This blog first posted on October 7, 2018, and reposted on November 9, 2024. The reason for the repost is because of the great amount of relevant research that has been published since it first appeared.

Over these six years, there have been seven additional meta-analyses, all but one concluding that we comprehend screens less well than paper (Clinton, 2019 – 29 studies; Delgado, et al., 2018 – 54 studies; Díaz, et al., 2024 – 49 studies; Furenes, et al., 2021 – 39 studies; Kong, et al. 2018 – 17 studies; Öztop, & Nayci, 2021 – 12 studies). The one exception found no difference between media with narrative texts, possibly because most readers find these to be relatively easy (Schwabe, Lind, Kosch, & Boomgaarden, 2022). Nevertheless, given the great agreement among meta-analyses, there are individual studies that contradict these conclusions (e.g., Florit, De Carli, Lavelli, & Mason, 2022), the meta-analytic differences are not especially large, and some of these analyses have concluded that students can easily surmount the digital disadvantages they had identified.

Newer studies confirm my introspection – the processing of texts on screens is faster and shallower (e.g., Jensen, Roe, & Blikstad-Balas, 2024). Simply put, we tend to skim more when reading screens and we are less likely to stop and think about what we are reading which limits later memory for the information.

A particularly troubling correlational study reported that the more that students read digital text at school, the lower their resulting reading comprehension. Readers not only comprehend screens more poorly than paper but according to this study, digital reading diminishes comprehension ability (Salmerón, Vargas, Delgado, & Baron, 2023). But, again, there is discrepant information on this point, too, making it uncertain whether digital reading experiences are detrimental in the long run (Hare, Johnson, Vlahiotis, Panda, Tekok?Kilic, & Curtin, 2024).  

I’m sticking to my contention that researchers and teachers should be trying to figure out how to prepare kids to read digitally more scrupulously. I am not disputing the new research – I think it’s certain that people read digitally less well, and I’m also concerned that this might hinder how well kids can read in the long run. However, most of my professional reading is now on screens rather than paper, all my newspaper reading is digital, and even much of my entertainment reading takes place on my I-Pad. Whether we read light beams as well as ink is not the determining factor. Digital reading is on us like white on rice, and we’d better prepare students for success in this electron-driven literacy universe.

RELATED: How Can I Teach with Books that are Two Years Above Student Reading Levels?

Teacher question:

Do we read digitally as well as we read paper texts? 

Shanahan response:

I’ve been asked this provocative question three times in three weeks. Once I was presenting a workshop on how to teach college-bound high-schoolers to handle complex text on tests like the ACT. This group wanted to know if it mattered whether students were tested digitally or with paper. Testing studies report performance differences favoring paper. 

Last week, I was on a panel at Reading is Fundamental’s National Reading Coalition, a meeting of literacy providers, policymakers, and business leaders. This time the question was posed by Kathleen Ryan-Mufson, Director of Global Citizenship for Pitney-Bowes, a major player in digital communications. She wanted to know about the importance of digital literacy in learning, which opens issues of access, precision of understanding, and student preference.

Then Friday, I was with a particularly thoughtful group of middle-school teachers in Indiana. They asked the question straight-up and were pretty sure that digital was better than paper because of technological affordances, such as easy in-text access to a dictionary, and because these kids are growing up digitally (the so-called “digital natives”).

Must be something in the water.

My answer: We don’t read as well digitally as we do on paper. When texts are short – a page or less — and comprehension demands light (what’s the main idea?), we do pretty well with either kind of text. But as learning demands increase and the texts are more extensive, paper wins hands down.

Like those Indiana teachers, students tend to think they read best digitally; but tests of their comprehension reveal that they are wrong.

Years ago, knowing such questions would come my way, I did some self-study. I read a novel silently, usually prior to bedtime; I read one aloud to my youngest daughter; I listened to one on “Books on Tape” when I drove to work; and I read Dracula on my computer (thanks, Gutenberg Project).

My personal sense of the matter was that I was hurrying when I was reading digitally. As with current research findings, I was fine with major plot points, but it seemed like my understanding was fragile and not very deep. For me, at that time, reading online was more like skimming than reading. I was moving too fast.

Since then, technology has improved, and I’ve grown used to such reading. Engineers have improved digital texts, in lots of ways. We can now download texts so that we’re no longer “online.” Page sizes and formatting are more like those of real books; and screen illumination is better, too.

There are even ways in which tech books are demonstrably better. I can increase font sizes (which, at my age, I love) and I can set screen illumination so that I can read with the lights out and Cyndie can sleep. I spend a lot of time on airplanes and portability matters, so being able to bring along tech’s version of a dozen books and as many magazines is a definite win.

These days I often read digitally, for work and pleasure, much more often.

Nevertheless, reading digitally is still a different experience.

One loses the sensory pleasures of the page, and navigation can be disorienting. I can’t always go back and locate what I’m looking for. I still have a sense that I’m going too fast and, perhaps, reading too superficially. Though that just might be me. Research found older readers do make shorter fixations when reading digitally, but that wasn’t true of younger readers (Kretzshmar, et al., 2013).

Dillon (1992) and Singer and Alexander (2017) have conducted the most complete and thorough meta-analyses of the issues; the former looking at all the pre-1992 studies, and latter all the work since Dillon.

Both meta-analyses concluded that we don’t comprehend digital as well as paper, and that the disparity is as true for so-called “digital natives” as for people like me (“digital geezers?”).

Apparently scrolling a screen is more memory disruptive than simply turning a page. Digital reading is also often interrupted by multi-tasking (Baron, 2015): 67% of readers don’t last ten minutes before they’re messaging or shopping during reading!

Of course, this is all a bit complicated. Reading a PDF file on one’s computer is different from reading a test passage on an online state exam or from reading Prairie Fires for pleasure on my I-Pad. They differ in navigability, user friendliness, and how likely one is to be tempted to do other things instead of reading.

No, comprehension is not always suppressed or limited by digital text, but it happens often enough that we should be concerned. One study found students grasped the major plot points of a story digitally but that they were deficient when it came to making connections of other text points with the plot (Mangen, Walgermo, & Brønnick, 2013).

Maryanne Wolf (2018) agonized over the potential losses to patience, persistence, and depth of thought that could result from a daily diet of the short, peripatetic text excursions characteristic of much digital reading.

Oh, and may I add that lots of people don’t enjoy reading digitally as much as they do paper texts. (The last couple of Scholastic surveys reported that the overwhelming majority of kids much prefer books.)

Digital reading is superficial, less understandable, and less enjoyable for most people. Sounds like we should get rid of it. Only fools would invest in digital texts for their instructional programs, right?

I strongly disagree.

Digital text is here to stay. There are all kinds of economic and social reasons why this is likely true, but what matters is that if I’m correct, then kids—all of us really—are going to need to learn to read such texts effectively.

Two things must happen:

First, many other writers (e.g., Boone & Higgins, 2007; Jabr, 2013; Kieffer & Reinking, 2006; Talaka, et al., 2015) have argued that tech engineers should continue to beaver away at making digital reading environments more supportive. Instead of trying to make tech readers prefer books, they should think about producing better digital tools. Tech environments seem to alter reading behavior. Perhaps technological modifications could slow us down or get us to move around a text more productively.   

Second, we as teachers need to make students aware of their tech fallibility. Instead of romanticizing the tech savviness of everyone born since the first Apple sprung from the head of Steve Jobs, we should be teaching humility. Young people aren’t as good with these tools as they think they are, and the digital tools, while solving some problems, pose others.   

Kids vary in their ability to locate information on Google, to evaluate such information, or to understand it. Basic reading comprehension ability helps with these things, as does amount of world knowledge; but even when those are high, students struggle to take advantage of the affordances of digital text or even to comprehend what they read digitally.

Interestingly, not everyone’s comprehension is impaired by digital text. Singer and Alexander (2016) found a group of college students who did better; they slowed themselves and became more careful when reading digitally -- unlike me and most of the students they studied.

We should be teaching students strategies for digital reading, fostering ways of reading that allow students to overcome the limits of how they adapt their reading behaviors to the screens. We should also teach them efficient ways of navigating in different screen environments (e.g., arrows, site maps, breadcrumb trails, non-linear navigation), and how to evaluate the trustworthiness of the digital information they read.

Students don’t comprehend digital text as well as they do paper text. But they must and they could. 


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Baron, N. S. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world. Oxford University Press.

Clinton, V. (2019). Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and meta?analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(2), 288–325.

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12269

Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25(1), 23-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003

Díaz, B., Nussbaum, M., Greiff, S., & Santana, M. (2024). The role of technology in reading literacy: Is Sweden going back or moving forward by returning to paper-based reading? Computers & Education, 213, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.105014

Dillon, A. (1992). Reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature. Ergonomics, 35(10), 1297–1326. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139208967394

Florit, E., De Carli, P., Lavelli, M., & Mason, L. (2022). Digital reading in beginner readers: Advantage or disadvantage for comprehension of narrative and informational linear texts? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12754

Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G. (2021). A comparison of children’s reading on paper versus screen: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 91(4), 483-517. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654321998074

Hare, C., Johnson, B., Vlahiotis, M., Panda, E. J., Tekok?Kilic, A., & Curtin, S. (2024). Children’s reading outcomes in digital and print mediums: A systematic review. Journal of Research in Reading. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12461

Kong, Y., Seo, Y. S., & Zhai, L. (2018). Comparison of reading performance on screen and on paper: A meta-analysis. Computers & Education, 123, 138-149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.05.005

Kretzschmar, F., Pleimling, D., Hosemann, J., Füssel, S., Borkessel-Schlesewsky, I., & Schlesewsky, M. (2013). Subject impressions do not mirror online reading effort: Concurrent EEG-Eyetracking evidence from the reading of books and digital media. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056178

Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2012.12.002

Öztop, F., & Nayci, Ö. (2021). Does the digital generation comprehend better from the screen or from the paper?: A meta-analysis. International Online Journal of Education and Teaching, 8(2), 1206-1224. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1294459

Salmerón, L., Vargas, C., Delgado, P., & Baron, N. (2023). Relation between digital tool practices in the language arts classroom and reading comprehension scores. Reading and writing, 36(1), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10295-1

Schwabe, A., Lind, F., Kosch, L., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2022). No negative effects of reading on screen on comprehension of narrative texts compared to print: A meta-analysis. Media Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2022.2070216

Singer, L. M., & Alexander, P. A. (2017). Reading on paper and digitally: What the past decades of empirical research reveal. Review of Educational Research, 87(6), 1007-1041. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317722961

Stiegler-Balfour, J., Roberts, Z. S., LaChance, A. S., Sahouria, A. M., & Newborough, E. D. (2023). Is reading under print and digital conditions really equivalent? Differences in reading and recall of expository text for higher and lower ability comprehenders.  International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 176, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103036

Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world. New York: Harper.

27 comments on the earlier version of this entry. 

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17 references

We have been working on strengthening and refining our early literacy instruction to be in line with the science. This has me wondering about the middle level. What does the science prioritize for middle level ELA instruction? Is there a point when teaching into a phonics gap for students does not have a payoff? With limited time in a middle school classroom, I am thinking about what needs to be prioritized. Some parents are wondering if phonics instruction should continue into middle school. This may need to happen for some students, but I imagine that Tier 1 instruction would focus on higher levels of structured literacy like morphology. I would be interested what the research says about teaching phonics in middle school.

RELATED: Putting on Your Underwear First: Why Instructional Sequence Doesn’t Always Matter

Shanahan Response: 

Not surprisingly, most phonics instruction studies have been focused on preschool, kindergarten, and grade 1. The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) and the National Reading Panel (NRP) reported clear benefits to such instruction: improvements in the ability to read words and nonsense words, spelling, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Making explicit, systematic phonics part of a comprehensive reading and writing program for beginning readers is a no brainer.

There have been some studies focused on the teaching of phonics in grades 2 and up, but not many, and most of those studies were aimed at struggling readers or dyslexic students. That poses multiple problems – there are reasons to believe that those populations may be particularly difficult to teach effectively and the generalizability of those results to regular classrooms are dubious.

In any event, the NRP found few benefits to phonics instruction, beyond grades K-1.

Here are some relevant quotes from that report:

“However, phonics instruction failed to exert a significant impact on the reading performance of low-achieving readers in 2nd through 6th grades (i.e., children with reading difficulties and possibly other cognitive difficulties explaining their low achievement). The effect size was d = 0.15, which was not statistically greater than chance. Possible reasons might be that the phonics instruction provided to low-achieving readers was not sufficiently intense, or that their reading difficulties arose from sources not treated by phonics instruction such as poor comprehension, or there were too few cases (i.e., only eight treatment-control comparisons pulled from three studies) to yield reliable findings.” p. 2-94

“The effects of systematic phonics instruction on text comprehension in readers above 1st grade were mixed.
Although gains were significant for the subgroup of disabled readers (d = 0.32), they were not significant for the older group in general (d = 0.12).” p. 2-94

“Because most of the comparisons above 1st grade involved poor readers (78%), the conclusions drawn about the effects of phonics instruction on specific reading outcomes pertain mainly to them. Findings indicate that phonics instruction helps poor readers in 2nd through 6th grades improve their word reading skills. However, phonics instruction appears to contribute only weakly, if at all, in helping poor readers apply these skills to read text and to spell words. There were insufficient data to draw any conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above 1st grade.” 2-116

Of course, the NRP report is 23 years old… there must be lots of new research on this topic that would provide us with a more definitive answer to your question. Accordingly, I conducted a search of studies that focused on phonics in middle school and high school.

I found only 4 studies worth mentioning and none of these were particularly encouraging. One study had high school students tutoring struggling sixth graders in phonics, sight word phrases, and text reading fluency (Lingo, 2014). It reported fluency improvement, but it would be impossible to attribute this to the phonics portion of the intervention.

Another study focused on a district school improvement effort that provided district wide phonics teaching (Hutcheson, Selig, & Young, 1990). They reported gains in word identification in the elementary and high school grades, but not middle school; and gains in spelling and reading comprehension at all levels. This study had no control group, so it is not certain to what to attribute these fall-to-spring learning gains (e.g., phonics instruction, maturation, other instruction).

Denton and her colleagues (Denton, Wexler, Vaughn, & Bryan, 2008) implemented a multicomponent reading intervention in middle school, with English Learners who had learning disabilities. The intervention included phonics. The students did not do any better in word recognition, comprehension, or fluency than students in the regular program.

Finally, an intensive phonics program was delivered for 12 weeks to 8 middle school students with learning disabilities. They improved in word recognition and spelling.

In other words, no convincing evidence.

So, I dipped into the What Works Clearinghouse analysis of reading interventions. Few of the studies with older students focused on phonics. Nevertheless, I went looking for upper grades (Grades 2-12) evidence on programs that explicitly included phonics/decoding instruction as part of their routine. The Clearinghouse had such information on 8 programs: Achieve3000, Corrective Reading, Fast ForWord, Failure Free Reading, Open Court, Reading Mastery, SpellRead, and Wilson Reading System.

What I wanted to see was, first, whether these programs improved older students’ decoding ability. The reason this is important is because for the most part, these programs included multiple components. If a program taught phonics and fluency, but only obtained improvements in fluency, it is unreasonable to attribute that gain to phonics. If the students had improved in both decoding and fluency, then maybe part of the fluency gain was due to phonics. This is an especially important consideration if the study evaluated decoding and reported no improvement. It is damning if a program taught phonics without any gains in decoding.

What I found was that several programs fostered improvements in some reading skills. For the most part, however, they either didn’t bother to look for increases in decoding, or they looked and found none in grades 2-12 (Achieve3000, FastForWord, Failure Free Reading, Open Court, Reading Mastery).

The Wilson Reading System had improved students’ decoding skills in Grade 3, but without any accompanying gains in fluency or comprehension, while SpellRead improved decoding, comprehension, and reading fluency with students in grades 5-6.

To me, those reports are consistent with what NRP reported so long ago: not enough studies, most of the studies focused on Tier 2 teaching, evidence that it is possible to improve decoding skills in the upper grades with explicit instruction, but with little evidence that such improvement transfers or generalizes to overall literacy gains at least in regular classrooms.

I think it is fair to say that we don’t know much about how best to teach decoding in grades 2-12.

That doesn’t mean that students in grades 2 and up shouldn’t be receiving some morphology and spelling instruction, with a small amount of decoding work on things like multisyllable words or conditional spelling patterns. However, given current knowledge, phonics beyond grade 1 (and with the kind of limited scope just mentioned), it should mainly (though not entirely) be a Tier 2 issue. For most kids a regular daily regimen of vocabulary/morphology/spelling with those occasional decoding lessons should be sufficient. 

If you had written to me in 1999, I would have given a somewhat different answer.

At the time, the studies that I knew had shown no positive outcomes for phonics with older students. Consequently, I’d have discouraged any additional phonics beyond grades 1 or 2.

The NRP work (I served on the Alphabetics committee) convinced me that we could successfully teach phonics to older struggling students in Tier 2 settings. But given the lack of transfer of those skills when taught to older kids, it was evident to me that phonics alone would not be enough.

Now, I find myself shifting again.

Recent research has reported that a significant number of older students (here I mean middle school and high school) still lag in decoding ability to an extent not widely acknowledged in the field (Wang, Sabatini, O’Reilly, & Weeks, 2019, Magliano, Talwar, Feller, Wang, O’Reilly, & Sabatini, 2023). Those adolescents who can read at a third or fourth grade level – and higher – may need targeted phonics instruction despite those reading levels.

Not long ago, I’d have discouraged this. I would have taken those students’ reading levels as evidence that they had sufficient decoding ability.

What research now reveals is that below a particular level of decoding proficiency, older students do not seem able to improve in reading – no matter what interventions and instructional approaches we adopt. Students above that decoding threshold, do manage to improve in reading from a wide range of instruction.

My advice?

1.     Make certain that in your middle school classrooms that students spend considerable time on words – vocabulary, morphology, spelling, and occasionally phonics. I’ve long argued for 25% of the language arts time to be devoted to developing knowledge of words and how they work. I would suggest that such teaching be systematic and explicit.

2.     Be on the lookout for kids who are not able to decode proficiently. Vigilance is needed to keep kids from slipping through the decoding cracks. It doesn’t matter the source of those problems – inadequate primary grade instruction, learning disabilities, transfers from other schools – they need to be identified.

3.     Provide high quality Tier 2 phonics instruction for kids who need it. This kind of teaching is often available to elementary students, but it tends not to be in middle school and high school. At those levels, students may be assigned to an all-purpose intervention which can be enough for some kids. But those kids below the decoding threshold? They need a dedicated, explicit phonics intervention in addition to anything else you can provide to support their literacy learning. (Phonics is unlikely to be enough for those kids, but without it, they won’t advance).

References

Denton, C. A., Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., & Bryan, D. (2008). Intervention provided to linguistically diverse middle school students with severe reading difficulties. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 23(2), 79-89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5826.2008.00266.x

Hooks, L., & Peach, W. (1993). Effectiveness of phonics for students with learning disabilities. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 20(3), 243-245.

Hutcheson, L., Selig, H., & Young, N. (1990). A success story: A large urban district offers a working model for implementing multisensory teaching into the resource and regular classroom. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 40, 79-96. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02648141

Lingo, A. S. (2014). Tutoring middle school students with disabilities by high school students: Effects on oral reading fluency. Education & Treatment of Children, 37(1), 53-75. https://doi.org/10.1353/etc.2014.0005

Magliano, J. P., Talward, A., Feller, D. P., Wang, Z., O’Reilly, T., & Sabatini, J. (2023). Exploring thresholds in the foundational skills for reading and comprehension outcomes in the context of postsecondary readers. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 56(1), 43-57.

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Wang, Z., Sabatini, J., O’Reilly, T., & Weeks, J. (2019). Decoding and reading comprehension: A test of the decoding threshold hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 387–401. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000302

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

One of the most important activities in my class is guided reading. Not the “Guided Reading” program (we use a textbook) but group work with the children reading under my guidance. Some of our teachers do this with the whole class. I think it works better the way I do it, with small reading groups. The students read the text and I ask questions and we talk about it. In my experience that is helpful. Is there any research supporting that?

RELATED: Does Literature Count as Knowledge?

Shanahan response:

First, let’s set aside the term “guided reading.” It now appears to a be a wholly owned subsidiary of someone. I guess it always was. Scott Foresman came up with that label in the 1920s to describe their reading lessons, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell grabbed hold of it successfully in the 1990s and now it’s difficult to talk about it without that connection.

In the 1940s, to compete, other book companies proposed alternative lesson plans. One of them used the term, “directed reading.” These days no one is likely to confuse that with a current commercial enterprise, so let’s use that.

Directed reading refers to those lessons in which students read a selection communally under teacher direction or supervision. The point is to practice reading under the vigilant watch of a teacher, who provides guidance and support to ensure success.

You are correct that this can be done and is done both whole class and small group.

Does research support that activity?

I can give you a definite, “Sort of.”

The problem here is that there are so many ways teachers can organize directed reading lessons. Some versions may work better than others, but several have been found to confer learning advantages.

Going way back, E. L. Thorndike (1917) found that asking comprehension questions in a reading lesson improved comprehension. When I was becoming a teacher, studies were supporting Russell Stauffer’s Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, which centered the discussions around student-generated predictions instead of teacher asked questions, and that seemed to work, too (Schorzman, 2005). Various forms of directed reading have paid off in one way or another (e.g., Davis, 1988; Schmitt, 1988). More recent studies have explored the value of approaches like Reciprocal Teaching (Moore, 1988) and Questioning the Author (Beck et al., 1996), and those seem to be good ideas as well.

Those studies prove that it is possible to make any of those varied approaches work. That doesn’t mean that all such plans would be effective or that they would work equally well. But there are enough of them for me to conclude that some form of directed reading should be regular part of any reading program.

I have long promoted the idea of dividing instruction among word knowledge, text reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. Directed reading would go in the reading comprehension slot in that scheme.

Given the general value of directed reading, let’s consider how teachers might maximize the benefit of this activity. The steps in traditional “directed reading activities” include:

1.         Preteaching new vocabulary

2.         Setting a purpose for reading or motivation

3.         Read text segments as assigned by teacher

4.         Questions and discussion after the reading of each segment

5.         Oral reading practice.

Preteaching vocabulary.

Preteaching vocabulary is a pedagogical move aimed at protecting comprehension from the disruptive effects that unknown words can cause. Students will typically comprehend a text more readily when the teacher has prepared them in this way (e.g., Wixson, 1986). But it is important to remember that the purpose of directed reading isn’t to guarantee high comprehension on an initial read. We are trying to teach students to read and to read better. If they are always taking on texts that the teacher guarantees will be comprehended immediately and with minimum effort, we aren’t really teaching reading – just watching kids practicing.

I must admit that I have concerns about preteaching vocabulary. I think a big part of successful reading depends upon dealing with unknown words. That is part of the reading process. In real life, readers are left to their own devices when it comes to new words. How they deal with them often determines comprehension. Personally, I would minimize this – increasing attention to vocabulary during the activity. Of course, if a text is especially heavy in words that I suspect the kids won’t get, I might hedge my bets, but that would be rare.

Teachers have long been encouraged to provide students with purposes for reading. “Find out what happens at Janie’s birthday party” or, “When reading this, pay attention to how many chambers the heart has and what they are called.” The idea, I guess, is that good readers read with clear purposes in mind.

Is that really the case? Sometimes it certainly is, like when someone is searching for specific information in a text. But, I must admit, when I read, I often don’t have very specific goals in mind. I want to find out what this study reported or what the characters did in this novel, very general purposes.

Research supports that notion. When students have very specific purposes set for them, they tend to narrow their focus, increasing the possibility of finding what the teacher asked for, while leading them to ignore the rest of the information (Narvaez, et al., 1999; O’Reilly, et al., 2018; Samuels & Dahl, 1985). Students with general purposes – read to summarize this part of the text or let’s find out what happens in this story – are more likely to lead students to develop a coherent mental representation of the text than when searching for more specific information.

Be vague here, rather than specific.

Reading.

When students are starting out, they need to read aloud. This is true in kindergarten and for at least a part of grade 1 for most kids. Certainly, by the time they achieve a high first grade reading level, they can profitably engage in silent reading, though too often teachers avoid this. This avoidance comes from the same drawer where we keep the preteaching of vocabulary. The idea is more to guarantee high comprehension rather than to develop students’ ability to read with comprehension.

 Initially, silent reading is not as effective as oral reading – for some kids that doesn’t start to even up until middle school! Accordingly, many teachers engage kids in round robin reading as if they were all beginning readers. It is better to have these text segments read silently. Admittedly, sometimes you will have to have kids reread at times (it happens).

How are they going to get good at silent reading comprehension if never asked to do such reading with a vigilant teacher close by?

When you start out with this, keep the segments short – even as short as a sentence or a paragraph. Over time, you can stretch them out, assigning longer segments as they develop the facility to do the reading in their minds. (Or, you can have them initially do whisper reading or mumble reading).

Questioning and Discussion.

I know some programs encourage the use of set questioning schemes, perhaps based on Bloom’s taxonomy or Raphael’s question-answer-relations, or some other scheme. Research suggests that there are many ways to question students and that it is helpful to ask at least some questions that go beyond literal recall or “right there” questions. Nevertheless, the benefits tend to be tiny.

I’m not a big fan of questioning schemes per se, at least I would discourage the idea of asking one of these, and two of those, and so on. I would much rather have the teacher ask questions aimed at identifying whether students comprehended the text well and, if not, where things, went wrong. What would be important to remember from a given text and what would you have to do to get that information? What vocabulary had to be understood?, which sentences had to be comprehended?, what connections had to be made?, were there spots where it was necessary to use prior knowledge?, what inferences were needed?, and so.

If students can’t answer the questions, the instruction should show them how, literally taking them back into the text and having them reread (often orally at this point) the part that gave them trouble. By the end of these lessons the student should have a fair understanding of the text – even though they may not have started that way – and the teaching should have helped the student to understand better the actions that may be needed to ensure comprehension.

Whether you teach this in a small group or whole class, teacher questions, no matter their quality, rarely surface the problems students may be having with a text. This is because there is almost always some more proficient youngster doing the answering. I strongly encourage the use of white boards, notebooks, or electronic means of getting everyone to individually answer each question. That way, the teacher can see how everyone is really doing, and can support the comprehension of all the students.

Oral Reading Practice.

Many directed reading schemes provide some oral reading practice, usually at the end. When I was a youngster, this was handled round robin style with each of us reading a sentence or paragraph until the text had been reread or until everyone had a turn.

These days, teachers have a better understanding of fluency development, so things like repeated reading and paired reading have allowed for more oral reading by each child during the same amount of time. That’s great.

I am less certain about fluency always being the follow up, however. I fear it encourages teachers to avoid text that might challenge students’ reading abilities (selecting texts easy enough to ensure high fluency) or it forces maximum use of inefficient small group instruction. At least for those youngsters likely to be disfluent, I’d suggest having them read the text aloud before taking it on for comprehension. Studies show that this one action can transform many supposedly frustration level texts into instructional level ones that students can take on successfully.

That fluency work can be done in pairs, through echo reading, chorally, at home with cooperative parents, or even with a recording device. The point is to give the kids a chance to decode those words and that kind of repetition has been found to accomplish that. That approach shows kids that they can often make sense of texts that they would have thought to be beyond their own means.

References       

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., Sandora, C., Kucan, L., & Worthy, J. (1996). Questioning the author: A yearlong classroom implementation to engage students with text. Elementary School Journal, 96(4), 385-414. https://doi.org/10.1086/461835

Davis, Z. T. (1988). A comparison of the effectiveness of sustained silent reading and directed reading activity on students' reading achievement. High School Journal, 72(1), 46-48.

Moore, P. J. (1988). Reciprocal teaching and reading comprehension: A review. Journal of Research in Reading, 11(1), 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1988.th00144.x

Narvaez, D., van den Broek, P., & Ruiz, A. B. (1999). The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(3), 488-496. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.91.3.488

O'Reilly, T., Feng, D. G., Sabatini, J., Wang, Z., & Gorin, J. (2018). How do people read the passages during a reading comprehension test? the effect of reading purpose on text processing behavior. Educational Assessment, 23(4), 277-295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10627197.2018.1513787

Rothkopf, E. Z., & Kaplan, R. (1972). Exploration of the effect of density and specificity of instructional objectives on learning from text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 63(4), 295-302. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033586

Samuels, S. J., & Dahl, P. R. (1975). Establishing appropriate purpose for reading and its effect on flexibility of reading rate. Journal of Educational Psychology, 67(1), 38-43. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0078669 

Schmitt, M. C. (1988). The effects of an elaborated directed reading activity on the metacomprehension skills of third graders. National Reading Conference Yearbook, 37, 167-181.

