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Barbara Oakley - constructivism vs. Learning science 

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Barbara Oakley - constructivism vs. Learning science 

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S5E15: Barbara Oakley on Constructivism vs. Learning Science

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In this episode, I sit down with Barbara Oakley—engineer, bestselling author, and one of the most influential voices in the science of learning—to talk about why so much instruction still misses the…

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Inquiry learning or explicit teaching - balance — Dr Nathaniel Swain

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Often in social and staff room discussions, inquiry vs explicit teaching are fiercely debated. It’s not all about explicit teaching! You can’t teach it all through inquiry! But students should be able to discover for themselves!
And on and on it goes. It’s not just the explicit teaching ‘somewhere’

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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Rethinking Reading: A Look at Linguistic Phonics

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Can starting with the spoken, not the written, word simplify reading instruction? Can mapping phonemes to graphemes (encoding) before graphemes to phonemes (decoding) make a difference? Some say yes.

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(specifically background knowledge and vocabulary)

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Today we are live with Natalie Wexler, the author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-And How to Fix It (LISTENERS - IT'S AVAILABLE TODAY!). The book focuses on the lack of content in the elementary curriculum and its connection to what is commonly known as the achievement gap.

Natalie provides a snapshot of research on building knowledge, then tangibly deconstructs the why and how behind the research making explicit connections to education classrooms today. She provides clear steps to take to 'fix' the knowledge gap: adopting a content-focused curriculum to build knowledge, and providing teachers and leaders with ongoing professional development and coaching grounded in the curriculum.

Pick up her book, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-And How to Fix It. In the meantime, find articles and say hi to Natalie at https://nataliewexler.com/ or on Twitter @natwexler.

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Melissa and Lori Love Literacy ™ - Episode 10: Noticing The #KnowledgeGap with Natalie Wexler

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Today we are live with Natalie Wexler, the author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-And How to Fix It (LISTENERS - IT'S AVAILABLE TODAY!). The book focuses on the lack of content in the elementary curriculum and its connection to what is commonly known as the achievement gap.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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NEA Today All News & Articles The Science of Learning

Psychology teachers understand how students' minds work. Find out how to use what they know to design more effective lessons and classroom practices.

Key Takeaways

1. It's not enough to push information into students' heads. Educators need to demand that students "retrieve" that information, over and again, to promote learning.

2. The teenage brain is not fully formed. In other words, there are real reasons they act the way they do!

3. "Learning styles" are a myth. But "dual coding" - that is embedding information in the brain through multiple avenues - is proven effective.

If you were coaching a new basketball team, would you ever have a single 45-minute practice on a Monday and then expect your rookies to win a game the following Friday? They'll shoot and miss, for sure.

And yet, some teachers teach a new skill or set of facts one week, test it the following week-and expect students to score big.

Those teachers are not psychology teachers. Psychology teachers know how memory works. They know how learning happens. They understand how children and adolescents develop socially, emotionally, and academically. And they use what they know-from their own curriculum-to design effective lessons and classroom practices.

Even better, they're willing to share their insights with their colleagues across grades and subject areas.

Here are 10 of their tried-and-true teaching strategies.

Your students are like squirrels, burying acorns of new knowledge in their brains. The most important thing a teacher can do is ask their students to dig out that information, every day, multiple times a day, says Kansas psychology teacher Jen Schlicht. Indeed, studies by cognitive psychologists show that this approach is a far better use of your time than repeatedly pushing information into their brains.
Keep in mind that retrieval practice is a learning tool, not an assessment tool. Although quick quizzes can be used as retrieval practice, these activities shouldn't be graded.

Suggested activity

Schlicht, who teaches at Olathe South High School, likes to use a "retrieval grid," which looks like a bingo card. "You put questions of varying difficulty on the grid and assign point values to each question. A question on today's content might be worth 1 point. Something from last week might be 3. Something harder might be 5," she explains. "Give them 5 minutes to get as many points as they can." Or try a brain dump: Ask students to write down everything they know on a topic, then have each student compare notes with a neighbor.

Cognitive psychologists have a million insights into memory and learning. Knowing about these learning patterns may help guide
your lesson planning.

The serial positioning effect: People generally remember the first and last things they hear or read, psychologists have found. With this in mind, Alabama psychology teacher Blake Harvard often starts class by saying, "Hey, this is what we're going to cover today." At the end, Harvard, who teaches at James Clemens High School, in Madison City, recaps: "Here are the three most important things we discussed."

The distributive effect: When students pull all-nighters, attempting to fill their heads with a semester's worth of content, they're unlikely to do well on the next day's test. Cramming also is bad teaching strategy! Research shows that a better approach is "spaced learning," which means spreading your content over a few days or weeks.

The interleaving effect: Psychologists also urge frequent retrieval practice. This technique can go hand-in-hand with spaced learning. Try "interleaving," or alternating between new and old content, Schlicht says. Researchers have found that interleaving is much more effective than teaching in big blocks of content.

When you connect your content to real life and make it more emotional for students, you're also making it easier to remember. The brain stores information in neural pathways, and it will make more interlocking pathways when the new stuff connects to previous knowledge and experience, Schlicht explains. These extra connections also make it easier to retrieve. "What's meaningful is memorable," Schlicht says.

Suggested activity

Don't be afraid to talk about yourself in the classroom. "I love to talk about my kids," Harvard says. "When we get to Piaget's stages of learning, I talk about my 7-year-old son. Not only does that give them a more concrete example, but it also gets them thinking about their own siblings, whatever it is their baby sister did, and it helps them practice where [the stages of learning] appear in real life. It definitely helps with remembering stuff."

"You want to use multiple modalities? Great. But the idea that you have to speak to Johnny because he's an auditory learner and show the visual to Sherry because she's a visual learner? No, no, no."

- Chuck Schallhorn, California Psychology Teacher and author of Advanced Placement Psychology

When you combine words and visuals-such as diagrams, maps, or graphic organizers-students have two ways to understand the information, and it also becomes more concrete to them. The cognitive psychologists at learningscientists.org caution that the visuals have to be meaningful and that educators should provide enough time for students to absorb the two representations.

You might be thinking, oh, this is because some students are "visual learners," right? Surveys have found that 93 percent of teachers believe in learning styles: auditory, kinesthetic, etc. But it's a myth, says California psychology teacher Chuck Schallhorn, author of the textbook Advanced Placement Psychology. "You want to use multiple modalities? Great. But the idea that you have to speak to Johnny because he's an auditory learner and show the visual to Sherry because she's a visual learner? No, no, no."

Suggested activity

Don't go over the top with this! It's math class, not crafting class, reminds Schlicht. Try asking students to create timelines, diagrams, storyboards, and illustrated notes.

"Where are the kids in teams of their cognitive development? Their social-emotional development?" asks Schallhorn, who teaches at Mountain House High School. Knowing these answers can be very helpful to educators.

In the teenage brain, for example, the frontal lobe, which controls impulses and provides organizational skills, isn't fully connected to the limbic system, the emotional seat of the brain.

