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 giving 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. When I was director of reading for Chicago, I required 30-45 minutes per day of writing in all classrooms.

There are many 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 (though I’m sure many nurses would disagree with that last point). 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, there are many who use writing as a form of self-expression, and a form particularly useful for preserving 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 figured doing this might help raise reading scores. I say that’s a mistake because writing can also be a path to higher reading achievement, so your kids and your school are really missing out. Instead of promoting higher reading scores, your school is probably squashing them.

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

Research has identified three important ways reading and writing are connected – and all three deserve a place in the curriculum (Tierney & Shanahan, 1991).

First, reading and writing draw upon the same body of knowledge and skills (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000; Shanahan, 2006; Shanahan, 2016). 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 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 improves comprehension). 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 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 onto 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 from 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 best. The same thing happens with the other elements, too – one starts with ideas and turns them into written language, the other marches in the opposite direction.

My advice about knowledge? Teach the 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 you also should have students trying to write 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 do it the student had to try to analyze 38 phonemes. He got most of them reasonably right. The most ambitious phonemic awareness lessons usually would NOT have individual children practicing anything like 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, then having kids read such texts to practice using that awareness to gin up their comprehension. That can be made even more effective if you have kids composing 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 communications 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 author’s 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 have been found to be beneficial in improving the quality of kids’ writing. There are any number of ways that teachers facilitate this kind of sharing that heightens student awareness that texts are written by somebody and that 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 to accomplish this.

On the reading side, it can help to read texts in which authors have a strong voice and/or style. It is, for example, 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 such authors, based only on the content and tone of the texts we are reading. Of course, as kids get older, having them read primary source text sets in their social studies classes and then evaluating the trustworthiness of this material based on who the authors are and when they recorded their ideas.

Basically, being an author provides students insights into what is happening off stage -- what is that author doing back there behind the curtain? – which can boost one’s critical reading ability. Likewise, being a thoughtful reader 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 have emphasized 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 of a text or to improve memory for the information from texts. Research finds that writing about what one is trying to learn from text is beneficial (Graham & Hebert, 2011); and this benefit is more likely to be derived the better that students can write. That means don’t just add writing to what you are doing with reading comprehension but teach students how to do that kind of writing.

Often when students read for a test, they read and reread and hope for the best. 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, to increase knowledge and to conquer academia.

For the second emphasis of this research is on synthesis writing. Teaching students how to collect information appropriately from text sources enables easier and more effective syntheses. Instead of just having kids writing 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, providing a summarization guide that will allow them to collect information from the texts in a way that would facilitate comparison makes sense, such as charting on which ideas the texts agree and disagree. Reading the texts in that way should enhance both comprehension as well as the writing that is to follow.

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. Research suggests that neither reading nor writing should be allowed to take up more than 60% of the ELA time – which, in most classes, would mean there is a need to increase the emphasis on writing (Graham, Collins, & Ciullo, 2024; Graham, Liu, Aitken, et al., 2018; Graham, Liu, Bartlett, et la., 2018). Having kids writing every day – in any and all of the ways described here can be beneficial.

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(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3501_5

Graham, S., Collins, A. A., & Ciullo, S. (2024). Evidence-based recommendations for teaching writing. Education, 52, 3-13. https:/doi.org:10.1080/03004279.2024.2357893

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2011). Writing to read: A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 710–744.    

       https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.81.4.t2k0m13756113566

Graham, S., Liu, X., Aitken, A., Ng, C., Bartlett, B., Harris, K. R., & Holzapfel, J. (2018). Effectiveness of literacy programs balancing reading and writing instruction: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3), 279–304. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.194

Graham, S., Liu, X., Bartlett, B., Ng, C., Harris, K. R., Aitken, A., … Talukdar, J. (2018). Reading for writing: A meta-analysis of the impact of reading interventions on writing. Review of Educational Research, 88(2), 243–284. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317746927

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, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2^nd ed., pp. 194-210). New York: The Guilford Press.

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Comments on Original Version

I’m no Erasmus but I’d say, “let’s risk it.” Experience tells me that weak definitions can do even more damage.

Our vague defining leads to misunderstandings and undermines sound decision making. If you aren’t sure what “balanced literacy” or “science of reading” mean, how can you deliver –- or avoid delivering — the appropriate pedagogy?   

In education, we don’t define well.

Often we adopt nomenclature without definition (“balanced literacy” and “science of reading” are good exemples of that) and other times we subtly stretch or twist the meanings of long-used terms in idiosyncratic ways for ideological purposes (“word recognition” seems to be in that blender these days).

Of course, we’re not the only ones to play games with words. Recently, I was upbraided because I dared refer to autism as a disorder. These days it’s hip to refer to it as “neurodiversity” so no one will mistake it for something bad, even if it reduces the chances someone is going to learn to read well.

Yesterday, I read that, to improve their lives, we now should call the “homeless” the “unhoused.” Later I spoke with such a gentleman. He described himself as “homeless,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that people would no longer shun him in the street if he would refer to himself more appropriately.

I admit that these last examples are evidence of well-meaning efforts to reduce the stigma that may be associated with certain terms. Unfortunately, experience suggests that such relabeling fools no one. Remember that it was just such an effort that gave us terms like “idiot” and “moron.”

The term “dyslexia” – with its neurological implications – has come in and out of fashion depending on whether one wants to relieve parents of one kind of guilt or another (behavioral or genetic).

Rebranding efforts require a lot of energy. They immerse a field in unnecessary semantic disputes (and arrogant disapproval), instead of addressing the real problems. One can only imagine if all this effort were devoted to solving the problems or alleviating the actual pain they cause.

These days my pet peeve is with the unfortunate explosion of the term “curriculum.” It used to mean only those things we wanted students to learn – that is, the curriculum detailed what we wanted kids to know or be able to do. That was it.   

These days curriculum include almost everything. Textbook programs are often referred to as “the curriculum.” So are educational standards. Such colloquial shortcuts may be excusable – though I suspect they are more due to sloppy thinking than verbal short cuts.

Even fine scholars treat curriculum as an almost borderless concept. It has become common to describe curriculum as including content, instruction, assessment, and evaluation (e.g., Prideaux, 2003). In other words, curriculum is pretty much everything that teachers do.

That kind of expansion has unfortunate consequences. There are benefits to distinguishing means from ends. A curriculum specifies what it is that students need to learn. Teaching or instruction refer to the actions that we take to try to make that learning happen.

While working on my book about the problems of leveled reading instruction I was struck by the lack of distinction between curricular solutions and instructional ones to educational problems.

During the first half of the last century, there was a nationwide search for a way to successfully differentiate reading instruction. What bugged me was that all the schemes that were proposed focused on altering the curriculum rather than adjusting the teaching.  

Instead of proposing different ways of teaching kids to read (instruction) so that more of them could accomplish the goals (the curriculum), they simply decided to establish different goals for everyone. That means some kids would be taught to read well enough to allow for their future success and some would not.

By design.

Teaching that intentionally reinforces early lags and minimizes the chances of kids ever catching up is a horrible approach. Once you decide to aim at the second-grade curriculum with third or fourth grade students – and that’s what you are doing when you decide to teach with those below grade texts – you guarantee a life of lost opportunity.  

One wonders what our reading proficiency would be if someone had suggested a teaching alternative rather than a curricular one – that is, if they had suggested ways to help kids to learn from the grade level texts rather than replacing them with easier books. Surely many more kids would have had a real opportunity to reach their potential.

Another example of the problem of confusing curriculum and instruction is when teachers focus on activities (instruction) without sufficient consideration of the potential outcomes of those activities (curriculum). Too often teachers schedule daily circle time, shared reading, small group instruction, guided reading, repeated reading, and so on without real consideration of the curricular reason for those activities.

Many elementary teachers read chapter books to their classes (an instructional activity). I know I always did.

But why? That is, what is the curricular purpose of it?

No one has found that reading to kids teaches reading, so it’s not a good idea to simply replace reading instruction with shared reading.

You might say, “Can’t kids learn vocabulary from shared reading?” Indeed, they can learn words from books that are read to them at least if it’s done right (e.g., Elley, 1989). However, I suspect that reply is raised more often as defense of an already chosen instructional activity rather than as a real curricular reason for why the activity was chosen in the first place.

Are the books being selected based on their vocabulary? Is there any kind of instructional follow up with those words as in the studies? Is there ever an assessment of them?[i]   

The failure to distinguish curriculum from instruction encourages too many teachers to choose activities they prefer, that they’re confident with, and that they think kids will like. These activities may not be the most powerful avenues to the learning goals, but they aren’t even thinking about that. For them, the activities have become the curriculum.

Sadly, curriculum is also confused with assessment. Assessments are valuable indicators of how well kids have mastered a curriculum. Too often, these days, assessments have become the curriculum, and this seems to be especially true with reading comprehension.

Students are supposed to learn to read and comprehend texts (that’s a curricular goal). Texts vary in difficulty, so each grade is assigned a range of text levels that they should be enabling.

To find out if kids are accomplishing this, we test their comprehension by having them read and answer questions about some sample texts. Our assessments may be imperfect, yet they provide a rough idea of whether students can usually read and understand such texts.

That we want kids to learn to comprehend texts should mean that we spend time guiding them to surmount the challenges that such texts pose. We should be making sure they can read the kinds of words these texts use – breaking the words down and sounding them out (instruction). Kids also should be developing fluency with these kinds of texts, practicing with various texts and receiving feedback and guidance (instruction). Likewise, they should be increasing their vocabularies from these instructional texts and learning how to figure out sentence meanings and how to connect ideas across the texts.

On top of that, we should be making sure kids know a lot about their world, getting them to read worthwhile texts during their instruction and on their own time. We shouldn’t neglect the value of social studies, science, music, art, and gym classes for building knowledge either, and we should ask parents to help too – getting their kids to read at home and involving them in knowledge building activities (yes, television can be a knowledge-building activity).

In other words, we should be teaching kids how to read texts and should be enabling their reading of texts!

Instead, what happens far too often is teachers and principals focus on having kids practice answering the kinds of questions they might see on an assessment – as if it were the questions that mattered, and not the texts. As ACT reported, when students can read texts well, they can answer any kind of questions about them; when they can’t read the texts well, they struggle with any question type (ACT, 2006).

We need to do a better job with definitions in our field, and I’d start with making sure that everyone is recognizing the distinctions among curriculum and instruction and assessment – in our discourse, but most importantly, in our pedagogical practices and educational policies.

References

ACT, Inc. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City: ACT.

Elley, W. B. (1989). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 174-187. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/461836

Prideaux D. (2003). ABC of learning and teaching in medicine. Curriculum design. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 326(7383), 268–270. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.326.7383.268

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher question: 

What does research say about early literacy and when to begin? I am aware that kids may reach the stage of development where they're ready for reading at different times. What does the research say about the "window" for when a kid can learn to read? What are the consequences if they haven't started reading past that time? 

Shanahan response:

Oh, fun. The kind of question that generates strong scholarly (sounding) opinion, with no real data to go on.

The advocates on both sides will bloviate about windows of opportunity, developmentally appropriate practice, potential harms of early or later starts, and how kids in Finland are doing.

Despite the impressive citations that show up in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, or in various blogs, the truth is that there is no definitive research on this issue.

The meager handful of supposedly direct comparisons between starting earlier versus later are so ham-handed that I’m surprised they were even published.

One example is a longitudinal study that followed kids for six years… after either a dose of academically- or play-focused preschool. The research claimed that the kids taught early ended up with lower later achievement (Marcon, 2002).

That sounds horrible, until you look closely at the analysis and it becomes evident that the comparisons were questionable and the statistics specious (Lonigan, 2003). More of the play-group kids were retained along the way, so the final comparison—the one that finally found the difference the researcher was seeking—wasn’t between the same samples as at the beginning. The researcher’s response to this criticism suggests that the samples weren’t equivalent at the start either, further highlighting that this study couldn’t possibly reveal whether early teaching was helpful, hurtful, or not an issue at all.

I can provide examples going in the other direction, too. Since graduate school I have been told that young children are especially able learners and that the earlier we start teaching the better the odds that we’ll catch kids during that “portal of receptivity” (Gross, 2016).  

The evidence behind that argument seems mainly based on the fact that from about 18 months to 5-years-of-age children learn an amazing amount of vocabulary; and that so-called vocabulary spurt is a real one. However, the idea that everything or even everything involving language is learned easily during those years is where the leap of faith comes in.

Reading development certainly does depend upon vocabulary, but there is much more to learning reading, and there is no convincing evidence that four-year-olds will learn to read more quickly or easily than would be the case a year or three later. Just because youngsters learn spoken words fast, doesn’t mean that they are able to perceive the sounds within words (phonological awareness), or that they'll be able to master the names and sounds of the letters (the beginnings of decoding) especially easily.