Schorzman, E. M., & Cheek, E. H., Jr. (2004). Structured strategy instruction: Investigating an intervention for improving sixth-graders' reading comprehension. Reading Psychology, 25(1), 37-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710490271828

Thorndike, E. L. (1917). Reading as reasoning: A study of mistakes in paragraph reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 8(6), 323-332. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0075325

Wixson, K. K. (1986). Vocabulary instruction and children's comprehension of basal stories. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(3), 317-329. https://doi.org/10.2307/747712

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I am the principal of a small primary grade school (350 students). I want to hire a consultant/ professional development specialist who could school my faculty in brain science so they will be able to teach reading more effectively. We all earned our credentials in colleges of education so none of us knows these new brain-based methods of teaching reading. Could you please provide some guidance?

RELATED: Does the science of reading include middle school?

Shanahan responds:

It may be hard to believe given news media reports and the numerous books that now purport to translate neuroscience into pedagogy, but there are not any new and effective instructional methods, approaches, techniques, or materials that have been developed based on “brain science.”

Save your money.

Invest in something more certain to help your school – like buying lottery tickets.

When people are talking about “teaching the brain to read”, they are typically touting phonics instruction. You know, phonics, an instructional method developed in the early 19^th century. Not exactly the spawn of modern neuroscience.

Teaching phonics is teaching the brain.

But then so is teaching word memorization.

I don’t mean to be cavalier here – I do understand that neurologists have identified some provocative distinctions between decoding and word memorization (we’ll get to that) – but let’s be honest: all cognitive learning is housed in the brain.

Much is made in those books and articles about how phonics is the right approach because it alters the brain. That latter claim is true as far as I can tell (I’m not a neuroscientist so reading such research gives me the heebee jeebees). However, it is not just phonics that changes the brain. The same can be said about any kind of learning, education, physical exercise, meditation and so on. They all alter the brain in terms of the circuits that are formed and the brain’s physical properties (such as thickening the hippocampus).

So far, no instructional method has resulted from the study of the brain.

Probably the best treatment of the neurological study of the reading brain aimed at a general audience is the now somewhat dated book (first published in 2009), Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene.

That book has a bit of a split personality – it starts out writing checks that it can’t cash and ends up getting real. On page 2, Dehaene claims: “The insight into how literacy changes the brain is profoundly transforming our vision of education and learning disabilities. New remediation programs are being conceived that should, in time, cope with the debilitating incapacity to decipher words known as dyslexia.”

Sounds great! That’s the kind of assertion that leads to letters like yours.

If neuroscience is leading to new ways of teaching, then teachers want to get their hands on those innovations.

But if you were tantalized by that page 2 promise, you’re going to be disappointed by the practical directions that neuroscience proposes. Dehaene argues for instruction in phonemic awareness (PA) and concedes that PA is not a prerequisite to reading (kids are likely developing PA and decoding simultaneously). I agree with all of that, but none of those pedagogical conclusions come from brain science – Dehaene usually cites psychological studies to support that type of claim.

Other insights that he shares are that kids learn complex rules or patterns later than simple ones, and that repetition matters when it comes to learning.

Duh.

Dehaene’s own characterization of these pedagogical claims: “A great many teachers will consider my recommendations redundant and obvious—but it does no harm to specify them” (Dehaene, 2009, p. 229). 

Let’s get real.

Neuroscientific research can do one of two things when it comes to the teaching of reading.

One possible outcome is that it will identify a structural difference (say, between the brains of normal readers and those with dyslexia) or some puzzling neurological process – such as a circuit implicating an unexpected region of the brain. These kinds of findings could, theoretically, lead to the development new assessments for the early identification of reading problems or suggestions for new and different teaching methods.

Neurological science has not yet led to such practical innovations. They might someday – that research should continue to be funded – but at this stage it hasn’t happened.

A second possible contribution that brain study can make is that it confirms what we already know. This kind of confirmational study is more about understanding the brain than how to teach reading. Such research offers possible explanations for why things work the way they do.

These studies have revealed that when we read words, we activate visual-phonological circuits in the brain. Such observations have led neuroscientists to conclude that phonics would possibly be more effective and/or more efficient than the teaching of whole words.

More recent studies (studies that were not yet available to Dehaene) go even further.

For example, in one fascinating investigation, subjects were either led to memorize whole words (with a made-up set of orthographic symbols) or to decode those symbols. The decoding instruction led to neural processing like what is observed in the brains of proficient readers (Yoncheva, et al., 2015). Word memorization led to processing more like what we do with pictures than with language.

The conclusion from such studies has been that it makes sense to teach phonics.

I certainly agree with that conclusion, but not because those studies are definitive. My assent comes from the fact that those conclusions are consistent with what psychological and pedagogical studies have repeatedly demonstrated for more than 60 years.

My reasoning isn’t:

“Oh wow, the brain coordinates both visual and phonological information when we read words. Man, I think we should try to teach kids to do that.”

It is more:

“That’s cool. These images of the brain show that kids coordinate visual and phonological information when they read words. I wonder if that is why reading instruction works better when phonics is included?”

I advocate phonics because so many studies show that kids do better in learning to read when that is part of their instruction. I do appreciate that these neurological findings appear to be consistent with those studies of teaching. This concurrence may give me greater confidence, but it would not make any difference in my practice. (Of course, it should be noted that the instructional studies can do more than just suggest possible benefits or efficiencies that could result from phonics – unlike the brain studies. No, instructional studies will also provide me with guidance as to what the content of those lessons should be, the types of examples and explanations I should provide, the actions the students should be engaged in, their duration, and other practical specifics that are pedagogically essential if I am to teach something, but that are unheard of in brain studies.

Think about it. What if we had no instructional evidence that phonics improved reading achievement, but neuroscientists had scads of photographs showing that we connect visual and phonological information when we read words?

If that were the case, I would not be advocating the teaching of phonics.

Instead, I’d be calling for further research to evaluate this fascinating hypothesis in classrooms. The same way such information is handled by the medical community.

Neuroscientists identify unusual accumulations of plaque in the brains of Alzheimer patients. Based on that information, physicians don’t immediately start prescribing anti-plaque medications. They wait until there are medical studies showing that reducing plaque works. Despite the obvious conclusion from brain images that plaque causes this disease, further study was required and that showed that plaque removal (or plaque removal alone) is neither a cure nor a palliative. 

Neuroscience is largely a correlational enterprise. Scientists analyze brain images and look for patterns and consistencies. That information is then translated into hypotheses and possible explanations for how those patterns connect to external behaviors and conditions.

In reading, most neural studies have explored how children read, not how they learn to read. Longitudinal studies, for instance, have been unusual (Wang, et al., 2023). Until recently, fMRIs could be used only with the reading of single words. Because those studies couldn’t look at connected text, they were unable to consider the impact of semantic context (Junker, et al., 2023; Terporten, et al., 2023), how ambiguous words are processed (Mizrachi, et al., 2023), the role of morphemes (Marks, Eggleston, & Kovelman, 2024), font differences (Wu, et al., 2023), or anything else about how we process written language. The newer studies, as they have looked at phenomena more like real connected reading, have not contradicted the explanations formulated from the images of single word reading, but time will tell.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there were studies that compared children who received little or no phonics with those who received a heavy dose of it. Most kids in both groups learned to read (albeit with less failure, greater average achievement, and better spelling ability in the phonics groups). But what about those kids who learned to read successfully without phonics? How do brains take such different learning paths to get to the same neural processing outcome?

I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, but I do know that the explanations that have been provided so far tend to neglect variations in learning and processing (Debska, et al., 2023; Wat, et al., 2023).

My advice?

I wouldn’t look for a consultant who knows the neuroscience, but for one who has a deep understanding and appreciation of the findings of instructional study. Your teachers don’t need to know how the brain processes single words, but what content if taught and what instructional methods if used are likely to be most successful in raising students’ reading achievement. Except in the most general terms (e.g., teach phonics, encourage kids to read a lot), neuroscience has few practical suggestions that do any more than confirm what you and your teachers already probably know.

References

Debska, A. M., Wang, J., Dziegiel-Fivet, G. K., Chyl, K. M., Wojcik, M. P., Jednorog, K. M., Booth, J. R. (2023). The development of orthography and phonology coupling in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex and its relation to reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0001495

Dehaene, S. (2010). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. New York: Penguin Books.

Junker, F. B., Schlaffke, L., Lange, J., Schmidt-Wilcke, T. (2023). The angular gyrus serves as an interface between the non-lexical reading network and the semantic system: evidence from dynamic causal modeling. Brain Structure & Function. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00429-023-02624-z

Marks, R. A., Eggleston, R., Kovelman, I. (2024). Brain bases of morphological awareness and longitudinal word reading outcomes. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105802

Mizrachi, N., Eviatar, Z., Peleg, O., Bitan, T. (2023). Inter- and intra- hemispheric interactions in reading ambiguous words. Cortex, 171, 257-271. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2023.09.022

Terporten, R., Huizeling, E., Heidlmayr, K., Hagoort, P., Kosem, A. (2023). The interaction of context constraints and predictive validity during sentence reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1-13. https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_02082

Wang, F., Kaneshiro, B., Toomarian, E. Y., Gosavi, R. S., Hasak, L. R., Moron, S., Nguyen, Q. T. H., Norcia, A. M., McCandliss, B. D. (2023). Progress in elementary school reading linked to growth of cortical responses to familiar letter combinations within visual word forms. Developmental Science. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc.13435

Wat, E. K., Jangraw, D. C., Finn, E. S., Bandettini, P. A., Preston, J. L., Landi, N., Hoeft, F., Frost, S. J., Lau, A., Chen, G., Pugh, K. R., Molfese, P. J. (2023). Will you read how I will read? naturalistic fmri predictors of emergent reading. Neuropsychologia. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108763

Wu, Y., Luo, C., Wang, Z., Xie, H., Huang, Y., Su, Y. (2023). A further specification of the effects of font emphasis on reading comprehension: evidence from event-related potentials and neural oscillations. Memory & Cognition. https://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01457-9

Yoncheva, Y. N., Wise, J., & McCandliss, B. (2015). Hemispheric specialization for visual words is shaped by attention to sublexical units during initial learning. Brain and Language, 145-146, 23-33. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2015.04.001. 

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on September 7, 2019, and reappeared on February 10, 2024. It seems to be that time of the year again. Principals are being encouraged by central administrations to put on the full court press for higher test scores this year. I know that, not because of Mardi Gras or Groundhog Day, but because I'm starting to get those questions from teachers. Here is one that just came in: "Dr. Shanahan, you have stated that STANDARDIZED reading test items analysis is a 'fool's errand.' My district requires me to complete an items analysis of a standardized reading test to "narrow my instructional focus on specific skills and question types" -per my admin. You stated, 'It is not the question type. It is the text.' How can I convince my supervisors to move away from this practice? Please help." Almost 5 years separates these questions, and the answer to them has not changed a bit.

RELATED: I want my students to comprehend, am I teaching the wrong kind of strategies?

Teacher question:

What are your thoughts on standards-based grading in ELA which is used in many districts? For example, teachers may be required to assign a number 1-4 (4 being mastery) that indicates a student’s proficiency level on each ELA standard. Teachers need to provide evidence to document how they determined the level of mastery. Oftentimes tests are created with items that address particular standards. If students get those items correct, that is evidence of mastery. What do you recommend?

Shanahan response: 

Oh boy… this answer is going make me popular with your district administration!

The honest answer is that this kind of standards-based grading makes no sense at all.

It is simply impossible to reliably or meaningfully measure performance on the individual reading standards. Consequently, I would not encourage teachers to try to do that.

If you doubt me on this, contact your state department of education and ask them why the state reading test doesn’t provide such information.

Or better yet, see if you can get those administrators who are requiring this kind of testing and grading to make the call.

You (or they) will find out that there is a good reason for that omission, and it isn’t that the state education officers never thought of it themselves.

Better yet check with the agencies who designed the tests for your state. Call AIR, Educational Testing Service, or ACT, or the folks who designed PARCC and SBAC or any of the other alphabet soup of accountability monitoring devices.

What you’ll find out is that no one has been able to come up with a valid or reliable way of providing scores for individual reading comprehension “skills” or standards.

Those companies hired the best psychometricians in the world, and have collectively spent billions of dollars designing tests, and haven’t been able to do what your administration wants. And, if those guys can’t, why would you assume that Mrs. Smith in second grade can do it in her spare time?

Studies have repeatedly shown that standardized reading comprehension tests measure a single factor—not a list of skills represented by the various types of question asked.

What should you do instead?

Test kids’ ability to comprehend a text of a target readability level. For instance, in third grade you might test kids with passages at appropriate levels for each report card marking (475L, 600L, 725L, and 850L). What you want to know is whether kids could make sense of such texts through silent reading.

You can still ask questions about these passages based on the “skills” that seem to be represented in your standards—you just can’t score them that way.

What you want to know is whether kids can make sense of such texts with 75% comprehension.

In other words, it’s the passages and text levels that should be your focus, not the question types or individual standards.

If kids can read such passages successfully, they’ll be able to answer your questions. And, if they can’t, then you need to focus on increasing their ability to read such texts. That means teaching things like vocabulary, text structure, and cohesion and having the kids read sufficiently challenging texts—not practicing answering certain types of questions.

Sorry administrators, you’re sending teachers on a fool’s errand. One that will not lead to higher reading achievement. It will just result in misleading information for parents and kids and a waste of effort for your teachers.

References

ACT. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City, IA : American College Testing.

Davis , F.B. (1944). Fundamental factors in comprehension in reading. Psychometrika , 9( 3), 185–197.

Kulesz, P. A., Francis, D. J., Barnes, M. A., & Fletcher, J. M. (2016). The influence of properties of the test and their interactions with reader characteristics on reading comprehension: An explanatory item response study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(8), 1078-1097. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000126

Muijselaar, M. M. L., Swart, N. M., Steenbeek-Planting, E., Droop, M., Verhoeven, L., & de Jong, P. F. (2017). The dimensions of reading comprehension in Dutch children: Is differentiation by text and question type necessary? Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 70-83. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000120

Spearritt , D. (1972). Identification of subskills of reading comprehension by maximum likelihood factor analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 8( 1), 92–111. https://doi.org/10.2307/746983

Thorndike, R. (1973). Reading as reasoning. Reading Research Quarterly, 9(2), 135-147. https://doi.org/10.2307/747131

To examine the comments and discussion that responded to the original posting, click here:

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/should-we-grade-students-on-the-individual-reading-standards

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Our district adopted a systematic phonics program and instruction is delivered whole class for each grade level for about 30 minutes per day. We have a wide range of learners in each class, so my question is, is whole class instruction an effective use of instructional time since some students are being exposed to phonics instruction beyond their level? For example, a second grader who still hasn’t mastered CVC words, but is focused on whole class instruction focused on CVCe words. Is there any research to substantiate that exposure to explicit phonics instruction beyond their current level of mastery is going to be valuable for that student?

RELATED: Should we grade students on the individual reading standards?

Teacher Question 2:

Do you know of any research that supports the notion that all students must receive tier 1 instruction in Phonics at their grade level even though they are significantly below in their decoding skills? I know that it is important that all students receive tier 1 instruction with grade level materials such as complex text and vocabulary, however I always get asked the question if it makes sense in phonics. I work with many teachers and often hear that some of their students still do not know letters, sounds or cannot yet decode simple CVC words yet they are receiving tier 1 instruction in more advanced phonics concepts. Is there any merit to this? 

Shanahan replies:

Glad you asked. I’ve been thinking about this problem recently. I’ve come across claims that teachers must differentiate phonics instruction, as well as ads claiming the superiority of certain products because of their instructional delivery to multiple small groups in a classroom.

Those assertions puzzle me because they fly in the face of the research that I knew and failed to cite any supporting evidence.

These kinds of questions don’t always match well with the research.

I wish that I could identify a bunch of studies comparing within-class small group instruction addressing varied content with whole-class instruction with no content adjustment.

Half these imaginary studies would equalize the amounts of instruction; the whole classes would get 30 minutes a day and so would each small group, though this would necessitate a lot of seatwork for groups not with the teacher.

The other half of the studies would limit the overall time devoted to phonics in the classroom – staying to a total of 30 minutes for both the whole class and the multiple small group versions. The amounts of time devoted to the small groups would have to share the 30 minutes, 2 groups would get 15 minutes each, 3 groups would get 10 minutes, and so on.

With those kinds of data, I could provide you a solid research-based answer.

Instead, I must reason from existing research, that is not a perfect fit for these questions.  

Existing research has studied the effectiveness of phonics delivered through both whole class and small group instruction, though group size was not the point of those studies. The necessary comparison comes from a meta-analysis of 38 studies (National Reading Panel, 2000, (NRP)).

The problem with this kind of question in a meta-analysis is that the feature being evaluated was not manipulated by the researchers. It is only a correlation.

Unfortunately, for this question, you are mainly comparing phonics instruction in the whole classes (in the original studies whole classes received or did not receive phonics) with phonics instruction delivered to small groups (these studies compared small groups with or without phonics).

The meta-analysis looked to see if there were different effect sizes for the whole group and small group studies. Any difference of this analysis could be due to group size – in small groups teachers can tailor instruction to individual needs, more easily intensify instruction, better monitor children’s progress, and be more responsive. But any differences could also be due to the Tier 1 versus Tier 2 aspects of the context – perhaps classroom kids are more responsive to instruction, for instance. In other words, the research here will give us the best prediction of how experimental comparisons might come out, but they don’t study the benefits of differentiation directly, so there is a lot of room for error.

What did NRP find?

Basically, NRP reported no significant differences between small group and whole class phonics instruction. They appear to be equally effective, despite the idea that the small group instruction would be better matched to the students’ levels.

I quote:

“Inspection of effect sizes for individual studies… reveals that some whole class programs produced effect sizes as large, and sometimes larger, than those produced by small groups or tutoring. Given the enormous expense and impracticality of delivering instruction in small groups or individually—except for children who have serious reading difficulties— research is needed to determine what makes whole class phonics instruction effective” (National Reading Panel, 2000, p. 2-121).

I think part of the problem here is that teachers may be thinking about phonics in the same way that they think about (and should think about) math curriculum. It would not be possible to teach kids long division before they had some degree of mastery of subtraction, since it is entailed in division problems.

But a phonics curriculum is not like that. Few skills need to be taught before other skills can be learned. The sequence of phonics is largely arbitrary.

We advise teaching the skills that are more frequently used before less usable ones, but it is not necessary to know the t /t/ sound before the w /w/ sound. The same can be said about the CVC and CVCe patterns. One of these may help unlock more words than the other, but they are both useful.

You may think that if some kids haven’t yet mastered the CVC, they won’t benefit from  lessons on the CVCe. That isn’t the case. Students may reap a greater payoff from the CVC pattern in terms of how many words it might help decode, but the lack of the earlier skill should not be an impediment to learning the others – nor would it vitiate the value of learning the CVCe.

I would certainly like to give everyone the biggest payoff with every lesson. The cost of that isn’t worth it in this case.

Dividing a class into groups means someone will get less instruction. The kinds of gaps mentioned in these letters would best be addressed in a Tier 2 pullout, or afterschool or summer program (not instead of the classroom teaching, but in addition to it).

I would keep everyone moving forward with their phonics program whole class because that allows maximum teaching time for each element and pattern. It allows students to develop the ability to visually and phonemically recognize the elements in a variety of word contexts, as well as sufficient time for spelling and reading such words, and for practice with decodable text.

This same instruction in small groups either must be less thorough or more hurried. Not good choices if our goal is mastery.

The other alternative is to allow phonics to devour reading instruction – ignoring the needs to build language, fluency, comprehension, and writing. Again, not a good idea, and certainly not an idea in accord with the science of reading.

We are trying to do better in reading achievement – our school is second lowest in our district. I’m convinced structured reading is the way to go and I’m willing to use my budget to pay for our primary teachers to attend the XXXXX professional development program. I’ve heard that having teachers take that training is an effective way to improve reading achievement. However, several of my teachers say they don’t want to go, and I can’t require it. I know they respect your opinion, what do you think of that training?

RELATED: Small Group Phonics in the Classroom – Good Idea or Not?

Shanahan responds:

As you can see, I blanked out the name of the professional development provider. I rarely make comments about specific products including this one.

However, research is somewhat mixed when it comes to PD. That doesn’t mean you can’t raise reading achievement that way. We accomplished it in the Chicago Public Schools under my leadership, but this kind of success is not as straightforward as you might imagine.

It may help to remind folks of my school improvement model.

Shanahan Model of School Improvement

The colorful inner circle includes those actions that usually have the biggest payoffs when it comes to kids’ learning. These are so powerful because they refer to direct changes to aspects of students’ experience. Items in the outer circle matter, too, but only to the extent that they exert an impact on those student-experience variables. As such, outer ring variables tend to have a more conditional and smaller effect than those inner circle variables. PD is in the outer circle.

PD can have a positive impact on children’s learning, but only to the extent that it leads to teacher learning. And, even then, it might not pay off if the teachers don’t implement well what they have learned.

That means there are a lot of “ifs” between the mind of the person/team who created the PD and little Johnny and Janie’s experiences in your second-grade classrooms.

The professional development program must have the right stuff designed into it, communicating practices that really can raise reading achievement. Then, those who deliver the PD must be fully up to speed, sharing what is intended in a powerful way without freelancing. Next, teachers must buy in and really learn what is being delivered and have a desire to implement it. Even then you’re not there yet, because successful implementation may require more than the teachers’ knowledge and commitment – they may need help, opportunities for appropriate feedback, supportive and appropriate curricular materials, and so on.

Of course, the assumption of this kind of training is that if we can just fix one part of the reading curriculum, then everything will be fine. I fell prey to that many times early in my career. I’d provide wonderful professional development focused on how to teach X (Phonics? Vocabulary? Fluency? etc.). I’d convince teachers to include X in their daily instruction, never suspecting that this would end the teaching of Y in those classrooms – Y, which I had naively assumed all children would continue to be taught.

So, indeed, PD can raise children’s reading achievement: if it is the right curriculum, if it is presented properly, if the teachers learn it, if they wish to implement it, if the district provides adequate support for successful implementation, if implementing it doesn’t weaken something else… well, you get the idea. It can work. It also can go wrong in enough ways, that I can’t blithely say, “Send your teachers for PD and your reading achievement will rise.” It just usually doesn’t work that way.

Nevertheless, a meta-analysis of 28 studies conducted between 1975 and 2017 found that “teacher PD has a moderate and significant, positive average effect on reading achievement” (Didion, et al., 2019). The studies varied quite a bit in quality, but at least in some of the more rigorous investigations, PD was an effective tool for raising reading achievement.

This review study didn’t find any mediators or moderators to this effect, though past studies have reported qualitative factors that were correlated with success. Things like making sure that the PD does more than focus on teacher knowledge, putting a strong emphasis on practice. Embedding ongoing PD in the context of the teachers’ work helps too; this can be done through things like collaborative planning opportunities, in-classroom coaching, and the like. Connecting PD to the specific curriculum and materials the teachers will work with is also often reported.

I must admit I have some concerns about the program that you queried me about. It is especially intensive, which is usually a good thing, though in this case I wonder. One analysis of PD efforts that improved learning reported that an average of 49 hours of teacher training was effective – with some programs providing more and some less than that. The program you asked about would be on the upper end of that distribution and it is focused much more narrowly. As much as I believe that we should be supportive of all kinds of learning, I wonder if this would be overkill in many school situations – more attention than would be needed to make teachers successful with the aspects of the reading curriculum you are trying to build up.

Beyond that practical consideration, I also look at the research on it and despite the claims you have heard, the best research has not been especially supportive – it seems to lead to teacher knowledge changes, teacher practice changes (so far, so good), but student reading achievement gains? Not necessarily. In at least one of those successful situations that you related to me, it is important to note that the PD was just one of many elements of school reform adopted simultaneously, making it impossible to attribute success to that program.

I have no doubt that PD programs (including that one) can work. I would be more sanguine about success if you told me you’d reviewed your program and found specific weaknesses in the area to be addressed, that your teachers were eager to take part, that a new instructional program consistent with the training was in the stars, and that you were going for the training too so you could provide the leadership that might be needed to make this successful.

Since your teachers are reacting negatively to the amount of commitment you are asking for, you might want to explore other possibilities. Maybe start with some collaborative learning with the group, getting them involved in reading some of what you have read, evaluating their own practices, and exploring curricular changes that might depend upon successful professional development. Who knows? Perhaps, those efforts will lead them to want to take on the PD you are interested in supporting.

References

Audisio, A., Taylor-Perryman, R., Tasker, T., & Steinberg, M. P. (2023). Does teacher professional development improve student learning? Evidence from Leading Educators’ Fellowship Model. EdWorkingPaper No. 22-597). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/ab2f-z471

Didion, L., Toste, J. R., & Filderman, M. (2019). Teacher professional development and student reading achievement: A meta-analytic review of the effects. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.  https://doi.org: 10.1080/19345747.2019.1670884

Garet, M. S., Cronen, S., Eaton, M., Kurki, A., Ludwig, M., Jones, W., Uekawa, K., Falk, A., Bloom, H., Doolittle, F., Zhu, P., & Sztejnberg, L. (2008). The impact of two professional development Interventions on early reading instruction and achievement (NCEE 2008-4030). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Gore, J. M., Miller, A., Fray, L., Harris, J., & Prieto, E. (2021). Improving student achievement through professional development: Results from a randomised controlled trial of Quality Teaching Rounds. Teaching and Teacher Education, 101.

Porche, M. V., Pallante, D. H., & Snow, C. E. (2012). Professional development for reading achievement. Elementary School Journal, 112(4), 649–671. https://doi.org/10.1086/665008

Short, J., & Hirsh, S. (2020). The elements: Transforming teaching through theory curriculum-based professional development. New York: Carnegie Corporation.

Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. (2007). Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement (Issues & Answers Report, REL 2007–No. 033). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Our district and state are making a big push to develop social studies knowledge through reading. I appreciate that and understand the importance of social studies (previously we hardly taught it at all). Our ELA textbook still has stories – each of these is connected to social studies or science topics. We are being told that if time is tight (and it always is – we have so many things to teach now) that we can skip the stories and focus on the social studies selections alone. I always thought reading class was for literature and social studies was for geography, history, and so on. That no longer seems to be the case. Am I just hopelessly old fashioned or can you provide me with support for preserving the place of literature in my classroom (I teach the fourth and fifth graders)? Don’t stories do more to improve reading achievement than social studies articles? 

RELATED: Can a Program of Professional Development Raise Reading Achievement?

Shanahan responds: 

You are correct that for years, literature – or stories, at least – dominated reading instruction. It was the rare selection that trod any other ground (most often an occasional story drawn from history, perhaps).

That has changed for several reasons.

Researchers have identified important differences between expository or informational text and narrative text. Too many kids were leaving elementary school able to read the latter reasonably well, but not the former. Makes sense to include informational text – with all its lexical and structural challenges.

Then there were the concerns about knowledge and its role in reading comprehension. Readers are advantaged by knowing stuff. Your experience with social studies is enlightening. Perhaps if social studies and science had received adequate attention previously, we wouldn’t be discussing this. But this neglect was common.

Given all of that, arguing for reading instruction from texts that carry information worth knowing seems like a no-brainer.

That said, I, too, am seeing/hearing that things may have swung too far in some locales.

The problem here is that too many educators think of stories as motivational or entertaining, rather than informative.

This misjudgment of the value of literature is so pervasive that scholars have felt the need to defend it – not with regard to reading instruction – but in terms of its contribution to intellectual thought, philosophy, and our daily discourse (Miner, 1976; Peels, 2020; Wilson, 1976).

There’s no research I’m aware of showing that reading instruction is better served by stories than informational text. I don’t think you can win the argument making that kind of claim.

Perhaps you can refer to some of the leading voices for increasing the emphasis on knowledge. People like E. D. Hirsch, Natalie Wexler, David Coleman and so on, all agree that literature should have a space in this kind of knowledge building.

Likewise, there are long lists of scientists who gained their first interest in science through science fiction. The same can be said about historians with historical fiction. That’s not unimportant.

Not everybody concedes to appeals to authority, however.

Maybe a better way to go would be to argue that literature is an important source of knowledge that everyone wants for the children – and better yet, show how you would teach appropriate literature in ways that would result in not just improved reading, but greater domain knowledge or declarative knowledge. (And, here, I mean a source of knowledge on its own merits -- not as a handmaiden to social studies through historical fiction or science through science fiction).

Why is it important to teach literature?

There are the obvious literary payoffs in terms of literary interpretation skills, appreciation of artistry, development of imagination, and language and communication abilities. Those benefits aren’t likely to convince your antagonists on this either. But literature can be an important source of knowledge, too. For instance:

1.     Cultural understanding: It can provide a window into the beliefs and practices of different cultures. We can use literature to develop insights about the cultural experiences of different groups. Think here about stories like: Last Stop on Market Street (Matt de la Peña), Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (John Steptoe), The Silence Seeker (Ben Morley), or Grandfather’s Journey (Allen Say). These kinds of stories promote empathy and cultural understanding and can familiarize and sensitize students to various information about different cultural heritages.

2.     Historical and social context: Literature can offer insights into historical and social contexts, too, familiarizing kids with political and social issues of different time periods and the forces that shape societies. Books like Number the Stars; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; and Esperanza Rising fit the bill if you want to introduce the Holocaust, resistance movements, or the Great Depression. Go, social studies! 