"As adults, we can say, I'm feeling angry and I'm going to do my best to hide it," Schallhorn says. "But kids can't. They don't have the part of the brain that says stop doing this! ...Be aware of their developmental limitations. Be the adult with the fully formed brain."

Taking scheduled breaks is necessary and refreshing. But that Snapchat ping can derail learning for more time than you might imagine. It takes about 25 minutes, on average, to get back on task after a distraction, a 2015 University of California study found.

Suggested activity

Schallhorn tells students to stow their phones and spend 25 minutes focused on schoolwork. Then, they can reward themselves with a 5- to 10-minute break. Consider a similar system in your classrooms: Maybe you focus for 30 minutes and then ... dance party!

Cognitive biases are ways of thinking that are unconscious and wrong. For example, outcome bias is common among educators. This is when you focus so much on an outcome, say, Advanced Placement test scores, that you overlook the process. Maybe the class learned how to ask questions, solve problems, and study better.

"Do not get caught up with only looking at grades to determine the success of a class," cautions Harvard in a guest post for the learningscientists.org.

Stereotyping is another cognitive bias. It's when you ascribe certain qualities to a person or people without any real information about them. Maybe you think a student is "a jock" and assume they're uninterested in Shakespeare. Or maybe you are-without being aware of it-assuming racial and gender stereotypes around behavior, academic achievement, and more.

A completely bias-free mind is simply impossible, psychologists say. The best you can do is try to recognize them in yourself and your students and counter the possible negative effects.

"If a student is acting out, there's a reason-and most of the time, unless you're a jerk, it has nothing to do with you."

- Jen Schlicht, Kansas Psychology Teacher

"Behavior is purposeful," says Schlicht. "If a student is acting out, there's a reason-and most of the time, unless you're a jerk, it has nothing to do with you." Keep in mind the physical limitations of a child's brain. They are helpless against their knee-jerk reactions.

Suggested activity

Schlicht and Schallhorn both describe few discipline problems in their classrooms. Coincidence or not, they also describe themselves as good listeners, focused on relationships, and unreactive to "drama."

Schallhorn suggests focusing on processes and procedures. You can say to a student, that's not how we come into class, that's not how we do our papers. "The behavior becomes the focus, not the individual," he says.

The theory of cognitive load suggests that cognitive resources, such as attention and working memory, are limited in nature. In other words, there's only so much to go around.

"When we attempt to learn new things, these resources are spread among different demands. Some go to just figuring out the task," says Sarah Rose Cavanagh, a psychologist at Assumption University, in Worcester, Mass. Others go toward solving problems and learning, she adds.

As an educator, you want to protect those resources and make sure they don't get wasted on deciphering a poorly worded question or other causes for confusion.

Suggested activity

Think about the extraneous distractions in your classroom or assignments, Harvard suggests. While flexible classroom seating is trendy these days, your students will be more focused in traditional seating rows. This is good to keep in mind, especially when you introduce new topics. Along the same lines, your Google slides should be clean and simple.

Remember there are no secrets! What psychologists know about learning, memory, and child development is accessible to all teachers. To get started, explore the resources below.

Online: For clues to students' cognition and ways to use that insight in the classroom, check out learningscientists.org and Blake Harvard's blog at theeffortfuleducator.com.

Videos: Schallhorn recommends cognitive psychologist Stephen Chew's videos on study skills, effective mindsets for learning, and more.

Books: Psychology teachers put these five on their must-read lists!

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learningby Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey

Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide by Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki, and Oliver Caviglioli

Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learningby Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham

Great public schools for every student

The National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest professional employee organization, is committed to advancing the cause of public education. NEA's 3 million members work at every level of education-from pre-school to university graduate programs. NEA has affiliate organizations in every state and in more than 14,000 communities across the United States.

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Psychology teachers understand how students' minds work. Find out how to use what they know to design more effective lessons and classroom practices.

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10 favorite papers on Science of Learning

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10 favorite papers on Science of Learning

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Ten of My Favorite Papers on the Science of Learning and Thinking - Scott H Young

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Ten interesting papers on the science of learning and thinking.

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After more than 20 years as the neglected goal of reading instruction (Allington, 1983; NICHD, 2000), fluency has finally become the hot topic among reading researchers, professional development providers, and teachers. These days it is rare to pick up a reading journal, attend a professional conference, or sit in a faculty staff room at a school without hearing someone discussing reading fluency. Surely most every educator has heard the message that if students aren't sufficiently fluent in their reading, they won't have sufficient comprehension. Given this clear statement-supported by a strong consensus of high-quality research studies-teachers and administrators everywhere are searching for ideas to help their students become fluent readers.

As someone who has conducted research on fluency over the past two decades, I find the current buzz both promising and troubling. As I will explain, fluency is a vital reading skill, but the buzz around fluency is reaching deafening levels-and crucial details from the research are being overlooked. As a result, schools across the country are putting significant amounts of time and effort into two instructional strategies for improving fluency that the research does not support: silent reading and Round Robin Reading (RRR). Developing fluency among struggling readers takes more intensive, carefully guided practice than either of these strategies can deliver. Let's take a quick look at how these ineffective strategies became so popular and move on to an in-depth discussion of what reading fluency really is and how teachers can help their struggling students.

Marilyn Jager Adams (1990) stated in her noteworthy synthesis of reading research that "if we want children to read well, we must find a way to induce them to read lots" (p. 5). Many educators took this statement to heart and made the leap to the idea that one great way to help students do a lot of reading would be to have them read in the classroom. Methods labeled "sustained silent reading" (SSR) or "drop everything and read" (DEAR) became commonplace in schools across the country. Some schools encouraged teachers to spend significant amounts of classroom time having the students-and often the teacher as well-read silently up to 30 minutes a day, plus an additional 15 minutes in writing personal reflections on what was read (Sierra-Perry, 1996). What some SSR and DEAR proponents may have missed is Adams's follow-up statement: "if we want to induce children to read lots, we must also teach them to read well" (1990, p. 5).

Of course, not all educators got swept up in the excitement around SSR and DEAR; some questioned if devoting this much time to unassisted, independent reading and writing could really be beneficial for all students. What about those students who struggle with basic reading skills and who may not use their silent reading time well-either wasting time by doing little to no reading or writing, or trying to read materials that cause frustration because they are too difficult? As it turns out, such concerns are justified. The National Reading Panel* (NRP) concluded there is insufficient support from empirical research to suggest that independent, silent reading can be used to help students improve their fluency (NICHD, 2000). (Note that the NRP did not say that it has no benefits, just that evidence does not suggest it improves fluency. So, if some students are fluent readers, they could read silently while the teacher works with the struggling readers.)

Instead of independent silent reading, the NRP (NICHD, 2000) concluded that teachers should provide opportunities for students to read aloud with some guidance and feedback. One way some teachers have provided this kind of oral reading practice in their classrooms is with a method that has long been used in classrooms: Round Robin Reading. RRR involves having individual students in a group take turns reading aloud from text. While RRR can be used to read narrative passages, it is also frequently employed by content area teachers who have students take turns reading aloud all or part of a chapter in a social studies or science textbook.