When I argue for teaching reading to young children, my claim is not that we need to take advantage of a particularly beneficial time when kids are most attuned to learning. (Though when I put forth such advice, I usually hear from those who, based on Finland’s educational attainment, claim that starting at 7-years-old is the magic ingredient to literacy success… an argument that neglects a few other differences between Finland and the English-speaking world, including homogeneity of population, relatively high economic advantage, formidable linguistic differences, and the fact that, according to the Finnish government, most of their children learn to read prior to entering school at age 7).

English reading can be challenging so I encourage as early a start as possible (and, no, research reveals no harm in this).

Starting early increases the amount of time available for kids to learn. Often kids enter kindergarten or first grade with the expectation that they are to learn to read that year. Spreading this expectation across 3-4 years can reduce pressure and anxiety.

This also means that it is possible to successfully teach older students to read. We often hear the statistics that show that early reading problems persist. But these problems don’t persist because we missed some magical window of learning opportunity, but because we are not doing the things that will allow older students to succeed.

My advice, if you are a parent or caregiver, start introducing your children to literacy once they are born—reading to them, talking to them, singing to them, showing them how to write their names, writing down their stories, teaching the alphabet and letter sounds, playing with language sounds (e.g., “K-K-K-Katie”), and so on.

Of course, young children have brief attention spans. But that’s one of the benefits of starting so early—you can take advantage of 20 seconds here, 3 minutes there, over a long period which can make a big learning difference.

If you are a preschool, kindergarten, or first-grade teacher, begin teaching reading once you meet the children…

Give kids as long a timeline as possible and don’t worry about an optimum time to teach reading. There isn’t one.

The reason for starting early isn’t to capture some magic window of neuronal plasticity, but to make the window as big as possible. If teaching early identifies a youngster who struggles to learn reading, then we will have more years to address this youngster’s needs. The later we wait, the smaller that window of opportunity. We want kids to have the maximum opportunity to learn.

We hear a lot about “developmental appropriateness” these days, and this concept is used to dismiss the early teaching of reading—"don't teach reading until it is developmentally appropriate."

If that is what you are hearing I suggest reading the National Association of Educators of Young Children’s policy on this matter:

“From infancy through age 8, proactively building children’s conceptual and factual knowledge, including academic vocabulary, is essential because knowledge is the primary driver of comprehension. The more children (and adults) know, the better their listening comprehension and, later, reading comprehension. Therefore, by building knowledge of the world in early childhood, educators are laying the foundation that is critical for all future learning (How People Learn I and II). The idea that young children are not ready for academic subject matter is a misunderstanding of DAP; particularly in grades 1-3, almost all subject matter can be taught in ways that are meaningful and engaging for each child (citations)” (NAEYC, 2019).  

Developmental appropriateness has more to do with how we might teach something successfully than with what we teach. Keeping lessons brief and lively makes great sense with young children (and it doesn’t hurt the older ones either). Teaching phonemic awareness with songs and chants is a great idea, and it can be fun to play games built around letters and sounds. Introducing reading and writing through play areas set up like post offices, restaurants, libraries, and the like are all developmentally appropriate for the youngest of our preschoolers.

Start teaching reading from the time you have kids available to teach and pay attention to how they respond to this instruction—both in terms of how well they are learning what you are teaching, and how happy and invested they seem to be. If you haven't started yet, don't feel guilty, just get going.

References

Gross, G. (2016). Windows of opportunity, part 1. Huffpost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/windows-of-opportunity-part-1_b_57c937cee4b06c750dd984b1

Lonigan, C. J. (2003). Comment on Marcon. Early Childhood Research & Practice, 5(1). https://ecrp.illinois.edu/v5n1/lonigan.html

Marcon, R. A. (2002). Moving up the grades: Relationship between preschool model and later school success. Early Childhood Research & Practice, 4(1). https://ecrp.illinois.edu/v4n1/marcon.html

National Association of Educators of Young Children. (2019). Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) position statement. Washington, DC: NAEYC. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/position-statements/dap/contents

Past comments

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I am a literacy interventionist at an elementary school, and we use DIBELS for our progress monitoring. While I recognize the value of DIBELS as a screening tool, I have concerns about the appropriateness of the current fluency benchmarks my school has adopted. I have found some research that identifies fluency goals calibrated to reading comprehension. Studies by O'Connor (2017) and Cogo-Moreira et al. (2023) identify specific words-per-minute benchmarks to establish a cut-off point for reading speed and accuracy to obtain minimum values for comprehending texts. These wpm goals are much lower than our fluency goals. If the ultimate goal of reading is understanding the text, I wonder if these research-based targets would be more appropriate goals for many of our students.

Shanahan responds:
Several years ago, a friend of mine was developing a remedial reading program. He wanted to set fluency benchmarks.

I hadn’t thought much about that problem. I had chaired the National Reading Panel subcommittee on fluency instruction. I knew that fluency teaching improved fluency and, consequently in most studies, reading comprehension.

But how fluent did kids have to be?

There were no studies that had addressed the problem in quite that way (I thought), but there were some fluency norms that could provide a clue.

My first thought was that they should aim for the 50^th percentiles. For example, the norms indicated that the average second grader ends the year able to read about 96 words correct per minute (wcpm) (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2017). For me, that would have been the second-grade target.

My reasoning was straightforward. My thinking was that kids who reached the 50^th percentile would not have a fluency problem. If they were struggling to make sense of text, it wouldn’t be because they struggled too much with the words, etc.

My friend was not satisfied. He wondered, “Why wouldn’t the 40^th or 45^th percentile be adequate?”

Many years ago, Keith Stanovich (1984) described reading as an “interactive-compensatory” process. What he was getting at was that reading involves a constellation of varied skills and abilities.

Think, for instance, of the “simple view of reading.” That model describes reading comprehension as the product of two sets of abilities: decoding and language comprehension. To read you must translate print to language and then you must do what you do to understand language. Decoding and language abilities must interact.

What happens if readers struggle with one of these skills? According to Stanovich and scads of research, readers try to rely on their relative strength to compensate for the limitation. When readers struggle to decode, they don’t quit in a snit, they make like AI, trying to guess the word, using what they know about the semantics and syntax of language to compensate for decoding limitations.

Fluency – like reading in general – is a bit of a mash up. It relies on both decoding skills and language knowledge (along with executive functioning, reasoning ability, and knowledge). Kids who reach the 50^th percentile in fluency are not necessarily all the same. Some kids may rely more on decoding, while others may compensate with some of their other abilities. Achieving average on a fluency test won’t guarantee average decoding skills, but it seems very unlikely that such students would be particularly low in decoding. You can only compensate so much.

The research that you noted is interesting. The researchers were doing exactly what you said, they were trying to identify the degree of fluency that was necessary to enable adequate comprehension.

There is a long line of research on this topic – something those modern researchers seem to be unaware of. Back in the 1940s, Emmett Betts (1946) wasn’t trying to establish a fluency learning objective. No, his purpose was to determine an appropriate level of text to use for instruction. He theorized, without evidence, that kids could only improve their reading when working with texts they comprehended, and he decided, again without any evidence, that an adequate degree of comprehension meant kids could answer 75-89% of the questions about a text.

He concluded, based on the kinds of studies researchers are doing now, that kids were best taught with texts they could read with 95% accuracy. When someone refers to “reading levels” that’s what they mean (or some variation on those criteria).

Later studies (Dunkeld, 1970; Powell, 1968) accepted Betts’s theory but challenged his criteria. They reported a lot of variation across the grades. In other words, different degrees of fluency were needed to ensure the target comprehension levels depending on grade levels.

The more recent studies don’t just consider accuracy – that is, the percentage of words read correctly. They look at a combination of speed and accuracy: the numbers of words students can read correctly per minute (wcpm). This approach provides a more reliable estimate of fluency, especially if conducted with multiple texts or for longer reading durations.

These newer studies, like those from the 1960s and 1970s, are reporting that kids don’t need to be especially fluent to comprehend. For instance, the fluency norms report that at the end of Grade 2, the average student can read about 100wcpm. Various studies say that 43 (Alves, et al., 2020), 47 (Cogo-Moreira, et al., 2023), or 78 wcpm (O’Connor, 2017) are all that is needed to allow successful comprehension.

Or for grade 4: the norms say 133 wcpm, while the amounts of fluency needed to ensure comprehension in these studies is 71 (Alves et al., 2021), 79 (Cogo-Moreira, et al., 2023) and 70 wcpm (O’Connor, 2017).

The researchers who have published these findings are appropriately cautious; they recognize that with different sets of texts or larger and more diverse samples of kids, the results are likely to vary quite a bit. This is because the standard deviations are large for this ability both in their studies and in the norms.

Those DIBELS targets are not just a seat-of-the-pants estimate like my notion of aiming for the 50^th percentile. Nor are they an attempt to predict reading comprehension. Their targets are based on the connection of their oral reading fluency scores and performances on state tests – a more distant and generalized measure of reading ability than used in these studies. Basically, their benchmarks are more linked to learning progress than to comprehension (University of Oregon, 2020). Accordingly, their targets are much closer to those averages that I had recommended. For second graders, the norms say 100 wcpm, and DIBELS aims for 94; for grade 3, it’s 112 and 114; for Grade 4, 133 and 125, and so on.

What is it that DIBELS (and other test makers) are claiming with their target criteria? They are not claiming that the accomplishment of those levels of fluency will guarantee high performance on your state tests. Reading is too complex for that.

No, they are saying that if your kids are that fluent, you can check that off as a reason for low reading comprehension performance. Another way of saying this is, that given those levels of fluency, if your kids are also adequate in all their other abilities (like vocabulary, for instance), then they should have good enough reading comprehension.

Personally, if my school was using DIBELS or one of these other testing regimes, I would use their targets. Without those kinds of tools, aiming for the 50%ile may be a bit high, but only a bit. It is a reasonable target. In any event, since there is more than one way to comprehend a text, preparing kids to only be fluent enough to comprehend a given text is just too low a standard if we want our kids to able to read a wide range of texts well enough.

References

Alves, L. M., Santos, L. F. D., Miranda, I. C. C., Carvalho, I. M., Ribeiro, G. L., Freire, L. S. C., Martins-Reis, V. O., & Celeste, L. C. (2021). Reading speed in elementary school and junior high. Evolução da velocidade de leitura no Ensino Fundamental I e II. CoDAS, 33(5), e20200168. https://doi.org/10.1590/2317-1782/20202020168

Betts, E. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. New York; American Book Co.

Cogo-Moreira, H., Molinari, G. L., Carvalho, C. A. F., Kida, A. S. B., Lúcio, P. S., & Avila, C. R. B. (2023). Cut-off point, sensitivity and specificity for screening the reading fluency in children. Pontos de corte, sensibilidade e especificidade para rastreamento da fluência leitora em crianças. CoDAS, 35(3), e20210263. https://doi.org/10.1590/2317-1782/20232021263pt

Dunkeld, C. G. (1970). The validity of the informal reading inventory for the designation of instructional reading levels: A study of the relationships between children’s gains in reading achievement and the difficulty of instructional materials. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hasbrouck, J. & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (Technical Report No. 1702).  Eugene, OR. Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon.

O’Connor, R. E. (2017). Reading fluency and students with reading disabilities: How fast is fast enough to promote reading comprehension? Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(2), 124-136.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219417691835

Powell, W. R. (1968). Reappraising the criteria for interpreting informal inventories. In D. L. DeBoer (Ed.), Reading diagnosis and evaluation (pp. 100-109). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Stanovich, K. E. (1984). The interactive-compensatory model of reading: A confluence of developmental, experimental, and educational psychology. RASE: Remedial & Special Education, 5(3), 11–19.  https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258400500306

University of Oregon. (2020). Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS, 8th ed.). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon. https://dibels.uoregon.edu

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I saw that Mark Seidenberg was complaining that there is now too much phonics instruction. What do you think of that?

Shanahan replies:

I have great respect for Dr. Seidenberg’s work but have long been critical of his tendency to ignore research on reading instruction. In his wonderful book, he argues for the teaching of phonics with barely a nod to any of the studies of phonics teaching.

Being an experimental psychologist, he was convinced of the value of phonics based on computer simulation studies. I, being a teacher, am more persuaded of the value of phonics because of the many studies showing that kids do better with reading when taught decoding explicitly (e.g., August & Shanahan, 2006; NICHD, 2000; NIFL, 2008). For me, instructional evidence is essential. For Seidenberg, it doesn’t seem to matter.

I think that may explain his current reaction. Just as he proclaimed the importance of phonics, now he asserts there is too much phonics. I don’t necessarily disagree with either statement, but neither seems especially helpful.

Admonitions to teach phonics are almost certain to get somebody to overdo it, just as cautions against too much phonics will likely encourage some to pull back too much.