3.     Human relations: Literature provides opportunities for readers to think about how we get along with each other – concepts like loyalty, competitiveness, loneliness, respect, compassion, bullying, empathy, and forgiveness are central to books like Wonder (R. J. Palacio), Each Kindness (Jacqueline Woodson), and The Hundred Dresses (Eleanor Estes).

4.     Identity and personal development: Literature considers personal growth and self-reflection, and involves readers in identifying with characters, grappling with moral dilemmas, and exploring existential questions. For this purpose, books like Oh, the Places You’ll Go (Dr. Seuss), The Little Engine that Could (Watty Piper), The Dot (Peter H. Reynolds), and the Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein) can be used to study resilience, self-confidence, perseverance, generosity, and sacrifice.

5.     Literary touchstones: Think of all the allusions to children’s books that come up in daily language such as “down a rabbit hole”, “your nose is growing”, “he cried wolf”, an “ugly duckling”, and “beauty and the beast”. Knowing such touchstones and usages and from whence they come is valuable content with a literary provenance.

To develop such lessons, think of the specific concepts, vocabulary, and knowledge that students would be expected to develop and how you would hold them accountable for gaining this information.

Literature can be an important source of knowledge, but only if our choice of books and pedagogical moves support that kind of learning. Let’s make sure this pendulum doesn’t swing too far.

References

Miner, E. (1976). That literature is a kind of knowledge. Critical Inquiry, 2(3), 487–518.

Peels, R.  (2020). How literature delivers knowledge and understanding. British Journal of Aesthetics, 60(2), 199–222. 

Wilson, C. (1983). Literature and Knowledge. Philosophy, 58(226), 489–496.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Boy, oh, boy! The past couple weeks have brought unseasonably warm temperatures to the Midwest, and an unusual flurry of questions concerning teaching children at their, so-called, “instructional levels.” Must be salesman season, or something.          

One question was asked specifically about my colleague, Dick Allington, since he has published articles and chapters saying that teaching kids with challenging text is a dumb idea. A couple of others referred to advertising copy for Units of Study, a program published by Teachers College Press. Both Dick and TCP had thrown the R-word (research) around quite a bit, but neither managed to conjure up any studies that supported their claims. That means that the instructional level, after 71 years, still remains unsubstantiated.

What I’m referring to is the long-held belief that kids learn more when they are matched to texts in particular ways. The claim is that learning is squelched if a text is too hard or too easy. I bought into it as a teacher and spent a lot of time testing kids to find out which books they could learn from and trying to prevent their contact with the verboten ones.

According to proponents of the instructional level, if a text is too easy, there is nothing to learn. Let’s face it, if a reader already knows all the words in a text and can answer a bunch of questions with no teacher support, that wouldn’t be much of a learning opportunity. I buy that. Surprisingly, however, early investigations found the opposite — the less there was to learn from a book, the greater progress the students seemed to make. Yikes! This was so obviously wrong, that the researchers rejected their own findings and made up some criteria for separating the independent and instructional levels.

Likewise, the theory posits that texts can be too hard – preventing children from learning and crushing their tender motivation.

But what’s too easy and what’s too hard?

Back in the 1940s, Emmett Betts, reading authority extraordinaire, reported on a research study completed by one of his students. He implied that the study showed that if you matched kids to text using the criteria he proposed (95-98% word reading accuracy and 75-89% reading comprehension), kids learned more.

Unfortunately, there was no such study of learning. Betts just made up the numbers and teachers and professors have rapturously clung to them ever since. Generation after generation of teachers has been told that teaching kids at their instructional levels improves learning.  

Over the past decade or so, some scholars have begun to realize that this widely recommended practice is the educational equivalent of fake news and have started reporting studies into its ineffectiveness.

The instructional level has not done well. It either has made no difference — that is the kids taught from grade level materials do as well as those placed at an instructional level — or the instructional level placements have led to less learning. This is probably because easier texts tend to limit kids’ exposure to linguistic and textual features that they don’t yet know how to negotiate. Kids not so protected, often do better.

It still makes sense to start kids out with relatively easy texts when they are in K-1, since they must learn to decode. Beginning reading texts should have enough repetition and clear exposure to the most frequent and straightforward spelling patterns in our language. But, once that hurdle is overcome, it makes no sense to teach everybody as if they were 5-year-olds. From Grade 2 on, it appears that kids can learn plenty when taught with more challenging texts.

Here are some related questions asked of me over the past 2-3 weeks:

My kids are learning to read, and they have for years. Why change now?

Because of the opportunity cost; your students could do even better. Students often tell me that they hate reading specifically because they always get placed in what they call the “stupid kid books.” If kids can learn as much or more from the grade level texts — and they can — we should be giving them opportunities to read the texts that are more at their intellectual levels and that match their age-level interests.

Isn’t it true that the studies in which the kids did better varied not just the book levels, but how the students were taught?

Yes, that is true, and instructional level proponents have raised that as a reason to reject that evidence. However, no one is claiming that students learn more simply by being placed in harder books. As students confront greater amounts of challenge the teaching demands go up. One suspects that part of the popularity of the instructional level is that teachers don’t have to do as much (since kids already know most of the words and can comprehend the texts on their own).

What about older kids who are still “beginning readers?”

 Anyone—at whatever age level—who is just starting to learn to read, is still going to need to master decoding. Teaching older students with a steady diet of more demanding texts may make it harder to master the relations between spelling and pronunciation. Stay with relatively easy books at least part of the time with older readers who are reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level.

Are you saying no more small group teaching?

No, small group teaching can be productive, unless the purpose of that grouping is to teach students with different levels of books. I think it would make more sense to work with small groups when teaching with harder texts, since this would facilitate greater teacher support. We do the opposite now. We place kids in relatively easy text and then place them in small groups to get the extra attention that isn’t needed under those circumstances.

You don’t believe in differentiation?

I believe in differentiation, but not if that mainly means teaching kids with different levels of books. There is a large and growing body of research that suggests that we would be better off varying the scaffolding provided to different students who are working with the same books.

Dick Allington admits that kids can learn more from more challenging texts but says that the scaffolding to do this would be too demanding for an average teacher. What do you think?

Dick was referring to studies done by Alyssa Morgan and Melanie Kuhn. In both, the frustration level placements led to more learning. In the Morgan study, the treatment was paired reading. That means the powerful instructional scaffolding that was provided was delivered by untrained 7-year-olds. My hunch is that the average teacher can scaffold as well as a second grader (I think there is a TV show about something like that). This is not for elite teachers only.

You totally reject the instructional level idea for anyone but beginners?

No, I’ve come to believe that the instructional level would be a great goal to aim at for at the completion of a lesson. If, when you are finishing up with a text, the kids know 75% or more of the ideas and can read 95% or more of the words, you have done a terrific job. One of Linnea Ehri’s studies found that the kids who did best ended up with 98% accuracy. Of course, if you start with texts at those levels, that leaves little to teach. Start with texts students cannot yet read successfully; then teach them to read those texts so well that people would think those texts were at their instructional levels. Make it the outcome, not the input.

Should all the texts that we teach from be at the levels that Common Core set?

No, I’d argue (based on little direct evidence) that students should read several texts across their school days and school years. This reading should vary greatly in difficulty, from relatively easy texts that would afford students extensive reads with little teacher support, to very demanding texts that could only be accomplished successfully with a great deal of rereading and teacher scaffolding.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/the-instructional-level-concept-revisited-teaching-with-complex-text

Teacher question: 

Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing?

Shanahan response:

You came to the right place.

I think your school is making a big mistake not devoting sufficient attention to writing.

When I was a teacher my primary grade kids wrote every day. When I became a researcher, I conducted studies on how reading and writing are related. As director of reading for Chicago, I required 30-45 minutes per day of writing in all our classrooms.

There are, of course, a lot of good reasons why someone should learn to write. Many jobs, mine included, require it – and often jobs that require a lot of writing pay better (I’m sure many nurses would disagree with that last point). Of course, writing is also an important form of self-expression. Just as there are people who play musical instruments, dance, sing, paint, knit, cook, and so on, many use writing as a form of self-expression and to preserve memory. All those are terrific reasons for teaching writing.

I’m going to guess that the reason your school is ignoring writing is because someone thought that might help raise reading scores. That’s a mistake because writing can be a path to higher reading achievement, so your kids (and your school) are missing out. Instead of elevating the reading scores, your school is probably squashing them.

So, there are lots of reasons for teaching writing, and this entry focuses on one of them: how writing can help kids to become measurably better readers.

Research has identified three important ways reading and writing are connected – and all three deserve a place in your curriculum.

First, reading and writing draw upon the same body of knowledge and skills. If you want to be a reader you must perceive the separable phonemes within words, recognize the most common spelling patterns, link meanings to the words in the text (vocabulary), understand the grammar well enough to permit comprehension, trail cohesive links accurately, and recognize and use discourse structure (texts are organized and recognizing this in a text improves comprehension). Of course, background knowledge plays a role in reading comprehension, too, so the more readers know about their world the better they may do in reading. Yep, learning to read requires all of that.

But think about it. That knowledge is integral to writing too. If kids can’t hear the phonemes, match sounds and letters, and remember spelling patterns, they won’t be able to get words on the page. The same can be said about all those other linguistic and content features of text needed for reading. That means when you are teaching the foundations of reading, you are also teaching the foundations of writing.

It is the same knowledge base, and yet, they play out differently because readers and writers start in different places. A reader looks at the author’s words and starts decoding—matching the phonology in their head to the author’s orthography. The writer thinks about the words he/she wants to write, thinks about the phonemes, and tries to remember what letters or patterns will represent those. The same thing happens with the other elements, too – one starts with ideas and turns them into written language, and the other marches in the opposite direction.

What is my advice about taking advantage of this overlap? Teach the reading skills that you teach now, but then think hard about them. How would kids use that skill in reading and writing? For example, when you teach letter sounds, you should be teaching kids to use those sounds to sound out words. It is a pathetic phonics lesson that includes no decoding practice. But also have your students try to write the words. Many programs include dictation, and that’s great.

I’m partial to invented spelling because it provides such extensive and supportive practice with the sounds. Look at this simple K-1 message:

Hermet Krabs liv in shels sum tims tha lev on the bech. 

[Hermit crabs live in shells. Sometimes they live on the beach.]

This piece of writing didn’t take long to produce, but to accomplish it the student had to analyze 38 phonemes. He got most of them reasonably right, too. The most ambitious phonemic awareness lessons usually would NOT have any individual child practicing 38 phonemes, so encouraging this kind of writing is smart teaching.

You can do the same with older kids when you teach informational text structure. For reading, that would usually entail teaching how problem-solution texts are organized, and then having the students read texts with that structure to gin up comprehension. That can be even more effective if the kids try to compose their own problem-solution texts – and what a great opportunity to review science or social studies content at the same time.

Second, reading and writing are communication processes. Studies show that writers think about their audiences and what they need to tell their readers to communicate effectively. That might not be surprising, but there are also studies showing the value of having readers think about authors and authors’ perspectives (this is emphasized in educational standards and is essential for reading history and for certain approaches to literary text, too).

Writing approaches that involve kids in reading and responding to each other’s texts are beneficial in improving the quality of kids’ writing. There are any number of ways that teachers can facilitate this kind of sharing and heighten awareness that texts are written by somebody. Doing this can sensitize young authors to the kinds of things that may confuse or entice their readers. Writing conferences, writer’s workshop, and revision circles are just a few ways this can be done.

On the reading side, it can help to read texts in which authors have a strong voice and/or style. It is terrific when kindergarteners find that they can recognize Dr. Seuss books or when third graders can distinguish a Beverly Cleary from a Barbara Cooney with their eyes closed. I like to have these students write imaginary biographies of the authors, based only on the content and tone of the texts we are reading. Of course, as kids get older, these kinds of things are addressed by having students read primary source text sets in their social studies classes and evaluating the trustworthiness of this material based on who the authors are and when they recorded their ideas.

Being author can give students insights into what is happening off-stage (what is the author doing back there?), which can boost critical reading ability. Likewise, being a thoughtful writer gives writers insights into what their readers might need.

The third way that reading and writing can connect is through combined use. Reading and writing can be used together to accomplish goals. Most research on combined uses emphasize two specific academic goals, so I’ll limit my comments to those; specifically, studying or learning from text and composing synthesis papers, like school reports.  

In the first, writing is added to reading to increase understanding or improve memory. Research finds that writing about what one is trying to learn from text is beneficial. Often when students read for a test, they read and reread and hope for the best. Studies show that reading and writing summaries, analyses/critiques, or syntheses of the information has a powerful and positive impact on learning. We should be teaching students how to use writing in concert with reading to improve comprehension, increase knowledge, and conquer academia.

The second body of research explores synthesis writing. Teaching students how to collect information appropriately from text sources enables easier and more effective syntheses. Instead of just having kids write a report with three sources or something like that, guide them to plan a paper with a particular purpose or structure and then help them to read the texts in ways that will facilitate this writing. For instance, if students are to write some kind of comparison of sources, provide a summarization guide that facilitates the collection of comparable information from the two texts (such as charting which points on which the texts agree and disagree). Reading the texts in that way should enhance the writing.

Too many principals think that ignoring and even discouraging writing frees up time better devoted to higher reading scores. Too many teachers are anxious about writing because of the limited preparation they receive in this area. But having kids writing every day – in any and all of the ways described here is a good idea.

Not doing so leaves reading achievement points on the table.

As Vivian says in Pretty Woman: “BIG MISTAKE!”

References

Fitzgerald, J., & Shanahan, T. (2000). Reading and writing relations and their development. Educational Psychologist, 35, 39–51.

Shanahan, T. (1984). Nature of the reading-writing relation: An exploratory multi­variate analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 466–477.

Shanahan, T. (1997). Reading-writing relationships, thematic units, inquiry learning… In pursuit of effective integrated instruction. The Reading Teacher, 51, 12–19.

Shanahan, T. (1998). Readers’ awareness of author. In R. C. Calfee & N. Spivey (Eds.), The reading-writing connection. Ninety-seventh Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (part II, pp. 88–111). Chicago: NSSE.

Shanahan, T. (2004). Overcoming the dominance of communication: Writing to think and to learn. In T. L. Jetton & J. A. Dole (Eds.), Adolescent literacy research and practice (pp. 59–74). New York: Guilford.

Shanahan, T. (2006). Relations among oral language, reading, and writing development. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 171—186). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2016). Relationships between reading and writing development. In C A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, & Jill Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2^nd ed., pp. 194-210). New York: The Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2019). Reading-writing connections. In S. Graham, C.A. MacArthur, & M. Hebert (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (3^rd ed., pp. 309-332). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (Ed.). (1990). Reading and writing together: New perspec­tives for the class­room. Nor­wood, MA: Christopher Gordon.

Shanahan, T. & Lomax, R. (1986). An analysis and comparison of theoreti­cal models of the read­ing-writing relationship. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, 116–123.

Shanahan, T., & Lomax, R. (1988). A developmental comparison of three theoretical models of the reading-writing relationship. Research in the Teaching of English, 22, 196–212.

Shanahan, T., & Tierney, R. J. (1990). Reading-writing connections: The relations among three re­search traditions. In J. Zutell & S. McCormick (Eds.), Literacy the­ory and research: Analyses from multiple paradigms. (Thirty-ninth Yearbook of the Na­tional Reading Confer­ence, pp. 13–34). Chicago, IL: National Reading Con­ference.

Tierney, R., & Shanahan, T. (1991). Reading-writing relationships: Proc­esses, transac­tions, out­comes. In P. D. Pearson, R. Barr, M. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.), Hand­book of Reading Research (vol. 2, pp. 246–280). New York: Longman.

Here is a link to the original posting of this blog in case you would like to see the 26 comments that were made in response to it.

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/how-can-we-take-advantage-of-reading-writing-relationships

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I didn’t get the organization immediately, but whatever is revealed about one author will be implicated in what will be divulged about the other, though the connection isn’t always explicit. Last night’s pair was about how these very despondent men each managed to find someone who would connect deeply with them emotionally and intellectually, despite the depths of their negativity.

That sounds like I was comprehending what I read… and, yet, that depends on how you define comprehension.


RELATED: Blast from the Past: How Can We Take Advantage of the Reading-Writing Relationship?

Each chapter addresses a span of years in these writers’ lives… but today, I could only provide a guestimate as to the spans of last night’s chapters (1850s and 1920s, perhaps). I remember that Melville’s emotional partner was Nathaniel Hawthorne – I’ve read a lot of Hawthorne over the years and even visited his home and the settings of some of his novels. But for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of Mumford’s long-suffering wife or how they found each other.

These chapters included a plethora of specifics and examples to support the points being made. I now remember only one for each man, though I remember appreciating how apt and effective it all was – even though now I can’t remember the specifics. I suspect that on a multiple-choice test, I’d do okay, while on an essay exam, the gaps in memory would be embarrassing.

I’m distinguishing here between reading comprehension and learning from text.

It’s an important distinction if we seek to teach reading effectively.

Historically, reading comprehension research tended to use text memory as a close-enough proxy for comprehension. This is because memory is a result of comprehension (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) and that the two phenomena can’t be separated (Harris, Cady, & Tran, 2006). Comprehension refers to grasping the meaning, and meaningfulness is an important factor in getting something into memory.

What got me thinking about all this was the late Ron Carver (rauding theory, studies of speed reading, creation of Society for the Scientific Study of Reading). We were at a professional conference in the 1980s. There was a debate over reading comprehension strategies.

One side argued for the importance of comprehension strategies because they engaged students’ metacognition – the students were intentionally trying to understand a text and trying to be aware of whether they were understanding it.

Carver’s side argued that these so-called comprehension strategies were not part comprehension. No, he believed that they belonged in a second category: study skills. According to Carver, that the strategies were less about understanding text (comprehension) and more about memorizing the information (learning from text), was an important distinction.

Historically, study skills and reading comprehension rarely have dined at the same table.

Reading comprehension was thought to be an issue for elementary schools and was about reading, while study skills aimed more at college students and the college-bound and had more to do with their overall academic success (e.g., Robyak, 1978; Raaheim, 1984).

Before the emphasis on strategies, comprehension instruction tended to be more about practicing reading and answering questions. Dolores Durkin famously criticized this as more of an assessment routine than an instructional one, but many educators believed that practice answering questions would improve students’ ability to answer such questions in the future. Strategies were meant to go beyond the comprehension practice idea, to transform kids into active readers, creating readers who would actively try to comprehend.

Study skills, by contrast, were more about developing routines for learning and remembering information. An example of this would be the emphasis it placed on highlighting text. Underlining important sentences wasn’t encouraged to improve understanding, but to make the key information available easily when students would be studying for an exam. Study skills tended to focus on what students could do to learn information – how to take notes, how to use the library, the development of study schedules for multiple classes, and the like. Comprehension was assumed to take place automatically, so study skills focused on the development of long-term memories.

This morning, I searched for peer-reviewed works on “study skills” in PsycInfo. It turned up 178,229 journal articles, though not all of those were on the right subject (many articles included the terms “study” and “skills”). Nevertheless, I perused the first 25 items, and many were in the right pew. I then searched among these tens of thousands of studies for any that addressed reading comprehension. That narrowed it down to 4,975 articles.

That illustrates that scholars have historically kept these constructs separate, and I think it is time that we respect that.

Arguments over comprehension strategies are a bit muddled these days. Some conflate the emphasis on metacognitive strategies with those aimed at fostering a knack for answering certain kinds of questions. That’s unfortunate because the former has a strong research record – strategy instruction improves comprehension – while the latter does not. That doesn’t mean we can’t have students reading and answering questions, we just shouldn’t assume that will improve the students’ ability to answer those kinds of questions. It usually doesn’t.

More recently, arguments about strategies have come from those who advocate for a knowledge emphasis over a reading comprehension one. These folks want less reading instruction and more content teaching.

Often, reading strategies advocates ignore the quality or value of the texts. They claim, “It doesn’t matter what they are reading as long as they are reading.” Since you can apply strategies to any text, the text just doesn’t matter that much.

The knowledge advocates seem to think that learning information is an automatic process – if students read about a topic they’ll learn it, especially if they read several texts on the same topic. Some learning does occur like that, with little intentional effort.

But, it occurs to me that Carver rightfully labeled many of those comprehension strategies as study skills. Summarizing the information in a text, perhaps multiple times, is not likely to improve understanding much, but I bet it increases learning. The same can be said for the recitation that occurs when you ask yourself questions about what you’ve read and then try to answer them. Those are surely useful tools when you need to gain a greater long-term claim on information you’ve read about. That doesn’t mean we should forget about comprehension strategies during reading, only that it’s time to consider whether a strategy improves understanding or recall and then to give each their appropriate due.

Certainly, the knowledge crew is right about the importance of books worth reading. This means reading science and social studies texts. But it also means reading worthwhile literature (cultural touchstones), and fiction that conveys important things about the human condition (our relationships, our motivations, and so on).  

The knowledge advocates tend to place a greater emphasis on the quality of the book and on kids grasping the information from the texts. Strategy advocates like these ideas, but strategy instruction can get pretty procedural, without much attention to the content.

But here’s the thing. Neither group pays sufficient attention to teaching kids to comprehend. The one group stresses study skills, while the other stresses knowledge as the key to comprehension.

Let’s say, I’m a student. I’m trying to read an assigned text. My problem is that I cannot read it with comprehension. The comprehension strategy group wants me to summarize what I’ve read, which may give me purchase on a few of the facts, but it probably won’t help me to grasp the meaning of the text. The knowledge advocates would have the teacher tell me what the text said or have me watch a video so that I would know what I was reading about before I tried to read about it (shifting the comprehension problem but not solving it, since I need to read this book now).

What does all this mean for reading instruction?

1.     Directed or guided reading lessons (lessons in which kids read text under teacher guidance and supervision) need to focus on the reading of valuable text, text from which we want students to gain content knowledge.

2.     It’s not enough that these texts are valuable. They also must be challenging. If kids can comprehend the text on their own, then it is not the right text for a reading lesson. The emphasis should be on how to negotiate the difficulties of a text.

3.     Building a depth of knowledge requires that students deeply process the information they are trying to learn. Just reading about something will rarely end up with a depth of learning (remember, here we want more than understanding, we seek learning). Teaching units of related texts can facilitate such learning. Having students write reports, critiques, comparisons, and analyses can be powerful, too, as can discussions, presentations, and debates. Those activities can get kids to review the content to the point that it is remembered. I’d add to this mix, teaching kids some strategies for learning information. That’s where many of those comprehension strategies make sense. They may not take a lot of time to learn (the knowledge advocates are right about that, we often overdo strategy teaching), but unlike some of those worthwhile teaching activities (e.g., units, writing assignments, culminating projects), these give kids power over their own learning.

4.     Comprehension strategy advocates should get serious about what constitutes a comprehension strategy. What helps students understand a text? Some of the strategies they’ve studied fall into this category. For instance, teaching kids to monitor comprehension – to be aware of when they are not getting it and to stop and do something about that. Surprisingly, many students, even college-age students, read with little understanding and do nothing about it. But what are students taught to do when they don’t understand a word meaning? Or when a sentence seems like gobbledygook? Or, when they are getting confused about which character or concept is now being talked about? Or, how to connect the ideas across a text? That’s where comprehension strategies should come in.

Of course, students who know how to monitor their comprehension can tell the teacher that they don’t get it and the teacher can explain it. But students also need to learn to solve those problems themselves and to develop the stick-to-it-iveness to do it.

When you’re teaching reading comprehension, create opportunities to teach students how to solve comprehension problems – guiding them to solve those problems so that they can comprehend the texts.

When the goal is to teach content, also provide students with some strategies that will help them to study and learn more effectively. Don’t allow the study strategies to distract from the content learning, however.

An interesting sidelight: Even though text highlighting was often emphasized in study skills regimes, research studies and teachers often found this approach ineffective. The reason? The students didn’t comprehend the text well enough to know what was important, so they highlighted everything. If they knew more about the topic, this would have been less of a problem. A point to the knowledge advocates. Similarly, if instruction had focused not on how to save the important information but on how to recognize what was important – shifting from study skills to comprehension skills (since it was comprehension the students were struggling with), then the highlighting might have paid off. Half-point to the strategies advocates; they recognized the need for an action plan for the students but recommended the wrong plan. Teaching students to recognize what’s important includes getting them to use the titles and other signals authors provide, the frequency with which some ideas are mentioned, or how that information connects to other information, as well as insights about what kinds of information disciplinary experts (e.g., psychologists, historians, chemists, literary critics) are likely to care about.

References

Craik, F. S., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.  https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(72)80001-X

Harris, R. J., Cady, E. T., & Tran, T. Q. (2006). Comprehension and memory. In J. Bryant & P. Vorderer (Eds.), Psychology of entertainment (pp. 71-84). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203873694

Raaheim, A. (1984). Can students be taught to study? an evaluation of a study-skill programme directed at first year students at the University of Bergen. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 

28(1), 9-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031383840280102

Robyak, J. E. (1978). Study skills versus non-study skills students: A discriminant analysis. Journal of

Educational Research, 71(3), 161-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1978.10885061

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

One of our younger teachers saw you speak, and she says you discouraged the use of small group instruction. She has been trying to teach her lessons to the whole class. I assume that she didn’t understand what you were saying because everybody knows small group instruction is the best way to teach reading. I’ve been a teacher for 18 years and I would appreciate it if you would respond so I could set her straight, I think she could be a fine teacher.
Thank you.

RELATED: Does Research Support “Guided Reading?” Practical Advice on Directing Reading

Shanahan responds:

I think I’m going to disappoint you. Your colleague probably heard me right.

I encourage teachers to try to minimize the amount of small group instruction.

That doesn’t mean that we should ban that configuration or mandate whole class teaching. There are enough situations in which small group instruction makes a lot of sense. But we tend to overdo this small group thing. Many teachers (and other educators) feel like you do, that it is the “best way to teach reading” or anything else for that matter.

That just isn’t the case, hence my desire to not overdo things when it comes to organizing a classroom.

Studies do find small group instruction to offer some benefits, at least under certain circumstances (Lou, et al., 1996). For instance, small group math instruction seems to deliver positive benefits – both larger and more consistent learning payoffs than in reading.

Reading studies often report that the amount of small group instruction confers no advantages or at best very small advantages (e.g., Hong & Hong, 2009; Patrick, 2020; Slavin, 1987), but when researchers drill down a bit it turns out to be a bit more complicated (Sørensen & Hallinan, 1986). For instance, research finds that kids are more likely to learn what is taught in a small group than in the whole class. I suspect that is often true, and it is what you are responding to. You can see that kids are really getting it when you are teaching small configurations of students.

However, that advantage get balanced out against the reduction in instruction that is required in most small group situations. In most circumstances, students don’t learn much away from the teacher. It is difficult to come up with seatwork activities that lead to much gain, except possibly for the highest achieving kids (Connor, et al., 2013).

That means that while grouping may increase the proportion of a lesson that students may master, it also means that there is much less opportunity to learn because so much less can be taught in the reduced time.

Think about it this way. Let’s say you have a 90-minute reading block and you have decided to teach three groups of students during 1-hour of that block. That means that students may learn a great deal of what you teach them during their 20 minutes, but they are not likely to be taught very much during that other 40 minutes. Of course, they probably won’t get the full benefit of those small group periods either because of the transition time and the times when you must stop teaching to manage the kids who aren’t in the group.

Surveys say that three group estimate is about average (Ford & Opitz, 2008). There are teachers who only work with two groups and there are those who work with 4, 5, or more. As the number of groups goes up, opportunity for learning goes down since students receive fewer and fewer minutes with the teacher.

I’m not willing to give up on groups because there are times when I need to supercharge my teaching briefly. These days absentee rates are high in our schools (a tragedy), so there are situations when I may need to reteach something that several students missed yesterday.

There are also those lessons that seem to go awry. Some of the kids got it, but many didn’t, so I plan on reteaching this tomorrow to those in need.

Certainly, there are circumstances, such as in math, where some kids are still on double digit addition and others are ready for multiplication. Given how sequential math is, it makes sense to ensure that foundation is sound. Most reading lessons don’t work like that, so grouping for skills isn’t as necessary.

The major way that reading tends to be grouped is around different books that the students are to read. Some children can read a fourth-grade book without too much trouble, while others may struggle with the second-grade book. Teachers have long been admonished to teach reading at the students’ reading levels, so that tends to end up with one group reading a fourth-grade book and the other reading one from second grade.

More and more, I have concluded that we overdo those separations, and can teach most kids with their grade level book – meaning that we could reduce the amount of small group reliance quite a bit (Shanahan, 2013, 2020). That would mean more time for teacher directed reading and other direct instruction lessons and fluency practice, which would be a real plus for most kids.

Grouping does not have a main effect on learning (Hiebert, 1987). It is beneficial only to the extent that it improves instruction in ways that really make a difference.