A common rationale for using RRR in a classroom-along with providing the oral guided reading recommended by the NRP-is that in some classes there are students who would not be able or motivated to read a literature passage or a chapter from their textbook by themselves. RRR is seen as a way for a teacher to ensure that every student is in fact reading, and if there are some difficult words or concepts, the teacher is available to provide support.

Despite the popularity and longevity of RRR, upon reflection there are clearly several downsides to using this method. Perhaps the most obvious concern is how the requirement to read aloud to classmates can put students-especially those who struggle with reading-in a position of being humiliated and demoralized by displaying their weak skills in front of their peers. Their more skilled peers may feel uncomfortable as well, and are subjected to listening to poor examples of reading. Another concern about RRR is the very minimal practice provided by this method. If there are more than a small number of students in the group, each individual student is only reading for a very short period of time, which is clearly insufficient to make any difference in fluency. In addition, it is questionable as to whether or not the students who are not reading aloud are actually paying attention. RRR can be most accurately viewed as a way to "cover" written text, but it is difficult to justify its use given these considerable weaknesses.

* * *

Since the importance of fluency has become widely recognized, teachers have been doing their best to improve students' fluency. But, as we have just seen, sometimes the information they have to work with is incomplete and, therefore, leads them down the wrong path. Silent reading seems like a good idea since it gives students additional practice. Round Robin seems like a good idea since it focuses the class on oral reading. But increasing fluency requires more practice, more support, and more guided oral reading than either of these strategies can deliver.

Let's cut through the buzz around fluency and review what reading fluency is, why it is essential to ensure that our students have sufficient fluency, how fluency should be assessed, and how to best provide fluency practice and support for our students. We'll start by defining fluency.

I. Understanding and Assessing Fluency

While the National Reading Panel's definition of fluency as the ability to read text with accuracy, appropriate rate, and good expression (NICHD, 2000) is widely accepted among fluency researchers, these experts continue to debate the more subtle aspects of fluency (Stecker, Roser, and Martinez, 1998; Wolf and Katzir-Cohen, 2001). However it is defined, this much is certain: Fluency is necessary, but not sufficient, for understanding the meaning of text. When children read too slowly or haltingly, the text devolves into a broken string of words and/or phrases; it's a struggle just to remember what's been read, much less extract its meaning. So it's important that teachers determine if their students' fluency is at a level appropriate for their grade. If not, how should it be developed? If a student is appropriately fluent for her grade level, how does a teacher help maintain that student's fluency? And, how does a teacher make these determinations? This process begins with assessments of the component pieces of fluency: prosody, accuracy, and rate.

The exact role of expression and phrasing-or prosody-in fluency and comprehension has not yet been determined, but it certainly is one element that signifies whether or not a student is truly a fluent reader. To measure the quality of a student's reading prosody, some educators rely on the four-level scale first developed for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading (Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, and Oranje, 2005). This scale focuses on the level of skill a student demonstrates in phrasing and expression while reading aloud (see below). After listening to an individual student read aloud, the educator rates the student's reading according to the level that best describes the student's overall performance.

National Assessment of Educational Progress Fluency Scale

Fluent

Level 4

Reads primarily in larger, meaningful phrase groups. Although some regressions, repetitions, and deviations from text may be present, these do not appear to detract from the overall structure of the story. Preservation of the author's syntax is consistent. Some or most of the story is read with expressive interpretation.

Level 3

Reads primarily in three- or four-word phrase groups. Some small groupings may be present. However, the majority of phrasing seems appropriate and preserves the syntax of the author. Little or no expressive interpretation is present.

Non-Fluent

Level 2

Reads primarily in two-word phrases with some three- or four-word groupings. Some word-by-word reading may be present. Word groupings may seem awkward and unrelated to larger context of sentence or passage.

Level 1

Reads primarily word-by-word. Occasional two-word or three-word phrases may occur-but these are infrequent and/or they do not preserve meaningful syntax.

A checklist developed by Hudson, Lane and Pullen (2005, p. 707) provides a more detailed assessment of a student's prosody:

1. Student placed vocal emphasis on appropriate words.

2. Student's voice tone rose and fell at appropriate points in the text.

3. Student's inflection reflected the punctuation in the text (e.g., voice tone rose near the end of a question).

4. In narrative text with dialogue, student used appropriate vocal tone to represent characters' mental states, such as excitement, sadness, fear, or confidence.

5. Student used punctuation to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

6. Student used prepositional phrases to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

7. Student used subject-verb divisions to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

8. Student used conjunctions to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

Although most researchers consider prosody important, the subjectivity of judging students' prosody makes it a difficult component of fluency to study. Many researchers have focused on the more easily quantifiable components of fluency (rate and accuracy) and, therefore, some basic questions about prosody-like what should be expected in second grade versus sixth grade-have not been answered. Nevertheless, students' prosody is an extra piece of information for making instructional decisions. When students' speed and accuracy are at appropriate levels, reading with proper phrasing, expression, and intonation should be the next goal.

To measure students' oral reading speed and accuracy, researchers have developed a simple and very brief procedure that uses regular classroom texts to determine the number of words that students can read correctly in one minute. To obtain a words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) score, students are assessed individually as they read aloud for one minute from an unpracticed passage of text.

To calculate the WCPM score, the examiner subtracts the total number of errors from the total number of words read in one minute. An error includes any word that is omitted, mispronounced, or substituted for another word. Words transposed in a phrase count as two errors (e.g., reading "laughed and played" instead of "played and laughed"). Each time a word is read incorrectly it is counted as an error. Words read correctly that are repeated more than once, errors self-corrected by the student, words inserted by the student that do not appear in the text, and words mispronounced due to dialect or speech impairments are not counted as errors. They do, however, impact the final score since they slow the student down and, therefore, reduce the number of words that are read correctly in one minute (Shinn, 1989).

If the passage is randomly selected from a text or trade book, an average score should be taken from readings of two or three different passages to account for any text-based differences. If standardized passages are used (in which the text has been carefully controlled for difficulty), a score from a single passage may be sufficient (Hintze and Christ, 2004). Standardized passages can be found in the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills-DIBELS (Good and Kaminski, 2002), the Reading Fluency Benchmark (Read Naturally, 2002), or Edformation's AIMSWeb materials.