I figured that one out about 35 years ago, after years of experience in schools. Since then, I’ve tried to be more helpfully specific.

For years I’ve called for 2-3 hours of daily literacy instruction. Unlike most such schemes, I don’t recommend one duration for all.

My reasoning?

If everyone is guaranteed 90-minutes or 2-hours of instruction, then we are ensuring that the most at-risk will never catch up. Low reading ability is not something that only happens to a few kids in each school. It befalls entire neighborhoods. Neighborhoods scourged by poverty. If the poor schools teach only as much reading as the more advantaged ones, then kids in the poor schools can never catch up. In any other endeavor, being behind means that you must work harder and smarter.

The reason for the 3-hour limit is because of the need to protect instructional time for math, science, social studies, and the arts. I concur with “knowledge-building” advocates about the importance of these subjects.

Unlike those who plead for less reading time, I’m convinced that all these can be addressed sufficiently in a 6.5-hour school day, even when reading maxes out. Research shows that low reading ability undermines later progress in those subjects, so if the goal is high knowledge then this is a wise investment (e.g., Caponera, Sestito, & Russo, 2016; Cromley, 2009; Martin & Mullis, 2013). 

Learning to read is a complex matter as models of reading illustrate (Duke & Cartwright, 2021; Scarborough, 2001). It does include decoding and language comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986)– but those entail multiple components and complex interrelationships.

Many instructional schemes are explicit about the total amount of reading instruction, but vague about how to distribute this time.

My approach is to divide the total amount of instruction by four – providing equal attention to the teaching of words and parts of words, text reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing (Shanahan, 2001). That means kids would get at least 90 instructional hours per year in each component – enough to assure substantial reading gains overall, and because the dosage is specific, teachers are discouraged from overdoing it with any of the parts.

Because this plan is aimed at K-12 and not K-2, kids will continue to increase their word knowledge throughout the grades. This time is for decoding (i.e., letters, sounds, spelling patterns, syllabication) but also for spelling and morphology and other aspects of vocabulary development. Just because kids leave the primary grades, words don’t lose their importance in literacy, though our attention needs to shift from decoding to meaning when it comes to words.

Those four components are drawn from solid research – studies show that teaching them improves reading (Graham & Hebert, 2010; NICHD, 2000). The time divisions are only a product of my own reasoning – there are no studies indicating that the time commitments must be equal to be sufficient. However, there is also no research proving any to be more important than the rest. They all matter and problems with any of them can undermine reading success, so equal time distributions seem sensible.

Most phonics studies with positive learning results have accomplished those outcomes with a series of daily 30-minute lessons (NICHD, 2000). Matching the successful implementations feels like a safe bet. Perhaps more is better but there is no evidence of that and a greater investment of time must come from somewhere. Again, 30 minutes seems safe.

I wish research could reveal the optimum time expenditures needed to ensure reading success for all students. That’s extremely unlikely because of the confluence of individual differences.

“The gods do not bless everyone the same,

with equal gifts of body, mind, or speech.

One man is weak, but gods may crown his words

with loveliness.” (Homer, 2018, E. Wilson, translation, p 225)

Individuals differ in their abilities to learn – some of us pick up language super easily, while others not so much. The multi-component nature of reading complicates things: kids who struggle with decoding development, may be strong in language, or vice versa.

Natural limitations may be reduced or exacerbated by environmental factors, too. Kids have home environments and school environments. Someone who struggles to decode may succeed anyway with supportive parents and effective teachers.

The best we are ever likely to do in this regard is to provide reasonable amounts of learning opportunity for all the key elements of literacy learning. Hence, the need to be specific about the time expenditures.

Carol Connor and her colleagues reported some insightful studies showing that first graders who had already mastered their grade level decoding skills benefited more from independent language-oriented activities (e.g., independent reading, writing, cooperative projects) than from sitting through the phonics lessons (Connor, Morrison, Schatschneider, Toste, Lundblom, Crowe, & Fishman, 2011).

Such proficiency may be due to natural affinities for pattern recognition, visual-phonological coordination, or some other underlying talent. Some brains decode more easily than others. It also could be due to moms and dads and preschools’ early efforts to teach decoding. No matter the source, if they have it, there is no benefit to reteaching it. (I believe that is Dr. Seidenberg’s sage point).

I have no problem with that. I take the same approach with fluency. If the students are hitting the fluency benchmarks, there is likely no benefit to more fluency practice. Allowing fluent students to opt out of fluency lessons may allow them to gain more in other areas.

A nice insight drawn from that Connor work is that the kids with proficient decoding also tended to be more able to work independently. The ones requiring the phonics teaching benefited more from working closely with their teacher.

I know there are some “authorities” these days who blanche at Connor’s conclusions, despite the quality of her research. They argue that teachers should group for phonics, so those skilled first-grade decoders can gain even more advanced decoding skills. That sounds great, but where does that time come from? Holding kids back in fluency, comprehension, and writing to get them even further ahead in decoding seems like a fool’s errand.

What about those kids who get 30 minutes a day of decoding instruction in kindergarten, first and second grades and still can’t decode well?  They exist. They evidently require more phonics tuition than I have allotted or than a good Tier 1 classroom can provide. That’s where Tier 2 interventions come in. Unlike regular classrooms, interventions don’t have to address everything.

That means that interventions need to be carefully implemented. They must provide not only high-quality targeted teaching (e.g., smaller groups, specialized teachers), but INCREASED opportunity for the students. Pulling kids out of regular reading lessons for a Tier 2 intervention is, well, nuts! Kids who are struggling with some aspect of literacy learning should get MORE help, not alternative assistance.

So, I think Mark Seidenberg is right. Some schools are probably overdoing the phonics thing for their students. Telling them to knock it off after telling them to knock it on takes a kind of courage that I admire, but it would be more helpful if he were explaining what knocking it on and knocking it off means. For that, you need instructional research.

Oh, by the way, the instructional approach that I described here was used by the Chicago Public Schools and the Joliet Public Schools to make their greatest ever achievement gains in reading. It requires a lot of hard work by principals and teachers, but it has promoted exceptional gains in achievement for hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged learners.

If you want to succeed, get specific. Explain what needs to be taught and how much time to devote to those components. Telling me to teach phonics but not too much, just doesn’t cut it.

References

August, D., & Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Caponera, E., Sestito, P., & Russo, P. M. (2016). The influence of reading literacy on mathematics and science achievement. Journal of Educational Research, 109(2), 197-204. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.936998

Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., Schatschneider, C., Toste, J., Lundblom, E., Crowe, E. C., & Fishman, B. (2011). Effective classroom instruction: Implications of child characteristics by reading instruction interactions on first graders’ word reading achievement. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 4(3), 173–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2010.510179

Cromley, J. G. (2009). Reading achievement and science proficiency: International comparisons from the Programme on International Student Assessment. Reading Psychology, 30(89), 89-118.

Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the Simple View of Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rrq.411

Gough, P.B. & Tunmer, W.E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10.

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Homer. (2018). The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Martin, M. O., & Mullis, I. V. S. (Eds.). (2013). TIMSS and PIRLS 2011: Relationships among reading, mathematics, and science achievement at the fourth grade—implications for early learning. Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College.

National Institute for Literacy. (2008). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 

Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97 – 110). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2001). Improving reading education for low-income children. In G. Shiel & U.N. Dhálaigh (Eds.), Reading matters: A fresh start (pp. 157–165). Dublin, Ireland: Reading Association of Ireland/National Reading Initiative.

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

As my teachers continue learning together about text-centered planning, I would love your help with a quick reflection. When you sit down to plan a unit:

1. How do you decide which comprehension standards the anchor text naturally requires?
2. What steps do you take to analyze the text before identifying standards?
3. How does the text guide the sequence of lessons and questions?

Shanahan Responds:

I’ll answer your questions.

But before I do, let me try to fend off some of the defensive comments my response is sure to elicit.

First, yes, I understand that teachers are busy and can’t design every lesson themselves in depth. No, I am not out of touch with reality, I’m aware there are only so many hours in a day, and that teachers have lives not just jobs. Got it.

However, if you are going to design comprehension lessons, or even just adjust textbooks to your students’ needs (which is what I recommend), you need to understand how to build such lessons from scratch. Try this with a few selections, and then home in on portions of it with future lessons.

With practice, it gets easier.

The best way to ease the pain and vouchsafe quality, try doing this with a colleague or two. You can even use those textbook lessons – comparing their version to yours. You’ll end up with a deeper understanding of the support such lessons provide, as well as their weak spots – where you need to focus your efforts to ensure maximum learning.

Second, no, there is not research showing the best way to design lessons. I’ve reviewed the research on lesson planning, and it is mainly descriptive – summing up what teachers do, rather than evaluating the outcomes of the various approaches.

Relevant research is cited throughout this piece, but none has undergone the kind of causal, experimental analysis that I would prefer.

The lack of such study matters. Often professors discourage teachers and prospective teachers from relying on textbooks lessons, disdainfully treating that as a lack of creativity, dedication, caring, or even intelligence. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but without any evidence those efforts to discourage textbook use seem dopey to me (an insight I gained as director of reading in Chicago – not from my stints as a textbook writer).

The guidance offered here is not meant to supplant those textbook lessons, but to strengthen how well teachers use them. Personal experience tells me that mindless fidelity does as much as harm as good. Research shows that often when teachers stray from those lesson plans, there is a tendency to lower the textbook demands, which does not serve students well (Brown, 2012). My hope is that the guidance here will help teachers to strengthen, rather than weaken, the textbook plans. 

Here goes…

Don’t start with the standards, start with the text that you will teach students to comprehend.

This may seem crazy. Studies show that teachers often think little about the goals when planning lessons (e.g., Hopkins, 2018), focusing on activities rather than learning. Nevertheless, I start with the text because it determines what can be taught. Most of the time I want to teach with a text the students cannot already read reasonably well. My instruction will be aimed at enabling them to comprehend this text successfully – without my reading it to them or telling them what it says. Also, I’ll guide students to consider the possibility of using with future texts whatever insights, skills, or methods allowed them to conquer this one.

We don’t want learning to be ignored, and that emphasis on enabling success should solve that problem. We also do not want the standards to dominate since their relevance depends entirely on the specific demands of a text and how it matches to what the students can already accomplish without teacher guidance. When text is an afterthought, like the distant cousin you almost forgot to invite to your wedding, learning will usually be inhibited.

Read the text. 

With a story, determine its plot or story grammar elements, key features of the characters, and one or more themes. For an informational text – what’s the point? Is it to explain the dangers of forest fires and how to prevent them? Then think about the key ideas and the structure of the article. Perhaps it specifies each danger, the cause of each, and then proposes solutions that can disrupt those cause-and-effect chains. Persuasive or argumentative text aims to make a point, it argues for or against something. Identifying the issue and the author’s take is essential. This argument will usually be supported by a series of claims, each with some kind of evidentiary support.

Knowing this information, you can design or select worthwhile questions that focus students’ attention on the major ideas. Asking about these will reveal whether your students are comprehending or not.

Then, in your planning, be attentive to the text’s affordances. An affordance is any information or text feature that may facilitate comprehension. Perhaps that forest fire article includes a table that summarizes or repeats the text information, arranging each danger, cause, and solution. A piece of fiction may describe characters and their actions using vocabulary like uncomfortably, hesitated, desperately, and humiliated. These words collectively should help readers to understand a character and, perhaps, why that character responds to a situation in a particular way. Students must not only obtain the key information from a text, but they should be aware of how they know what they know about the text. Encouraging the use of text evidence is a good idea (Buffen, 2019), and it fits nicely with recognizing a text’s affordances. Students may recognize that a character is timid, but they should also know that this was an inference that they drew based on those vocabulary words noted above.

Finally, be sensitive to potential barriers to comprehension. Authors’ affordances sometimes miscarry. Instead of bolstering understanding, they may serve to impede readers’ comprehension. A simple example of this is an apt vocabulary choice that derails readers who don’t know the word’s meaning. A description of a historical figure that includes the word “compassionate” may miscarry with audiences ignorant of that word. Keep your eye out for words your students may be unfamiliar with that could block their understanding. (Since this is a comprehension lesson, don’t worry for the moment about unknown words unlikely to get in the way of understanding the instructional text.)

Syntax can be another barrier. Some texts try to increase readability by breaking complex ideas into a series of simple sentences. Others may employ longer sentences to explain complex ideas or relations among ideas. A famous example of these:

Text 1:                    The king raised taxes. The people revolted.

Text 2:                    Because the king raised taxes, the people revolted.

Text 1 may be easier to “read”, and readers may gain the two key facts (what the king and the people each did). As simple as those sentences are, the overall meaning may be obscured by their separation. To get the point, readers must infer a causal connection between the actions and making this kind of inference depends on prior knowledge, how people feel about higher taxes.