• Small group teaching can matter – if it facilitates effective differentiation with students properly matched to curriculum and when teaching those skills separately really supports better learning.
• Small group instruction should improve teachers’ ability to monitor learning, too. It’s easier to notice a puzzled look with six kids than with 25. That should mean that it fosters greater intensity of instruction.
• Small group instruction should facilitate participation or interaction. For instance, a larger proportion of students should be able to respond to teacher questions, since there are fewer peers to compete with for that attention.

But small group instruction must confer those advantages to an extent that overbalances the reduction in teaching that it necessitates. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s just a waste of time.

Quite often I see grouping schemes that provide none of these advantages: the differentiation is unnecessary or trivial. Teachers are trying to correct for student diversity that doesn’t matter or that would not undermine a less differentiated lesson. Or situations in which the intensity seems no greater, or the amount of student engagement no higher.

Of course, the assumption seems to be that whole class instruction is a problem and grouping is the solution to that problem. Classroom configuration is not a problem; the problems are whether we are teaching students what they need to learn, whether we are teaching enough and whether we are making sure that everyone gets it, that everyone is paying attention and is engaged.

Perhaps instead of focusing on how to get rid of whole class instruction, teachers would do better to think about how whole class instruction could be better implemented to address some of those pedagogical needs.

Some investigations have shown how especially low readers can get lost in whole class instruction (Schumm, et al., 2000), and that makes sense. But the solution to that is not necessarily to reduce the amount of teaching markedly to ensure that these students get at least a modicum of instructional attention. Teachers need to be aware that those students’ needs are often neglected both in whole class and small group teaching, and the importance of keeping their needs in mind as they deliver lessons – monitoring them closely, making sure to hold their attention, and making adjustments and modifications to meet their needs, whether that is adding some explanation or emphasizing a feature the other students might not require. 

How can classroom seating be rearranged to ensure maximum attention and participation? (Individual desks in rows and columns seems to reduce inattention and facilitate greater cognitive engagement, for instance; but it is important to consider the purpose of the activity, too).

How can teacher placement and movement facilitate learning?

How can differences in students’ abilities or knowledge be facilitated without trying to teach everyone something different?

How can student participation be increased with techniques like multiple response cards, random student selection techniques, turn and talk, and so on?

Again and again, studies find that small group teaching either leads to no increase in learning or to very small increases. The reason for that is that it’s possible for teachers to address well these kinds of instructional needs no matter the configuration, so it isn’t the grouping that makes the difference.

I’m aware that some teachers aren’t providing lots of small group instruction because they believe that to be best. No, their curriculum director or principal believes it, or maybe it is one of the senior teachers at the school who weighs in. Some schools even require that teachers schedule a specific amount of small group teaching. That makes little sense. It’s sort of like insisting that teachers wear a red sweater at least two mornings a week. Neither approach is likely to do much for children’s reading achievement.

Let’s be more strategic than that… using pedagogical tools purposefully and wisely. That’s how you raise reading achievement.

References

Connor, C. M, Morrison, F. J., Fishman, B., Crowe, E. C., Al Otaiba, S., & Schatschneider, C. (2013). A longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled study on the accumulating effects of individualized literacy instruction on students’ reading from first through third grade. Psychological Science 24(8), 1408-1419.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612472204

Ford, M. P., & Opitz, M. F. (2008) A national survey of guided reading practices: What we can learn from primary teachers. Literacy Research and Instruction, 47(4), 309-331. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/19388070802332895

Hiebert, E. H. (1987). The context of instruction and student learning: An examination of Slavin’s assumptions. Review of Educational Research, 57(3), 337–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170461

Hong, G., & Hong, Y. (2009). Reading instruction time and homogeneous grouping in kindergarten: An application of marginal mean weighting through stratification. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 31(1), 54-81. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373708328259

Lou, Y., Abrami, P. C., Spence, J. C., Poulsen, C., Chambers, B., & d’Apollonia, S. (1996). Within-class grouping: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 66, 423–458. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170650

Patrick, S. K. (2020). Homogeneous grouping in early elementary reading instruction: The challenge of identifying appropriate comparisons and examining differential associations between grouping and reading growth. Elementary School Journal, 120(4), 611-635. https://doi.org/10.1086/708666

Schumm, J. S., Moody, S. W., & Vaughn, S. (2000). Grouping for reading instruction: Does one size fit all? Journal of Learning Disabilities, 33(5), 477-488. https://doi.org/10.1177/002221940003300508

Shanahan, T. (2013). Letting the text take center stage. American Educator, 37(3), 4-11, 43.

Shanahan, T. (2020). Limiting children to books they can already read. American Educator, 44(2), 13-17, 39.

Slavin, R. E. (1987a). Ability grouping and student achievement in elementary schools: A best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 57(3), 293-336. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170460

Sørensen, A. B., & Hallinan, M. T. (1986). Effects of ability grouping on growth in academic achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 23(4), 519-542. https://doi.org/10.2307/1163088

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher question: I am currently working in two large school districts that have purchased certain commercial programs and materials that claim to be SOR. Both districts insist that all schools implement these programs with ‘fidelity.’ The schools within these districts vary enormously. Some serve majority ELLs and recent immigrants, some serve mostly children from professional families, some serve a majority of low-income families. I cannot understand how it could make sense for teachers in such widely varied settings to read the same words from the teachers’ manual, present the same information with the same materials to expect the same outcomes. The notion of fidelity seems very confusing to me. What am I missing?

RELATED: What is the Best Way to Organize a Classroom for Reading Instruction?

Shanahan response:

Years ago, I was invited to coach some teachers. I’ve done a lot of that over the past almost 50 years. I watch a lesson, and the teacher and I sit down and discuss how it may be improved.

But this was going to be a strange situation.

The school had adopted a curriculum program I’d developed. They hadn’t told me that. Now I was to critique teachers who were using my lessons. Uncomfortable territory.

The principal assured me it would be fine since the classes using my stuff were doing well—better test scores than in the past. I wasn’t so sure.

Two teachers were using the program: one was experienced but she’d never taught reading before, and the other was a rookie.

I watched the first teacher, had the follow up meeting… nothing remarkable.

But then I sat in on the neophyte’s class. She wasn’t a superstar—yet. But she was darn good, one of those lessons that probably couldn’t get much better. What she may have lacked in artfulness, she more than made up in fundamental teaching chops. Heinemann probably wouldn’t sign her to a book contract, but you’d be pleased if she were teaching your kids!

During that lesson I started to think I was pretty wonderful. Here was a fresh-faced beginning teacher, a greenie, working with a challenged bunch of kids and outperforming past teachers… using my program. Magic!

Then I came to my senses.

For instance, when presenting the brilliant vocabulary lesson that I’d designed, the rook would sometimes add an extra example of a word’s meaning; other times, she omitted one.

The same kind of thing happened during the comprehension portion of the lesson: Sometimes she’d ask the wonderful questions as I’d written them, sometimes she’d recast one or omit one or add one.

It looked like she was following my lesson plan, and she was, kinda. But she was also sort of teaching her own lesson.

When we sat down for our debriefing, she immediately thanked me for designing such a wonderful program. She explained that she wouldn’t have known what to do if it hadn’t been for me. That was true—in a way. And, yet it was only part of the reason for her pedagogical success.

That incident came to mind while reading a new research synthesis (Parsons, Vaughn, Scales, Gallagher, et al., 2018) published this month in Review of Educational Research that examined studies of “teachers’ instructional adaptations;” the kind of instructional responsiveness that rookie had demonstrated.

Parsons and company reported that studies over the past 40 years have described the phenomenon in a variety of ways: instructional decision-making, scaffolding, reflective teaching, adaptation, teacher metacognition, dialogic teaching, etc. But whatever it has been called, it’s an essential, and too often ignored, component of effective teaching.

Coaching has been found to enable adaptive teaching (Vogt & Rogalla, 2009), and six studies reported that focusing teacher attention on student learning (assessment) improved both teacher adaptability and student outcomes. Teaching experience also tends to improve adaptability (my rookie was an outlier—it usually takes a while to gain the kind of “teacher vision” she exhibited).

What was it that I had seen in that observation? A complex pedagogical dance between a teacher trying to adhere to the major outlines of a program—I’d provided the bones of the lesson and sequenced the major activities—while she observed the students’ responses and reacted accordingly. If she saw confusion, she reworded my script or added an example or helpful explanation. If the lesson was clear, but student interest was flagging, she added a teaspoon of enthusiasm and kept their heads in the game.

That reminds me that there are two really important things underlying effective teaching.

On the one hand, as teachers we need to have a profound understanding of what needs to be taught. It matters that primary teachers possess a depth of knowledge of the alphabetic system, or that high school algebra teachers be well schooled in math. That’s where great curricula come in; a coordinated body of texts, lesson plans, and activities that have a strong chance of engendering the desired knowledge and skills.

On the other hand, slavishly following such a curriculum is unlikely to succeed, unless teachers are wisely adaptive. Effective teaching will always be more than following a script. Teachers must assess on the fly and note whether the kids are getting it and if they are not, then something needs to happen. Teachers must make both immediate adjustments—adding explanations, changing examples, requiring more practice—and more ambitious changes, too (“today’s lesson was a bust, I need to reteach it tomorrow”).

I worry these days about the idea of teaching with “fidelity to program.” Was my rookie evidencing fidelity? In a way she was. But any careful analysis of a transcript of her lesson would reveal that she was making important adaptations to my brilliant handiwork. She was taking a good lesson and making it go. Both components are essential, and one is no more important than the other if learning is the goal.

I’m a big fan of shared curriculum because without it, it is virtually impossible to get large-scale school improvement. Likewise, it makes no sense to adopt such a shared curriculum and then tell everyone they can do whatever they want with it. But such a collective commitment to a common program of instruction in no way should limit a teacher’s ability to adapt lessons to student response. Follow the research, teacher adaptation matters.

Since this entry was first published, there have been various criticisms of curricula – including some that I have helped to develop. The non-research-based complaint has been that there is too much good stuff and that teachers can’t possibly make appropriate choices to teach in the kinds of varied situations that your letter describes.

The problem with that approach is that it leaves so many kids high and dry. What if you work in a school with many kids above grade level? Or who struggle with dyslexia? Or who are English Learners? Or minority kids who want to learn to read but also to feel some connection to their culture?

Then, of course, there are the schools that are happy with what they are doing with spelling, so they don’t need spelling lessons, while other schools won’t even consider a program – no matter how much they like the other features – if it doesn’t have weekly spelling plans.

I’m personally more concerned about programs that assume one-size fits all more than I am about those that intentionally include more than any single classroom could possibly digest.

The critics have a point though, some teachers may have difficulty making sound choices when there is a lot of good stuff there.

The critics approach is to try to “idiot proof” the programs, narrowing them down to the point that fidelity is the only possibility. They believe – without any evidence, of course (so much for the “science of reading,”) – that this narrowing will raise literacy levels, even if the programs can’t easily be adjusted to meet the needs of diverse students.

I recommend two different solutions to this problem. Rather than narrowing the possibility of addressing varied children’s needs, I suggest the following:

1.     My plan, oft described here, of dividing instruction into quarters or quinters (I made that word up), allocating time on word knowledge, text reading fluency, reading comprehension, writing – and possibly, certainly with English-learners, oral language. Schools that have adopted that scheme often find that it guides them to increase attention to some areas that a program might be a bit short in, and to cut back when too much time is accorded to some areas of concern. Knowing, for example, that you must teach phonics for 30 minutes a day can serve as a kind Occam’s razor, both ensuring that enough time is invested in that essential, while making sure that it doesn’t prevent sufficient attention to the rest of the curriculum.

2.     A second solution is to facilitate some kind of group planning process. Involve your reading specialists and special education teachers in this, too. Basically, allow your teachers some latitude in omitting or insisting upon certain lessons, but do that as a group rather than a free-for-all in which every teacher does whatever she wants to do with the curriculum. I wrote about that years ago and have a link to that here. These kinds of discussions or meetings can both identify problems the teachers may be having with a program or lessons that are duds – dealing with those as a group will increase the chances that good choices will be made.

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/in-defense-of-textbooks-core-programs-and-basal-readers

References

Parsons, S. A., Vaughn, M., Scales, R. Q., Gallagher, M. A., Parsons, A. W., Davis, S. G., Pierczynski, M., & Allen, M. (2018). Teachers’ instructional adaptations: A research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 88(2), 205-242. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317743198

Vogt, F., & Rogalla, M. (2009). Developing adaptive teaching competency through coaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(8), 1051–1060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.04.002

Link to past comments on this topic:

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-follow-a-program

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I would love to know your advice on pre-teaching. My colleague does this for math instruction and has seen great gains. She teaches the whole group lesson for the day to those students she suspects of needing a double dose of instruction in small group before the whole group lesson is presented. She’s seeing great gains in confidence with these students during whole group instruction due to them having had this pre-teaching beforehand. What would this look like for ELA? I’m eager to try it, just not sure how.

Shanahan responds:

I know of no research on this scheme, but it is something that I have long recommended for certain Tier 2 programs. Recently, I heard from a middle school that had taken my advice on this matter. They wanted me to know of their big success with this scheme in terms of student learning and were looking to expand their efforts. (They sent me test scores and everything).

I think this approach could make a fine contribution within a classroom as well, at least under certain circumstances. In the past, I’ve not recommended this approach for classrooms, nor have I ever seen it in operation in the regular classroom. But I’m convinced that it could pay off.

Why do I think it could be beneficial?

First, and perhaps most important, it would increase the amount of instruction for some kids. This kind of time increase often results in learning gains, especially for students who don’t catch on as quickly as the others.

Another possible advantage is the one that you allude to. This gameplan alters the social fabric of a classroom in a way that can be productive since it puts the low kids on a more even footing with the higher achieving students. In my experience with Tier 2 versions of this, that can be very motivational. 

Think of how Tier 2 programs often work.

A classroom teacher recognizes that some of her students struggle to read the social studies book. They can’t keep up with the rest of the class and have trouble completing assignments because of their reading deficiencies.

Accordingly, this teacher refers those students for remedial assistance.

In response, the remedial specialist assesses them and if they test low enough qualify, they are provided a dose of pull-out teaching.

Let’s say that the students in question are fourth or fifth graders who read at a second- or third-grade level.

The remedial teacher will likely place them in a book or program supposedly appropriate to those low reading levels. That means that in the classroom, those kids will be taught with a grade-level social studies book, while in the remedial class, they’ll work with much easier books, books at those reading levels – and this work will probably include vocabulary study, fluency practice, and some form of guided or directed reading.

At some point the Tier 2 teacher will report that these students are making satisfactory progress.

And, what of the teacher who originally made the referral? She likely thinks, “What a waste of time!” These students, even if they have made progress in reading (perhaps going from a 2.0 to a 2.5 on the test) can now handle texts at the 2.5 grade level), still cannot read the social studies book. Those gains make nary a dent in these students’ inability to handle the grade level text. The students still can’t do the assignments, keep up with their classmates, or even read the content texts that were the original reason for referral.

The students’ thoughts on the matter should be considered too. In their case, they are often unhappy about the remedial work since it stresses their deficiencies and separateness to their peers. They might not mind this if the remedial work paid off with substantial gains, but that is all too rare. Moving from a 2.0 to a 2.5 reading level for 9- or 10-year-old students is barely noticeable progress and it certainly isn’t likely to enable those students to succeed.

There is just too big a mismatch between what everyone wants – educational success for the struggling students – and what is offered instructionally.

This pre-teaching approach to Tier 2 turns that situation on its head.

The students aren’t working on out-of-grade level texts, but with the actual texts that they need to read. They aren’t always lagging the other students but are instead always a step ahead.

The instruction they receive is not necessarily very different from what they would be doing with those second-grade texts. They are engaged in vocabulary work, guided reading, repeated reading, and so on – but those lessons have a perceptible payoff to the student since they focus on books that they need to read. In such a case, students can gauge the results themselves by considering what they are now able to do in their classroom. Instead of feeling unnecessarily isolated or segregated, the success this approach provides increases their ability to connect with classmates and more than compensates for the pull-out work.

Those meaningful payoffs are why I frequently recommend that approach for Tier 2 programs, especially in middle schools and high schools.

But it could payoff as a strategy for more effective classroom teaching as well even in the language arts.

As regular readers of this blog know, I often discourage small group instruction because of the inefficiencies it tends to introduce. However, I do say that if some students fail to meet the intended goals of a whole class lesson, teachers may want to follow up with additional small group work to get all students across the goal line.

Your colleague is taking a preventative approach, rather than my remedial one. I like her thinking on this better than my own. Although the overall approach lacks clear research support, there are studies showing that it is possible to use instruction to transform a text from frustration level to instructional level (e.g., Parker & Burns, 2014). That means that such pre-teaching – however and wherever it might be delivered, could have a real payoff in terms of student learning even within English Language Arts. Much comprehension instruction takes the form of guided reading practice with increasingly difficult text, and this approach would allow a greater percentage of students to benefit from such practice with more complicated texts than in the past. (That means that the pre-teaching would take place with the same texts the students were about to study in their reading class.)

I know some teachers would be afraid of this approach because of their desire to have those students work with “reading level” texts. Nevertheless, research reveals that such students can often make similar or better gains with more advanced texts, texts that in the past would have been deemed too difficult to support learning (Shanahan, 2019; Shanahan, 2020. The extra doses of teaching that you are asking about could be just the support those students need to make success possible.  

But what about the fourth-grade teacher who has students with the decoding skills of a first or second grader? Clearly, those kids would need some kind of explicit decoding instruction. Such decoding, however, isn’t content that would make sense for all fourth or fifth graders. This pre-teaching scheme only makes sense if it provides support for struggling students to get a jump on the grade level curriculum. It would not be useful for addressing important gaps that are not part of that grade level curriculum. That means as good an idea as I think this is, it isn’t appropriate in all cases, and it would not obviate the need for explicit help with that kind of learning problem.

References

Parker, D. C., & Burns, M. K. (2014). Using the instructional level as a criterion to target reading interventions. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 30(1), 79-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2012.702047

Shanahan, T. (2019). Why children should be taught to read with more challenging text. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 44(2), 17-23.

Shanahan, T. (2020). Limiting children to books they can already read. American Educator, 44(2), 13-17, 39.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Our school district is using a program that has received many bad reviews, including by EdReports. We raised that with our School Superintendent, and she indicated that EdReports is revamping its review process so their evidence doesn’t mean anything. What do you think?

Teacher Question:

EdReports and Knowledge Matters Campaign and others are requiring that high quality texts build background knowledge—a good thing.  However, they are expecting it to be through a topical approach not a broader thematic approach. One curriculum that is touted as strong in this area addresses one topic for 18 weeks!  So the question I am asking is what is the difference between a topical approach or a thematic approach and which is preferred?

Reporter: 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2024/02/22/literacy-experts-say-some-edreports-ratings-are-misleading/?sh=75e5be984128 

Shanahan Responds:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been inundated by emails and phone calls about EdReports and a couple of other textbook review protocols (those issued by Knowledge Matters Campaign and Reading League).

I usually stay away from this kind of topic since I help design commercial programs and try to avoid conflicts of interest. At this point, the problems with these reviews have gotten so broad and so general, that I can discuss them without any danger of conflict.  

I’ve noticed six problems with these reviews and have suggested solutions to each.

1.        Educators are placing way too much trust in these reviews.

These review processes have been undertaken by groups who want to make sure that curriculum materials are up to snuff. But what that means differs from review process to review process. Each review organization has different beliefs, goals, and methodologies. Accordingly, reliance upon any one of these reviews may be misleading.

The federal government requires non-profits to file 990 forms. These forms require a declaration of purposes and description of their activities. For instance, the Reading League says that it encourages “evidence-aligned instruction to improve literacy outcomes” and EdReports aims to provide “evidence-based reviews of instructional material.”

The Knowledge Matters Campaign is a bit different. They are not a free-standing entity but part of another non-profit, “Standards Work”. In their 990, Knowledge Matters Campaign is described as an “advocacy effort” that showcases “high-quality, knowledge-building curriculum.” There is nothing wrong with advocating for favorite commercial programs. That just isn’t the best basis for providing objective reviews or sound review tools. They can provide such reviews, but I think their documents should transparently state those prior commitments. One can only wonder about a review process that starts with the programs they like, and then subsequently formulates review criteria based on that.

The Reading League and EdReports both explicitly claim to support “evidence-aligned” curricula. This is a bit of shift for EdReports since originally its goal was to ensure alignment with the Common Core State Standards. Knowledge Matters Campaign does not seem to make that “evidence-based” assertion, though their review protocol mimics the others in how it uses research citations.

The point here is that these kinds of review often have other motives other than those of the educators who use them. Unless you can be certain of their motives – both in terms of declared purposes and in their alignment with those claims – buyer beware! It’s one thing to try to ensure that school practices are in accord with what we know, it is quite another to establish review criteria based on other considerations, no matter how well-meaning those consideration may be.

All these reviews are spotty at best when it comes to this alignment so I would discourage curriculum selection processes that depend entirely or mainly on any of these reviews. I wouldn’t ignore them entirely; I would just independently verify each demerit they assign – including determining whether that criterion even matters.

A cool thing that that Reading League does is that is shares the publisher’s responses to their “red flag” warnings. That kind of transparency is good because it should help school districts to consider both sides of an issue. For instance, in a program I’m involved in, Reading League flagged a particular practice their reviewers didn’t like. The fact that this device was in three lessons out of about 900 in the program or that we could provide substantial research support for the specific practice made no difference to them. In such instances, having both the review claim and the publisher response should help districts to examine such issues and to decide for themselves if that is really a problem or a big enough problem to matter.

That’s how it should work. When districts surrender all judgment to these organizations – refusing to consider or purchase any program that gets dinged no matter the evidence – then the game is lost. Instead of getting the best programs available, schools will end up with the programs that best meet some groups’ ideological positions.

2.        What Constitutes Evidence?

Despite the rhetoric of these groups, the term “evidence aligned” is meaningless. Often there is no direct evidence that what is being required has ever benefited children’s learning in a research study.

By contrast, the National Reading Panel and the What Works Clearinghouse have required – before they will say anything works – that studies have directly evaluated the effectiveness of that something and found it to be advantageous to learners.

The review documents cite research studies for each criterion. This may seem convincing to some district administrators. However, if you look more closely, you’ll find that the evidence is woefully uneven. In some cases, the research is substantial, in others there is no direct evidence – only poorly controlled correlational studies or evidence that a particular topic is important, but with no proof about how pedagogy might best address that important issue.

I wish they would all take the approach that the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) takes. The Clearinghouse allows their guest experts to make any claims they want to, but then it checks out the nature and quality of the evidence supporting those claims. Their reports tell you what the experts say, but then report how strong that case is in terms of actual research support.

That kind of reporting would allow districts to know that the phonics requirements for Grades K-2 were supported by substantial research, but that the phonics claims for the upper grades are proffered with little evidence.

What Works would allow the encouragement of decodable texts and of favored approaches to teaching background knowledge. But they would require an admission that those criteria are not really evidence aligned.

Sadly, too many district administrators assume that the opposite must be true. They are wrong. These reviews adopt review criteria and then seek any kind of evidence to support those choices – no matter how unconvincing and uneven that evidence may be.

3.        Grain Size Problems

Not all the criteria included in these reviews appear to be of equal importance.  

For example, the Reading League requires that reading programs require both explicit teaching of phonics and handwriting. A program that lacks either can be smacked for the omission, and some districts, by policy, will then prohibit the consideration of such programs.

Don’t get me wrong. It makes sense for schools to explicitly teach both phonics and handwriting. Core reading programs should include phonics, given that such instruction contributes fundamentally to early reading development, and it seems prudent to align the decoding lessons with the rest of the program (though, admittedly, there is no direct research evidence supporting that concern).

 The benefits of teaching handwriting, however, do not accrue directly to reading, and I am aware of no data that shows either necessity or benefit of aligning such instruction with the rest of the reading lessons. It would not be perverse for a district to purchase separate reading and handwriting programs.

To me these criteria are not equivalent. A low mark in one should be a real concern. A low mark in the other may be informative but it should not be determinative. There are many such false equivalences throughout these evaluation schemes: some criteria flag essentials and some could safely be ignored.

4.        Measurement Problems

Even when a criterion is spot on one might wonder about how to determine if that criterion has been sufficiently addressed. Knowledge Matters Campaign encourages the teaching of comprehension strategies – a reasonable thing to do given the extensive research supporting their benefits – and, yet how much strategy teaching will be sufficient to meet the standard? It is easy to see how two well-meaning and careful reviewers could disagree about an issue like that.

The teacher letter included above points out a reading program that devotes 18 weeks to one content topic. Such a program would surely meet the Knowledge Matters Campaign criteria, though to me that sounds like overkill – certainly not something that possesses research support. If I reviewed it, I’d be critical that the program is too narrow in focus while other reviewers might conclude that it addresses the knowledge building criteria appropriately.

The more specific the review criteria are, the more reliable should be the reviews. However, the more specific they are, the harder it is to justify them given the nature of research. For me, I’d prefer that everyone has all the information available:

“We reviewed this program and judged that it met our knowledge building criteria. That’s a plus. However, it is so narrowly focused that we wondered if that is best (and we know of no direct research evidence on this matter). Students taught from this program are likely to know more about electricity than any group of fourth graders in the history of mankind. If they are ever again asked to read about electricity, they will likely achieve the highest reading comprehension ever recorded – if they do not run screaming from the testing room.”

There is a body of research on sentries and their ability to protect military installations. These studies find that the more specific and exacting the criteria for entering a camp (e.g., how exactly someone needs to know the password), the more likely that friendly troops will be shot. The more liberal those entry procedures, the more likely an enemy will gain entrance. The Knowledge Matters Campaign criteria look to me to be the most general and the Reading League ones seem most specific. That probably means that if you go with one, you will be more likely to reject sound programs and with the other, weaker programs may sneak through.

My preference would be for districts to appreciate the limitations of these reviews. That doesn’t mean ignoring their information but considering their claims with the same gimlet-eye that should be use with any of the claims made for the commercial programs. Do they just say there is a problem, or do they specifically document their concerns, perhaps like this:

“We did not think programs should include lessons that encouraged this-or-that kind of an activity. We reviewed six grade levels of this program and found it included 420 fluency lessons. It earned a demerit because twice in the second-grade program it encouraged the this-or-that activity.”

                  That way, a district could decide whether such an inclusion mattered much to them, either in terms of how serious the infraction or its extent. It would also be good if the producer of that curriculum weighed in to either admit they screwed up or to defend their approach. By reporting not just that there was an infraction to the review criteria, but the extent of the problem, districts would better be able to use the reviews appropriately.

5.        Effectiveness versus Potential Effectiveness

Product reviews don’t tell us what works in terms of improving reading achievement. No, they only reveal the degree to which the program designs are consistent with research, standards, or someone’s ideology.

The National Reading Panel reported that fluency instruction in grades 1-4 and with struggling readers 1-9 improved reading achievement. These program reviews all require that programs address fluency, and in some cases they even specify some preferred details about that instruction.

The idea is that a program that includes fluency teaching like the fluency teaching delivered in the studies is going to be advantageous. That is a hope and not a fact, because most core programs have no data showing that their fluency lessons boost reading achievement.

We are aiming for a possibility. The idea is that when research proves that an approach can be effective, we should encourage schools to replicate such instruction in the hopes that they will obtain the same results.

This is nothing like the standards that we have for medical and pharmacological research. They must show that their version of a treatment works; it is not enough to show that they are trying to do something like what has worked elsewhere.

This is an important distinction.

The Bookworms program apparently received low reviews from EdReports, despite having rigorous, refereed research studies showing its actual effectiveness – not that it was designed to look like what was done in the studies, but that its design really did pay off in more student learning.

I’m flabbergasted that EdReports (and the other reviews) don’t leave themselves an out here: If there is sound, high-quality research showing the effectiveness of a specific program, who cares whether it matches your predictive review criteria? Program A looks like the research, Program B doesn’t look as much like the research, but it is very effective in teaching children.

The review agencies should have a provision saying that they will give an automatic pass to any program with solid direct research support concerning its actual effectiveness.

I would still review their program. However, my purpose here would be to try to figure out how a program that failed to meet my criteria did so well. Perhaps the reviews were sloppy, which might require more rigorous training of reviewers. Another possibility is that the criteria themselves may be the problem. Maybe some of the “non-negotiables” should be a lot more negotiable after all.

6.        Usability

                  I’m a bit thrown by the usability requirements in some of these reviews. I agree with them in one sense. If teachers struggle to use a program then it’s unlikely to be effective no matter what non-negotiables it addresses.

However, I know of no research that can be used as the basis of evaluating usability, so what constitutes it is more of an act of reason than of evidence-alignment. Knowledge Matters Campaign wants programs to include not just what it is that teachers are supposed to do, but explanations for why those things should be done. I love that but have no idea whether that would improve practice.

 I think the reason for this emphasis on usability may come from the fidelity evaluations that are now common in instructional research studies. Researchers, to ensure that it is their instruction that is making the difference, do many things to try to guarantee fidelity to their plan. This includes teaching the lessons themselves, using video teachers, scripting the lessons, and observing their delivery, and so on. That kind of thing makes great sense in a 12-week research study which didn’t include any second language students or kids below the 40^th percentile and was only taught to children whose parents granted approval.