To determine if the student's score is on target, the examiner compares it to the oral reading fluency norms (see the sidebar " Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring: The Details"). My colleague Gerald Tindal and I (2006) developed these national norms for grades one to eight by analyzing data that were collected using the procedures just described with over 200,000 students from 23 states. It's critical to understand, as explained in the next section and in the sidebar above, that a WCPM score can be an alarm bell, a canary in a coal mine. If the WCPM is very low, the student is not sufficiently fluent and an intervention is merited. However, a low WCPM score may be the result of weak fluency skills or other reading weaknesses, for example, in decoding, vocabulary, sight words, etc.-so administering some diagnostic assessments may be necessary to determine exactly what type of intervention a student needs.
The Canary in the Coal Mine
With all the assessments schools are required to administer as a result of No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and numerous statewide and district initiatives, some educators are concerned about over-testing students. They ask: "How can we justify spending so much precious instructional time testing our students over and over again?" This concern is certainly legitimate. The purpose of having our students in school is to teach them, not to test them. However, as professional educators, it is imperative that we make decisions about the instruction we provide our students based on the best information available. The WCPM procedure just described is an extremely time-efficient and reliable way to track students' fluency- and their overall reading ability. While it may be surprising that a one-minute assessment can be so informative, WCPM has been shown, in both theoretical and empirical research, to serve as an accurate and powerful indicator of overall reading competence-especially through its strong correlation with comprehension. Its validity and reliability have been well established in a body of research extending over the past 25 years (Fuchs et al., 2001; Shinn, 1998). The relationship between WCPM and comprehension has been found to be stronger in the elementary and junior high grades than in older students (Fuchs et al., 2001), likely due to the fact that as a reader matures, competent reading involves more complex skills, vocabulary, and knowledge (and thus any single measure becomes less predictive of general reading competence as a student develops).

Teachers can and should use WCPM as their canary in the coal mine-their first indicator that all may not be well with their students' reading ability. In first through fifth grade, WCPM should be used to screen all students, help to diagnose a possible cause of struggling students' problems, and to monitor the progress of struggling students who are receiving additional support. To learn how, see the sidebar mentioned above.

* * *

With this understanding of what fluency is and how to assess it, let's turn to the questions that teachers are always most interested in: What should fluency instruction look like? And, what can I do to help students whose fluency is far behind their peers'?

II. Developing Fluent Readers

Research over the past two decades has identified repeated reading as the key strategy for improving students' fluency skills (NICHD, 2000). Repeated reading has two essential elements: 1) Giving students the opportunity to read and then re-read the same text, and 2) having students practice their reading orally with an opportunity to receive corrections and guidance (if necessary). Research has also determined that having students read aloud along with a model of well-paced, expressive reading and receiving specific feedback through systematic progress monitoring also helps improve students' fluency skills. So, what are the best methods to use in the classroom to help students become fluent? The answer depends on whether the student is just beginning to read, has learned to read and is making adequate progress, or is struggling. Let's start with beginning readers, those students in kindergarten and grade one.
Teaching Beginning Readers to Become Fluent
Because accuracy is a fundamental component of fluency, teachers who work with beginning readers must focus significant amounts of instructional time on basic word recognition and word analysis skills (Pikulski and Chard, 2005). To do this effectively, teachers should provide instruction that systematically presents daily opportunities for students to learn to read words accurately (Snow, Burns, and Griffith, 1998)-the important first step in becoming a skillful, proficient, and motivated reader. Pushing students to "read faster" too soon could cause some students to begin guessing or otherwise undermine their focus on reading carefully.

There is no guidance from empirical research about precisely when teachers should formally begin encouraging beginning readers to increase their speed, but teachers usually wait until about the middle of first grade. Fluency researchers Stahl and Kuhn (2002) recommend that students be given opportunities to re-read sentences and encouraged to make their reading "sound like talking" as soon as they are making good progress with basic decoding, demonstrating an understanding of the act of reading, and showing some degree of confidence-whether that happens in kindergarten or in first grade. Teachers and parents should also frequently model fluent reading, demonstrating (and sometimes explicitly pointing out) how accurate reading can be done at a reasonable rate and with good phrasing, intonation, and expression. In the classroom, the teacher can read aloud from large-format books so the students can follow along.
Maintaining Reading Fluency for On-Level Readers
What about students in grades two and higher who are making adequate progress with their reading? Three techniques can be used very frequently with a variety of texts to help maintain and develop students' reading fluency: Choral reading, cloze reading, and partner reading. All of these procedures can be used with readers at any grade level, with small or large groups, and with fiction or content-heavy nonfiction materials. Two additional techniques can also be considered for use: Readers' Theater and poetry readings. Let's review each.

For choral reading, the teacher and students read aloud together, following the teacher's pace-so students get the benefit of a model while they practice reading aloud. The teacher can stop at any time to ask questions, comment on the text, discuss a vocabulary term, or remind the class that she expects everyone to be reading. If choral reading is used with heterogeneously grouped students, it is possible that the lowest performing students may have difficulty keeping up with even a moderate pace. However, they can follow along, participating when they can, and still hear the text being read accurately and with good pacing and phrasing. Choral reading works best if the teacher directs all students-regardless of age or ability level-to use a marker or finger to follow along in the text as they read.

Cloze reading is similar to choral reading, except that the teacher does most of the oral reading while the students read along silently. Once or twice every few sentences, the teacher omits an important vocabulary or content word, not a simple sight word, and the students' job is to read it aloud as a class. Notice that with cloze reading, as opposed to choral reading, students spend less time practicing oral reading. Therefore, cloze reading is best thought of as an alternative to Round Robin Reading. Cloze reading allows teachers to cover text and keep students engaged while avoiding the pitfalls of subjecting the class to examples of poor reading and embarrassing struggling students. As with choral reading, it is likely that the lowest performing readers will be unable to keep up or to correctly read every omitted word, but they will not be singled out-and will be provided with examples of skillful reading.

Another method for improving fluency is to have students read aloud to a partner. This procedure works best when students are taught some techniques for giving feedback and managing their time, and when the partners have been selected by the teacher. One technique for assigning partners is for teachers to first rank the students from the strongest reader in the class to the weakest (making judgments subjectively or from assessment data) and then consider whether there are students whose reading ability is so low that partner reading may be inappropriate. (These students could meet with the teacher for more direct instruction or closely supported partner reading while the other students do independent partner reading.) The teacher then divides the remaining students in half, forming pairs such that the strongest reader is paired with a mid-level reader, and so on, ensuring that each pair has a slightly stronger reader, but that the difference in the students' ability is not so large as to cause embarrassment or confusion.

At times, the stronger reader may be directed to read first, providing a model of fluent reading. Then the less fluent reader reads the same text aloud. The stronger student can help with word recognition and give feedback and encouragement to the less fluent partner. Another effective technique pairs students who read at the same level and asks them to re-read a story on which they have already received instruction from the teacher (Osborn and Lehr, 2004).

Readers' Theater and poetry readings-both of which engage students in a reading performance-have become popular over the last few years. Much has been written about Readers' Theater in particular, and about the apparent value of having students participate in dramatic readings (Rasinski, 2006). These kinds of activities provide students with an opportunity to read text that is enjoyable-and provides a clear incentive for students to read, and re-read, their assigned parts or poem. However, while these techniques are motivating, teachers should not assume that either one could possibly provide as much practice for the whole class as choral or partner reading, much less anything close to the amount of instruction and practice necessary for struggling students to improve their fluency.
Improving Struggling Readers' Fluency: Suggestions for Intervention
The research literature provides some clear directions on what to do with struggling readers: Interventions must combine the modeling, repeated reading, and feedback that research has demonstrated effective (Shaywitz, 2003). Several commercial programs have been developed, including Read Naturally (Ihnot, 1991), the Six Minute Solution (Adams and Brown, 2003), Quick Reads (Heibert, 2002), and the Great Leaps Reading program (Campbell, 1996). Each of these programs includes at least some of the instructional components that have been shown to improve students' reading fluency and has its own approach to student engagement.