In Text 2, the key facts are stated along with an explicit connection between them. This version may trip some kids up because the sentence length and need to coordinate three ideas puts a greater load on memory – and the sentence construction complicates this a bit, by first providing the causal connection and then the parts to be connected.

Don’t get me wrong. One of these isn’t necessarily better than the other. The issue isn’t one of quality but accessibility or effectiveness. To comprehend these, readers must either infer or recognize the reason for the people’s action. Some readers may accomplish that with either version, while others may miss the point with one or another.  

A final example of a barrier is an author’s use of metaphor. Here is a doozy (or three doozies) from William Faulkner, one of my favorite authors. In describing mosquitoes, Count No ’Count wrote: “Across the Southern sky went a procession of small clouds, like silver dolphins on a rigid ultramarine wave, like an ancient geographical woodcut.”

Thank goodness for that first metaphor, I know what small clouds look like and can easily connect a swarm of mosquitoes with that. Although I’ve seen wild dolphins, I’m ignorant of “rigid ultramarine wave[s].” I not only was not benefited by my prior knowledge of dolphins but had to intentionally suppress that knowledge – I doubt Faulkner meant that the mosquitoes were flying in single file. The allusion to an “ancient geographical woodcut” left me bereft, too. I asked AI for help with that one. It provided examples of such woodcuts. Perhaps Faulkner meant for me to think they looked a bit like black and gray smudges on dirty white paper. If metaphors are supposed to connect an author’s ideas with a readers’ experiences, the first one worked for me, the second disrupted my comprehension, and for the third I needed to already know what swarms of mosquitos looked like to connect them to woodcuts – the opposite of how such metaphors should work.

Each of these examples shows a potential barrier a text may pose to comprehension. Teaching students to recognize these problems and how to surmount them should be a big part of comprehension teaching.

Teachers (and textbook publishers) should read instructional texts with a gimlet eye to identify words, morphemes, figurative language, metaphors, embedded clauses, elaborated phrases, passive sentences, subtle or confusing cohesive links, organizational schemes, genre features, graphic features, literary elements, or potential mismatches between a text and kids’ prior knowledge (Connor, et al., 2014).

If you think some of those may interfere with your students’ understanding of a text, then anticipate the problem by designing questions that will reveal if they were tripped up. (Questions like “why did the people revolt?”, “how would you describe Sally?,” or “how would you describe what the mosquitoes looked like on p. 87?” should accomplish this nicely).

If the students can answer such questions, then that information or text feature wasn’t a problem. There is nothing more to do. But if they can’t, then teaching will be needed to show them how to deal with issues such as the importance of recognizing causal connections, the use of adjectives and adverbs in identifying a character’s traits, or how to recognize and use metaphors. Such “on the fly” adaptations are essential when it comes to comprehension instruction (Howerton, 2011).

Think about what you should do if your questions reveal incomprehension or miscomprehension.

If it were the first time we’d dealt with an issue, I’d likely point out the problem, take the kids back to that portion of text to reread it to them, and I’d use a think aloud to demonstrate how I’d deal with this portion of text.

On the other hand, if this had already been so addressed, then I might try to guide the students to solve it themselves. “What did we say it meant when a sentence begins with ‘because’? Can you find the two ideas the author was trying to connect?” And still later: “What do we do when a sentence begins with ‘because”? I would fade the scaffold over time. Research shows that such scaffolding leads to learning (Montanaro, 2012).

This kind of teaching requires a “gradual release of responsibility” approach… starting with direct telling and modeling, followed by guided practice, and then a reduction of support (McMichael, 2020).

When it comes to reading comprehension instruction, the text needs to be king (or queen). It should determine the questions to be asked and the stopping points where guidance and teaching can take place. The standards have a more general purpose – to guide the choice of texts (in terms of challenge levels and genres) and to stress the importance of gaining an understanding of both what a text says and how it works.

You might have noticed that many of those potential barriers listed above were about language.  That is not an accident. Although state education standards usually require the teaching of English language skills, these treatments tend to separate language from writing and comprehension. That’s unfortunate and may explain the lack of payoff from such teaching (e.g., formal grammar instruction). Studies reveal that except for vocabulary, teachers rarely focus on linguistic affordances and barriers in their comprehension lessons (Flory, 2021).

I don’t know what standards you are working with, so I’ll focus on the Common Core standards, a reasonable choice because many states still use them or have at the very least retained their basic structure. These reading standards are divided in four parts: (1) key ideas and details, (2) craft & structure, (3) integration of knowledge and ideas, and (4) the range of text and text complexity.

The standards included in that first category match well with my content category above.

Likewise, the affordances idea is especially relevant to the standard’s “craft and structure.” Both of those emphasize encouraging students to consider an author’s choices (Klingelhofer, 2014) and how we might use those.

I’m ignoring the third category here, “integration of knowledge and ideas,” since it is more about connecting multiple texts and using text info – not reading comprehension, per se.

I’ve already dealt with the fourth category – choosing the right text – text worth knowing, text demanding enough that students will benefit from working with it, text that represents a genre we want kids to know. The text determines the information and text features that students will confront. But there is more to it than that.

With directed or guided reading, you need to choose where to stop so discussions can take place and guidance can be offered.  Some authorities recommend students read a whole selection, then rereading it together in parts. Others seem to think that all guided reading texts should be divied into digestible chunks.

My advice is to decide this based on how hard the text will be for your kids. If it will be relatively easy, it might be read through with minimum support. If it’s very challenging, you might want to give it a “close reading” treatment, reading it multiple times to address key ideas, craft and structure, and potential barriers separately. These rereads could be of the complete text, or students may be guided to revisit a sentence here, a paragraph there, and any of these excerpts may be read multiple times. We want both to enable students to understand this text and to learn how to solve future texts. We reread when and in ways that will help us accomplish those goals.

Design questions that get at each the text’s content, craft and structure, and barriers – not based on the standards. Then, compare your questions with the standards. Perhaps you’ll see something that you think you missed. It’s reasonable to add questions based on the standards if they really fit the text.

Remember, our purpose isn’t to give kids practice answering certain kinds of questions, we are trying to get them to comprehend the text. If a question helps kids to notice something important that a text says or how it says it, then it’s a good question. Also of value, are those questions that uncover misunderstandings. They can identify skills and abilities that would benefit from teaching.

Teaching students how to overcome barriers and make sense of a challenging text – a text that may not easily be connected to their prior knowledge, a text that might outstrip their current decoding and/or language skills – should be the major point of those guided or directed reading sessions.

References

Brown, M. T. (2012). Instruction for struggling adolescent readers and the limited influence of curriculum materials. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University.

Buffen, L. (2019). Coping with text complexity in the disciplines: Vulnerable readers’ close reading practices. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Connor, C. M., Phillips, B. M., Kaschak, M., Apel, K., Young-Suk, K., Al Otaiba, S., Crowe, E. C., Thomas-Tate, S., Johnson, L. C., & Lonigan, C. J. (2014). Comprehension tools for teachers: Reading for understanding from prekindergarten through fourth grade. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 379-401. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10648-014-9267-1

Flory, M. (2021). Investigating recommended language instruction of complex literary texts: A content analysis of close reading lesson plans for elementary grades. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Utah State University.

Hopkins, L. J. (2014). Planning for reading comprehension instruction with core reading programs: Elementary teachers’ processes and plans. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University.

Howerton, W. S. (2011). Teachers’ adaptations during planning and instruction, their vision for teaching and their students’ understanding of reading comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Klingelhofer, R. R. (2014). Text-based discussions and functional grammar analysis: Scaffolding understanding and rich participation for English Language Learners. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan.

McMichael, E. A. (2020). District implementation of the gradual release of responsibility model situated within the reading workshop instructional framework: Lessons learned from a collective case study of exemplary primary teachers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of West Georgia. 

Montanaro, E. A. (2012). Instructional behaviors and student reading outcomes in a scripted tier 2 intervention for fourth grade struggling readers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland.

I talk a lot about research in this space.

I argue for research-based instruction and policy.

I point out a dearth of empirical evidence behind some instructional schemes, and champion others that have been validated or verified to my satisfaction.

Some readers are happy to find out what is “known,” and others see me as a killjoy because the research findings don’t match well with what they claim to “know.”

Members of this latter group are often horrified by my conclusions. They often are certain that I’m wrong because they read a book for teachers that had lots of impressive citations contradicting my claims. Sometimes these days, it doesn’t even take that. A few nasty assertions on X can do the trick.

I’m often challenged with statements like, “I thought that was part of the science of reading.”  

What is clear from these exchanges is that many educators, legislators, journalists, and parents don’t know what research is, why we should rely on it, or how to interpret research findings. That, perhaps, is not surprising but it does make these very important people susceptible to groundless claims and false promises.

Research is used to try to answer a question, solve a problem, or figure something out. It requires the systematic and formal collection and analysis of empirical data – using methods able to provide the kind of answer being sought. That means not all research can be used to provide a valid answer to all questions. Even with that, research can never prove something with 100 percent certainty. It is useful for reducing uncertainty, for increasing the likelihood that we will get something right – it cannot guarantee it.

“Systematic and formal” means that there are rules or conventions for how data in a research study should be handled; the rigor of these methods is what makes the data trustworthy and allows research to reduce uncertainty. If a researchers want to compare the effectiveness of two instructional approaches, they must make sure the groups to be taught are equivalent at the beginning. Without that we can’t be sure which method did best. Likewise, we are more likely to trust a survey that defines its terms, or an anthropological study that immerses the observer in the environment for a long period of time.

Research reports do much more than just report the results or outcomes of a study, but they explain—preferably in detail—how those results were obtained. Most people may find such detailed description of methods to be mind-numbingly boring, but it is that detail that allows us to determine what a study really means and how much weight to place on it.

Here are some simple guidelines to remember.

1. Just because something is written, doesn’t make it research.

Many practitioners think that if an idea is in a book or magazine (or even just comments on social media) that it is research. Some even think this blog is research. It is not, and neither is the typical Reading Teacher article or Heinemann book.

That’s not a comment on their quality or value, but a recognition of what such writing provides. In some cases, as with my blog, there is a serious effort to summarize research findings accurately, and to distinguish opinions (what someone believes) from research findings (what we know).  

Many publications for teachers are no more than compendia of opinions or personal experiences, which is fine. However, these suffer all the limits of that kind of thing. Just because someone likes what they’re doing (e.g., teaching, investing, cooking) and then writes about how well they’ve done it… doesn’t necessarily mean it’s great. That’s why 82% of people believe they’re in the top 30% of drivers; something that obviously can’t be true. (Often teachers will tell me they are getting great results doing something that contradicts my research summaries. I always request supporting test data that demonstrate the claim. Not surprisingly, they almost never write back and when they do it is not to offer any proof.)

As human beings we all fall prey to overconfidence, selective memory, and just a plain lack of systematicity in how we evaluate what we are doing and its impact.

Often teachers tell me that kids now love reading because of the teaching they have provided them. I ask how they know. What evidence do they have? Usually the answer is something like, “A parent told me that their child now likes to read.” Of course, that doesn’t reveal how the other 25 kids are doing, or whether that parent is a good observer of such things, or even what the motivation may have been for the praise.

Even when you’re correct about things improving, it’s impossible—from personal experience alone—to know the source of the success. It could be the teaching method, or maybe just the force of your personality. If another teacher adopted your methods, things might not be so magical.

And, then there is opportunity cost. We all struggle with this one. No matter how good an outcome, I can’t possibly know how well things might have gone had I done it differently. The roads not traveled may have gotten me someplace less positive—but not necessarily. You simply can’t know.

That’s where research comes in… it allows us to avoid overconfidence, selective memory, lack of systematicity, lack of reliable evidence, incorrect causal attribution, and the narrowness of individual experience.

When I first published this in 2018, my concern was that many teachers were placing too much confidence in first-hand accounts of other teachers and were too likely to buy into junk from Teachers Pay Teachers. It was not that I didn’t believe teachers could gain worthwhile ideas from such sources. My concern was that teachers were often placing these sources above sound research results.

If an article recommends a technique that the authors claim worked for them, I might want to give it a spin in my own classes to see what I think. But I’d have much more confidence in this if someone had objectively evaluated it.  

How have things changed over the past several years?

I’m noticing that teachers are getting a lot more advice about how to teach from journalists, social media influencers, and scientists who may study reading but not reading instruction. These sources usually have little or no experience teaching reading and their knowledge of the relevant research and their ability to evaluate it are questionable at best. I don’t mind when these folks make recommendations as to what they want kids to learn (everybody has a vested interest in such curricular issues), but the best ways to teach something? Nah!