It is a lot harder to argue for especially-narrow prescriptive, non-adjustable approaches – lessons aimed at making certain the teachers don’t screw it up by varying from what’s in the teacher’s guide – in real classrooms. The idea of teaching everyone the same lesson, no matter what they already know, may make sense to some “reading advocates.” Nevertheless, it is a lousy idea for kids and reading achievement.

Many districts, in their selection procedures, require tryouts of new programs – or at least they used to. Some of their teachers try to deliver the lessons for several weeks to see how workable the product may be. This makes a lot more sense to me than the armchair usability criteria in these reviews. Again, districts make a big mistake in ceding their responsibility to these reviews. Some things should be done carefully in house.

What are the big take-aways here?

1.        The development of commercial programs for teaching reading are serious endeavors that can provide valuable supports to teachers. However, such program designs are fallible. They require the contributions of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people whose knowledge and efforts can range greatly. It is sensible for districts to purchase such programs, and essential that they take great care in this to try to end up with supports that really help teachers and students succeed.

2.        There are benefits to having third-party reviews of these kinds of programs, both by government agencies (e.g., What Works Clearinghouse) and by non-profits that are not commercially entangled with the corporations that sell these programs. These external reviews can warn consumers (the school districts) of egregious problems, and they can push publishers to do better.

3.        These kinds of reviews are likely to be most useful when they depend substantially on high quality research – approving programs that have been proven to provide learning advantages to students and encouraging the close alignment of programs with existing research data.

4.        Just as school districts need to be skeptical of undocumented claims of commercial companies (the folks who sell the programs), they must be just as skeptical of the claims of those who critique them. The more transparent, specific, and well-documented these critiques the better. Districts should be wary of simply accepting any negative judgments by reviewers – requiring evidence that the criteria are truly essential to quality and that research really rejects what a program is doing.

5.        Districts should adopt sound procedures for choosing programs. These procedures should include consideration of these reviews. However, no district should adopt policies that automatically accept or reject programs based on these reviews.

Here are links to each of these product reviewing organizations:

https://www.edreports.org/reports/ela

https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/review-tool/#research-compendium

https://www.thereadingleague.org/compass/curriculum-decision-makers/

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Search/Products?productType=2

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

This blog considered the value of decodable text. Since then, there has been more research on the issue, so I thought it a good time to update. There have been several thoughtful reviews of the empirical research over the years, and these reflect a great deal of consistency among the scientists who think deeply about this issue. None of them rules out the use of decodables, but none claims that their use improves reading achievement. Those who recommend a heavy and/or long-term dose of decodable text in beginning reading programs are not doing so based on the science of reading. I’ve updated this piece a great deal and beefed up the research references. You might want to go back to the original blog to see the 45 comments that it elicited, so here is that link:

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/should-we-teach-with-decodable-text 

 Teacher question:

Please share your thinking as well as research referencing the occasional use of decodable texts for small group reading instruction in grades K-2. 

Shanahan responds:

This is still not a highly researched topic. There have been only a handful of investigations into the effectiveness of decodable texts since the 1980s. And, truth be told, this collection of studies is a bit of a mess; with little evident agreement as to what decodable text is, what it should be compared with, and what learning outcomes should be expected.

Research has done less to solve the problem — do decodable texts advantage early reading development? — and more to demonstrate how complicated even simple ideas can be. (This is typical in the social sciences. Research studies often force us to operationalize constructs and that sometimes exposes how squishy soft our thinking is).

First issue… what is decodable text? Originally, the term was used relatively, it suggested more a continuum than a category (Juel & Roper-Schneider, 1985): phonics-oriented decodable texts used a preponderance of “words where all letters followed their major sound patterns.” The contrast to this was the basal readers of the time that employed a lower proportion of such words. Words like pet, big, nap, and dot would fit the decodable definition, while words like cow, pear, and come would not.

How regular did the words have to be to merit designation as decodable? Doesn’t decodability change with learning? As children know more spelling/pronunciation patterns, then those less frequent patterns become decodable, too.

Some researchers have tried setting percentages of decodability, and others have shifted the definitions to consider what the children have been taught at a given point.

If we all define decodable text in different ways then no one can be very happy with the research. No matter what a study finds, it becomes possible to reject research results out of hand because that may not be “what I meant by decodable.”

In that first study (Juel & Roper-Schneider, 1985), first graders taught with decodable texts outperformed the others in word reading, nonsense word reading, and the ability to read words they had not previously encountered – well, at least this was true when tested in November and February. However, by end of year, there were no differences when it came to either decoding ability or overall reading achievement. It is also fair to point out that the decodable group received more explicit phonics instruction, too. In other words, this study was more intriguing than determinative.

Since then, there have been a handful of empirical studies into the effectiveness of decodables. Sometimes with positive results (a 14 lesson study found that students were more likely to try to decode words in text if they worked with decodables (Mesmer, 2005)), and other times this experience seemed to reduce the likelihood of fluent reading (Price-Mohr & Price, 2018), or seemed to have no effect at all (students who worked with texts 11% decodable and 85% decodable did equally well in learning to read (Jenkins, et al., 2004)).

There are now almost as many research reviews on this topic as there are primary studies. These reviews all draw pretty much the same conclusions (Adams, 2009; Bier, 2007; Birch, et al., 2022; Cheatham & Alor, 2012; Mesmer, 2001). They acknowledge that decodable texts encourage students to apply their phonics skills (though this seems only to be true for most kids during a brief time during grade one). They also conclude that it is most prudent to use both decodables and non-decodables.  

Hammering home that latter point is a new meta-analysis that examined more than 90 studies of early reading interventions. These studies were divided into 4 groups: those that did not employ text at all, those that only used decodables, those that did not use decodables, and those that used a combination of both. The text regime that significantly outdistanced the others in terms of how well they nurtured decoding ability was the diet that included decodables along with other texts.

Of course, there are several studies and evaluations of phonics instruction in which the program under investigation included decodable text (look at the phonics studies synthesized in the National Reading Panel Report or the various reports of What Works Clearinghouse). These phonics programs have been successful, but there is no evidence that without decodables they would have been any less effective. Phonics programs with and without them both seem to do well.

There are still methodological problems that need to be worked out on the research end of this. Researchers have usually failed to control the effects of other text factors. For instance, the amount of word repetition and the frequency of the words in the various texts are important variables that may confound the results of these studies (Mesmer, Cunningham, & Hiebert, 2012).

Finally, English is complex, and the sounds associated with letters and letter combinations depend on the letter’s position in the syllables, morphology, and etymology. That’s why so much is made these days of “statistical learning.”

Readers start to discern that b is more often associated with the /b/ sound in words like big and bad much more often than it will serve as a silent letter (such as in words like bomb or climb), and they learn to respond to this statistical difference accordingly. If unsure of the pronunciation of a b word, go with /b/; you’re more likely to get it right. Presenting students with lots of decodable text, text that’s much more regular that normal text, might mess up some of these cognitive calculations. Dick Venezky and Dale Johnson (1973) long ago showed that adults attribute sounds to letters in proportions more reflective of their appearance in children’s primers than of the actual proportions in which they appear in English language overall. (This is a problem for both leveled readers and decodable texts.)

I think it’s okay to use decodable texts as part of phonics instruction, but such practice should be limited, and even beginning readers should be reading (not just listening to) more than decodable texts.

References

Adams, M. J. (2009). Decodable text: Why, when, and how?” In E H. Hiebert & M. Sailors (Eds.), Finding the right texts: What works for beginning and struggling readers (pp. 23-46). New York: Guilford Press, 2009.

Bier, L. D. (2007). Texts and Beginning Readers. Unpublished paper, University of Delaware.

Birch, R., Sharp, H., Miller, D., Ritchie, D., & Ledger, S. (2022). A systematic literature review of decodable and levelled reading books for reading instruction in primary school contexts: An evaluation of quality research evidence. Newcastle, Australia: University of Newcastle.

Cheatham, J. P., & Allor, J. H.  (2012). The influence of decodability in early reading text on reading achievement: A review of the evidence. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25(9), 2223-2246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-011-9355-2

Jenkins, J. R., Peyton, J. A., Sanders, E. A., Vadasy, P. F. (2004). Effects of reading decodable texts in supplemental first-grade tutoring. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8(1), 53-85. doi:https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr08014

Juel, C., & Roper-Schneider, D. (1985). The influence of basal readers on first grade reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(2), 134–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/747751

Mesmer, H. A. E. (2001). Decodable text: A review of what we know. Reading Research and Instruction, 40(2), 121-42. https://doi.org/10.1080/19388070109558338

Mesmer, H. A. E. (2005). Text decodability and the first-grade reader. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 21, 61-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573560590523667

Mesmer, H. A. E., Cunningham, J. W., & Hiebert, E. H. (2012). Toward a theoretical model of text complexity for the early grades: Learning from the past, anticipating the future. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(3), 235–258

Price?Mohr, R. M., & Price, C. B. (2018). Synthetic phonics and decodable instructional reading texts: How far do these support poor readers? Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 24(2), 190-196. https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1581

 Pugh, A., Kearns, D., & Hiebert, E. H. (2023). Text types and their relations to efficacy in beginning reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 58(4), 710-732.  https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.513

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast 

I know you advocate fluency instruction. But what do you think of choral reading? I love to do that with my second graders, and they have a lot of fun with it. We usually follow Tim Rasinski’s advice and do choral reading with poetry. Do you think that satisfies the fluency teaching requirements?

Shanahan responds:

I must admit that I am not a big fan of choral reading, though to be fair this is not a research-based opinion. There simply are too few studies of choral reading on which to base a sound judgment.

First my objections and then a consideration of the research evidence.

My concern is pretty simple: in observing classrooms, which I have done a lot of over the years, I often notice that many kids don’t really participate. Oh, they may move their lips a bit behind the rest of the class, but they are not necessarily even looking at the words. I suspect that often they’re “reading” in the same way many people at a baseball game “sing” the National Anthem. They look like they are participating -- without really singing.

Fluency instruction – any instruction – only can pay off to the extent that the students engage in the process. I prefer approaches like paired reading (with teacher supervision) because each individual student needs to make the commitment to the text. If they don’t read a word, it doesn’t get read and there can be some instructional response.

With choral reading, in contrast, kids can hide out a bit which likely reduces their learning.

I went looking for studies of choral reading and there are a few, but none that look specifically at this part of the fluency regimen. In every study, they combine choral reading with repeated reading and then there is no way to sort out their effects. There are studies of repeated reading showing its effectiveness. None isolate choral reading.

For example, in a study with middle schoolers (Landreth & Chase, 2021), 10 minutes of daily oral reading fluency practice outdistanced a comparable amount of time devoted to independent reading. They had a 5-day routine with choral reading being one of the items in the routine (it also included repeated reading). In a study of intermediate grade students with learning problems, it was found that oral reading fluency instruction, which included choral reading, was successful in improving both fluency and comprehension (Mefford & Pettegrew, 1997).

There are some studies of “reading while listening.” Some of those might be choral reading studies. However, it is possible to read silently while listening or to focus more on trying to follow the teacher (the one who is being listened to) more than trying to stay with the group.

My concerns wouldn’t proscribe choral reading altogether. I suspect in some classrooms, choral reading might be used for a first run through of a text, to get the kids started. Once that has occurred it is set to the side for more individual work. I cannot say I have any problem with that; I bet that, at least with some text, that might even be more efficient than having everyone trying to read the text alone.

You mention that it can be fun for the kids. Probably my favorite examples of “choral reading” are more “choral singing,” in which the teacher provides the kids the song text.

Part of your question noted that you focus choral reading on poetry – and, again, admittedly that can be entertaining. Nothing wrong with kids enjoying this work.

Nevertheless, as much as I think it appropriate to practice fluency with poetry and verse, I fear that an important idea gets lost when that is the focus. Students need to learn to read a great variety of text – including stories, social studies articles, and science books. They need to develop a sense of how to read those texts fluently and that will be best developed by working with such texts. There are many differences in the syntactic features that are included in such texts and I want to be sure that kids get to try to negotiate those (including poetry).

It is very reasonable to do some work with poems, maybe even to start there since reading such texts aloud is a kind of authentic public performance (attend a “poetry slam” sometime). But it is also sound practice to segue from this to guiding students to read the kinds of text that will matter in their education.

The National Reading Panel (NRP) reported that students benefited from reading texts aloud repeatedly with guidance and feedback. Later work concluded that this is most beneficial with texts beyond the students’ instructional levels (not much benefit from practicing a text you can already read well). The studies NRP considered did not use choral reading, and I know of no studies conducted in the past two decades that have evaluated its effectiveness.

Clearly, choral reading matches the NRP guidance – with choral reading, students are reading texts aloud and usually with repetition, though the feedback is tough to provide because of the problem of discerning what everyone is up to. Accordingly, I would not discourage the use of choral reading, occasionally, just as I wouldn’t tell you not to include poetry and song in your fluency instruction.

The trick, I think, to making this work best for raising reading achievement is to make sure that kids are still getting plenty of opportunity to engage in individual reading that can be observed and supported, and plenty of opportunity to figure out how to read narrative and expository texts fluently, too.

My friend, David Paige (2011), provides some useful guidance for how to make use of choral reading in the classroom. He suggests that you use passages of 200-250 words in length and provide countdowns to get everyone started at the same time. He recommends that teachers circulate during this reading to try to hear mistakes and other difficulties (I find that hard to do with 25 voices going at once). He also suggests that these sessions incorporate both teacher modeling and some direct instruction of words that are problematic.

Personally, choral reading would be a very occasional activity or one with a very specific purpose (starting kids off with a passage). Nevertheless, it has been part of several fluency interventions that have been successful. The researchers can’t say that its inclusion is essential, and I cannot say that it isn’t.

References

Archer, A. L., Gleason, M. M., & Vachon, V. L. (2003). Decoding and fluency: Foundation skills for struggling older readers. Learning Disability Quarterly, 26, 89-101.

Dowhower, S. L. (1991). Fluency in oral reading. Theory into Practice, 30, 165-175.

Landreth, S. (2018). 3, 2, 1… Read! An engaging reading routine that builds fluency and morale in secondary readers. Texas Journal of Literacy Education, 6, 108-111.

Landreth, S., & Young, C. (2021). Developing fluency and comprehension with the secondary fluency routine. Journal of Educational Research, 114, 252-262.

         https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2021.1910475

Mefferd, P., & Pettegrew, B. S. Fostering literacy acquisition of students with developmental disabilities: Assisted reading with predictable trade books. Literacy Research and Instruction, 36, 177-190.

Paige, D. D. (2011). “That sounded good!”: Using whole class choral reading to improve fluency. Reading Teacher, 64, 435-438.

Rasinski, T., & Hoffman, J. V. (2003). Theory and research into practice: Oral reading in the school literacy curriculum. Reading Research Quarterly, 38, 510-522.

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https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-about-tracing-and-other-multi-sensory-teaching-approaches 

Teacher question: 

I have read the work of researchers like Louisa Moats, Stanislas Dehaene, and Linnea Ehri and understand of how reading works in the brain. I understand the critical role of connecting graphemes to phonemes. My question is what is the true role of the kinesthetic activities promoted in many intervention programs? In a webinar that I

watched the speaker mentioned several times how critical it we to have students trace

the words because this created neural pathways. What does the research say about this?

Shanahan response:

The idea of tracing words to improve literacy has been around for a century. You’d think by now, we’d have a clear idea on whether tracing (and all the other haptic and kinesthetic training procedures) help and, if so, how and why.

But you’d be wrong.

This method was first described by Grace Fernald and Hellen Keller in 1921. Fernald, a clinical psychologist, with a practice focused on reading improvement, applied the method with severely disabled readers. By all accounts, she was a remarkable teacher and her article described what she did and how well it worked (the kids she worked with learned to read). She didn’t devote much space to explaining why tracing was such a boon.

Her idea caught on and ended up in several remedial reading programs, most notably in the one created by Gillingham & Stillman (now referred to as the Orton-Gillingham or O-G method). And, via that route, there are now several commercial instructional programs aimed at dyslexia that include tracing and air writing and that sort of thing.

Over time, these V-A-K-T (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile) practices accumulated several explanations of their effectiveness (Shams, & Seitz, 2008). Many of these focus on memory, claiming that tracing builds neural pathways or that it reinforces visual-auditory pathways in the brain through physical movement and touch. There are also attentional and perceptual explanations and there have been many a rationale based on whatever the current thinking on brain architecture and neural processing may be at the time. Some of these explanations have fallen by the wayside as it has become apparent that they were out of sync with the how the brain works. Many of these are still unresolved.

Personally, I’m more in the attention camp (D’Mello & Gabrieli, 2018), I’m not convinced that these practices create special neural routes or facilitate the paring of alternative paths that is typical of any kind of learning.

My own guess – and this is no more than that and mine is not necessarily better than yours – is that the various kinesthetic schemes simply increase the amount of time readers spend looking at the letters and words. Better attention often translates to more learning.  

Attention is not trivial, so if tracing gets kids to look better or longer, it could be mathemagenic (an action that give rise to learning). Think of many study skills; they often work because they get students to spend more time thinking about the ideas in text by highlighting or note taking (Rothkopf, 1970).

When youngsters simultaneously look at a word, say its name, and trace its letters, it is possible that they are improving word memory for some subtle neurological reason, but it seems more likely that they are just spending more time looking at the words and this may encourage or facilitate phonological stretching (drawing out the pronunciation of a word to highlight the phonological parts and make them more phonetically accessible).

Of course, providing a rationale for why tracing works, assumes that it does, which raises a big, “Not so fast.”

Unfortunately, though educators have tilled these fields for a hundred years, it is unclear whether it works. I often hear from parents and educators who tell me that O-G is the “gold standard” of reading interventions, however the research studies do not provide as glowing an endorsement. Kids don’t seem to read better if they are taught with O-G, tracing or not (Stevens, et al., 2021).

Part of the problem is that these instructional procedures have never gained much sustained attention from the scientific community, so deep understanding is not likely. Often when there is a lot of study of an issue, we start to figure them out a lot better. That has not been the case here.

Making it even more difficult to sort out is the fact that many of the studies have been small (often with only 2-3 children), quite diverse in outcomes and types of students served.

Certainly, some studies support the idea of teaching reading (or aspects of reading such as letter recognition or blending) with multisensory approaches (Campbell, Helf, Cooke, 2008; Connor, 1994; Gentaz, Cole, & Bara, 2003; Ho, Lam, & Au, 2001; Itaguchi, Yamada, & Fukuzawa, 2015; Itaguchi, Yamada, Yoshihara, & Fukuzawa, 2017; Nash, Thorpe, & Lamp, 1980; Thomas, 2015; Xu, Liu, & Joshi, 2019). Many of the studies were conducted with non-alphabetic languages like Japanese or Chinese. None of the studies done in Western languages controlled for the time differences in how long the students were looking at the words. That is not supportive of my supposition about attention, but it does not refute it.

There are some studies that support tracing, but many more and better done studies have reported no clear or consistent benefits (Hulme, 1981; Lee, 2016; Myers, 1978; Schlesinger & Gray, 2017; Wilson, Harris, & Harris, 1976). There are still other studies showing that tracing can be distracting or irrelevant, leading to lower performance when compared to more traditional visual-auditory approaches to decoding (Berninger, Lester, Sohlberg, & Mateer, 1991; Rau, Zheng, & Wei, 2020); Vandever, & Nevelle, D. 1972).

After 100 years, I still can’t tell you if tracing improves learning when it comes to reading.

Of course, several instructional programs incorporate tracing, and some of those programs are effective. Unfortunately, studies of them can’t reveal the impact of tracing because those programs include much more than that. Maybe the tracing is an effective ingredient, or maybe it is inert (just a wasting a bit of time). It is even possible that it is disruptive, but if so, it is not so damaging as to outweigh the program benefits.

Perhaps if tracing supports more thorough and careful looking and listening, it is beneficial. When it doesn’t, it may have no impact whatsoever. And, when learners get all wrapped up in rubbing the letters or dipping their fingers in goop, it could be a distraction that reduces learning.

As a teacher I would not seek out multisensory programs, though I wouldn’t necessarily avoid them either.

If I were using such a program, I’d do what I could to ensure that the tracing wasn’t distracting the students from matching sounds and spellings by ear and eye. I prefer having students seeing the words and hearing the sounds while tracing; I’m not a big fan of “air tracing” despite its effectiveness in Japanese character memorization.

Tracing, if it is to be used at all, should slow students down, focusing their attention on the letters and helping them to think about the letters and sounds more thoroughly and carefully. The teacher who uses this method must be vigilant to make sure that it delivers.

References

Berninger, V., Lester, K., Sohlberg, M. M., & Mateer, C. (1991). Interventions based on the multiple connections model of reading for developmental dyslexia and acquired deep dyslexia. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 6(4), 375-391.

Campbell, M. L., Helf, S., Cooke, N. L. (2008). Effects of adding multisensory components to a supplemental reading program on the decoding skills of treatment resisters. Education & Treatment of Children, 31(3), 267-295. 

Connor, M. (1994). Specific learning difficulty (dyslexia) and interventions. Support for Learning, 9(4), 114-119.

Fernald, G. M., & Keller, H. (1921). The effect of kinaesthetic factors in the development of word recognition in the case of non-readers. Journal of Educational Research, 4, 355-379.

Gentaz, E., Cole, P., & Bara, F. (2003). Évaluation d'entraînements multisensoriels de préparation à la lecture pour les enfants en grande section de maternelle: Une étude sur la contribution du système haptique manuel. L’Annee Psychologique, 103(4), 561-584.

Ho, C. S., Lam, E. Y., & Au, A. (2001). The effectiveness of multisensory training in improving reading and writing skills of Chinese dyslexic children. Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient, 44(4), 269-280.

Hulme, C. (1981). The effects of manual tracing on memory in normal and retarded readers: Some implications for multi-sensory teaching. Psychological Research, 43(2), 179-191.

Itaguchi, Y., Yamada, C., & Fukuzawa, K. (2015). Writing in the air: Contributions of finger movement to cognitive processing. PLoS One, 19(6).

Itaguchi, Y., Yamada, C., Yoshihara, M., & Fukuzawa, K. (2017). Writing in the air: A visualization tool for written languages. PLoS ONE, 12(6).

Lee, L. W., (2016). Multisensory modalities for blending and segmenting among early readers. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 29(5), 1017-1032.

Myers, C. A. (1978). Reviewing the literature on Fernald’s technique of remedial reading. Reading Teacher, 31(6), 614-619.

Nash, R. T., Thorpe, H. W., & Lamp, S. (1980). A study of the effectiveness of the kinesthetic-tactile component in multisensory instruction. Corrective & Social Psychiatry & Journal of Behavior Technology Methods & Therapy, 26(2).

Rau, P.P., Zheng, J., & Wei, Y. (2020). Distractive effect of multimodal information in multisensory learning. Computers & Education, 144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.219.103699

Schlesigner, N. W., & Gray, S. (2017). The impact of multisensory instruction on learning letter names and sounds, word reading, and spelling. Annals of Dyslexia, 67(3), 219-258.

Shams, L., & Seitz, A. R. (2008). Benefits of multisensory learning. Trends in Cognitive Science. https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(08)00218-0?_returnURL= 

Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397-417. DOI: 10.1177/0014402921993406

Thomas, M. (2015). Air writing as a technique for the acquisition of sino-Japanese characters by second language learners. Language Learning, 65(3), 631-659.

Vandever, T. R., & Nevelle, D. D. (1972). The effectiveness of tracing for good and poor decoders. Journal of Reading Behavior, 5(2), 119-125.

Wilson, S. P., Harris, C. W., & Harris, M. L. (1976). Effects of an auditory perceptual remediation program on reading performance. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 9(10), 671-678.

Xu, Z., Liu, D., & Joshi, R. M. (2019). The influence of sensory-motor components of handwriting on Chinese character learning in second- and fourth-grade Chinese children. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000443

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There is much interest in many states to reduce the number of student contact days.  The typical 180 student contact days are being questioned and often replaced with fewer instructional days that are often only a few minutes longer.  Is there any research on four-day weeks versus the typical 180 school day calendar?

Shanahan responds:

Amount of instruction is an important variable in academic achievement. Usually, if we increase the amount of teaching by a reasonable amount, we tend to see increases in learning. From eyeballing the research studies, I’d estimate that 20-30 hours more reading instruction per year, tends to lead to more learning.

Increasing amount of instruction can raise achievement, so reducing instruction would likely have an analogous learning reduction.

Time increases don’t always pay off, however.

For instance, teachers may not use the added time for teaching. I’ve seen that with some afterschool programs. By the time there has been a bathroom break, a snack, and some recreation, the extra hour turns out to be more like an extra 15 minutes and that isn’t necessarily devoted to potentially effective teaching either.

Time – amount of instruction – is one of the “big three” when it comes to stimulating learning, but it only leads to increased learning if something worthwhile is being taught (curriculum) and when the teaching is sufficiently sound (quality).

It is difficult to sort out exactly how much time is lost with the four-day week since districts usually put some back by lengthening school day. But it’s hard to see how days can be lengthened sufficiently to make up for what would be about a 6-hour weekly loss in many districts.

Surprisingly, according to the research, four-day school weeks generally make no difference.

One possibility is the time reductions aren’t as great as I’m suggesting. Maybe we’re not really losing 6 hours per week. The studies point out some reductions in the reductions due to lowered absenteeism. Students – and teachers – tend to miss fewer days under this kind of schedule and having kids in school a larger percentage of the time with fewer days taught by substitutes is a powerful offset.

Even when time is lost, however, a district may try to “protect” reading and math time. That may vouchsafe reading and math scores, though there would likely be a loss in terms of content learning (e.g., science, social studies, art, music, tech).

I suspect that there is another important reason why reading achievement holds up.

Reductions in time may fail to lower reading scores due to the wasteful way time is often used in our schools.

Teachers too often fill the reading block rather than utilizing it. They may devote the reading instruction time to:

• Reading to students (instead of engaging them in reading – here I’m not speaking of reading aloud to younger children who can’t read or can’t read very well yet),
• Assigning “independent reading” (self-selected reading with no monitoring or brief one-on-one conferencing),
• Guided reading with texts the students can already read reasonably well (texts supposedly at the kids’ “instructional levels”), or
• Worksheet assignments that appear aimed at little more than test-taking practice with certain kinds of comprehension questions.

Dump those activities and there might not be much of a loss in achievement, since they don’t contribute much to learning in the first place.

Teachers often cling to these activities not because of their potency, but because of the need to fill time with a minimum of planning. These activities keep kids busy even if they don’t stimulate learning.

I would be a lot happier if those time losses due to four-day weeks would matter.

I think they would if we were more careful in our use of instructional time, providing a substantial amount of the kinds of word, fluency, comprehension, and writing instruction that results in learning.

If that were the norm, the results of those correlational studies might be very different, perhaps enough to make school boards loathe to surrender instructional time.

Maybe they would even think about how to get more instructional time for our kids.

Bibliography

Bell, J. L. (2011). Can the 4-day school week work: An analysis of the impact of the 4-day school week on a rural Georgia school district. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Capella University. 

Cooper, H., Valentine, J. C., Charlton, K., & Melson, A. (2003///Apr 2003 - Jun). The effects of modified school calendars on student achievement and on school and community attitudes. Review of Educational Research, 73(1), 1-52.

Cuban, L. (2008). The perennial reform: Fixing school time. Phi Delta Kappan, 90(4), 240-250.

Domier, P. S. (2010). Every second counts: School week and achievement. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Capella University.

Kraft, M. A., & Novicoff, S. (2022). Instructional time in U.S. public schools: Wide variation, causal effects, and lost hours. Annenburg, Brown University. 

Lewis, M. E. (2018). Comparing professional learning practices of Missouri’s four- and five-day schools. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Southwest Baptist University.

Patall, E. A., Cooper, H., & Allen, A. B. (2010). Extending the school day or school year: A systematic review of research (1985-2009). Review of Educational Research, 80(3), 401-436. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654310377086

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I know that you encourage teachers to teach reading with grade level texts even if this means they would be working at their frustration level. But what about the boys and girls who can already read at grade level? What should we do with them?

RELATED: Should We Teach Graphicacy?

Shanahan response:

There is a great deal of diversity in American classrooms. Teachers can expect to be responsible for students at a wide range of reading levels. I suspect this skews low – meaning most teachers will be scrambling to meet the needs of more kids below grade than above it. But that’s statistical. If your class goes the other way, that is what you must deal with.

There is no widely agreed upon idea of what to do with kids who have already mastered grade level skills and content. Teacher responses are likely to depend upon the mix of students in their classrooms. The more low kids there are to teach, the less likely they will try to do anything special with the higher achievers. Then there are school policies, that may forbid teachers from working with above grade level textbooks which can severely limit a teacher’s flexibility.

Let’s consider some possibilities.

One option is to do nothing special. Simply teach those kids with everyone else. Their reading is not likely to improve much from that – and it is possible that they may be a bit bored – but it will allow teachers the opportunity to catch up some of the less advantaged kids. That’s efficient, of course, but it offends the sensibilities of those committed to the learning of all.