Unfortunately, research that directly compares the effectiveness of these various programs has yet to be done. In my own review of the available research, I've concluded that the strategy developed by Read Naturally makes the best use of the research base on fluency and has the strongest evidence of effectiveness as a fluency intervention. And, in using the Read Naturally strategy with students in many different grade levels, I've found that it engages them in the repeated reading they so desperately need. (However, I encourage readers to keep in mind that over the next several years, research may provide evidence of effectiveness on these other programs that equals or surpasses that of the Read Naturally strategy.)

The Read Naturally (RN) strategy was developed by Candyce Ihnot, a Title I reading teacher from Minneapolis. Candyce developed and tested it in 1989 as part of her master's thesis in special education. After finding that her approach was effective with struggling students in her school, Candyce and her husband, Tom Ihnot, developed a set of instructional materials that are commercially available from their company, Read Naturally, Inc.

To implement the RN strategy, students' fluency levels (WCPM) are assessed to place students at an appropriate instructional level. The teacher then helps each student set a reasonable, achievable fluency goal (approximately 80-90 WCPM for primary students or older students reading at a primary level; from 90-120 WCPM for upper elementary students).

Instruction begins with an unpracticed, "cold reading" of a student-selected passage from the targeted level. Passages may range in length from approximately 100 words at the mid-first-grade level to 350 words at the sixth-grade level. As they read, students use a timer and keep track of the words they skip or stumble over (by lightly underlining the problem word). They then calculate their WCPM and graph this first, unpracticed WCPM score on a bar graph.

In step two, students practice reading this same passage three to four times along with a model to learn how to accurately pronounce all the words in the text. This step is not timed, and the students read the entire passage. The modeled reading can come from a recording or a person trained to read the passage at a rate that is comfortable for the student. The key here is that a student does not just listen to the model, but actually reads aloud (softly) with the narrator's voice, giving full attention to the text. Encouraging students to point to the text being read and informing them that they will be responsible for answering a set of comprehension questions after completing all the steps in the strategy helps students stay focused.

Once students feel comfortable with the text, they begin step three in which they read the text independently, again aloud, but softly. Students set a timer for one minute and read the text several times until they are comfortably reaching their predetermined goal level-and are ready to be checked by the teacher. (Having some kind of silent signal for the teacher such as a flag or colored card at the students' desk can help manage this step.) Students keep practicing the passage until the teacher can meet with them because this maximizes their engaged practice time-a key to improved skills in low-performing students (Brophy, 1988).

In the final step, the student reads for the teacher, who then calculates the WCPM score. The student "passes" if four criteria are met: 1) the WCPM score meets or exceeds the predetermined goal; 2) three or fewer errors are made; 3) the student reads the passage with correct phrasing and attention to punctuation; and, 4) the student can correctly answer a few comprehension questions. When students do not pass, they continue practicing this same text. When they do pass, they graph their new score onto the same bar with their initial, unpracticed score, using a different colored pencil or marker. This graph gives tangible evidence to the students that they are improving-and keeps motivation high by showing them that their own effort makes the difference. (For an external check on progress, the teacher should also periodically assess students' performance on an unpracticed passage by following the progress monitoring procedure described in the sidebar mentioned above.)

Students repeat these steps until they complete 10-12 passages of equivalent difficulty. At that point the student and teacher collaboratively examine the data on the student's graph to decide what step to take next. If the student is making steady progress in the current level, but is not yet approaching his goal level on the first, unpracticed reading, he should stay in that same level for another 10-12 passages. If the student's first unpracticed readings are occasionally meeting or approaching the goal, the teacher and student may decide to move the student up to the next level of difficulty with the same goal, or stay in the current level of difficulty and raise the "pass" goal a bit higher. Of course, if at any time the student is having difficulty reading at the goal level after the practice readings, the decision can be made to move the student down to an easier level or make a downward adjustment in the WCPM goal.

In addition to requiring the students to answer a set of comprehension questions at the end of each passage, some teachers have added other comprehension activities to this process, such as having the students write a five-minute re-tell response after each passage.

Using the RN strategy for 20-30 minutes per day, for three or more days per week, can have a significant impact on improving students' reading fluency. In two studies reported on by Hasbrouck, Ihnot, and Rogers (1999), second- and third-grade Title I students, as well as sixth-grade special education students, showed significant improvement in their fluency. The second- and third-graders received, on average, 32 weeks of RN instruction. From fall to spring, the second-graders' average WCPM increased from 17.9 to 71.6, meaning that they moved from well below the 25th percentile to well above it (see norms table, p. 29); they showed an average gain of 1.68 WCPM per week, much greater than the 1.2 WCPM per week gain that second-graders typically make. Third-grade students had similar results. From fall to spring, their average WCPM increased from 42 to 93, meaning that they moved from just below the 25th percentile to well above it; they gained 1.60 WCPM per week, as compared to the typical growth of 1.1 WCPM per week. The study of sixth-grade special education students also found significant improvements. These students were reading at levels ranging from grade 1.5 to 4.0. They received RN instruction in a special education class for 20 to 32 weeks and improved their fluency by an average of 1.4 WCPM per week, which is double the 0.7 words per week that sixth-graders typically gain.

* * *

I would like to add two caveats regarding reading fluency. First, as this skill has recently garnered greater attention, and awareness of the link between fluency and comprehension has grown, there appears to be a tendency for some to believe that raising a student's fluency score is the main goal of reading instruction. As important as fluency is, and as valuable as the information obtained from fluency-based assessments can be for instructional decision-making, I want to caution teachers and administrators to keep fluency and fluency-based assessment scores in perspective. The ability to read text accurately, at a reasonable rate, and with appropriate expression and phrasing is certainly a key factor in being able to understand what has been read and to enjoy the process of reading. Nonetheless, fluency is only one of the key components of reading. I urge teachers to use the 50th percentile as a reasonable level of proficiency for students, and keep in mind that it is appropriate and expected for students to adjust their rate when reading texts of varying difficulty and for varied purposes. Pushing every student to reach the 90th or even the 75th percentile in fluency is not feasible or necessary and, for students at or above the expected level in fluency, the instructional time could be better spent by enhancing other critical aspects of reading, such as increasing their vocabulary and becoming better at monitoring their comprehension.