My 2026 take on this is: For the best advice on how to teach reading, turn to studies that explore the effects of reading instruction and what works best. Teachers’ advice based on their own experiences in delivering such instruction can’t replace the research studies but can provide valuable practical information that would never make its way into a research study. The value of advice on how best to teach reading from folks who don’t teach reading and who aren’t relying on instructional research? Not so much.

 2.     Research should not be used selectively.

Many educators use research the same way advertisers and politicians do—selectively, to support their beliefs or claims—rather than trying to figure out how things work or how they could be made to work better.

I wish I had a doughnut for every time a school official has asked me to identify research that could be used to support their new policy! They know what they want to do and seek research that will allow them to say their idea is a good one. What they should be doing is turning to the research first and then using that to determine the best way forward.

Cherry-picking an aberrant study that matches one’s claims or ignoring a rigorously designed study in favor of one with a preferred outcome may be acceptable debater’s tricks but bad science. That can only lead to bad instructional practice.

When it comes to determining what research means, you must pay attention not just to results that you like. Research is at its best when it challenges us to see things differently.

I vividly remember early in my career when Scott Paris challenged our colleagues to wonder why DISTAR, a scripted teaching approach was so effective, even though most of us despised it. Clearly, we were missing something. Our theories were so strong that they were blinding us to the fact that the approach to teaching that we didn’t like was providing something beneficial for kids—at least for some kids or under some conditions (the kinds of things that personal experience can’t reveal).

Anything to add to this in 2026?

These days my concern is not just with cherry-picked evidence but with evidence inappropriate to the question. Recently, I was speaking with legislators who were telling me about the importance of phonics instruction because of the studies of how the brain works.

Those studies are fascinating and have value, but their value is not that they reveal how we should teach phonics, how much phonics to teach, which programs to use, which curricular sequence to focus on, what activities to use and so on.

These studies provide us with a possible explanation for why phonics instruction has been successful in so many instructional studies. Who knows, someday this brain work might even suggest new ideas for designing or redesigning some of that instruction, but we won’t know the benefits of such invention until someone tries it out in classrooms in the context of a rigorous instructional study. All those things mentioned in the previous paragraph about how to teach decoding is something that those neurological studies can’t tell us. Instructional studies need to be the source of the determinative evidence as to how instruction should proceed – if we are really trying to reduce our uncertainty about how best to increase reading achievement. Legislating instructional practice based on brain scans is dopey.

 3.     Research, and the interpretation of research, require consistency.

Admittedly, interpreting research studies is as much an art as a science. During the nearly 60 years of my professional career, the interpretation of pedagogical research has changed dramatically.

It used to be entirely up to the discretion of each individual researcher as to which studies they’d include in a review and what criteria they’d use to weigh these studies.

That led to some pretty funky science: research syntheses that identified only studies that supported a particular teaching method or inconsistent criteria for impeaching studies. What that would mean is that a study would be ignored because it suffered from a serious design flaw unless its findings matched with what the researcher wanted to find – then that design flaw was no longer a problem.

Since I wrote this, research has found long-term negative consequences for Reading Recovery (May, Blakeney, Shrestha, Mazal, & Kennedy, 2024). Studies have long reported short-term gains (e.g, May, Gray, Sirinides, Goldsworthy, Armijo, Sam, Gillespie, & Tognatta, 2015; Shanahan & Barr, 1995), but the long-term harm of the approach is greatly concerning.

When this blog first posted, those long-term consequences were unknown. At that time, it was common to hear the short-term positive results of Reading Recovery dismissed because it was taught one-to-one (“anything works if it is taught one-on-one,” critics would say).

That dismissal disturbed me, not because I was a big Reading Recovery fan (I was always skeptical), but because the folks who were pooh-poohing Reading Recovery in that way, were simultaneously embracing the phonics results of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000). The problem with this? Many of the studies that reported strong positive results had evaluated one-on-one phonics instruction, which didn’t seem to bother these critics at all.  

I’ve retained this paragraph from the 2018 version: “I’m persuaded that both phonics and Reading Recovery work (because they both have multiple studies of sufficient quality showing their effectiveness). That doesn’t mean I think they work equally well, or that they are equally efficient, or that they even accomplish the same things for students.”

That paragraph still makes the important original point that we need to evaluate all research and research results using the same standards and criteria. But it now also reveals the fact that what we think we know from research may change over time. New studies may overturn previous research-based practices. That is not a problem, that is a strength of science.

In the arguments over the “science of reading,” phonics opponents often have argued that it is inappropriate to require phonics instruction since there is no such thing as “settled science“ (e.g., Tierney & Pearson, 2024). They’re not wrong about the nature of science – new better research can always alter our perspectives and practices and in that sense science can never be settled.

Nevertheless, that does not mean we cannot proceed to apply science to our lives. No physician would withhold today’s most effective cancer treatments because there is no such thing as “settled science.” We apply the best knowledge that we have and continue through science – not rhetoric – to keep adding to what we know, even if it means that in the future we will need to alter our course (which is a good reason to resist overly prescriptive legislation even if it appears to be consistent with today’s scientific findings, since up the road science may make such legislation problematic).   

If we want to do better in reading education, we’re going to need to rely on science. That means valuing science over loud opinionizing, evaluating scientific information consistently, and rejecting arguments that there is never enough research to dictate our actions.

Let’s do better.

References

May, H., Blakeney, A., Shrestha, P., Mazal, M., & Kennedy, N. (2024). Long-term impacts of Reading Recovery through 3rd and 4th Grade: A regression discontinuity study. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 17(3), 433–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2023.2209092

May, H., Gray, A., Sirinides, P., Goldsworthy, H., Armijo, M., Sam, C., Gillespie, J. N., & Tognatta, N. (2015). Year one results from the multisite randomized evaluation of the i3 scale-up of Reading Recovery. American Educational Research Journal, 53(3), 547-581.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction: Reports of the Subgroups. Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Shanahan, T., & Barr, R. (1995). Reading recovery: An independent evaluation of the effects of an early instructional intervention for at-risk learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 958–996. https://doi.org/10.2307/748206

Tierney, R. J., & Pearson, P. D. (2024). Fact-checking the science of reading: Opening up the conversation. Literacy Research Commons. https://literacyresearchcommons.org

November 3, 2018 Version

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Fat chance.

RR, if you don’t know, is a remedial reading program for first graders. It started in the 1970s in New Zealand and was widely adopted throughout the United States. Over the years, it has been both widely lauded and decried by reading authorities. From its inception, it was the focus of lots of research – much of which seemed to support its effectiveness, though I had expressed concerns about this (Shanahan, 1987; Shanahan & Barr, 1995), as had others (Iversen & Tunmer, 1992). The combination of its one-on-one instruction and its extensive teacher development requirements make it an especially expensive intervention.

In 2022, Henry May and his colleagues at the University of Delaware reported a fascinating study – extensive and high in quality. It was a follow up to an earlier study they had conducted evaluating the effectiveness of RR. That earlier study found clear learning advantages for the children enrolled in the program (May, Sirinides, Gray, & Goldworthy, 2016).

The study, first reported in 2022 and published in 2024, evaluated the long-term benefits for the program and the results weren’t pretty (May, Blakeney, Shrestha, Mazal, & Kennedy, 2024).

Reading Recovery advocates claimed that its students would become self-improving systems, no longer with a need for remedial support. A promise meant to allay the concerns about its costs. But according to the May study, these kids needed as much or more of those additional services as the untreated population. Evidently, there was no saving at all.

Even worse, the RR kids did less well in reading by grades 3 and 4. Their achievement levels were lower than those of the comparison kids. In other words, RR hadn’t improved their ability to keep learning. If anything, it appeared that it had somehow made them less able to keep up with their classmates.

That was what I wrote about in that blog that I thought would be my last word on RR.

However, in the past few weeks, I’ve received multiple queries about the May study. Each was as skeptical as I had been about the possibility that RR somehow disadvantaged these children. By the end of grade 1, the RR kids were outperforming the reading of similar kids who hadn’t had the advantage of RR instruction. How could that be a problem?

Some emails questioned the quality of the study. For example, as is often true with longitudinal research, attrition levels were high. Large potentially biasing losses of subjects can undermine the trustworthiness of a study. In this case? There were still 15,000 kids in the study and various analyses showed the unlikelihood that attrition had affected the results.

The results seem screwy – I’ve never seen this kind of long-term negative result from any instruction – but there was nothing screwy about the study.

One questioner raised the best query of all:  

“Something very weird is going on when first graders who got a lot of one-on-one help from an expert teacher end up going backwards. What’s your theory?”

I didn’t really have an explanation. I had taken the study to mean that RR didn’t have the lasting power its advocates claimed and treated the underperformance as a quirky anomaly.

But what if it weren’t? What if RR made it harder for kids to keep learning well?

One explanation, this one particularly popular with RR opponents, is that intensively teaching students an approach to reading that is inconsistent with how we read, you know three-cueing, may have long-term negative consequences.

That may be, but one could level the same kind of argument at some phonics instruction.

Let’s face it, we don’t read by sounding out words laboriously, and studies do show that kids who come to expect too much regularity or consistency in our orthography don’t do as well as those who recognize English orthography as a more complex and conditional system.

The benefit of phonics is that it guides kids to pay attention to spelling patterns and alters their memory in ways that makes it possible for words to be easily remembered. Any youngster who perseverates on the sounding out part or who rigidly expects letters to always be related to certain phonemes wouldn’t be likely to make the same gains as kids who have a better purchase on the nuances of our spelling system.

I doubt that either three-cueing or sounding out usually have those negative consequences – kids wisely don’t follow what adults say that slavishly.

But what about a child who is working one-on-one with an adult for 30 minutes a day for 12 weeks? That might be somewhat a more persuasive circumstance. Perhaps with that kind of intense instruction more kids might be persuaded to approach words through context rather than through the spelling.

I’ve never been a big fan of this explanation, but it would be unreasonable to dismiss it out of hand.

Another possible explanation is that kids identified for inclusion in RR may differ in some unidentified qualitative way from those kids who are ever so slightly higher performing in reading. That could mean that RR hadn’t really done any harm in the long run, just that the kids it serves are in especially great need, which makes it hard for them to keep up.

Of course, that would also mean that RR is not a sufficiently effective program for those lowest performing kids, which is a serious problem since those are the kids it targets.

In 1995, I pointed out that reading problems have two possible sources: something internal to the child (organic or neurological differences) or something external to the child (environmental problems including poor teaching). It was evident to me at the time that RR was increasing students’ ability to read but that it wasn’t altering either students’ ability to learn nor the kids’ environment. If youngsters had perceptual problems or an especially weak memory, they would still suffer these ills, even though they would have slightly higher reading scores. Likewise, if mom and dad weren’t encouraging academic success at home, RR wasn’t altering that either.

Despite the claims of RR advocates there was no reason to think the program would make kids successful in learning to read from then on.

But that wouldn’t explain why they would do even worse than comparable kids who didn’t get the treatment. That’s why it would be necessary to posit some unidentified factor that makes those lowest dozen kids different from everyone else. Whatever that unknown difference might be – internal or external – it should be obvious from the May study that RR was insufficient to adequately address it. That would argue against the heavy concentration of resources demanded by RR, since students with such stubborn learning problems should be expected to need ongoing instructional support.

Currently, we rarely plan for continuous need. Interventions usually aren’t designed to provide multi-year support, so our lowest progress kids tend to end up with a patchwork of programs, much of it repetitious, and all of it poorly coordinated.

Personally, I think this is the most likely of my explanations. Nevertheless, this one, like the others is just a hunch, not a research finding.

A third possibility for the odd results reported in the May et al. study could be that the degree of support offered by RR is so extensive that it ultimately undermines kids’ confidence, leading to “learned helplessness” and its consequences (Maier & Seligman, 2016). These kids know they are getting a substantial amount of help – 60 or more half-hour lessons delivered one-on-one is substantial. That so much help fails to alter their course – despite RR they still require remedial assistance – that could be especially discouraging.

It’s easy to imagine students concluding from their lack of success from so much help, “I must be really dumb.”

That explanation highlights something important about any remedial teaching. It is essential that we set specific goals for remediation, goals shared with the students; goals that we are serious about accomplishing. That way kids will have very specific ideas of the potential value of what they are being provided, and they’ll be aware of any real learning gains that they make.

What we shouldn’t do is make the kinds of claims offered by Reading Recovery advocates – that the students’ reading problems will be extinguished once and for all. Likewise, I’m wary of any program that touts learning guarantees. In medicine, it’s considered unethical to promise cancer cures and I think we should be equally cautious when it comes to assuring learning gains.

So those are three conjectures about why a program like RR might appear to slow student learning in the long run: (1) it may have slowed student learning by inculcating bad reading habits; (2) it may only look like it interfered with learning because it failed to address the real needs some students have; (3) it may somehow have undermined student confidence making them more likely to withdraw or quit trying.