An attractive variation on the idea of teaching everyone the same thing whether or not that is what they need is to make sure that the content of the reading tasks is valuable. That way, even if their reading doesn’t improve, they will have access to worthwhile content that they don’t yet know. That’s not nothing.

Another idea is to exempt them from guided reading, allowing those students to read on their own or to play computer games. That would offer modest reading, though students may like it. (Even when they do, this can wear a bit thin, making some of them feel excluded and ignored.)

An important thing to remember is that Carol Connor and her colleagues found, at least with younger kids, that the ones reading at relatively high levels are also the most able to work independently, away from a teacher (Connor, et al., 2011). That would allow advanced readers to be engaged in pedagogically worthwhile activities, without much teacher attention during class time (this will require additional planning time, however).

What kinds of independent activities would make sense?

One possibility is to work with multiple groups. Teaching the kids who cannot yet read third-grade text well with the third-grade texts, and those beyond that with a somewhat harder text. That way everyone gets the chance to work with challenging texts with teacher supervision and guidance. But it requires a reduction in the amount of instruction that each child receives or an increase in the overall amount of time needed for reading instruction. That problem may be ameliorated a bit by offering fewer lessons to the advanced group – they would likely make good progress with fewer resources given their advanced levels of reading.

Another option is “walking reading” letting a third grader go to a fourth or fifth grade class for their reading instruction (Gutiérrez, & Slavin, 1992). If done right, this works. Let’s say some third graders can already read the third-grade texts reasonably well, so sending them to fourth grade can pay off. This works, though it may limit other instructional choices because of the need to coordinate schedules across classrooms.

A third idea, and one more in line with Connor’s data, is to provide semi-independent possibilities for advanced readers – providing them with less direct instruction (since they are less likely to need it) while providing them with constructive activities that they can engage in successfully with limited supervision. Again, in my experience, these kinds of arrangements usually require more teacher time investment up front, though with practice such  demands can usually be markedly reduced.

Some semi-independent activities that make great sense are Literature Circles, Book Club, Project based Instruction, and Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI); pretty much anything that involves collaborative inquiry or cooperative learning. I don’t need to provide detailed descriptions of those here – there are multiple books and lots of online resources for each of them for teachers who want more specific details. For the most part, these are activities that would usually be carried out under direct teacher supervision and with explicit instruction, however they are typically used with a wide range of students. In this case, the students would all be relatively good readers and able to be productive with less explicit teaching. Nevertheless, it would be wise to provide some explicit teaching regarding how to participate, to provide rules of engagement, and to scaffold tasks (such as providing writing formats or graphic organizers).

Many of these activities require multiple texts. That’s great because one way to provide sufficient experience with harder texts is to have multiple resources (including video) available on a topic. These resources should be at a range of difficulties. That way, the easier texts can scaffold their attempts to deal with the harder text – with minimum teacher input; a win-win, for sure.

These kinds of activities provide students with opportunities to apply their reading and writing skills

to texts of a range of difficulty including those that would present new possibilities of learning.

None of these choices is perfect, but any combination of them is likely to be better than just ignoring that some students can already read the instructional texts well. I’ve included a list of practical resources at the end of this blog entry.

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Connor, C.M., Morrison, F.J., Fishman, B.J., Giuliani, S., Luck, M., Underwood, P., et al. (2011). Testing the impact of child characteristics X instruction interactions on third graders’ reading comprehension by differentiating literacy instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(3), 189–221.

Duke, N. K., Halvorsen, A-L., Strachan, S. L., Kim, J., & Konstantopoulos, S. (2021). Putting PjBL to the test: The impact of project-based learning on second graders’ social studies and literacy learning and motivation in low-SES school settings. American Educational Research Journal, 58(1), 160-200.

Goatley, V. J., Brock, C. H., & Raphael, T. E. (1995). Diverse learners participating in regular education “book clubs.” Reading Research Quarterly, 30(3), 352-380.

Gutiérrez, R., & Slavin, R.E. (1992). Achievement effects of the nongraded elementary school. A best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 62, 333-376.

Imbaquingo, A., & Cárdenas, J. (2023). Project-based learning as a methodology to improve reading and comprehension skills in the English language. Education Science, 13, 587

Lattanzi, J. A., Jr. (2014). “Just don’t call it a book club”: Boys’ reading experiences and motivation in school and in an after school book club. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University.

McMahon, S. I., & Goatley, V. J. (1995). Fifth graders helping peers discuss texts in student-led groups. Journal of Educational Research, 89(1), 23-34.

Book Club

• Breathing New Life into Book Clubs: A Practical Guide for Teachers by Sonja Cherry-Paul and Dana Johansen
• Better Book Clubs by Sara Kugler
• Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs Across the Curriculum by Lesley Roessing and Lester Laminack

Cooperative Learning

• The Teacher’s Sourcebook for Cooperative Learning: Practical Techniques, Basic Principles, and Frequently Asked Questions by George M. Jacobs, Michael A. Power, and Loh Wan Inn.    
• The Collaborative Classroom: 50 Cooperative Learning Strategies for Student Engagement

by Boney Nathan and Seetal Kaur

• https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/comprehension/articles/using-collaborative-strategic-reading

CORI

• https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/curriculum-and-instruction/articles/overview-concept-oriented-reading-instruction-cori

Project-Oriented Reading Instruction

• Inside Information: Developing Powerful Readers and Writers of Informational Text Through Project-Based Instruction by Nell Duke 
• https://www.nellkduke.org/project-based-learning

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Here is an FAQ on teaching oral reading fluency:

Do all students need work with fluency? 

For the most part, yes. However, fluency is a relatively constrained reading skill. That means students eventually reach a peak level of fluency, at which point instruction can be discontinued. The higher the grade level you teach, the more likely you’ll have some students who won’t need any additional fluency instruction. If you teach in the elementary grades, it is not likely that you’ll have many students who can read high school level texts with high accuracy, and a reading speed of 150-175 words per minute. If you do, those kids can skip the fluency practice.

What is the point of fluency instruction?

The earliest thinking on fluency came from Carol Chomsky. Her notion was that students who had learned decoding, needed to learn how to implement this knowledge when reading text. This argues for providing both explicit phonics instruction, along with fluency practice. Jay Samuels believed that the point of this instruction was to develop automaticity – the ability to carry out a task successfully without conscious attention, which led to his recommendation for repeated reading, since repetition can lead to that level of proficiency. Later, Joe Torgesen, who was looking at fluency with younger readers and lower performing readers, concluded that the students were mainly memorizing particular words, so he argued for the use of texts with lots of vocabulary repetition across texts. Other scholars have noted the important role that fluency practice plays in the development of prosody or expression – meaning that once student can read the words in text successfully they must make it sound like text, which is entirely a comprehension issue. 

What kinds of teaching improves fluency?

The National Reading Panel concluded that oral reading practice with feedback and repetition was valuable in developing fluency. Providing some kind of guidance in how to parse or chunk sentences – where to pause when reading so the words are grouped appropriately is beneficial, too. 

Our students are getting low scores in reading comprehension. Why aren’t we focusing on that instead of fluency?

Low comprehension scores can mean many things. Perhaps, they signal problems with language (e.g., lousy vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, discourse structure), limited prior knowledge, or just a lack of ability to focus on the right kinds of information. If kids do have those problems, then fluency work is not likely to help. But quite often, the reason for low comprehension is that the students can’t read the text well. In other words, if you want higher comprehension, fluency work can be a powerful road to get there.

How much fluency teaching are we expected to provide?

There is no research that I am aware of that establishes the most effective amount of fluency instruction. However, looking at the studies that have found such practice to improve reading achievement (there are several), I would shoot for about 30 minutes per day – in other words, 25% of the ELA time – but the more fluent my students, the less time I would likely spend.

How do I keep from embarrassing my low readers?

Fluency work is a practice activity, not much different from basketball players shooting free throws prior to a big game. Practice usually isn’t embarrassing, if everyone knows it’s practice. Most students enjoy fluency work. It’s active, involving, and they can see their own improvement. Embarrassment is the result of performance activities like round robin reading, where one student reads, and everyone follows along. Paired situations are much better if they don’t single anyone out. I prefer paired reading with the teacher moving among the groups to monitor progress and to provide essential guidance to both the reader and the listener. It also helps to talk to the class at the very beginning to make sure that they understand the purpose of this practice, and what to expect.

How do I pair the kids?

Don’t make a big deal out of pairing up, as this can be a real time waster. One guideline is to make sure that the students who are working together on a given day are using the same book. That’s easy in most classrooms. A second rule is not to pair the same kids all the time; they differ in their ability to give feedback, so share the wealth. My favorite take on this comes from a teacher who had two class lists and she rolled them into concentric “wheels.” That allowed her to adjust the wheels each day, so that each child had a different partner every day. Very cool.

What kind of texts should we use for fluency?

Many teachers like to select special texts for this work, such as poetry. However, we really want students to become fluent with prose, so practice with prose materials is essential, too. Any material that you are using in class for reading comprehension or in a content subject such as social studies or science are ideal. Remember we are trying to enable students to read these kinds of texts, so having practice with those, makes sense.

I've been told the texts should be easy reading?

Research says the opposite. In repeated oral reading activities, it is more productive to work with texts that are challenging--even frustration level. It takes more rereading, of course, but kids learn more from such practice and are more likely to make progress.

Doesn’t silent reading improve fluency?

Silent reading can contribute to fluency improvement. Kids who read a lot tend to be fluent. Unfortunately, teachers can only be certain if students are fluent by listening to them read. The same can be said for their ability to evaluate the progress and effort students are making. Silent reading can only contribute to progress when students are really reading, and not just looking at pictures, skimming, skipping over unknown words, and turning pages. I insist upon silent reading (in grades 2 and up) for comprehension, and oral reading for fluency work.

How do I know that fluency activities such as paired reading or chunking work?

Nothing works automatically, you make it work. Research studies indicate that the techniques now recommended for teaching fluency have been made to work successfully with a broad range of students. Fluency work will improve students’ ability with the texts they are practicing with, and over time, this ability transfers to the reading of other texts.

I work with very young children. Do you recommend fluency work for them?

When children are first getting started with real reading, you want them to be somewhat disfluent. That is, you want the reading to go slowly enough that each word stands out on its own. Fingerpoint reading is the starting point. However, once students begin to read, the fluency goal is the same as with older children.

When you observe in classes, what are the biggest problems that you see with fluency instruction?

The biggest problem is that teachers often fail to teach fluency at all, and students fall further and further behind as the texts get harder. Another problem is the reliance on round robin reading, which is a real time waster compared with paired reading. Finally, even when teachers do have students work on fluency, there often is little or no repetition, so the students do not necessarily become fluent (they just read the material aloud and then move on).

How much rereading makes sense?

There have been two schools of thought on this. Some researchers specify a specific number of readings, and some specify a target level of performance with students reading the text repeatedly – however many times it takes – until they achieve it. The research these days seems to favor those who argue for no more than three readings. Students may not be perfect by that point, but they will have made the major amount of improvement that they are likely to see. Given that, move on to another text.

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Research, for instance, has shown repeatedly that when you’re trying to teach kids to read a word, it is best to ditch the pictures. Word learning requires that attention be focused on the sequence of letters, not the accompanying photo or drawing. Those are just distractions.

Another problem with pictures and words is that when kids have trouble with some words in a text, they may try to depend on the picture context. The pictures may give the reader a way around the reading. Illustrations may even allow some kids to slip through the cracks, allowing them to answer comprehension questions without any grasp of the words.

Young kids often conclude that book-sharing parents or teachers are making the stories up from the pictures. They’re surprised to discover that while they were examining the art, the adult was reading the squiggles.

RELATED: What Do We Do With Above Grade Readers?

We seek ways to teach kids to ignore the pictures for the words.

Yep, pictures can be a problem for beginning readers. If things go well, students come to rely less and less on pictures.

What about informational texts, like science books? Now that’s a horse with an entirely different pigmentation.

With science texts this progression goes in the opposite direction. In the primary grades, science graphics are like what one finds in storybooks – illustrations there to motivate or to restate the words.

Science graphics don’t fade away. They get superseded by scientific graphics aimed at supplementing and extending the textual information rather than replacing it. (Glossy high school textbooks are sometimes an exception to this. Those graphics may be more about decoration than information – a complaint of both science and history teachers).

It is fair to say that for a lot of academic reading, graphics are of central importance. Students who can’t make sense of them are at a real reading comprehension disadvantage. Understanding content text requires a reliance on graphics, not to help with the comprehension of the words, but to provide readers with a complete understanding.

A scientist once explained to me that science works that way because it describes natural concepts, relationships, and processes and that language is ill fitting for this purpose. Consequently, scientists try to describe these things in multiple ways – in words, graphics, and mathematically. They are all imperfect representations, of course, but together they provide the most complete and accurate rendition of the information.

That only works if readers can make sense of words and graphics. My experiences with high school science students tells me they have no idea how to read graphics. If referred for reading help – they may have trouble with both words and graphics – the reading teacher focuses on the former alone (and the science teacher stops using the textbook altogether).

There are whole books written on this topic (Roth, Pozzer-Ardenghi, and Han, 2005) and there is more to teaching graphics reading than I can provide in a blog entry. But there should be enough room for me to offer some basic recommendations that may benefit your students. You might dismiss this, waving it away as not being your responsibility – reading teachers teach kids to read written words.

My response? Kids even need help making sense of the words in the graphics – the captions, labels, and such. Teaching students to read such graphics is our responsibility.

One thing students should know is that graphics tend to communicate five kinds of information: spatial relations, time sequences, relationships among variables, classifications and hierarchies, and causation.

1.        Spatial graphics depict the spatial placement of objects or the physical relations among objects or parts. This may be accomplished with photos or scientific drawings. An understanding of spatial graphics is demonstrated by being able to describe or remember the placement of the items and their relationships and why that is important.

2.        Sequential graphics represent the steps in a processes or cycles that take place over time. Flow charts are often used for this purpose. Understanding can be demonstrated by an ability to describe the steps in the appropriate sequence and key features of the process such as asymmetricity, circularity, etc. 

3.        Variable relationship graphics reveal similarities and differences in phenomena or processes or relationships among variables (such as correlation). These may be represented with tables, bar graphs, etc.  Understanding these graphics requires that readers recognize what is being compared or connected and to draw appropriate generalizations about these relations.

4.        Classification/Hierarchical graphics reveal taxonomic or rank relationships or arrangements among phenomena, objects, processes, etc. These may be represented with tree diagrams, category graphs, etc. Understanding these requires recognition of what is being compared or related and the nature of the relations (e.g., superior to inferior, general to specific, sources).

5.        Causal graphics reveal conditions or actions that lead to outcomes. These come in many forms; be especially attentive to graphics that illustrate relationships between two variables (some may be correlational and others causal). Understanding requires being able to describe the antecedent, consequent, and how the former impacts the latter.   

Teaching students to recognize the range of purposes of graphics and how they work will go a long way towards building greater reading comprehension. You’ll be amazed at the discussions that ensue and how much richer the rest of the reading can be.

References

Roth, W., Pozzer-Ardenghi, L., & Han, J. A. (2005). Critical graphicacy: Understanding visual representation practices in school science. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

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Teacher question: 

I know you typically don’t talk about specific programs, but I really would like to know your thoughts. I had always wanted more training in a structured literacy program/approach. I always thought Wilson, and specifically OG approaches, were the gold standards. More recently, I began reading about programs labeled as speech to print. Proponents of speech to print methods claim it is much faster to teach kids to read (and spell) than OG based approaches. Is there research to support this? Are these studies comparing programs based on OG (that mainly follow a more print to speech approach) and programs that are more specifically speech to print? Thank you!

Shanahan response:

You’re right that I don’t comment on specific programs. However, I do talk about research on programs or the consistency of certain parts of a program with research.

Let’s start with the claim that Orton-Gillingham (OG) and programs derived from it being the “gold standard.”
To me a gold standard program would consistently result in positive learning outcomes and would outperform competing methods. Outperformance would be demonstrated by direct research comparisons, or by meta-analyses summarizing disparate but relevant studies. Gold standard approaches would result, on average, in more learning.  

If OG is the gold standard, it should reliably do better than other explicit decoding programs.

The National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) analyzed the effectiveness of phonics across 38 studies that evaluated 18 different curricula. Our conclusion was that phonics added a valuable ingredient to literacy teaching, and that programs with explicit systematic phonics outdistanced those that did not.

What about different types of phonics teaching?

We made some of those comparisons, too. Synthetic phonics (reading words from individual letters and sounds), for instance, had higher average effects than analytic phonics (focused on syllables, morphemes, and use of known words as analogies). This difference wasn’t statistically significant, however. That means those different approaches did equally well.

We didn’t compare individual phonics programs with each other.

There were usually only 1 or 2 studies of each program. Not enough evidence for meaningful comparisons of Phonics Programs A and B. An exception was OG. There were enough of those studies to compute a meaningful estimate of effectiveness, it could have been compared with the rest of the set.

I didn’t push for such an analysis because I feared the results would be misleading. OG often failed but usually with severely disabled – hospitalized – populations. It was clear that OG exerted no miracle impact on those learners, but would any other program have done so? It would be impossible to say.

Over 20 years, more research has accumulated, and OG now has merited its very own meta-analysis (Stevens, Austin, Moore, Scammacca, Boucher, & Vaughn, 2021). That study found OG to be effective but with rather modest benefits – lower effectiveness than for the average phonics study that NRP considered.

So much for being the gold standard!

Orton-Gillingham procedures are no more effective than any other explicit systematic phonics instruction – despite the religious fervor of some of its advocates.

Of course, those true believers, argue against these data:

“They didn’t look at the right version of OG.”

“I do it a little differently than others and it really works well for my kids.”

“The newer trainers aren’t as good as the past ones, so they probably studied teachers who weren’t well trained.”

Those complaints aside, there is no reason to think those kinds of things affect OG any more or less than any other program. If it’s that hard to find a potent version, then we shouldn’t expect widespread success.

We lack direct comparisons of OG with other phonics approaches, but it looks like it works about as well any (though often it does not do as well as those).

Which moves us on to the second point – the one about speech to print approaches to phonics.

I’ve oft grumbled about the lack of evaluation of individual features of complex instructional programs. Research may affirm the benefits of a program without revealing its active ingredients.

You’d think with all the interest in phonics there would be many such studies exploring the implications of sound tracing, analytic/synthetic approaches, grapheme-phoneme sequences, inclusion of morphological analysis, decodable text, emphasis on consistency versus flexibility, print-to-speech/speech-to-print approaches, dosage variation, and so on.

Unfortunately, there are few research comparisons of print-to-speech and speech-to-print. There is relevant information about that difference, just nothing definitive yet.

Historically, phonics programs tended to emphasize print-to-speech. Kids are taught to identify letters, to link sounds to those letters, and then to sound out words by sounding each letter. That sequence mirrors the process readers must use during reading: look at the letters and use that information to generate a phonological representation.  

It seems reasonable to teach students explicitly what we eventually want them to do. However, advantageous curriculum designs do not necessarily mirror their end points so closely. Engaging in a process like reading and learning to read are not the same thing.

Perhaps the opposite – starting with phonemes and pronunciations and connecting those to letters and printed words – might be a good idea. It’s possible that trying to spell and write words does more to enhance phonemic awareness and it may somehow make the phonology more prominent or easy to perceive (Wasowicz, 2021).

The earliest evidence I know of on this was reported by Jeanne Chall (1967). In her qualitative review of research on phonics, she concluded that programs with spelling, writing, and/or dictation did better than those without.

I followed up on that in my reading-writing relationship research in the 1980s. I found spelling and decoding to be closely related, even when a lot of other variables were available to suck up the variance (Shanahan, 1984). Later, Ginger Berninger and her colleagues followed up on that and with an even more ambitious effort they found the same thing (Berninger, Abbott, Abbott, Graham, & Richards, 2002).

Marilyn Adams (1990) and Linnea Ehri (1997) both theorized on that possibility as well, and Steve Graham reported a meta-analysis on spelling instruction that found spelling to improve reading – probably because of its contribution to decoding (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).

That’s all fascinating, but it’s indirect. It suggests value, it doesn’t prove it.

Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Louisa Moats (1998, 2005, 2010), for example, has several publications that treat this as a settled matter, claiming speech-to-print to be most effective. Her reasoning hasn’t convinced me, and yet the preponderance of current data are on her side. (I suspect that adding speech-to-print is effective including adding spelling to traditional phonics instruction, but it is too early to claim it to be a proven fact).

Perhaps the closest thing we have to a direct test of the proposition is a meta-analysis of 11 studies (Weisler & Mathes, 2011). It concluded that instruction that integrated encoding into decoding instruction led to significantly higher reading achievement. Still not the strongest evidence – because it combined investigations that compared encoding with decoding (Christensen & Bowey, 2005) along with those that compared encoding instruction with things like extra math lessons (Graham, Harris, & Chorzempa, 2002).

At some point – any decoding program must focus on print-to-speech, since that is what we do in reading. However, I think there are real benefits to be derived from activities like invented spelling, spelling instruction, word construction from sounds, and so on – in any phonics program. Speech-to-print activities appear to increase learning. My advice: get a phonics program that includes such activities or layer them into a traditional print-to-speech program (including OG).

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References

Adams, M. (1990) Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham, S., & Richards, T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(1), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/002221940203500104

Boldrini, G., Fox, A. C., & Savage, R. S. (2023/01//). Flexible phonics: A complementary ‘next generation’ approach for teaching early reading. Literacy, 57(1), 72-86. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12308

Chall, J.S. (1967). Reading: The great debate. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ehri, L. C. (1997). Learning to read and learning to spell are one and the same, almost. In C. A. Perfetti, L. Rieben, & M. Fayol (Eds.), Learning to spell (pp. 237-269). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27, 1703-1743. DOI:10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0

Moats, L.C. (1998). Teaching decoding. American Educator, 22(1), 1-9.

Moats, L. C. (2005). How spelling supports reading and why it is more regular and predictable than you may think. American Educator, 29(4), 12-22, 42-43.

Moats, L. C. (2010). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

Møller, H. L., Mortensen, J. O., & Elbro, C. (2022). Effects of integrated spelling in phonics instruction for at-risk children in kindergarten. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 38(1), 67-82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2021.1907638

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Shanahan, T. (1984). Nature of the reading-writing relation: An exploratory multivariate analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 466–477.

Stevens, E.A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A.N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397-417.

Vadasy, P. F., Sanders, E. A., & Cartwright, K. B. (2023///Oct 2023 - Dec). Cognitive flexibility in beginning decoding and encoding. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 28(4), 412-438. https://doi.org/10.1080/10824669.2022.2098132

Wasowicz, J. (2021). A speech-to-print approach to teaching reading. LDA Bulletin, 53(2), 10-18.

Weiser, B., & Mathes, P. (2011). Using encoding instruction to improve the reading and spelling performances of elementary students at risk for literacy difficulties: A best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 17-200.

Click here to read the 37 comments generated by the original version of this entry.

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With all the emphasis on “science of reading,” what about the art of teaching? Do you think there is a place for that?

RELATED: Print-to-Speech or Speech-to-Print? That is the Question

Shanahan response:

Indeed.

Teaching is an act of practical reasoning, persuasiveness, problem solving, and communication. It need be shaped by science but much of it is improvisation rooted in experience.

Science may contribute to that, but it will never be sufficient. Art must have a place.

It might help to examine the experience of other fields. Medicine, for instance, has had a much longer and more obsessive relationship with science than has education. Where are they on this art-science continuum?

My medical colleagues are grappling to preserve the humanity in their practice while inundated with technologies, tests, and data. For a long time, art vs. science in medicine was much akin to the undercard at a boxing match, with the touts arguing over the under-over. No one could be sure who would win. These days it is still usually posed as a duality, though physicians seem to be growing more comfortable with the idea that wisdom and knowledge deserve a seat at the table. A doctor can prescribe all the right meds and administer all the approved regimens, and still show empathy for patients, smiling, making eye contact, listening, developing rapport, laying on hands, and sometimes even going off protocol when it makes sense.

Maybe we educators start from a better spot. Witness Chase Young, David Paige, and Tim Rasinski’s book, Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading. That title certainly argues for a unity in this regard.

I suspect the tension comes from trying to transform education from an enterprise that was full-tilt boogie on the arts end to one that now must accommodate science. Art, the older colleague, believes it deserves respect for its years of service and the wisdom it has gained from that experience. Science, the brash upstart, is sure it has all the answers and possesses the seemingly limitless energy of youth.

When I entered teaching, it was mostly a field of art. There wasn’t much research, and few decisions were based upon it. Likewise, there was little data to go on. States were just starting to evaluate reading and math.

Without data or research, teachers had a great deal of latitude. I picked the textbooks I wanted to teach from and organized my classroom as I chose. Occasionally, I’d receive advice from senior colleagues (“teacher lore”). This tended to be of the “don’t smile until after Christmas” variety, and often was contradicted by other counsel. (In some schools, a principal or a clique of older teachers might exercise authority over these choices – sources based more on opinion than knowledge).

That may sound idyllic to many of you these days, and it was – in a way. It was also pretty self-satisfied. We were certain that we were terrific and that the kids were doing as well as possible. Without tests, there could be no contradiction.

Principals evaluated teacher performance with a heavy emphasis on classroom order and parent satisfaction – learning wasn’t usually central to those reviews. Teachers stayed out of each other’s lanes – we were equally effective (if someone stood out it was due to a unique personality, not more effective practice). Parents didn’t always surrender to this fiction. They figured out which teachers were best and pressured principals to assign their kids there. “Best” may have been due to better spelling lessons or to having just the right personality to appeal to mom and dad (both “sweet” and “demanding” were likely seen as positive, with “crabby” always a negative indicator).

The idea of requiring standardized assessments and scientific research to the mix had to do with a growing realization that students weren’t learning as much as we assumed. The tools of science could allow us a more reliable evaluation and more potent learning opportunities. At least that’s the theory.

How does this play in practice?

I would not want individual teachers deciding which reading skills should be taught. A teacher might be satisfied with her lessons that routinely omitted phonics (or some other key element) and her kids performed to her satisfaction. Perhaps she was successful, though that is hard to determine without actual data (and a lack of past complaint isn’t evidence). 

Perhaps her students were taught the missing skills at home in the past so the value of that content would not be evident. The determination of what needs to be taught in reading is better left to the science – comparative studies with lots of kids can do a better job of distinguishing the necessary from the optional.   

Determining the best approaches to teaching has proved somewhat more daunting. It is not that studies can’t identify practices that seem effective, both generally (e.g., lessons with clear purposes, lots of teacher-student interaction, clear explanations, sufficient repetition, informative feedback) and more specifically for some reading components (e.g., PA lessons that include the ABCs, phonics lessons that include encoding practice, comprehension lessons that connect with prior knowledge).

Yes, with research we can identify potentially positive practices. What we can’t do is tell teachers how best to implement these insights in real classrooms. Having everyone mindlessly read a purpose-setting script at the start of a lesson may be a no-brainer. Noticing that some kids are neglecting that purpose, seems more in the realm of art.

For instance… in a dictionary assignment, students are to read a passage and copy the correct definition of some highlighted words. We can quibble about that assignment in a moment, but the purpose is to make kids aware of the multiplicity of definitions for many words, of the need to identify the correct ones, and to gain some practice in doing that.

What of the kids who decide the fastest way to the finish line (their purpose) is to copy each word’s shortest definition? Completing the task but ignoring the purpose.

(Yes, this lesson would be better if the students just recorded the number of the correct definition or were to translate the definition into their own words rather copying).  

Science says that clarity of purpose matters and that good teachers start lessons with an explanation of purpose. Art says that students may ignore the stated purpose and replace it with something superficial and less supportive of learning. Artful teachers must be vigilant of kids who are only completing tasks.

I work hard on the science part – not because I’m anti-art – but because that has been a missing piece, a piece that I can add. The idea of teaching those things that have led to greater learning appeals to me. The same can be said for teaching in ways that have been found more successful.

Maybe I’m all in on that approach because I understand that research-based approaches don’t work… they are made to work.

In the studies, teachers worked hard – using certain tools – to confer a learning advantage. Positive results say that they succeeded. Multiple studies say several teachers were able to succeed this way. I can’t be sure that I can teach this well but knowing that others have done so and how they went about that is a good start.

The science of reading isn’t one of blind compliance or high-fidelity implementation.

Science reveals what can work. The art of teaching suggests what I might do to make the science work.

That means I’m going to try to build rapport with my students… looking them in the eye, smiling frequently, bumping fists to reward success.

I’m going to try to be patient, too. “Yes, I did just explain this, and little Jimmy is proceeding as if I hadn’t. I’d love to hide the rascal, but it would be better to explain it again.” Some kids just need more repetitions and practice than others. Some scientists claim that kids need 8 repetitions of something before it sticks and they may be right. “However, I’ve got a group of kids who are on repetition number 11, and I want to pull my hair out. Probably better to go for repetition 12 than to do a Dwayne Johnson imitation.”