The second caveat is that we still have much to learn about fluency. Ongoing debates in the research community include questions regarding the value of reading lists of words versus sentences and paragraphs; repeated reading of the same passage versus reading several different passages that have lots of the same vocabulary; the nature of the text in which students would benefit most for fluency practice (i.e., narrative or expository, randomly selected or highly controlled passages); the exact role of silent reading in a comprehensive reading instructional program; the role of prosody in the impact of fluency on text comprehension, etc. For example, we know that the ability to instantaneously recognize high-frequency sight words is an essential element of fluent reading. Researchers continue to explore whether or not having students practice reading word lists or passages is the more efficient way to develop this automaticity. Until research provides a definitive answer, having students orally read passages seems more beneficial because of the added opportunity to work on prosody and comprehension. Likewise, we know that repeated reading of a single passage is highly effective, but it is not clear whether or not a set of passages on a single topic that has been carefully written with a large number of repeated words could be equally or even more effective. If reading a set of passages turns out to be as effective as re-reading a single passage, the set could conceivably be used to enhance students' fluency, vocabulary, and domain knowledge simultaneously.

We will leave researchers to continue their valuable efforts to address these important but yet-to-be-answered questions. However, this article should help practitioners feel confident that there is sufficient guidance from research to support the use of fluency-based assessments in their professional data-collection procedures, and to select instructional practices for both those students who are on-track and those who are struggling to develop the essential skill of reading fluency.

Jan Hasbrouck is president of JH Consulting, as well as an affiliate of the Behavioral Research and Teaching Group at the University of Oregon. Her most recent book, which she co-authored with Carolyn Denton, is The Reading Coach: A How-To Manual for Success.

*In 1997, the U.S. Congress asked the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to convene a group of experts to assess the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read. This group, called the National Reading Panel (NRP), spent more than two years reviewing research; their resulting report, completed in 2000, is widely considered the single best source for information on how-and how not-to teach reading. ( back to article)

†Comprehension depends on reading skills (like decoding and fluency), but it also depends on vocabulary and background knowledge. To learn more about comprehension, see "Building Knowledge: The Case for Bringing Content into the Language Arts Block and for a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for All Children" by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in the Spring 2006 issue of American Educator. ( back to article)

‡There are also screening assessments that should be administered as early as kindergarten, to determine if students are on track for reading achievement. To learn more, see "Preventing Early Reading Failure" in the Fall 2004 issue of American Educator. ( back to article)

References

Adams, G.N. and Brown, S. (2003). The Six-minute solution. Longmont, Colo.:Sopris West.

Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press.

Allington, R. L. (1983). Fluency: The neglected reading goal in reading instruction. The Reading Teacher, 36, 556-561.

Brophy, J.E. (1988). Educating teachers about managing classroom and students. Teacher and Teacher Education 4(1), 1-18.

Campbell, K. (1996). Great Leaps Reading Program.

Daane, M.C., Campbell, J.R., Grigg, W.S., Goodman, M.J., and Oranje, A. (2005). Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading (NCES 2006-469). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office.

Edformation (2004). AIMSweb progress monitoring and assessment system. http://www.edformation.com/.

Fuchs, L.S., Fuchs, D., Hosp, M. K., and Jenkins, J.R. (2001). Oral reading fluency as an indicator of reading competence: A theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), 239-256.

Good, III, R.H. and Kaminski, R.A. (Eds.) (2002). Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), 6th Ed. Institute for the Development of Educational Achievement. Eugene, Ore.:University of Oregon.

Good, III, R.H., Simmons, D.C., and Kame'enui, E.J. (2001). The importance and decision-making utility of a continuum of fluency-based indicators of foundational reading skills for third-grade high-stakes outcomes. Scientific Studies of Reading 5(3), 257-288.

Hasbrouck, J.E., Ihnot, C., and Rogers, G.H. (1999). "Read Naturally": A strategy to increase oral reading fluency. Reading Research & Instruction, 39(1), 27-38.

Hasbrouck, J. and Tindal, G.A. (2006, April). ORF norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636-644.

Hasbrouck, J.E., Woldbeck, T., Ihnot, C., and Parker, R. I. (1999). One teacher's use of curriculum-based measurement: A changed opinion. Learning Disabilities: Research and Practice, 14(2), 118-126.

Heibert, E.H. (2003). Quick reads. Parsipanny, N.J.:Pearson Learning.

Hintze, J.M. and Christ, T.J. (2004). An examination of variability as a function of passage variance in CBM progress monitoring. School Psychology Review, 33(2), 204-217.

Hudson, R.F., Lane, H.B., and Pullen, P.C. (2005, May). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how? The Reading Teacher, 58(8), 702-714.

Ihnot, C. (1991). Read naturally. Read Naturally:Minneapolis, Minn.

Kuhn, M.R. and Stahl, S.A. (2000). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. CIERA Rep. No. 2-008. Ann Arbor, Mich.:Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.

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Osborn, J. and Lehr, F. (2004). A focus on fluency. Honolulu: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.

Partnership for Reading (September 2001). Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read. Washington, D.C.:National Institute for Literacy; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and U.S. Department of Education.

Pikulski, J.J. and Chard, D.J. (2005). Fluency: Bridge between decoding and comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 58(6), 510-519.

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Shinn, M.R. (Ed.) (1998). Advanced applications of curriculum-based measurement. New York:Guilford.

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By Jan Hasbrouck

Screening, Diagnosing,
and Progress Monitoring:
The Details (PDF)

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After more than 20 years as the neglected goal of reading instruction (Allington, 1983; NICHD, 2000), fluency has finally become the hot topic among reading researchers, professional development providers, and teachers. These days it is rare to pick up a reading journal, attend a professional conference, or sit in a faculty staff room at a school without hearing someone discussing reading fluency. Surely most every educator has heard the message that if students aren’t sufficiently fluent in their reading, they won’t have sufficient comprehension.

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Carl Hendrick - real-time teaching: checking for understanding and more 

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Carl Hendrick - real-time teaching: checking for understanding and more 

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In this episode of Chalk Dust, Rebecca Birch and Dr Nathaniel Swain are joined by Dr Carl Hendrick, Professor of Education at Academica University of Applied Sciences and co-author of How Learning Happens and How Teaching Happens. Together, the team explore real classroom footage from Australian classrooms, reflecting on how teachers respond when learning doesn't go exactly to plan.

They analyse three lessons: Jeanette Breen's Year 3 class tackling sentence kernels, Troy from Sophia College guiding students through sentence fragments in a secondary context, and Mark De Bruin from Cranbrook using a "Do Now" and visualiser work to develop literacy. Across these examples, Carl, Rebecca and Nathaniel highlight what expert teachers do when slides contain errors, students answer unexpectedly, or early practice shows misconceptions.

Themes include how to pivot in real-time, why checking for understanding is more than asking "are we good?", and how to create psychological safety so imperfect student work can be used as a springboard for improvement. They also discuss the role of cultural knowledge in English, why retrieval practice can fail if poorly executed, and how responsive teaching underpins explicit instruction.