I don’t know if any of these explanations holds water – but thinking about those possibilities suggests some important insights about remedial instruction.

In any event, kids enrolled in Reading Recovery did less well in the long run than similar kids who didn’t receive the program. No matter the reason, those sad results recommend caution. If I were calling the shots in a school district again, I’d discontinue the program until and unless I received a satisfactory explanation. 

References

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033

May, H., Blakeney, A., Shrestha, P., Mazal, M., & Kennedy, N. (2024). Long-term impacts of Reading Recovery through 3rd and 4th Grade: A regression discontinuity study. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 17(3), 433–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2023.2209092

May, H., Sirinides, P., Gray, A., & Goldsworthy, H. (2016, March). Reading Recovery: An evaluation of the four-year i3 scale-up. A research report. Newark, DE: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

Shanahan, T. (1987). Review of “The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties” (3rd ed.), (by Marie Clay). Journal of Reading Behavior, 19, 117–119.

Shanahan, T., & Barr, R. (1995). Reading recovery: An independent evaluation of the effects of an early instructional intervention for at-risk learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 958–996. https://doi.org/10.2307/748206

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I'm looking at finding a spelling program for my school.  What are the elements that should be in a good program?  Should the lists of words be based on phonics/spelling patterns like silent e, later expanded into multisyllable words with the same pattern for upper grades + later study on affixes etc.? Should the spelling words be embedded in stories or articles that the students read as part of their word study? Should there be word and sentence dictation?  Should there be vocabulary related activities such as filling out sentences with missing spelling words that are included in a word bank? How many words per week?

Shanahan responds:

Can you spell “procrastination?”

Lately, I seem to find ways to do almost anything rather than work.

I don’t know if my delaying in this case was due to the sheer number of spelling queries or to the occasional warm spring days we’ve enjoyed lately.

My first reaction to your request was, “this will be easy. I’ve monitored spelling research over the years and have even done some of the early work on the relations between decoding and spelling development.”

I set out to provide a coherent response to your queries more than once, and more than once gave up with a hodgepodge of advice – all of it brilliant I’m sure, but coherent? Not so much.

Then I decided to take a fresh look at recent studies on spelling in the hopes of finding some masterful piece that would waken a new insight about orthography or provide some intelligible overall scheme that would result in a sage response.

There were some cool studies – various qualitative and quantitative analyses of research on spelling interventions – all of it worthwhile and none of it sufficient to get me in gear.

Finally, I tried something different. I wrote to several colleagues whose knowledge of word teaching outstrips my own. I’ve never been one to choose my friends based on a common philosophy, so I was interrogating a diverse sample of experts: Donald Bear, Peter Bowers, Richard Gentry, Steve Graham, and Louisa Moats.

I didn’t hit them with all your questions I just wondered what three major points they would make if someone were setting out to teach spelling or to adopt a new spelling program.

Unlike me, they all answered immediately and generously. Oh, I’m not saying there was no hesitation, a few of them responded and then quickly responded again. That’s one thing I love about people who study words – they care deeply about getting it right.

Some didn’t stay to my three pieces of advice (see what I mean), and all found ways of stretching those limits a bit. Nevertheless, I found a lot of overlap among their answers – and my quick review of recent empirical work. In those commonalities is the wisdom I couldn’t conjure up on my own (though my initial feeble attempts were not far off).

As with any enterprise of this type, the one who combines the responses is necessarily responsible for any resulting deficiencies – and any great insights are due to the individual contributors. In other words, if you don’t like an answer, blame me.

1.        Provide daily explicit, systematic spelling instruction that progresses from grade-to-grade.

Some people have gotten it into their heads that spelling instruction doesn’t matter anymore. One reason for this is the spell-check function provided by computers. Another is the precedence given to reading and writing – those are obviously more important and there is only so much instructional time.

Richard Gentry wisely opened with this one. No one else mentioned it. Given their past research, I think it fair to conclude that they all would agree with it. I guess it wasn’t included since my inquiry seemed to assume this.

Research is very clear that direct explicit instruction of spelling improves spelling ability – especially with the words taught, but also with related words (Graham & Santangelo, 2014; Pan, Rickard, & Bjork, 2021; Peterson-Brown & Kromminga, 2023). According to the research, spelling instruction improves spelling, but it also improves reading and writing ability. So much for the idea of skipping spelling to benefit reading and writing. 

2.        Integrate spelling into word study, phonics, and vocabulary.

Donald Bear offered this point up and in a way it’s echoed in the next two that follow. I could have rolled it into them. I included it because of its structural importance to a teacher’s workday schedule. Instead of treating spelling as just one more doggone thing that must be done each day, this item tells teachers where it fits in the daily routine.

I’ve long argued for a daily 30-45 minutes dedicated to building word knowledge – including any and all kinds of study of words and their parts. Gentry recommended 20-minutes per day of spelling study. However, once you combine spelling, phonics, and morphology it’s easier to think about how word instruction fits into the school day.

3.        Teach explicitly the principles that underlie the spelling lists.

Bear, Gentry, Steve Graham, and Peter Bowers all overtly argue for this one, and Louisa Moats seems to rally around this flag too. While not using these terms, she opposes the whole idea of having kids memorize weekly spelling lists. To put it another way, like the others, she wants the focus to be on teaching the patterns and principles.

Research shows that instruction leads to improvement in the studied words, but with less successful generalization to similar words.

Whatever the value may be of adding the spellings of specific words to memory, most likely the real power of word knowledge – in spelling, reading, and writing – comes from a deep structural understanding of how words work and that’s what these experts want teachers to emphasize.

As the next item reveals – their point isn’t to foster a simplistic understanding of English orthography.

What I mean by that may best be demonstrated through example. Imagine a lesson focused on the -ane pattern. Perhaps this lesson would have students toiling over a list like this one:

                  -cane

                  -mane

                  -pane

                  -vane

                  -wane

                  -crane

                  -plane

This would be a weak lesson, I think all would agree. Most kids could memorize the items in this list without understanding much of anything. They’d probably score 100% on Friday’s test without breaking a sweat and would not be likely to remember any of these words by Monday.

This could be improved any number of ways. One would be to teach kids about the   -VCe idea – that this pattern will tend to result in the pronunciation of a long vowel with a silent e at the end. That would require restructuring this list:

                  -plane

                  -dome

                  -gene

                  -fine

                  -tune

                  -crate

                  -bike

                  -note

Not only do about 10% of one syllable English words include this pattern, but it’s common in multisyllable words too (e.g., complete, behave, explode). It matters also because this spelling can distinguish word meanings (e.g., plan-plane, fin-fine, not-note). Kids can’t as easily memorize this list because of the varied vowels, so both the words and the underlying principle will more likely be learned.

This better list could be improved even more: perhaps including some of those meaning distinctions or the multisyllable instances of the pattern. I especially like the idea of including some important exceptions (e.g., have, give, come, done). That may seem to undermine the pattern, but we want kids to see both the consistencies and the exceptions. If you want kids to learn a principle, it helps to contrast it with its exceptions. Including the exceptions also mitigates against the mindless memorization of words – forcing kids to think about the spellings.

If lessons don’t lead students to understand how the spelling system works (or doesn’t work), they aren’t worth much.

Of course, these underlying spelling principles can’t be fully exposed or explored in one week’s lessons. They will be best addressed through a series of such lessons – across a school year, across school years – that address patterns, principles, generalizations, contrasts, pronunciations, and meanings.

Also, although instruction should have intentional goals that doesn’t mean teachers must explicitly tell kids the patterns or principles. It can be a good idea to get the students to try to articulate these relations from their analysis of the words. Don’t worry, if they fail to figure it out, you can still tell them.  

4.        Teach the complexity of English spelling.

Gentry, Moats, Bear, and Bowers all argue for an emphasis on the complexity of English spelling. My examples in the previous recommendation eventually got to some of that complexity, but it is a pale (not pail) representation of what this crew of authorities were getting at.

They want to see lessons that link pronunciation, spelling, and meaning.

They want kids to learn how different letters and letter combinations correspond to the same pronunciations (e.g., apron, cake, rain, day, steak, vein, they, eight, ballet, café).
They want kids to come to see how combining morphological elements alters spelling (dropping or keeping silent letters, doubling consonants, changing y’s to i’s, altering prefix pronunciations, etc.).

                  hope –  hoping

                  hope –  hopeful

                  change –  changeable

                  run –  running

                  visit  –  visiting

                  happy –  happiness

                  cry  –  crying

                  happy –  unhappy

                  photograph – photography

                  act  – action

                  active – activity

They want kids to understand how syntax or grammar affect spelling: tense (e.g., like, likes, liked, liking), plurality (e.g., babies, leaves, boxes, man-men, foot-feet), noun/verb/adverb/adjective shifts (e.g., quick-quickly, happy-happily, good-well, decide-decision, active-activity), comparatives/superlatives (e.g., big, bigger, biggest), and possessives (e.g., dog’s, dogs’). I get the impression that at least some of these experts would not just handle this complexity by having kids studying lists of words. No, they would want kids to see how these syntactic spelling shifts work in sentences as well. Peter Bowers even sent me a link to a video of students working with the spelling implications of morphology.

5.        Link spelling with writing.

Steve Graham stressed the importance of selecting words for the spelling curriculum from students’ writing. I know some spelling programs have conducted word frequency studies – looking to find the words kids try to write most often, as well as the ones they tend to mess up on. That makes sense since we are more likely to learn something that we will use.

It pays for teachers to consider errors their students make in writing and to add some of these words into the spelling mix as well.

Louisa Moats stressed the importance of getting the kids to do more than write the words, but to write the words in context. This makes sense a couple of ways. If we are going to stress the variations in spelling that are caused by syntactic requirements, having kids write whole sentences that use these words would show kids how it works. Likewise, an emphasis on sentences forces students to spell words without super focusing only on certain ones. Kids must learn to manage spelling demands even when their attention is divided by the rest of the sentence.

6.        Make spelling interesting, make spelling fun.

Admittedly, most responses focused on the curriculum – the what that we need to teach, not necessarily the how. Nevertheless, both Bowers and Graham stated major instructional principles, and the others found ways to couch their curriculum-focused principles in lots of practical teaching advice.

Peter Bowers loves etymology and believes it is valuable when it comes to teaching kids about words. I’m always a bit of a skeptic on these things. I believe kids can learn what they need to about words without the historical source material. That’s true, but Pete’s bigger point that should not be lost here is his desire to arouse kids’ curiosity (something inherent in the work of all these valued colleagues).

Kids may not need to know the reason an odd spelling pattern or contrast came about, but knowing it may make the information stickier. As Peter put it: “Students with poor phonological awareness and weak orthographic memories especially need every possible advantage to bind words into automaticity.” Louisa Moats gave me an example of using etymology to explain the odd pronunciation of the first vowel in oven, and showed how it could be linked to love, dove, does, done.

Even more important than improving remembering, this approach may get kids wondering about words in a way that could have wonderful long-term learning implications.

Steve Graham came right out and said, “make spelling fun.” He even sent me a study (Graham, Harris, & Fink-Chorzempa, 2003) in which, along with explicit instruction, the kids worked in pairs, played spelling games, and graphed their success week-to-week. Part of the success was due to the kids’ enjoyment.

Donald Bear encouraged games as well, along with word hunts, and timed word sorts.

Richard Gentry stressed the importance of emphasizing complexity while keeping the tasks from being overly hard. He recommended a weekly list of 20 words, with the kids already knowing about 10 of these. This makes sense in so many ways: it gives kids a sense of having a leg up on the week’s work, it gives them an opportunity to link what they know with the new stuff and provides valuable review.

My job is to sum things up. It seems to me that my colleagues are saying, look for programs that teach kids to think about and understand words – how they work, what they mean. Engage kids in activities that get them to think deeply about words – to pronounce them, to decode them, to spell them, to interpret them, to use them in a variety of ways. Encourage interest and engagement. Spelling is about understanding and knowing language, not about memorizing lists of words.    

I have smart friends, huh?

References

 Bear, D., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2023). Word study for phonics, spelling, and vocabulary instruction (7th ed.). New York: Pearson

Bowers, P. N., Kirby, J. R., & Deacon, S. H. (2010). The Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy Skills: A Systematic Review of the Literature: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 144-179.

Colenbrander, D., von Hagen, A., Kohnen, S., Wegener, S., Ko, K., Beyersmann, E., Behzadnia, A., Parrila, R., & Castles, A. (2024). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy outcomes for children in English?speaking countries: A systematic review and meta?analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 119.