Science and art are both about trying to maximize student learning.

Science powerfully identifies what has been proven to be workable. I believe only foolish educators would ignore the valuable insights it offers. But those educators must recognize that these findings cannot be implemented successfully without a lot of effort aimed at making them work.

Art, on the other hand, includes everything else that teachers do to increase success. For me, William Faulkner’s definition of art is best: “Art means anything consciously well done.” That’s where patience, careful listening, empathy, rapport, clarity, and persistence come in. Knowing when to double down and when to back off. Implementing a science of reading successfully requires a thoughtful dose of such ingredients – items that may not have shown up in the research study, but which certainly were in the classrooms with the greatest learning.

Remember the old commercial?: “Peanut butter and chocolate, chocolate and peanut butter, two great flavors that taste great together.”

Perhaps we need to hire an advertising exec to come up with something like, “Art and science, science and art… two great sources of success that work great together.” I doubt that will sell anything, but its heart is in the right place.

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Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on September 12, 2020, and reposted on August 24, 2024. Recently, I noticed a couple of research studies published in 2024 about seatwork and it reminded me of this blog. Like most professors, I have long looked askance at worksheets and their role in reading instruction (though I had relied upon them as a teacher). These newer studies (e.g., Amendum, et al., 2024), suggest that they are not as bad as we have been led to believe (Taylor, et al., 2005). Good teachers often use a mix of direct instruction along with some practice sheets. Nevertheless, there are studies (Block, et al., 2009) that suggest that this traditional seatwork can be improved upon. That study assigned reading that the children did on their own but provided provocative questions that required students to write extensive answers, and this had a positive impact upon achievement. The suggestions below should be of use as well.

You may be interested in the 9 comments that the original elicited: September 12, 2020 version 

Teacher question: 

I work with students in small groups daily and need the rest of the students to be engaged in meaningful practice of their new literacy skills. What types of activities would be best for this practice?

RELATED: The Science of Reading Versus the Art of Teaching Reading

Shanahan response:

The benefits of small group instruction are obvious. Teachers can make the learning experience more apt and intense – the small numbers allow for more responsiveness, more vigilant monitoring, and fine tuning of the teaching.

The downside of small group instruction should be equally evident. While the teacher is working with one small group, the rest of the kids are on their own. Much more learning takes place with the teacher and, frankly, much less with the kids on their own.

There are some supports and approaches that can mitigate this problem, though their availability is uneven. For instance, some schools provide teacher’s aides, and this assistance can allow productive activity with a couple of groups simultaneously. There may be parent volunteers who play that role. Some schools are close to a college and have access to preservice teachers. And, then there are those classrooms with multiple computers that allow students to work with research-proven programs.

Those situations exist, but there are many more teachers who are on their own trying to manage small groups. I suspect you are one of those.

Even in those cases, there are things a teacher can do to minimize the problem. For instance, in some schemes the teacher moves among groups. This takes various forms. In paired reading, the teacher goes from pair-to-pair to monitor progress, guide partners’ responses, and add some teaching to the mix. I recommend that all the kids in a class work on fluency simultaneously, to make this as efficient as possible. Sometimes teachers alternate between two guided reading groups, interacting with one while the other reads. Cumbersome, perhaps, but workable. Another possibility is book club groups in which the kids play a big role in operating the group discussions; this allows the teacher to move profitably among even more groups.

Teachers can also have everyone in the class reading the same selection at the same time. What varies in this case is the amount of scaffolding, support, and extension that will be provided to some students. That increases the amount of teaching delivered to the lowest readers (they get more help) and decreases it for the best – which fits nicely with Carol Connor’s research (2022) on what leads to the greatest learning for a class. (Connor found that the best readers could make real progress reading on their own and being engaged in more independent activities. She did not find the same benefits for the other students.)

In any event, I’ve long recommended that teachers minimize small group work. Often such work is unnecessary, engaged in only because the teachers are required by their district to do it. This leads to silly stuff like teachers delivering the same lesson multiple times.

While I try to avoid any more small group teaching than necessary, I would never ban the practice. It’s just too valuable and classroom life too complicated to not have access to it – at least when it is used appropriately.

Let’s say you use small group instruction strategically, to target learning needs of students and you need to know what kinds of activities to assign the other students. For that, all you need to do is turn your attention to the research on seatwork…

Except there is no body of research on seatwork (just one study as far as I can tell—and, though helpful, it doesn’t even attempt to describe appropriate instruction in any kind of specific detail).

This is an issue without empirical data; Just lots of authoritative opinion.

So, let me add my advice to the mix.

Use activities that require a lot of accountable reading and writing. We want kids to read and write a lot. Some schemes aimed at doing that reduce instruction markedly to free up reading time. I’m not talking about that kind of thing, since studies haven’t found those practices to be productive for most kids.

The accountability issue is big here. If students know that there will be some real follow up that will take them back through the text in detail it changes both their reading behavior and their learning. I’m not a big fan of one-on-one conferencing in reading because it increases the amount of time kids are away from the teacher and minimizes their accountability.

There are various ways of requiring reading during the time a teacher is busy with another group. The teacher might encourage students to attempt that day’s selection on their own before they try to undertake it with the teacher’s guidance. The same thing can be done, frankly, with a social studies or science chapter. That permits students to read such texts multiple times.

Another possibility is to teach a writing lesson just prior to starting with reading groups and to have the boys and girls working on their compositions or revisions while the teacher is elsewhere. The same can be done with vocabulary lessons.

However, if students have problems with the work tied to such lessons, the teacher will have to follow up – so it’s important that the seatwork not be so demanding that children need teacher help. I’ve tried this with math, which would be fine if doing the problems wasn’t such a big part of the math learning. Teachers really need to be available to take part in that classroom activity, so that pairing wasn’t a good one. 

Accountability means that the teacher is going to have to closely monitor student success. This can be done several ways – but usually through either follow up discussion (small group or whole class) or writing.  

The best seatwork activities will guide students to engage the meaning of the text more deeply. I suspect this is as true for seatwork as for other pedagogical endeavors. That’s why many worksheets and centers simply don’t work very well. To complete them it usually isn’t necessary to think much about the text.

What kinds of activities fit the bill? Here are a few that can be done with any texts that the students are trying to read. The key is to focus them on key parts of the text or language that you suspect will trip kids up.

1.     Sentence reducing and sentence combining

Get students to dig into the meaning of sentences by recomposing them. For instance, have them turn these three sentences into one:

“Cities in many countries have special building laws. Buildings must be strong and flexible. That way, they won’t collapse during an earthquake.” ----> 

To keep buildings from collapsing during an earthquake, cities in many countries have special laws that require the buildings to be strong and flexible.

Or, try breaking this sentence down into multiple sentences:

“So Hayleigh began drawing out her ideas to make charms that look like earrings.”  ---->

Hayleigh draws out her ideas.

She makes charms.

The charms look like earrings.

2.     Cohesion analysis

Get students to connect the ideas across a text. To track the ideas, students can mark each appearance of an idea with different colors or by some other marking system. Here I have used underlining, italics, and bolding to show the links.

“When disasters such as storms, floods, and earthquakes strike an area, people from all over the world want to help. They know that someday they may need help themselves. They also know that it is the right thing to do and that it is rewarding. I think that when people are in need it is important for all of us to find a way to help out.”

“When disasters such as storms, floods, and earthquakes strike an area, people from all over the world want to help. They know that someday they may need help themselves. They also know that it is the right thing to do and that it is rewarding. I think that when people are in need it is important for all of us to find a way to help out.”

3.     Vocabulary and context

Lift some sentences from the text and have the students use the context to figure out the meaning of the underlined word and then have them replace the word with an appropriate synonym or phrase.

Buildings must be strong and flexible. That way, they won’t collapse during an earthquake.

Buildings must be strong and flexible. That way, they won’t _fall down_ during an earthquake.

4.     Text Comparisons

Have students write text comparisons. They can compare today’s text with any other text that you have already had them read or that you have read to them. These comparisons might be of something quite specific such as comparing the characters from two stories, or it might be something more all-encompassing like comparing two social studies chapters (comparing two civilizations in grade 4, for instance).

Each of these exercises requires that students think deeply about the language of the text that they are trying to understand. These kinds of exercises can be done before or after the students have read the text.

Of course, if they are going to analyze text in those ways successfully, you cannot start out with a seatwork assignment. Initially, you’ll need to do these with the boys and girls so that they learn how to do them. In one of Connor’s studies on seatwork, this was one of the big take-aways. Kids often don’t have any idea how to do the seatwork. Using similar activities throughout the year and preparing students to complete them will make a big difference.

References

Amendum, S. J., Li, Y., Hall, L. A., Fitzgerald, J., Creamer, K. H., Head-Reeves, D., & Hollingsworth, H. L. (2009). Which reading lesson instruction characteristics matter for early reading achievement? Reading Psychology, 30(2), 119-147. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710802275173

Block, C. C., Parris, S. R., Reed, K. L., Whiteley, C. S., & Cleveland, M. D. (2009). Instructional approaches that significantly increase reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(2), 262-281. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014319

Connor, C. M., May, H., Sparapani, N., Hwang, J. K., Adams, A., Wood, T. S., . . . Day, S. (2022). Bringing assessment-to-instruction (A2i) technology to scale: Exploring the process from development to implementation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(7), 1495-1532. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000758

Taylor, B. M., Pearson, P. D., Peterson, D. S., & Rodriguez, M. C. (2005). The CIERA School Change Framework: An evidence-based approach to professional development and school reading improvement. Reading Research Quarterly, 40, 40–69.

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What does the research say about students and “one-minute reads” for homework. My son is expected to read the same passage every night for a week, and we mark how many words he reads per minute. We get a new passage weekly. Although I understand WPM as an assessment measure of fluency, what positive and negative effects does this practice have on students? I notice he reads as quickly as possible and hates the task. I fear this is not encouraging appropriate speed and accuracy to support comprehension while also possibly taking away his want to read. Therefore, I’m curious what the research says or what your opinion is on this practice. Thank you.

RELATED: Seatwork that Makes Sense for Reading

Shanahan responds:

I’m a big fan of getting parents involved in their children’s literacy development. I know that isn’t always possible, but it really can help – and kids are usually happy for their parents’ participation. We likely leave achievement points on the table by not asking for parent involvement.

I’m a big fan of oral reading practice to build reading fluency, too. Research, again, is very clear that practicing oral reading – including oral reading to parents can improve reading achievement. In fact, some of the most intriguing studies of fluency teaching focused on parental efforts (Senechal & Young, 2008).

However, what you describe is less like worthwhile fluency work and more like practice for the classroom fluency tests. It is possible that something good might come of this, though it is just as likely that it will steer your son away from being a better reader.

Some studies show that when time rather than reading comprehension is emphasized in oral reading practice students read differently (Valencia, et al., 2017). They try to perform rather than to understand – not the right direction if you want junior to become a good reader. Encouraging parents to listen to their children read each night is a great idea. Having mom or dad timing that is silly –more about trying to juice the test scores rather than making kids better readers.

Another problem with the scheme is the amount of repetition. It isn’t hurtful, just wasteful. Originally, there were two basic approaches to fluency practice: either reading a text repeatedly – no matter how many times – until some accuracy criterion was reached or reading the text a specified number of times. Research suggests that all or most of the improvement that kids are likely to make comes from reading a text 2-3 times (Kuhn, 2005). That means at least two of those nights you are spinning your wheels.

There is also research saying that there is no reason for the repetition. According to that research, it is the amount of reading practice, not the amount of repeated reading practice that matters (Norton, 2012; O’Connor, et al., 2007). I must admit I still think repeated reading has value, but when it comes to parents listening to their children, I would encourage more reading and less repetition.

The one-minute idea is the tip off that this is test practice rather than teaching, and that the teacher is not really interested in improving the kids’ fluency as much as trying affect higher scores on the classroom screener.

You didn’t say anything about the texts that your son is practicing. I hope they aren’t the test passages he’ll be screened on, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Teachers and principals often do this kind of thing to inflate test scores – not understanding that they are both failing to improve the children’s abilities while ruining the value of the testing information.

I think I have read pretty much every study of fluency instruction and have never seen an instructional effort aimed at 1-minute reads. The reason for that amount of time is because test makers thought that might be enough of a reading sample to reveal how kids are doing. Three-minute reads provide better information, and most screeners require that students do two or three one-minute reads to get a sufficient assessment. Trying to match the training time to the testing time is revealing of the real point of this wasteful practice.

Another reason to blow this off is the fact that your son hates it. That’s reason enough to not do this.

I suggest that you talk to your son’s teacher. I’d encourage you to find out where the texts are coming from. If they are test passages, this is a no-no. That’s a rip off and you should complain.

I’d also let her know how unhappy about it he (and you) are about the practice.

In any event, if it were my son I’d continue listening to his reading – though for longer times and without the timer. When he reads a section of text ask him questions about it. If the reading isn’t very good (lots of mistakes, laboring to read the words, poor expression), indeed, have him read it once or twice more. Be positive, be encouraging, make it a nice time for both of you – maybe even take turns reading to each other (one of my granddaughters and I did that last evening). Do that on a regular basis and your son will make faster progress in reading to learn.

References

Homan, S.P., Klesius, J. P., & Hite C. (1993). Effects of repeated readings and nonrepetitive strategies on students’ fluency and comprehension. Journal of Educational Research, 87, 94–99. 

Kuhn, M. R. (2005). A comparative study of small group fluency instruction. Reading Psychology, 26(2), 127–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710590930492

Norton, E. S., & Wolf, M. (2012). Rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading fluency: Implications for understanding and treatment of reading disabilities. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 427-452.

O’Connor, R. E., White, A., & Swanson, H. L. (2007). Repeated reading versus continuous reading: Influences on reading fluency and comprehension. Exceptional Children, 74(1), 31-46.

Rashotte C.A., & Torgeson, J. K. (1985). Repeated reading and reading fluency in learning disabled children. Reading Research Quarterly, 20,180–188.

Senechal, M., & Young, L. (2006). The effect of family literacy interventions on children’s acquisition of reading from kindergarten to grade 3: A meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research, 78, 880-907. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308320319

Valencia, S. W., Smith, A. T., Reece, A. M., Li, M., Wixson, K. K., & Newman, H. (2010). Oral reading fluency assessment: Issues of construct, criterion, and consequential validity. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(3), 270–291. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27822888

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Teacher question:

Dr. Shanahan, I know that you don’t support independent reading at school. However, in my graduate program we are learning that research evidence shows that kids who read the most become the best readers. I don’t get why you don’t support this research-based practice.

Shanahan responds:

In grad school my statistics professor had us analyze a set of research data that he had collected. These data revealed a close connection between the number of school library books and kids’ reading achievement. Makes sense, right? The greater the availability of books, the better the students would read.

Unfortunately, these data showed the opposite of that. The more books available, the lower the kids’ reading ability.

Now there’s a rousing headline for you: “Cut school library budgets so kids can learn to read!”

My point: Beware of correlations.

Your professor describes a relationship between how much students read and how well they read, and you assume the one leads to the other.

But correlation does not mean causation.

Go to the Buzz Feed website and you can see how increases in ice cream consumption lead to murder, something about which fans of mint-chocolate chip or Oreo cookie dough should be concerned about.

Obviously, that’s silly. I eat ice cream all the time and I’ve never killed anyone.

The reason for that odd correlation results because ice cream sales and murder both happen to be related to a third variable, outdoor temperatures. As weather gets hotter, people eat more frozen custard and get more violent. Those latter two variables have nothing to do with each other, despite their high intercorrelation.

In those library book data, the weird connection resulted—not because high book availability interferes with learning to read—but because school libraries at that time were funded based on reading achievement. The poorer a school scored in reading, the more library funding it received.

In other words, poor reading caused library books!

Correlations tell us nothing about the directions of relationship when the variables do have a causal connection.

Your professors are correct. There are many correlational studies showing that the best readers read more. That’s a fact.

But there are several possible interpretations of this correlation.

First, the one you assumed, is that these data show that if students practice their reading, their achievement will rise. 

Second, another possibility however, is that the better readers choose to read more. Their stronger abilities make reading enjoyable, less of chore. Poor readers often can’t find books that they would enjoy reading.

Third, it’s possible that this reading problem is like the ice cream-murder connection. Perhaps amount of reading and reading achievement are both related to some third variable, like parent education. Learning and students’ life habits may both be connected to how much the parents read.

Fourth, the relationship may be reciprocal. Higher reading ability encourages more reading, and more reading rewards the reader with improved reading ability – the so-called Matthew effect.

Scientists have long been aware of specious correlation and have worked out ways for sorting out this kind of thing.

The most obvious fix is to test the patterns experimentally. For example, ice cream producers could provide free ice cream to everyone who lives in certain randomly selected cities for the month of July. They would withhold these goodies from other cities. An experiment I would be happy to volunteer for. I bet people’s weights might increase in the ice cream gifted cities, but the murder rates? Probably not. With a study like that we could be certain.

What about reading?

We could try to get kids to read more and then measure improvements, if any, in their reading achievement.

There have been several such studies, and they have not been terribly successful. The results have ranged from no improvement to extremely modest gains (NICHD, 2000).

That doesn’t mean that reading practice can’t improve reading achievement, only that the practice evaluated so far haven’t done so. Most such studies have looked at “sustained silent reading" (SSR) or DEAR time, the practice of setting aside class time for kids to read self-selected books on their own.

A major flaw in these studies has been a lack of measurement of amount of reading. They impose the practice but fail to monitor whether kids are really reading more.

One of the best studies of this type found that as kids read more at school during their DEAR time, they chose to read less on their own away from school. These independent reading times at school may be exchanging one kind of reading for another or may be discouraging students from embracing reading on their own (Summers & McClelland, 1982).

One very important point that is usually ignored in these discussions is that these kinds of studies are not really measuring the impact of independent reading on reading achievement, but the impact of specific ways of encouraging kids to read more. Perhaps, SSR and DEAR are duds, but maybe there are some forms of encouragement that could be more successful. I’ve long thought, for instance, that these approaches isolate kids which is not very motivating.

Teachers and publishers often tell me that they have improved on SSR (e.g., by adding reading conferences, quizzes) so I need not be concerned about its limitations. So far, no one has conducted a study showing, unambiguously, that we can increase kids’ amount of reading with clear improvements resulting in achievement.

Colleagues have often chided me for not recognizing the importance of practice. It is not practice that I abhor, but the type of practice that is being promoted.

Experimental research in other realms suggest that not all practice is equal (Ericsson, 1993). "Deliberate practice" seems to be particularly effective. That is practice that is purposeful and systematic, requiring focused attention and that is conducted with a specific goal of improving performance. Practicing under the auspices of a coach seems to matter, too.

Deliberate practice – which has been found to be quite effective – sounds less like free reading and more like the reading that teachers guide in a directed reading lesson.  

Another way that scientists deal with this kind of correlational evidence is to conduct longitudinal studies in which amount of reading practice and reading achievement are each measured multiple times. Instead of correlating those two things at a single time, we can track the influence of each across development. It is possible, for instance, to connect the amount of reading practice fourth graders engage in with their gains in reading achievement between fourth and fifth grade.

Such studies, however, have failed to show a clear connection between earlier reading practice and reading comprehension gains (Aarnoutse & van Leeuwe, 1998). For instance, one of these studies concluded: “Reading achievement at age 10 significantly predicted independent reading at age 11. The alternative path, from independent reading at age 10 to reading achievement at age 11, was not significant.” (Harlaar, Deater- Deckard, Thompson, DeThorne, et al., 2011, p. 2123). That study also attributed differences in both reading achievement and reading practice to genetic influences.

Another of these longitudinal correlational studies concluded that, “the results show that it is children’s reading skills that contribute to their subsequent out-of-school reading habits rather than vice versa: the more competent the children were in sentence comprehension, text reading, and word recognition at the end of first grade, the higher the amount of book and magazine reading” (Leppanen, Aunola, & Nurmi, 2005, p. 395).

This study did find that reading practice was related to later improvements in word recognition but not enough to affect the kids’ reading comprehension.

Similarly, with older students, Cain and Oakhill (2011) reported that reading practice had positive impacts on vocabulary, but not comprehension, and that practice was more attributable to reading attainment than the opposite.

My conclusions from all of this?

Increasing students’ amount of reading may have positive impacts on at least some aspects of reading (e.g., word recognition, fluency, vocabulary). And, over a long enough period, perhaps those improvements in foundational skills might enhance reading comprehension—though neither experimental nor longitudinal correlational studies have found such a connection.

The practice effects that have been reported are tiny, so if they do eventually lead to better comprehension, that would likely take a long time, and those improvements would probably be even smaller.

The more certain effect, according to these longitudinal correlational studies, is that reading achievement influences desire to read. If we are serious about making kids love reading, we’d better do a better job in teaching things like phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, morphology, sentence comprehension, cohesion, text structure, and so on.

Swapping one form of school reading – teachers guiding reading of challenging text – for another (having kids reading self-selected texts on their own) is not likely to improve either achievement or a love for reading. Even efforts to get kids to read more during the summer away from school have not had much impact on achievement and in those studies there is no tradeoff, the kids aren’t getting less instructional reading (Kim & Quinn, 2013).  

Bottom line?

Independent reading at school is not a research-based practice.

Use school time to raise reading achievement and find ways to encourage kids to choose to read on their own away from school.

Doug Fisher has had great success in getting inner-city kids to read at home by making texts available, allowing reading choice, providing teacher book talks and opportunities for kids to share socially their home reading at school (e.g., book clubs).

That approach, though not yet proven to work by experimental study, intrigues me because it has the possibility of both increasing amount of student reading while encouraging students to choose to read on their own. Even better, would be doing this while preserving the maximum amount of teaching; an approach more consistent with research findings that show achievement to have a bigger impact on practice, than the opposite.

Doug estimates that his students get 15 extra days of teaching each year from this practice, since 30 minutes of free reading per day across a 180-day school year displaces 15 days of instruction or deliberate practice.

Now please let me enjoy my ice cream in peace.


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References

Aarnoutse, C., & van Leeuwe, J. (1998). Relation between reading comprehension, vocabulary, reading pleasure, and reading frequency. Educational Research and Evaluation, 4(2), 143–166. https://doi.org/10.1076/edre.4.2.143.6960

Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2011). Matthew effects in young readers: Reading comprehension and reading experience aid vocabulary development. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 44(5), 431–443. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219411410042

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

Harlaar, N., Deater?Deckard, K., Thompson, L. A., DeThorne, L. S., & Petrill, S. A. (2011). Associations between reading achievement and independent reading in early elementary school: A genetically informative cross?lagged study. Child Development, 82(6), 2123–2137. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01658.x

Kim, J. S., & Quinn, D. M. (2013). The effects of summer reading on low-income children’s literacy achievement from kindergarten to grade 8: A meta-analysis of classroom and home interventions. Review of Educational Research, 83, 386-431. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313483906

Summers, E. G., & McClelland, J. V. (1982). A field-based evaluation of sustained silent reading (SSR) in intermediate grades. Alberta Journal of Educational Research 28, 100-112.

Original blog entry with comments

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The original blog entry included a misinterpretation of a study by Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley. I assumed that when they introduced letters into their PA intervention that they named the letters. I was incorrect in that assumption as Christopher Such a vigilant reader of this blog noticed. That means that there is no evidence that teaching letter names improves reading achievement (though including plastic letters in PA instruction was positive). There is also no evidence that students are benefited by not teaching letter names or that it is better to only introduce sounds for letters than for names. That means I still side with theories that argue for spending a small amount of time teaching letters, but unlike what is incorrectly claimed in this blog, there is still NO direct evidence supporting that belief. This note was added on September 30, 2024 -- I made no changes to the original entry, so it is easy to see my mistake and to disregard to the errant evidentiary claim.

RELATED: How Can I Teach with Books that are Two Years Above Student Reading Levels?

Teacher question:

I have a question regarding letter naming. I know that for decades, letter naming fluency has been a reliable predictor of future reading ability. I'm wondering if there are any recent studies that continue to uphold this truth. At our school, we are seeing more and more children start kindergarten with very low letter-name knowledge. Yet, our reading scores, for the most part are high. We are in an affluent, education-focused community, and the parents at our school seem to have a good amount of buy-in... yet their kids don't know their letter names! I guess I'm wondering if letter naming is still as reliable a predictor as it used to be.

Shanahan responds:

Indeed, letter name knowledge continues to be the best or one of the best predictors of later reading achievement (e.g., Adlof, Catts, & Lee, 2010; Bond, & Dykstra, 1997; Fletcher, & Satz, 1982; Hammill, 2004; Kegel, & Bus, 2014; Schatschneider, Fletcher, Francis, Carlson, & Foorman, 2004). Consistently, for the past century, studies report reasonably high correlations between letter name knowledge and reading. They vary a bit from study to study depending on how early the letter knowledge is assessed, the outcome prediction (word reading or comprehension), and when the outcome is gauged (kindergarten, first grade, second grade. later).

But knowing the letter names has consistently predicted later reading successfully.

That doesn’t mean that every kindergartner who doesn’t know his/her ABCs is on the way to a lifetime of illiteracy. The correlations vary, but .50 is a reasonable estimate. Alphabet knowledge explains or predicts 25% of the variation in later reading scores. That means that if letter name knowledge causes literacy learning and we could make all kindergartners know their ABCs, there would be 25% less variation in reading ability (that means fewer strugglers).

Of course, a correlation of .50 doesn’t mean that everyone who knows their letters does well in reading or that everyone who starts school without letter names tattooed on their brains won’t learn to read. It is a correlation and far from a perfect one. Given the size of the prediction, it would not be surprising that your kids succeed despite this lack of knowledge.

The important question is, “Is the relationship causal?” Does knowing one’s letters make any difference in learning to read?

There is no obvious functional role for letter names in reading, so it has long been supposed that ABC knowledge isa proxy for some other variable. One idea has been that kids who know more letters are more intelligent. Being able to remember up to 52 meaningless symbols must reveal something about attention, perseverance, memory, and so on.

Another claim has been that ABC knowledge comes about because more educated parents teach this to their children prior to school entrance. Those kinds of parents are likely to continue to offer support, so the numbers of letters known are no more than an index of how much help mom and dads will provide in the future.

That all makes sense until you look closer at the strange letter name data. ABC knowledge is a better predictor of eventual reading progress than IQ. Also, low socio-economic status parents appear to be more committed to teaching the ABCs than those highly educated parents (e.g., Burgess, 1999; Hoyne, & Egan, 2022; Robins, Ghosh, Rosales, & Treiman, 2014; Sénéchal, 2006). The latter might be an example of what you are seeing in your school.

Another weird pattern is that knowledge of the ABCs is one of the best predictors of math achievement, too. Now come on. That really makes no sense.

We don’t really know why alphabet knowledge is such a good predictor, but it is. If you are trying to identify who might be at risk in your kindergarten, it must be considered (along with phonemic awareness, invented spelling, RAN, oral language). I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.

However, if the issue is whether you should teach the ABCs as part of early reading instruction, then you’ll get a pretty good argument. Most programs include the ABCs, with some going a little crazy over it (like letter of the week efforts). Others strenuously object to the teaching of the ABCs (e.g., Diane McGuiness) arguing that letter names are confusing and advocating instruction in sounds but with no names.

I suspect the right answer is someplace in between.

Studies of teaching the alphabet (and there aren’t many) have not found gains in reading achievement due to this tuition (e.g., NELP, 2008; Ohnmacht, 1969 cited in Gibson & Levin, 1975; Roberts, 2003). That suggests not putting much time into teaching the ABCs. Twenty-six weeks on teaching letters is overkill (Reutzel, 1992).

Why should we teach the letters at all?

There are no studies in which groups are either taught letter names or not that show such teaching improves reading achievement. But there is research showing that teaching phonemic awareness has a positive impact on learning to read (NRP, 2000; NELP, 2002), and that teaching letters along with PA multiplies the PA effect (Byrne-Fielding-Barnsley, 1995). It almost triples the payoff. Teaching PA improves reading, teaching PA along with letter names improves it even more. Much more.

I would teach kindergartners decoding and word reading including phonemic awareness, letter names, letter sounds, how to write the letters, morphology, and spelling and I would encourage activities like invented spelling. That’s the surest way to achieve maximum decoding ability – other things are needed to bolster the language comprehension part of the equation.

Let’s face it. Everything has a name. Pretending that letters are an exception won’t improve reading achievement, and teaching the sounds as names will have limited value and add unnecessary confusion (what do we call the letter “e,” in that case: ?, ?, /?/, and of course there is the silent e?).

Beginners do rely on letter names as a reminder of the sounds, and that works sometimes (Venezky, 1975). When there is a misunderstanding (e.g., making the /d/ for W), it is decidedly brief. 

There are theories as to why we should teach letter names (Foulin, 2005; Seidenberg, 2018), and I think they hold water. But to tell the truth these explanations don’t matter. In a nod to Jerry McGuire, you had me when you said teaching letter names tripled the impact of phonemic awareness on early reading achievement.