Carl reflects on the "illusions of learning" that shaped his forthcoming book, co-written with Paul Kirschner, and explains why engagement, apparent fluency, or polished lessons are not always indicators of genuine understanding.
Mentioned resources and explainers
Carl's earlier books with Paul Kirschner distilling core findings from cognitive psychology for teachers.
The Writing Revolution (TWR)
Referenced in Jeanette's lesson, this approach uses sentence kernels to build syntactic and compositional fluency. Contact Ballarat Clarendon College for opportunities to complete this training at a time convenient for Australian participants.
Retrieval Practice
Carl and Nathaniel note how surface-level "Do Nows" can fail unless they actually prompt students to connect prior knowledge. Christine Counsell's writing on history teaching is mentioned as a model.
Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)
Lee Shulman's concept, invoked when Troy pivots his grammar explanation, illustrating how teachers need multiple representations of knowledge, not just content expertise.
"Illusions of Learning" (forthcoming book)
Carl previews his new book with Paul Kirschner and Jim Hill, addressing why engagement, confidence or "busyness" can mislead teachers about true learning. You can pre-order here.
Listen or view, and support our work
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Takeaways
* Responsive teaching means pivoting when materials or answers don't align with expectations.

* Checking for understanding requires variety-listening, thinking, and retrieval are not the same.

* Student work, even if imperfect, is a powerful lever for whole-class improvement.

* Retrieval practice only works if students genuinely recall prior knowledge, not just copy prompts.

* Cultural and content knowledge are prerequisites for deeper learning, particularly in English.

* Explicit teaching is not only "telling," it's breaking down steps, modelling improvement, and making excellence visible.

* Great lessons are built on earlier culture-setting and routines, not just what happens in the room that day.
Keywords
explicit teaching, Carl Hendrick, Rebecca Birch, Nathaniel Swain, Chalk Dust podcast, sentence kernels, The Writing Revolution, retrieval practice, do now, visualiser, student work, responsive teaching, adaptive teaching, pedagogical content knowledge, illusions of learning, guided practice, explicit instruction, classroom culture, checking for understanding

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chalkdust.media

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SummaryIn this episode of Chalk Dust, Rebecca Birch and Dr Nathaniel Swain are joined by Dr Carl Hendrick, Professor of Education at Academica University of Applied Sciences and co-author of How...

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National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)

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We have a literacy crisis in this country. Last year's NAEP scores found that more than one third of fourth grade students can't read at a basic level, and that rate climbs even higher for students of color, those with learning differences, and those who grow up in low-income households. This dismal data has nothing to do with the students and families, and everything to do with inequities in access to effective literacy instruction. But there is good news: Decades of research has resulted in a rich, robust understanding of how children learn to read. So what does this research say? Inspired by a conversation at a recent Barksdale Reading Institute Lunch & Literacy forum, researcher Dr. Reid Lyon developed a clear, concise summary of the research on how children learn to read. Here we share Dr. Lyon's "Ten Maxims," originally published by - Dr. Heather Peske Reading Universe. These maxims underlie NCTQ's own work to advocate for the science of reading in teacher preparation. By increasing understanding and adoption of scientifically based reading instruction, together we can address the literacy crisis head-on, reversing historical patterns of inequity and changing the lives of millions of our children.

Ten maxims: What we've learned so far about how children learn to read

By Dr. Reid Lyon

Over the last 50 years, there's been a vast outpouring of research about reading development, drawing on insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, educators and other experts. I'm sometimes asked to summarize, in plain language, what we've learned so far. These ten maxims represent my best attempt at doing that.

This may seem like a fool's errand, because no set of maxims can fully convey the scope or the nuance of thousands of studies. I hope nevertheless that these maxims might be useful in crystallizing some of the most essential findings. In collaboration with some outstanding researchers and practitioners, I've compiled here a selective list of studies that underlie each of the ten maxims. The research behind the maxims addresses a wide range of individual differences in reading development, reading difficulties and reading instruction. Taken as a whole, the studies encompass children identified as having dyslexia and other learning disabilities as well as children who struggle with reading as a result of inadequate instruction. Many of the studies also include proficient readers.

Because these maxims are very broad, there is of course more to say about specific subpopulations of students with distinct strengths and needs. I encourage advocates for these students to formulate additional maxims that are not adequately covered by these first ten. Any additions should be in clear, consumer-friendly language and supported by cited studies that report relevant empirical findings.

The overarching message is that learning to read is a complex process involving multiple abilities, skills, and knowledge. Each is essential but none is sufficient on its own.

With that as prologue, here are my ten maxims:

1. Almost all children learn to speak naturally; reading and writing must be taught.

2. Literacy begins at birth. It is rooted in early social interactions and experiences that include regular exposure to oral language and print. Strong roots tend to produce stronger readers.

3. All good readers are good decoders. Decoding should be taught until children can accurately and independently read new words. Decoding depends on phonemic awareness: a child's ability to identify individual speech sounds. Decoding is the on-ramp for word recognition.

4. Fluent readers can instantly and accurately recognize most words in a text. They can read with expression and at an appropriate rate for their age. Reading fluency requires comprehension AND it supports comprehension.

5. Comprehension-the goal of reading-draws on multiple skills and strengths, including a solid foundation of vocabulary and background knowledge.

6. One size does not fit all: use student data to differentiate your instruction.

7. Direct, systematic instruction helps students develop the skills they need to become strong readers. Indirect, three-cueing instruction is unpredictable in its impact on word reading and leaves too much to chance.

8. These maxims apply to English Learners/Emergent Bilinguals, who often need extra support to bolster their oral language as they learn to read and write in a new language.

9. We should support students who speak languages or dialects other than General American English at home, by honoring their home language and by giving them expanded opportunities to engage with General American English text.

10. To become good readers and writers, students need to integrate many skills that are built over time.

This piece originated with the Barksdale Reading Institute's Lunch & Literacy forum and originally appeared on the Reading Universe website. Reading Universe is a joint project of the Barksdale Reading Institute, WETA/Reading Rockets, and First Book that provides free resources for educators and families.

About the guest author:

Dr. Reid Lyon, a neuroscientist and specialist in learning disorders, joined the faculty of Communication Science and Disorders at Northwestern University in 1980 where he also directed the neuropsychology laboratory. In 1983 Dr. Lyon was recruited by the Stern Center for Language and Learning in Burlington, Vermont where he served as the director of research. He also served as a clinical associate professor of neurology at the University of Vermont Medical School. From 1992 to 2005, Dr. Lyon served as a research neuropsychologist and the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the NICHD at the National Institutes of Health; in this role he developed and oversaw research programs in cognitive neuroscience, learning and reading development and disorders, behavioral pediatrics, cognitive and affective development, School Readiness, and the Spanish to English Reading Research program. He designed, developed and directed the 44-site NICHD Reading Research Network. After leaving the NIH, Dr. Lyon held distinguished scientist and distinguished professorships at the University of Texas, Dallas (neuroscience) and Southern Methodist University (educational leadership).

Dr. Lyon is the author and co-author of over 130 peer reviewed journal articles, books, and book chapters addressing developmental neuroscience, learning and reading disorders/dyslexia, and the translation of science into practice and policy. He also co-authored the definition of dyslexia used at the NIH and worldwide. Dr. Lyon received the NIH Director's Award twice. Once for his contributions to the neuroscience of learning and learning disorders. He also received the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in The Sciences Award for contributions to educating veterans about the neuroscience of Combat PTSD in 2013. Dr. Lyon, a former paratrooper and combat veteran, received the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantryman Badge among other combat awards during his 15th month tour in Vietnam including the 1968 Tet Offensive.