Galuschka, K., Görgen, R., Kalmar, J., Haberstroh, S., Schmalz, X., & Schulte-Körne, G. (2020) Effectiveness of spelling interventions for learners with dyslexia: A meta-analysis and systematic review. Educational Psychologist, 55(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1659794

Gentry, J. R., & Ouellette, G. (2019). Brain words: How the science of reading informs teaching. Stenhouse Publishers.

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Chorzempa, B. F. (2002). Contribution of spelling instruction to the spelling, writing, and reading of poor spellers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(4), 669-686.

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27(9), 1703-1743.

International Literacy Association. (2019). Teaching and assessing spelling. Newark, DE: Author.

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

Pan, S. C., Rickard, T. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2021). Does spelling still matter—and if so, how should it be taught? Perspectives from contemporary and historical research. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 1523-1552.

Petersen?Brown, S., & Kromminga, K. R. (2023). Systematic review and meta?analysis of the implementation and effectiveness of spelling instruction and intervention. Psychology in the Schools, 61, 3315-3338.

Teacher question: If you were teaching second grade what would your schedule look like?

Shanahan response:

I start from the premise that kids deserve 120-180 minutes per day of reading/writing instruction. The more challenged the kids are, or the greater the learning gains we’re seeking, the more time I want to devote to literacy.

Given the ambitious learning goals we are striving for, I see no possibility of success with fewer than 2 hours per day. On the other hand, no matter how great the literacy needs, I can think of no situation where I’d devote more than 3 hours per day to these goals because of the importance of math, science, social studies, the arts, etc. You can only do so much with a 6 ½ hour school day.  

Considering various surveys and observational studies reported since the early 1960s (e.g., Austin & Morrison, 1963; Baumann & Heubach, 1996; Baumann, et al., 2000; Kaufman, et al., 2018; Kraft & Novicoff, 2025; NAEP, 2023; Shanahan& Duffett, 2013), it appears that English language arts (long dominated by reading) usually gets about 90 minutes per day on average. This works out to about 2 hours per day in the primary grades and an hour in upper elementary—with a 90-minute average.

Most schools these days are proud of their 90-minute reading block. That means they’ve institutionalized the average. I push for a greater investment than that (2-3 hours) with the idea that more time leads to more literacy learning (e.g., Fleming, 2013).

I don’t love the idea of all schools providing equal amounts of reading instruction either, since that ensures that the lowest, least-advantaged learners never catch up.

Another dimension of this has to do with the need for attention to multiple literacy components. Teaching devoted to word knowledge, oral reading fluency, writing, and reading comprehension all may lead to higher reading achievement. I’d pay roughly equal attention to each of these key components. (In some situations, such as with English Learners, I can be persuaded to add explicit oral language instruction to this mix, dividing the time in five).

One more thing. I’m not a big “reading block” fan. Block time can make it difficult to schedule a school day. There’s no inherent learning benefit from block scheduling — and often I see kids getting less than the scheduled time because of questionable assumptions about block sanctity.

If your school day begins at 8AM, and your literacy block goes from 8:00-9:30… what are the chances kids will receive 90 minutes of instruction? My bet (and past observations) say that the first 10-15 minutes there’ll be no teaching: pledge of allegiance, morning announcements, lunch money collection, attendance, pencil sharpening, circle time, and so on are not reading instruction.  

With those basics out of the way, let’s start with a simple example.

8:10-8:40          Reading comprehension

8:40-9:10          Text reading fluency

9:10-9:40          Word knowledge (including phonics, spelling, morphology)

9:40-10:10        Writing

That plan would satisfy the criteria I set above, and in some cases, it might even make sense. However, as noted, elementary school days can be complicated, so here’s another perhaps more realistic example:

8:10-9:10          Reading comprehension

9:10-9:40          Word Knowledge

9:40-10:10        Text reading fluency

That one seems like a problem; too much comprehension time and no writing at all. I probably wouldn’t do this in Grade 2 admittedly, but I might in the upper grades. Often teachers at those levels want a greater amount of time for reading longer selections and it’s possible to trade reading comprehension and writing time across days. If this balances out over a couple of weeks, no problem.

However I’d scheduled the total reading comprehension time, I’d want the kids reading during about half of that time – rather than engaging in discussion or receiving explicit teaching from me. That isn’t special to reading comprehension either. During phonics kids should spend much of the time decoding and encoding words, and writing should involve lots of writing and revising.

Another scheduling possibility:

8:10-8:40          Reading comprehension

8:40-9:40          Math

9:40-10:00        Word knowledge

10:00-10:30      Art

10:30-11:00      Text reading fluency

11:00-11:30      Writing 

11:30-12:30      Lunch/recess

12:30-12:40      Word knowledge

This schedule shows that you don’t need a reading block. It’s not a problem to work on literacy, to do something else, and then to do more literacy. That won’t interfere with learning. In this case, the school’s math consultant hasn’t read the research, but she’s sure that morning teaching works best (that’s not what the research says). I’m willing to keep her happy by adding math to my morning schedule, even if it bumps some literacy teaching to the PM.

Oh, and the divided word knowledge time? That might be problematic for some lessons, but in this case, it provides “interval training.” I could teach a skill in the morning, and later in the day have a productive review session with more practice. That kind of time spacing can lead to better recall (Cepeda, et al., 2006).

The word knowledge instruction would focus on decoding, spelling, and morphology. That instruction aims to make sure kids can read words, write words, and understand the meanings of the words.

And what about the text reading fluency teaching? It isn’t enough that kids can read words, they must read them in text and that’s a somewhat different thing. There are lots of ways of doing it, but most often I’d engage kids in supervised paired-reading practice. I’d divide the class into pairs; they’d take turns reading pages and giving feedback to each other. While they did that, I’d move from pair to pair to help with the reading and the feedback, to collect data on student performance, and to keep kids on task.

Another planning variant can free up additional time. What if today’s reading comprehension lesson was taught with the science or social studies book or the writing lesson was linked to that content? That would reduce the time needed to address an ambitious elementary curriculum.

Of course, this kind of schedule says nothing about interconnections among the parts. We can’t tell from these agendas whether the kids will write about the text used for reading comprehension, or whether the word work or fluency work will be based on that text. Perhaps the class is working on a project or report and the texts used for reading comprehension are topical text sets. The schedule may look the same, whether the degree of integration is low or high.

If my kids were especially low in literacy, I may increase the total time to as much as three hours. That would give me more time to address each component. I know some schools that require 2 hours for reading and writing and another half hour for in-class intervention time, providing reteaching opportunities for kids in need.

One district I know fulfills that two-hour commitment, but they add an additional 30 minutes a day to foster a love of reading (e.g., reading to the kids, independent reading, computer games, book clubs). I’m not a big fan of that approach because those activities do little to improve reading ability and there’s no evidence that they lead to love of reading, but at least it isn’t taking the place of the required reading instruction.

These examples are limited, but they highlight some important points:

• The amount of instruction should be maximized and varied based on student need. Down time and activities with low learning payoffs must be minimized.
• The actual amount of instruction students receive is more important than how much time is scheduled, and there is a difference.
• Schedules should be aimed at intended learning outcomes not at activities one might want to use for teaching.
• Many different activities can be used to accomplish any learning goal – there is more than one way to teach something. Effectiveness is what matters.
• Literacy instruction should include lots of oral and silent reading, writing, decoding, spelling. Kids need explicit instruction and guided practice in doing these things.
• Schedules should be dynamic and flexible, allowing teachers to better meet the needs of students rather than honoring traditional – and often unsubstantiated claims – like kids learn more in the morning or small groups are always better than whole class.
• Integration across the language arts and content areas can have a multiplier effect. Using text materials and topics from your content classes during language arts can increase learning and free up time in your busy schedule.

References

Austin, M. C., & Morrison, C. (1963). The first R: The Harvard report on reading in elementary schools. New York: Macmillan.

Baumann, J. F., & Heubach, K. M. (1996). Do basal readers deskill teachers? A national survey of educators’ use and opinions of basal readers. Elementary School Journal, 96(5), 511-526. https://doi.org/10.1086/461842

Baumann, J. F., Hoffman, J. V., Duffy-Hester, A., & Ro, J. M. (2000). The first R yesterday and today: U.S. elementary reading instruction practices reported by teachers and administrators. Reading Research Quarterly, 35(3), 338-377. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.35.3.2

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354.

Fleming, N. (2013, March 14). Expanded learning time linked to higher test scores. Education Week.

Kaufman, J. H., Opfer, V. D., Bongard, M., Pane, J. D., & Thompson, L. E. (2018). What teachers know and do in the Common Core era: Findings from the 2015–2017 American Teacher Panel. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018.

Kraft, M. A., & Novicoff, S. (2025). Time for school: Assessing the inequality of access to instructional time across the United State. Education Next, 25(1), 32-39.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (2023). 2022 reading survey questionnaire results. Washington, DC. httos://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/survey-questionnaires/?grade=4

Shanahan, T., & Duffett, A. (2013). Common Core in the schools: A first look at reading assignments. Washington, DC: Thomas B. Forham Institute. 

18 previous comments

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I wondered whether any aspects of it might raise concerns from the perspective of how students develop comprehension through reading. Allowing AI to provide explanations of sources or to summarize and synthesize multiple texts seems as though it could bypass some of the processes that develop comprehension, such as grappling with complex texts, comparing sources, resolving inconsistencies, and constructing one's own synthesis of information.

From a reading comprehension standpoint, do you see any aspects of this kind of AI research framework as potentially concerning?

Shanahan responds:

I’ve been receiving different versions of this question for about three years. This one is particularly articulate; I’ve only included an excerpt of it. The author herself provided a good answer to her own question.

Why haven’t I responded earlier to these queries?

To tell the truth, I didn’t know how to answer. I knew of some AI tutoring schemes that seemed potentially hopeful, but that was about it.

As this query points out, AI may undermine learning as much as it could help it along. This danger seems especially pertinent to the development of reading comprehension.

Accordingly, this two-part blog/podcast entry will address some of those concerns.

It makes sense to start with my definition of reading comprehension. It is the ability to make sense of information conveyed in written language – the ability to negotiate the affordances and barriers of text.

This is an “active reader” kind of definition. It includes understanding, inferring, judging, interpreting, relating, and remembering – all actions that readers may have to implement to make sense of a text.

But the definition also emphasizes the social aspects of this sense making. Texts are not natural phenomena; they are written by or for somebody who has a communicative purpose. As such, texts may include definitions, descriptions, graphic elements, explanations, examples, analogies, repetitions, and so on, all aimed at helping the imaginary readers (those readers the author imagined would be reading the text) to get the point. Those are the kinds of linguistic and conceptual features that act as affordances. They are efforts an author makes to helping the readers to grasp the message.

Of course, authors differ in how well they do this imagining or in how effectively they address their readers’ communicative needs. However, even if they were to do these things to perfection, there’s always the chance that some unexpected reader may come along who will be unable to make use of some of these affordances. They might even be perplexed by them. Perhaps the author’s diction excludes somebody, a metaphor miscarries, or a reader simply doesn’t know what to do with a complicated graphic element. When that happens, these conceptual and linguistic elements themselves may become barriers to understanding.

Readers, to comprehend, must take advantage of the affordances to a sufficient degree and surmount enough of the barriers to make sense of a text.      

Learning to read means learning to do this with a wide variety of texts; texts that vary in content, style, purpose, structure, genre, language features, and, yes, difficulty.

Since the 1940s, teachers have been told that kids learned reading best when taught with texts at “their reading levels.” Nevertheless, research has overwhelmingly rejected that idea (Shanahan, 2025). Kids make greater gains when they get a chance to try to make sense of texts they can’t yet read reasonably well. Such texts give them the opportunity to grapple with and figure out some of those affordances and barriers.

Given that starting point, the idea of having AI “summarizing or synthesizing” texts for students seems like a really bad idea.

I find exercise to be tiring, sweaty, and often boring. Whether I’m running, swimming, bicycling, or lifting weights, I’ve often fantasized about hiring someone to do those things for me. That way I could easily exercise 3-4 times a week and still do everything else I want to do.

Now, Cyndie, my wife, is a bit of killjoy. She’s been downright discouraging about my hiring idea. She is steadfast in her belief that I will have to do my own exercise if I’m to benefit. The person who does the exercise is the one with stronger bones and muscles and clearer lungs.

It’s the same when it comes to learning to read. No one else can do that for you – not even machines that have consumed hundreds of billions of words.

These days one of my big concerns about AI has to do with its use to render texts understandable for readers. Go online and you’ll fine scads of sites that claim they can improve kids’ reading achievement by matching them to texts using AI. Also, many teachers are having AI translate the texts in their curricula to the kids’ supposed reading levels. (These schemes seem to meet your school districts’ Level 1 criteria, seemingly meaning that it is a rather limited intrusion of AI).

I’m concerned about such approaches.

