right now.

So why don't we do that?

And then a bunch of other kids chimed
in and said, yeah, yeah, let's do that,

let's do that.

And said, I can help,
we'll send you the links.

And these two students in Connecticut
said, okay, we know how to make a web

page, our teacher showed us how
to do that, so send us the links.

And so they built a web page
about Gary Paulsen, and so

that's an example of an online
collaborative project.

But there are many,
many different types of projects.

We just think that it should be something
that connects the skills that students

have been learning into a global context
because that's exactly where kids

are going to be working
when they're adults.

They'll be working in environments
where they'll have to collaborate and

problem solve and work with many other
people from other cultural contexts from

other countries and to solve whatever
problem they face in their work place.

So let me talk a little bit about
school leadership in this area.

It's probably one of
the most important areas

as we think about the changing
nature of literacy and

learning in the school classrooms with
the Internet for several reasons.

First of all, everything we know about
the research on school leadership is that

school leaders drive change.

That is, change doesn't happen unless
there's a school leader with a vision for

the change that's needed.

So school leaders have
to have this vision,

they have to understand what's going
on in the changing nature of things.

But it's also constrained right
now at least in the US by

Common Core State Standards.

Because you can look at those
Common Core State Standards with the lens

to the past that most of us have and
only see what we've been doing in

school classrooms, or you can look
at Common Core State Standards.

A few people are starting to look
at it with a lens to the future.

And understanding each of those standards
in terms of what it really means to learn

and communicate, read and
write in online context.

So let me give you an example of what
I mean by a lens to the past and

a lens to the future.

So the first anchor standard, it's close
reading, that is we want our kids,

I'm going to summarize it here.

We want our kids to be able to read
carefully, closely, with the information

but also to make inferences about
the information that they encounter.

So traditionally, we've taught
that in reading comprehension,

through discussion, through levels of
comprehension questions, and so forth.

And that's one way of implementing close
reading but with a lens to the past.

But if you take a lens to the future,
you would see that

reading search engine results is really
one of the best examples of close reading.

Because there, kids have to read,
very carefully,

make inferences about what those short
little segments are telling them

about the information they're
gonna find behind that link.

And make an inference about whether or
not that source is the best source for

them given their particular needs.

So to me, close reading really involves
helping students read carefully and

make inferences about
search engine results.

So that they can be more efficient when
they're trying to locate information.

And that's what we have to do is we look
at these Common Core State Standards.

Each one of them can be looked at with a
lens to the past and a lens to the future.

And it's really important that all of
us look at those standards with a lens

to the future.

And think about how does this
Common Core State Standards

really play itself out when we're reading
and learning and communicating online.

And that's a real key as
we think about leadership.

If you can see that, then you're in a
position to really help your teachers and

help your students prepare for
their future.