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References

Adlof, S. M., Catts, H. W., & Lee, J. (2010). Kindergarten predictors of second versus eighth grade reading comprehension impairments. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43(4), 332-345. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219410369067

Bond, G. L., & Dykstra, R. (1997). The cooperative research program in first?grade reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 32(4), 348-427. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.32.4.4

Burgess, S. (1999). The influence of speech perception, oral language ability, the home literacy environment, and prereading knowledge on the growth of phonological sensitivity: A 1-year longitudinal study. Reading Research Quarterly, 34(4), 400-402. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.34.4.1

Byrne, B., & Fielding-Barnsley, R. (1995).  Evaluation of a program to teach phonemic awareness to young children: A 2- and 3-year follow-up and a new preschool trial. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87(3), 488-503.

Fletcher, J. M., & Satz, P. (1982). Kindergarten prediction of reading achievement: A seven-year longitudinal follow-up. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 42(2), 681-685. https://doi.org/10.1177/001316448204200233

Foulin, J. N. (2005). Why is letter-name knowledge such a good predictor of learning to read? Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18(2), 129-155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-004-5892-2

Hammill, D. D. (2004). What we know about correlates of reading. Exceptional Children, 70(4), 453-468.

Hoyne, C., & Egan, S. M. (2022). ABCs and 123s: A large birth cohort study examining the role of the home learning environment in early cognitive development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 221, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105424

Kegel, C. A. T., & Bus, A. G. (2014). Evidence for causal relations between executive functions and alphabetic skills based on longitudinal data. Infant and Child Development, 23(1), 22-35. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.1827

National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Washington, DC: National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.

Riley, J. L. (1996). The ability to label the letters of the alphabet at school entry: A discussion on its value. Journal of Research in Reading, 19(2), 87-101. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1996.tb00090.x

Roberts, T. A. (2003). Effects of alphabet-letter instruction on young children's word recognition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 41-51. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.95.1.41

Robins, S., Ghosh, D., Rosales, N., & Treiman, R. (2014). Letter knowledge in parent–child conversations: Differences between families differing in socio-economic status. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00632

Schatschneider, C., Fletcher, J. M., Francis, D. J., Carlson, C. D., & Foorman, B. R. (2004). Kindergarten prediction of reading skills: A longitudinal comparative analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(2), 265-282. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.96.2.265

Sénéchal, M. (2006). Testing the home literacy model: Parent involvement in kindergarten is differentially related to grade 4 reading comprehension, fluency, spelling, and reading for pleasure. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(1), 59-87. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr1001_4

Venezky, Richard L. (1975). The curious role of letter names in reading instruction. Visible Language, 9(1), 7-23.

Teacher question:
I teach 4th-grade general education. I have read several of your articles the last few days because I have a growing frustration regarding guided reading. I believe a lot of your ideas about what does not work are correct, but I don't understand what you believe we SHOULD be doing. I am confused about how to give students difficult textbooks to read without reading it to them. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I do not know how to scaffold science or social studies text for students that are 2 years behind without reading it to them. I also feel pressure in these subjects to read it to them because I thought it was more important for them to understand the information thoroughly by reading the text aloud, having thoughtful discussions, and follow up activities. Every time I think I know what I should be doing, I read another article and realize that I am doing that wrong too. So, please give me guidance on how to best to teach nonfiction and fiction text to my class whole group. What strategies and types of activities are the best?

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain. What would it look like to scaffold a fourth-grade lesson from a social studies book with children who are reading at second-grade level? There are several possibilities.

First, I would “level” (pun intended) with the kids. I would not try to hide from them that I was going to ask them to read a book that in the past we would have avoided. The point here is motivation. People like a challenge and kids are people. When you ask them to take on something hard, let them in on the secret so they can take on the challenge with the right mindset and so they can be proud of themselves when they manage to meet the challenge – and we will make sure that they meet the challenge.

Second, it is essential that the teacher read the chapter before the kids do. We need to identify the linguistic, conceptual, and textual features that may be the source of their difficulty. Look out for ideas that you think will be especially complicated, subtle, or abstract, assumptions of background knowledge that you think your students lack, unknown vocabulary, complicated sentences, cohesive links that might be hard to track, organizational structure that students might ignore, and so on. Basically, you are trying to figure out what might make this text hard for your students to comprehend.

I’m willing to head off or avoid a problem if I think the students cannot surmount it. For instance, if there is a word that I think the students will not know and the author doesn’t define it, the context doesn’t reveal its meaning, or it can’t be figured out from morphology, then I am willing to familiarize the kids with it prior to reading. However, if it is possible to gain its meaning from the text, I will not try to avoid the problem. I’d rather that they miss it, which will allow me to teach kids how to take it on successfully. Teachers must decide which problems to solve for the kids and which to guide them to fix themselves. The real learning will come from the latter.

Third, the scaffolding described above will likely require some rereading—either of the whole chapter (fourth-grade science and social studies chapters can be surprisingly short, so rereading the entire chapter is usually not that big a deal). Thus, they try to read it; I question them and help them work through the problems; and then they reread it (perhaps more than once), to see if they can figure it out the second or third time.

Fourth, if your kids’ reading levels are more than a year or two below the level of the book that you are trying to teach, consider starting with fluency work. Have those students read the text aloud, once or twice before the lesson aimed at comprehension of the text. This can be done many ways (e.g., having partners practice reading the social studies text during their ELA fluency time, getting parents involved, including this kind of practice in a Tier 2 intervention). The point of the fluency work is to reduce the amount of basic reading struggle – the reading of the words – that these students may face. Once they have engaged in the fluency practice, these students should read the text along with the rest of the class. They will benefit from the same comprehension scaffolds noted above.

What you are trying to do with this encouragement, fluency work, and comprehension scaffolding is to enable the students to read the text that they are sure to struggle with. You can monitor their learning by how much improvement you see in their reading of each text. But remember your goal is not to avoid difficulty but to enable students to surmount difficulty. That means that you don’t shift kids to texts at their supposed levels, you don’t read the texts to the kids, and you don’t go around the text by telling them what it says.


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References

Shanahan, T. (In press). Leveled Readers, Leveled Lives. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Previous Comments 

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Teacher Question:

An educational consultant came to our district and she and I disagreed over the idea of fluency instruction in the middle school. Our middle and high school classrooms are mostly homogeneously grouped, with many struggling readers three or more grade levels.

She said that if we are teaching fluency, there should be a plethora of data to support it, and that all students do not need fluency work. I disagree with her, but I was not sure if I should push it because maybe we are not exactly "teaching fluency." (We are less teaching fluency, than having students practice it). If all the students in a class are more than two years behind grade level, would you encourage fluency work (partner reading, echo reading, choral reading, repeated reading, etc.)?

RELATED: Is Comprehension Better with Digital Text?

Shanahan responds:

I agree with your consultant that not all students require fluency instruction.

The fluency development of average students often plateaus at about the 8^th or 9^th grade. Proficient readers tend to read aloud at about 160 words per minute, and it is common that many students accomplish that by the time they enter high school (Rasinski, et al., 2022). Those students are not likely to benefit much from fluency work.

There can be exceptions to this, of course. Even if students read that automatically, if their reading doesn’t reflect the meaning of the text (respecting the punctuation, pausing at meaningful boundaries, etc.), I would continue. Also, even if students are generally fluent, they may not be able to accomplish such fluency with special texts – like algebra books or Shakespeare. Some targeted teaching there makes sense, too.

If students are two or three years behind their grade level in reading, then it would not be surprising that they would require fluency instruction throughout high school.  

I’m uncertain as to what a plethora of data would look like. Listen to kids read some grade level texts. If they are reading with those kinds of accuracy, speed, and prosody, then don’t bother with fluency. If they can’t, there should be some fluency work.

Why do I give that advice?

The importance of fluency instruction does decline as students advance up the grades. That may explain your consultant’s reticence. However, even by 8^th grade, fluency continues to explain 25% of the variance in reading comprehension. That means if we could get all students to read fluently, the differences in comprehension would be reduced by 25% -- which is substantial (Tosto, et al., 2017). This only works if fluency has a causal relationship with reading comprehension – which it does (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Also, Tim Rasinski and his colleagues have conducted studies showing fluency problems with large numbers and percentages of high school (Rasinski, et al., 2005). That suggests a strong possibility that many of your students will need fluency teaching.

As for your concern as to whether you are teaching fluency or just having students practice it, I think that is a definitional problem.

Fluency is an action, not a form of declarative knowledge. You don’t tell someone how to be fluent, you guide them to do that. It is not terribly different than learning to dance or skate or ride a bicycle.

How do you usually teach actions?

Modeling helps. Read a sentence or short paragraph and then have the students give it a try. Provide opportunities to engage in the action and offer both feedback or advice and opportunities to repeat the action to improve on the attempt.

All those approaches to teaching fluency that you noted provide that kind of “teaching.”  One more thing needed for effective fluency instruction is text challenging enough to require fluency improvement. With students who are two and three years behind, fluency work with their grade level textbooks should be just what the doctor ordered.


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References

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Paige, D. D., Rasinski, T. V., & Magpuri-Lavell, T. (2012). Is fluent, expressive reading important for high school readers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(1), 67-76. https//doi.org:10.1002/JAAL.00103

Rasinski, T., Galeza, A., Vogel, L., Viton, B., Rundo, H., Royan, E., Shaheen, R. N., Bartholomew, M., Kaewkaemket, C., Stokes, F., Young, C., & Paige, D. (2022). Oral reading fluency of college graduates: Toward a deeper understanding of college ready fluency. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 66(1), 23-30.

Rasinski, T. V, Padak, N. D., McKeon, C. A., Wilfong, L. G., Friedauer, J. A., & Heim, P. (2005). Is reading fluency a key for successful high school reading? Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(1), 22–27. https://doi.org:10.1598/JAAL.49.1.3

Tosto, M. G., Hayiou-Thomas, M., Harlaar, N., Prom-Wormley, E., Dale, P. S., & Plomin, R. (2017). The genetic architecture of oral language, reading fluency, and reading comprehension: A twin study from 7 to 16 years. Developmental Psychology, 53(6), 1115-1129. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000297 

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Shanahan Response:

When I was a young boy, I learned about King Canute. He was the one who revealed the limits of his power by ordering the tides not to come in. They came in anyway. More about that later.

This question about cueing systems was posed to me a couple of weeks ago by a colleague I hadn’t spoken with in a long time.

I wasn’t surprised by his question. He knew I was a fan of explicit phonics instruction and over the past couple years some states have banned three-cueing.

I’ve written about three-cueing before but not since governors and state legislators warmed to the topic. Their actions make it worth revisiting.

What is three-cueing?

Three-cueing refers to how people recognize and read words. A cue is a signal that provides a hint as to how to read a word.

Three such word reading cues have been identified: semantics, syntax, and graphophonics. A semantic cue provides hints as to the meaning of the word you are trying to read. For example, ‘The sailor lifted the _______.” Semantically, it should be clear that the word refers to something that a sailor can lift. That would include any words that have an obvious connection to sailing like anchors, mainsails, or cargo, but it also points to items that anyone might lift (e.g., pens, coffee cups, magazines, spirits).

Syntax offers a second cue. Whatever is to be lifted by this sailor is a noun, reducing the population of possible words to one of the 80,000 English nouns.

Finally, there are the graphophonic cues – the letters or spelling patterns and the sounds or pronunciations that they signal. Readers might try to decode from print to pronunciation, but they could also look only at the first letter or two and, along with those other cues, to make an educated guess. In this case, “an----” would be a great hint for anchor, though sailors might lift some other items that begin that way such as anchovy.

Kenneth Goodman (1967), a noted psychologist, theorized that proficient readers would rely on print as little as possible, anticipating words based on those cueing systems. He thought that proficiency meant that the reader had become liberated from the print – relying on letters as little as possible to identify words.  

Is there evidence that readers use those three cues when reading words?

There is. In that sense, three-cueing is a research-based idea. There are several studies showing that children as young as two-years-old expect print to have meaning (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Harste, Burke, & Woodward, 1984). If you show them a cereal box and ask them to read the word “Kellogg’s,” they’ll tell you it says, “corn flakes” or “cereal.”

There is also extensive evidence from miscue analysis (Goodman 1967). These studies examine oral reading errors and reveal that when readers misread words, those miscues often fit semantically or syntactically.

Three-cueing theory is based on substantial amounts of such evidence. That evidence shows that readers, when trying to read words, will use whatever information is available to accomplish that. If you have any doubt have someone cross out some words in a text and see what you try to do.

What’s the problem?

The problem with that research is that it is based on misreading. When someone fails to read a word, they may rely on those semantic or syntactic cues, but not when they read the words.

Instead of readers becoming “unglued” from print as they gain proficiency, eye movement studies show that good readers look at all the letters when they read (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). Other studies show that as readers increase in proficiency, their reliance on those graphophonic cues increase, while their use of the other systems decline (Stanovich, Cunningham, & Feeman, 1984). In other words, poor readers rely on these cueing systems to help them to guess at the words they can’t read, while better readers focus as much as possible on the letters and sounds. Those other cueing systems aren’t reading – they’re a “work around” when for some reason reading isn’t working.

That’s probably why so many studies have found that phonics instruction is beneficial and that reading brains show a coordination of the visual and phonemic information. By way of contrast, in the 60 years since three-cueing was proposed, there is no direct evidence that teaching it improves reading.

Do you support the three-cueing prohibition laws?

No, even though I suspect that much of the three-cueing instruction is worthless at best and somewhat misleading at worst, I don’t. I think such instruction is a mistake, but these laws and regulations are more likely to undermine quality instruction than to encourage it.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

“As used in this section, "three-cueing approach" means any model of teaching students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues.” This quote is from the Ohio version of the three-cueing prohibition.

This law not only seems to ban attempts to teach students to guess at words – which is a reasonable goal – but it neglects the nature of reading and what it means to teach reading.

This law bans the teaching of essential aspects of reading – elements included in the simple model of reading, Scarborough’s reading rope, and the recent Active Model of Reading.

It also forbids much of the reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel, National Early Literacy Panel, National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children or Youth, or what is recommended by the What Works Clearinghouse (which is the unit of the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Science that provides practical guidance to educators). These sources identify key aspects of what we mean when we speak of the “science of reading.”

Reading comprehension is an important aspect of reading and it depends on using “meaning, structure and syntax.” Perhaps the political types don’t think Ohio’s children should be taught to comprehend.

But isn’t that law focused specifically on word reading?

No, actually, it isn’t. I checked Ohio’s definition of reading instruction, and it includes comprehension. That means if Ohio teachers try to teach reading comprehension, they had better not use any approaches focused on “meaning, structure and syntax.”

Kind of like protecting baseball by prohibiting any use of bats.

Are you saying that the problem is that this law may be overgeneralized to include more than decoding?

That’s a problem. But not the only one. This kind of ban on three-cueing may have unfortunate negative consequences for the best explicit decoding instruction, too.

The problem here is that parents, journalists, social media types who advocate for such legislation don’t really understand phonics instruction or decoding – despite their advocacy.

Successful decoding in reading is a two-step process. It involves more than translating the letters into phonemes – though that is the starting point — and, as such, students should be taught to perceive the phonemes, to link them to letters, to pronounce spelling patterns, and to break words into syllables.

Because of the complications of English spelling there is more to it than that, however. Perhaps no one has had as deep an understanding of our spelling system as the late, Richard L. Venezky, the author of The Structure of English Orthography and The American Way of Spelling. Here is how he explained that second step in the decoding process:

“If what is first produced does not sound like something already known from listening, a child has to change one or more of the sound associations (most probably a vowel) and try again. The result, however, should make sense in the context in which it appears.”

That simply means that when we decode words we need to monitor our success – and we do that by evaluating our pronunciations against “meaning, structure and syntax.”

Of course, Ohio has mandated that students only be taught the first part of the decoding process. They now prohibit the second part – the part where readers may determine that their first try wasn’t right and that they must consider other alternative sounds or pronunciations. (No, when their first attempt at decoding fails, students shouldn’t be taught that guessing from context is the next step). Ohio kids are required to figure out what to do about such failure on their own. Teachers, apparently, can no longer teach that.

Teaching three-cueing is a bad idea. I agree with that. Students shouldn’t be taught to use pictures, meaning, context, or syntax to guess at the words.

They should be taught to decode words.

But that doesn’t mean banning three-cueing is sensible.

Canute couldn’t stop the tides. But, of course, he didn’t have the power to control the moon.

Readers must decode.

Politicians can’t change that.

Unfortunately, they can prevent teachers from teaching all the skills needed for students to learn to decode proficiently.

When politicians try to legislate a science of reading, they should consult with scientists not journalists, social media experts, or representatives of special interest groups.

References

Ferreiro, E., &  Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Exeter, NH: Heinemann

Goodman, K. S. (1965). A linguistic study of cues and miscues. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED011482

Goodman, K. S. (1967). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, 6(4), 126-135.

Harste, J., Burke, C., & Woodward, V. (1984). Language stories & Literacy Lessons. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1989). The psychology of reading. Englewood Cliffs, MJ: Prentice Hall.  

Stanovich, K. E., Cunningham, A. E., & Feeman, D. J. (1984). Relation between early reading acquisition and word decoding with and without context: A longitudinal study of first-grade children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 668–677.

https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.76.4.668

Venezky, Richard L. (1999). The American way of spelling. New York: Guilford Press.

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Annually, I consult Charity Navigator (U.S.) and Charity Intelligence (Canada) to identify the top-rated literacy charities (4-stars in U.S., and 5-stars in Canada). You can be sure that the charities listed here:

• Are international, national, or multi-regional in scope,
• Focus entirely or mainly on providing books and literacy instruction to populations in need,
• Provide these services directly to children,
• Are transparent in their reporting, and
• Spend all or most of their donations on their missions rather than overhead.

I have no connections to any of these charities. Donations to any and all of these organizations make good literacy things happen for lots of boys and girls.

I am pleased to point out that there are literally hundreds of local, state, and provincial charities that meet all but the first of my criteria. There are too many of these more localized efforts for me to evaluate. If you are more interested in local giving than taking a regional, national, or international focus, those can easily be identified with Charity Navigator or Charity Intelligence. Please support some of these local charities, too!

Of course, the major purpose of this entry is to encourage financial support for these valuable institutions. However, it could be used in a couple of other ways as well.

For instance, I know that many readers of this blog work in schools that serve children from economically distressed families – the types of kids that many of these charities serve. This list might be useful for identifying potential sources of support or partnership for your schools or for some of the children that you serve.

Also, I know some of you may not be in a position to make a financial contribution to these fine organizations, but many of them indicate that they need volunteers to help out, and this list may give you a starting point on identifying organizations in your community that would love your assistance.

RELATED: ’Tis the Season of Test Prep: Bah Humbug

I’m recommending these charities today, but will keep these listings on the charity page of my website through the coming year: Shanahan Charities 

Book Trust is a national early literacy nonprofit increasing book access, choice, and ownership for thousands of students. Providing all children equitable access to books of their choice to promote reading motivation and engagement. In the past year, they have delivered 632,313 books to 58,106 students in 15 states, engaging almost 3,000 teachers from 194 schools. Over the past two decades, they have distributed more than 10 million books to children.

Books for Africa. Most African children who attend school have never owned a book of their own. In many classrooms, 10-20 students share one textbook. Books For Africa supplies sea containers of books to rural school libraries, orphanages, adult literacy programs, and community resource centers (containers hold about 25k books). Founded in 1988, Books for Africa collects, sorts, ships, and distributes books to children in Africa. Books donated by publishers, schools, libraries, individuals, and organizations are sorted and packed by volunteers who carefully choose books that are age and subject appropriate. They send enough good books for whole classes to use. In the past year, they have provided more than 4 million books.

Children’s Literacy Initiative. This program provides professional development and resources aimed at improving early literacy instruction and learning. Their efforts provide coaching for teachers, workshops and seminars, and they stock classrooms with books. They help educators serving high-need student populations to learn high-impact instructional strategies aimed at school improvement. Currently, the Initiative serves about 250 schools in 6 states with more than 100,000 children. Over the past 12 years, CLI has helped more than 30,000 teachers deliver quality PK- 5 early literacy instruction.

Curious Learning works with partners to curate, localize, and distribute free open-source apps in 69 languages that empower everyone to have the opportunity to learn to read. They work to empower users with the resources and tools to activate learning and engagement, from the individual child that wants to learn to read, to the parent who wants more for their children, and to the teacher striving to help many. This year their technological resources have reached 3.5 million children around the world, including serving more than 100,000 children in Ukraine. 

Ferst Readers' mission is to strengthen communities by providing quality books and literacy resources for children and their families to use at home during the earliest stages of development. Their efforts focus on children in low-income communities. They ensure that children have age-appropriate books in their homes and that their parents have the literacy resources needed to support early learning and book sharing. By mailing a new book every month to enrolled children, birth to five, Ferst Readers is committed to providing early learning opportunities. They have distributed more than 7 million books over the past 24 years (about a half million each year now in 11 states)!

First Book is dedicated to ensuring that all children, regardless of their background or zip code, can succeed, by removing barriers to equitable education. They reach 6.5 million kids each year in low-income communities across North America, providing books and resources through a powerful network of more than 600,000 educators, the largest online community of its kind. By infusing high-quality resources into classrooms and programs nationwide, they help ensure that children are ready to learn.

Reach Out and Read was founded in 1989 to help families make reading a part of their routines, and to supply the books they need to get started. They are now in all 50 states, with 6,200 program sites that provide 7.1 million books each year. Their pediatric network provides families at routine check-ups with the knowledge and tools they need to make reading a part of their daily routine. Currently, they reach 4.4 million children across the country — more than three-fourths of whom come from low-income families.

Reading is Fundamental was founded in the 1960s with the purpose of making books available to children growing up in poverty. This year alone they have distributed almost 5 million books and other literacy resources, and their efforts reach 91 percent of all elementary schools in the United States (serving 24 million children).

Reading Partners. Founded in 1999, the mission of Reading Partners is to help children become lifelong readers by empowering communities to provide individualized instruction with measurable results. They do this by focusing on children from low-income communities; giving one-on-one instruction at the student's reading level; recruiting and training community volunteers to work with children; partnering with high-need elementary schools to offer free services on the school campus; and providing a way for volunteers to give a small amount of their time to make a huge difference in a child's life.

Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments, they develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond. The literacy programs that they support around the world have served 35 million children and they have distributed more than 39 million books.

United Through Reading unites military families facing physical separation by facilitating the bonding experience of reading aloud. In more than 200 locations worldwide on land and at sea, it offers military service members the opportunity to be video-recorded reading books to the special children in their lives. More than 2 million families have used the United Through Literacy app. Services can be accessed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When service members read to children they love and send the video recordings and books home: family morale is boosted; separation-related stress is reduced; family reading routines are maintained; children remain connected to their service members, making family reintegration easier; and children's literacy and language skills develop.

Canadian Charities

CODE promotes every child’s right to read. It works in partnership with locally based organizations to promote local literacy education efforts around the world. They have helped more than 10 million children to gain access to better reading and writing education, providing teacher education, supporting literacy programs, research initiatives, and literacy awards. CODE’s literacy efforts provide teacher professional development and equip teachers with culturally relevant children’s books and learning materials to nurture reading and writing skills in young students. 

First Book Canada. Over the past 15 years, First Book Canada has distributed more than 10 million high-quality age-appropriate books to kids in need who would not have access to books otherwise. Their programs focus on getting books into the hands of children growing up in poverty. The program reached more than 130,000 children this year.

Please be generous!



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Teacher question:  

We’ve been given a directive to provide plans/resources to “support schools in preparing students for these high-stakes tests.” Our ELA team is discouraged by this ask. We joked that we’d create a document that just said, “stay the course-and teach word recognition to those who are not yet reading at grade level.” The district is looking at data to determine areas of need. This leads us down a slippery slope that often ends with schools forming main idea reteaching groups, and inference groups, etc. What advice do you have for us?

RELATED: Literacy Charities for 2025

Shanahan response:

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten up on this soapbox. 

Many consider this “the season to be jolly,” but for schools the kickoff for heavy test prep is soon to begin.

Your district wants to “use the data” or to create “data driven classrooms.” They have been told, without evidence, that approach will allow them to shine on the annual accountability tests.

I appreciate the hopefulness behind this practice, but I have one small concern…. The fact that it doesn’t work….

These so-called test score improvement experts who promulgate these ideas don’t seem to mind that their recommendations contradict both the research (e.g., Langer, 2001) and successful educational policy and practice.

Their “theory”—and it is just a theory—is that one can raise reading scores through targeted teaching of specific comprehension skills. Teachers are to use the results of their state accountability tests to look for fine-grained weaknesses in reading achievement—or to identify which educational standards the kids aren’t meeting.

This idea makes sense in math, perhaps. If kids perform well on the addition and subtraction problems but screw up on the multiplication ones, then focusing more heavily on multiplication can work.

But reading comprehension questions are a horse of a different color. There is no reason to think that practicing answering types of comprehension questions would improve test performance.

Question types are not skills (e.g., main idea, supporting details, drawing conclusions, inferencing). In math, 3x9 is going to be 27 every doggone time. But the main idea of a short story? That is going to depend upon the content of the story and how the author constructed the tale. In other words, the answer is going to be different with each text.

Practicing skills is fine, but if what you are practicing is not repeatable, then it is not a skill. 

The test makers know this. Look at any of the major tests (e.g., SBAC, PARCC, AIR, SAT, ACT). They will tell you that their test is based upon the educational standards or that their questions are consistent with those standards. But when they report student performance, they provide an overall reading comprehension score, with no sub-scores based on the various question types.

Why do they do it that way?

Because it is impossible to come up with a valid and reliable score for any of these question types. ACT studied it closely and found that question types didn’t determine reading performance. Texts mattered but question types didn’t. In fact, they concluded that if the questions were complex and the texts were simple, readers could answer any kind of question successfully; but if the questions were simple and the texts were hard, the readers couldn’t answer any question types.

Reading comprehension tests measure how well students can read a collection of texts—not how well they can answer different types of questions. 

If your principal really wants to see better test performance, there is a trick that I’m ready to reveal here.

The path to better reading scores? Teach kids to read. 

It works like magic.

Kids don’t do well on the tests because we don’t spend enough time on those things that make a difference in making kids proficient. Most American elementary schools these days pride themselves on their 90-minute reading blocks… but much of that time is devoted to activities that do little to promote reading ability.  Kids are supposedly reading independently or doing shut-up-sheets while the teachers are working with the other kids.

I’d love it if instead of a 90-minute block, we’d commit to providing 90 minutes of teaching and guided practice to each child each day. That might take more than 90 minutes to deliver, but it would sure give kids a better chance to become proficient.

In my schools, I required 120-180 minutes per day of reading and writing instruction. I know that’s a lot, but it is accomplishable in most schools if they ditch the test prep and reading activities that don’t contribute much.

This instructional time should be devoted to explicit teaching and guided practice aimed at developing knowledge of words (including phonemic awareness, phonics, letter names, spelling, morphology, vocabulary); oral reading fluency (accuracy, automaticity, prosody); reading comprehension (written language, strategies, knowledge); and writing (transcription, composition). And, for English learners (and perhaps poverty kids too)—explicit oral language teaching.

Too many teachers think kids would be better off reading on their own than working with them because “reading is learned by reading.” Kids do need to read, but that practice is best included in reading lessons than pushed away. I encourage devoting at least half the instructional time to reading and writing.

In a reading comprehension lesson, there will be teacher-led demonstrations and explanations and guided discussion, and so on—but the students should also be reading text. The same is true for decoding; during a big chunk of that instruction kids should be decoding and encoding words.

In grade 2 and up, students spend too much time working with books they can already read reasonably well. There is no such thing as an “instructional level” in reading, at least beyond first grade. Teaching kids at their supposed “reading levels” hasn’t been found to facilitate learning but lowers the sophistication and complexity of the content and language they get to work with.

We do too little to develop students’ reading stamina. Oh, I know that some are proud that they use books instead of short stories to teach reading, or that many assign extended silent reading. But those tend to be sink-or-swim propositions. Kids would be better prepared for tests (and many real reading situations) if there was an intentional regimen of stretching how long they can persist in making sense of texts. For many, having to read an extended fourth-grade selection silently to answer questions doesn’t go so well since they’ve never done anything that demanding before.

Lack of a knowledge-focused curriculum is an important culprit, too. Science and social studies aren’t given enough time in elementary school (and the value of the literature may be suspect, as well). Kids should get daily work in those subjects, and those lessons should include the reading of content text.

Nothing very exciting here, right?

If you want higher test scores, it takes a lot of dedicated teaching of the key things that matter in learning. Nothing sexy about it. Yet too few kids get those things and test prep is not a replacement. Focus like a laser on what works, and your kids will do better. 

References

ACT. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City, IA: ACT, Inc.

Langer, J. A. (2001). Beating the odds: Teaching middle and high school students to read and write well. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 837-880.

Shanahan, T. (2015). Let’s get higher scores on these new assessments. The Reading Teacher, 68, 459-463.

Shanahan, T. (2014). How and how not to prepare students for the new tests. The Reading Teacher, 68, 184-188.

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