First, I’m unsure whether AI can even make texts easier to understand. There are only a handful of studies, and they suffer from mixed results and inadequate analysis. For the most part, the research shows that AI can alter texts in ways that lowers their grade level readability estimates – but it isn’t clear whether they make the texts easier to comprehend (Abreu, et al., 2024; Nasra, 2025; Picton, et al., 2025; Zou, et al., 2026). 

I’m not at all surprised that they can transform a 1000L text (suitable for middle school readers) into a 500L one that would appear to be appropriate for the primary grades. No question about it, breaking sentences down and replacing some vocabulary words can make a text look easier.

The issue is whether shortening a few sentences and swapping out some vocabulary improves anybody’s comprehension. Over the years, studies have usually said, “no.” That kind of revision rarely works (e.g., Mac, et al., 2025), and there are even studies in which the researchers have revised texts in ways that made them score harder on readability, and, yet were more comprehensible to children when tried out.

Despite their value for predicting how well kids will comprehend text, readability schemes have been lousy guides for text revision.

I asked ChatGPT to revise a page of Little House on the Prairie. It supposedly translated this 5^th-6^th grade appropriate text into one that would be readable by 3^rd-4^th graders. For instance, look at this change:

Original:

“They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.”

Revision:

“They drove away and never came back.”

The revised sentence seems easier. But it fails to convey the same information, a problem that has plagued some efforts to use AI to produce readable health documents. If you don’t believe me, let’s ask AI.

ChatGPT suggested some comprehension questions to ask about those two sentences. It provided several questions for each, but many of them couldn’t be answered with the information in those sentences (e.g., Where were they going? Why did they have to leave?) or weren’t probing comprehension (e.g., what kind of sentence is it?). I deleted those, and this is what was left:

Obviously, those sentences aren’t equivalent. The original appears to be more difficult. It poses greater linguistic and conceptual challenges to readers.

The revision might be more easy for kids to understand. But avoiding those challenges has no possibility of helping students to become better comprehenders. The original text is the one that offers a possibility for teaching reading comprehension.

This entry explains why you shouldn’t use AI – or most other systems – for rewriting text to meet a desired level of difficulty. At the end of this, I have included the entire text revision done for me by ChatGPT. A careful examination of it will show revisions both apt and ham handed, and I have no doubt that over time and with more human guidance than I provided, that AI could produce much better revisions (Shel, et al., 2025). However, no matter how accurate those tools and processes may become, they’ll always miss the point. If you are trying to teach kids to read, dumbing down the text in those ways will always reduce their opportunity to learn.

Using AI to revise or produce texts of certain levels of difficulty or using it to summarize and explain texts are ways teachers can avoid teaching reading comprehension, not scaffolds likely to make kids into better readers.

Our next entry will explore how AI could help literacy teachers to improve students’ comprehension.

References

Abreu, A. A., Murimwa, G. Z., Farah, E., Stewart, J. W., Zhang, L., Rodriguez, J., Sweetenham, J., Zeh, H. J., Wang, S. C., & Polanco, P. M. (2024). Enhancing readability of online patient-facing content: The role of AI chatbots in improving cancer information accessibility. JNCCN.org, 22, 1-8.

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Gromoll, E. W. (1989). Learning from social studies texts. Cognition and Instruction, 6(2), 99–158. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3233499

Mac, O., Ayre, J., McCaffery, K., Boroumand, F., Bell, K., & Muscat, D. M. (2025). The readability study: A randomised trial of health information written at different grade reading levels. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 40(8), 1820–1828. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-024-09200-z

Nasra, M., Jaffri, R., Pavlin-Premrl, D., Kok, H.K., Khabaza, A., Barras, C., Slater, L.-A., Yazdabadi, A., Moore, J., Russell, J., Smith, P., Chandra, R.V., Brooks, M., Jhamb, A., Chong, W., Maingard, J. and Asadi, H. (2025), Can artificial intelligence improve patient educational material readability? A systematic review and narrative synthesis. Internal Medicine Journal, 55, 20-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/imj.16607

Picton, B., Andalib, S., Spina, A., Camp, B., Solomon, S. S., Liang, J., Chen, P. M., Chen, J. W., Hsu, F. P., & Oh, M. Y. (2025). Assessing AI simplification of medical texts: Readability and content fidelity. International Journal of Medical Informatics,195,105743.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2024.105743.

Shen, L., Kane-Cabello, J., Candelaria, P. Y., Stratford, D., & Clemens, N. H. (2025). Can artificial intelligence tools generate text that is useful for reading practice? Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 40(4), 191-204. https://doi.org/10.1177/09388982251352564

Zou, Y., Kuek, F., Ng, K. H., & Cheng, X. (2026). Comparative analysis of text readability and writing styles in AI-generated vs. Human-written academic abstracts. PloS One, 21(4), e0343163. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0343163

OpenAI reports that ChatGPT serves 700 million users each week. Seventy-eight percent of businesses and other organizations depend upon it, too. Private investment in AI is more than $100 billion in the U.S. alone.

Given that, it shouldn’t be surprising that the nose of this technology camel is poking under the Education tent. Even when educators eschew it, students themselves find ways to bring it in.  

In my last blog entry, I decried some uses of AI in the teaching of reading comprehension. My concern was that these would do more to undermine kids’ progress than to facilitate it.

Much of my criticism was based on a fundamental truism: Nobody can learn for you. We all must do our own learning.

When students read a text and summarize it, they may or may not learn something. But when AI does this summarizing, a lack of learning is guaranteed.

Think of some analogous non-tech examples:

Mom finds out about Janey’s homework assignment at bedtime. She insists her little darling sleep, but has an older sibling complete the work so Janey won’t get in trouble. I don’t know if the big sister will learn something, but it’s certain it will be a zero for Janey.

Butch, the hulking football star, bullies a nerdy classmate into completing his book report. You don’t need an fMRI scan of their brains to recognize that in the game of learning, Butch fumbled.

Even when students seemingly do the work, AI may manage to prevent learning.

Reading comprehension instruction tends to focus too much on how to answer certain kinds of questions and not enough on how to understand text. Question types don’t explain variance in reading achievement, but differences in text complexity do (ACT, 2006). If kids can make sense of text, they can answer any type of question.

Comprehension instruction should focus on world knowledge, complexity and extensiveness of content, vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, discourse structure, literary devices, data presentation devices, tone, bias, genre differences, and so on. Readers need to know how to negotiate these text features (Shanahan, 2025).

That’s why the use of AI to revise texts to facilitate comprehension is such a bad idea. The ability of AI to reliably transform a fifth-grade text into a third grade one without losing or damaging content has not yet been proven. But even when it manages to accomplish that, it strips away or transforms those text features students should be learning to deal with.

Altering the readability of a text – when done well – may ease reading comprehension. But such alterations reduce the possibility that the reading will contribute to improved comprehension.

That might make me sound like a technophobe, striving to keep those nasty modern technologies out of our schools; a charter member of the Luddites Are Us Club.

Nothing of the kind.

Students must do certain things if they are to become good comprehenders. They need to read lots of texts and use information gained from that reading: discussing it with others, writing about it, applying it to problems. The texts they read for this purpose need to be challenging – not much is gained from focusing on texts that can already be read reasonably well. Teaching should help students learn how to surmount text features that may block understanding, and as they gain purchase of those barriers, they become better readers.

That, I believe, is a good place for artificial intelligence to come in. Instead of helping kids to evade and avoid those challenges, it should help teachers to guide kids to deal with them.

When I speak to teachers about teaching reading with complex text, I offer examples of some of those barriers and the kinds of teaching that would help students to solve the texts.

Almost always, I’m asked by teachers (some displaying considerable embarrassment), how can I know which sentences (or cohesive links) might trip up students’ comprehension? I usually give an answer like: “Look for especially long sentences, sentences with a lot of internal punctuation, sentences with multiple clauses or phrases, sentences in passive voice, and so on.” They often nod skeptically, revealing uncertainty, a lack of confidence.

I’ve decided that a better answer is to use artificial intelligence. Teachers don’t have the time to do a thorough analysis of these kinds of text features, and AI can do a reasonably good job of identifying them. With that assistance, teachers can choose which ones they want to address, considering their students and their time constraints.

For instance, I entered into ChatGPT the text, “How the Camel Got His Hump” by Rudyard Kipling, and asked, “What are the five most complex sentences – sentences that might confuse young readers?”

It spit out five sentences, along with explanations as to why they were chosen. Here are three of them:

“In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all, and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself.”

“So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most ‘scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said ‘Humph!’ Just ‘Humph!’ and no more.”

“At the end of the day the Man called the Horse and the Dog and the Ox together, and said, ‘Three, O Three, I’m very sorry for you (with the world so new-and-all); but that Humph-thing in the Desert can’t work, or he would have been here by now, so I am going to leave him alone, and you must work double-time to make up for it.’”

All five would be potentially useful for syntax teaching, and Kipling tales are particularly good selections for a heavy emphasis on syntax. In this case, I wanted to emphasize the third sentence. ChatGPT’s explanation for the choice is that it includes dialogue embedded in a long sentence, several clauses joined by commas and semi-colons, and the figurative phrase, “Humph-thing.”

I’d ask the kids, “Why was the Man angry at the Humph-thing?” or “Why did the Man apologize to the Horse, Dog and Ox?” or “Why might the Horse, Dog, and Ox dislike the Camel?” Those questions can be answered with information from that sentence. If they can answer, then the sentence was not a barrier to comprehension. If they could not, then I’d teach them how to make sense of it, focusing on the quotation marks, figuring out how to break it into parts, and so on.

I wasn’t surprised that AI could identify complex sentences and uncover what made them complicated and potentially confusing. I didn’t ask it to suggest comprehension questions for those sentences. Experience tells me it can do that well.

What about potential barriers that may be harder to determine, like cohesive links? These are important because they connect the ideas in a text.

I entered an episode of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince,” and asked, “Can you show me some of the cohesive ties in this text?” It provided several so I followed up with, “Do any of these appear to be especially difficult for readers to recognize?”

It nominated several possibilities. For instance, consider this complex linkage of ideas:

“I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince.

But, after some thought, he added:

“What does that mean — ‘tame’?”…[8 intervening sentences]…

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”…[48 intervening sentences]…

If you want a friend, tame me…”

To make sense of this exchange, readers must connect tame, establish ties, and friendship, something hard to do given the distance between their mentions in the text.

My AI helper also pointed out some reappearance of concepts in this text without exact repetition: unique-important, men-hunters, and ellipsis (omissions of words the reader must fill in): “‘On another planet?’ ‘Yes.’” (A full sentence response would be: “Yes, it is on another planet.”)

Those were helpful, but I was especially pleased with the identification of parallel structure or pattern repetition in this text. In this short episode, the terms “to me” and “to you” are repeated 9 times. ChatGPT pointed out that this reinforced text cohesion throughout through rhythm and structure.

For me, this structure emphasizes that this conversation is a meeting of the minds of two strangers who come together from very different perspectives. They are trying to communicate and connect, but they also want to maintain their view and to make certain the other recognizes this. By reiterating that what is being stated is my opinion or my point of view (“to me”) makes this clear. This is a wonderful example of the structure of the text conveying or reinforcing the information that is being stated in the words themselves. Kids need to learn that authors repeat themselves for a reason and it is worth noting those repetitions and thinking about the reason for them.

I made some other requests of AI, too, asking it to identify multiple themes or tone (and what words or structures the author used to convey tone). Tone refers to the atmosphere of a text and reveals an author’s attitude towards the subject at hand or the characters. A text may be funny, sad, playful, nostalgic, frightening, authoritative, and so on.

In all these cases, AI provided more than I could possibly teach in one set of lessons. I liked having the options, and, of course, by querying AI more specifically, I may end up with fewer choices but ones particularly relevant to my curricular goals. Even with that, a teacher will need to make the choices. Perhaps the items that AI identifies will be too easy for your students or irrelevant to your goals.

As you can see from these examples, artificial intelligence can be a useful tool for helping develop more powerful comprehension lessons. Instead of using it to remove barriers to comprehension, use it to identify the barriers and then show students how to surmount them.

When it comes to reading comprehension, our job isn’t to smooth their way, to avoid and evade difficulty. No, we are responsible for making students powerful and independent, teaching them how to recognize and transcend linguistic and conceptual obstacles. 

AI has a role to play in the teaching of reading comprehension. But that role should involve it as an assistant to the teacher, not to the reader.

References

ACT, Inc. (2006). Reading between the lines: What the ACT reveals about college readiness in reading. Iowa City: Author.

ChatGPT, personal communication, May 5, 2026.

de Saint-Exupéry, A. (2018). The little prince (I. Testot-Ferry, trans.). Ware, England: Wordsworth Editions.

Kipling, R. (1902/2001). How the camel got his hump. New York: NorthSouth Books.

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.