Additional contributors to this piece include: Jane Ashby, Louise Dechovitz, Linda Diamond, Jan Hasbrouck, Kari Kurto, and Julie Washington. With appreciation to Kelly Butler, Claude Goldenberg, and Noel Gunther.

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Ten maxims: What we've learned so far about how children learn to read by Dr. Reid Lyon

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Together we can address the literacy crisis head-on, reversing historical patterns of inequity and changing the lives of millions of our children.

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Simple Guide to Reading Research - shifting the balance 

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Simple Guide to Reading Research - shifting the balance 

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A Teacher Friendly Guide to Reading Research.pdf

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40 pg Presentation--user friendly!

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Culturally Sustaining Science of Reading 

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Culturally Sustaining Science of Reading 

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Toward a culturally sustaining science of reading

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Published in Middle School Journal (Vol. 55, No. 3, 2024)

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Reduced Feedback - Desireable  Difficulty 

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Reduced Feedback - Desireable  Difficulty 

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Robert and Elizabeth Bjork originally spoke of five desirable difficulties. Three of them get widespread PR: interleaving, spaced practice, and retrieval practice. The remaining two - contextual interference (a kind of interleaving but of contexts and not tasks) and reduced feedback get less with the last almost forgotten. This piece is about why reduced practice should be elevated to the level of the others.

We've all seen it. A student is 'flying' through practice. Every answer gets an instant tick or cross, every misstep corrected on the spot. The lesson feels smooth. Efficient. Productive. And then, a week later, the same student can't do it. The 'learning' that we saw has seemingly evaporated into thin air.

That, in a nutshell, is why reduced feedback deserves a place among what Robert and Elizabeth Bjork call 'desirable difficulties': conditions that make performance during practice look worse and feel harder but make learning more durable and transferable (see this article in The American Educator or this article from Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork for a discussion of the difference between performance and learning). The uncomfortable truth is that the conditions that produce rapid performance gains are often the very conditions that undermine long-term learning. Immediate feedback is one of the best examples.

Reduced feedback is exactly what it sounds like: you limit the frequency or immediacy of feedback during training. Not because you enjoy watching learners struggle, and not because feedback is unimportant, but because you want learners to do something we too often outsource to teachers, apps, and rubrics: monitor their own performance, identify errors, and correct course. When feedback arrives after every attempt, learners can succeed while thinking surprisingly little. When feedback is less frequent or delayed, they must judge and retrieve. And that is where learning actually happens.

The Bjorks' argument begins with a simple observation: immediate and constant feedback improves performance during practice, but can sabotage learning by creating a what can be called a fluency trap. Practice becomes smooth, and smoothness is mistaken for mastery. The lesson 'works' because the student keeps getting steered back onto the right track before they have a chance to build their own internal map. Frequent feedback acts like a Waze or Google Maps: you arrive at the destination, but you couldn't do the route again without the voice telling you what to do next. In classrooms, that voice is the teacher, the answer key, the autocorrecting app, the constant confirmation or correction that makes the work look right in the moment. The price is dependency. The student learns, implicitly, that the job is not to understand or to evaluate, but to respond and wait for correction.

When you reduce feedback, something interesting happens. The learner is forced to rely on internal monitoring processes. They have to ask themselves whether their answer is correct or even plausible, whether a step follows logically from the preceding step, whether what they wrote matches the rule or the concept that they have been taught. This isn't extra effort for fun or for the sake of it. It's retrieval and self-evaluation. It's the learner bringing relevant knowledge back online and using it to diagnose their own performance. And because that diagnosis is effortful, it strengthens memory and makes knowledge more stable and adaptable. You can think of reduced feedback as a way to train the learner's internal teacher. If you always do the checking for them, that internal teacher never develops.

But there's a second, often forgotten dimension of 'reducing feedback' that matters just as much as reducing how often you give it, namely reducing how much you give and how specific it is. In the beginning, especially for novices, learners often need feedback that's concrete and corrective. Not a vague 'try again,' but rather: 'your subject and verb don't agree here,' or 'you divided before you multiplied,' or 'you're using the wrong unit.' That kind of specific feedback helps them build an initial, workable model of the task and prevents them from practising the wrong thing. Yet if we keep that level of specificity, we create a different kind of dependency. Students start waiting not just for the verdict, but for the diagnosis and the next step. They learn to outsource the thinking about what went wrong to the person with the red pen.

A powerful way to avoid that trap is to fade feedback in two directions at once. Over time you give feedback less frequently, but you also make it less detailed and more general. Early on, you might point to the exact place where the reasoning breaks and name the rule that was violated. Later, you might simply indicate that there is an error in a particular line and ask the student to find it. Later still, you might offer only a general cue: 'Check your units,' 'Look again at the relationship between these two ideas,' 'Does your conclusion follow from your evidence?' Notice what this does. The feedback gradually stops being an instruction manual and becomes a prompt for self-regulation; it becomes more and less corrective/directive. You're not withholding help; you're transferring responsibility. You're, quite literally, training students to do what experts do, namely detect problems, locate them, classify them, and repair them.

This is also why so many lessons feel successful and then disappoint later. High performance during a session is often an illusion of competence. Correct answers produced with constant, highly specific support look like learning, but they may be little more than guided performance. True learning shows itself later, when the learner must retain and transfer without the scaffolds. Reduced and faded feedback tends to make practice look shakier and less fluent, precisely because the learner is doing more cognitive work. That is not a bug; it is the feature. The goal is not elegant performance at 10:15 on Tuesday, but durable competence at 10:15 next month.

Of course, reduced feedback can be implemented wisely or foolishly. Wisely, means you stop correcting every move and start designing space for the learner to notice patterns. One simple approach is to wait and give feedback after a short run of attempts rather than after each one. Instead of interrupting the flow problem by problem, you let learners complete a handful, then you discuss what went right and what went wrong. The feedback becomes less like a reflex and more like a diagnosis. Delaying feedback can be powerful for the same reason. A time gap between attempt and correction forces learners to 'reload' what they did. Immediate feedback is easy to process shallowly (sound of a buzzer: wrong, next) but delayed feedback asks the learner to reconstruct their reasoning: ask themselves what did I answer, why did I choose that, where did I go off track? That reconstruction is another form of retrieval practice, except the object being retrieved is the learner's own thinking. You might even call it second order retrieval, but that's another blog.

In skill-based domains, there's a further refinement that teachers often do intuitively. Good teachers don't comment on everything. They intervene when errors fall outside of an acceptable range and let students self-correct the small stuff. That's not neglect; it's training autonomy. If you correct every minor slip, you make the learner a passenger in their own learning process instead of the driver.

WARNING: The concept of desirable difficulty has been used as a justification for all sorts of pedagogical nonsense. Reduced feedback is desirable only when learners have enough foundational knowledge to eventually succeed. If you withhold feedback, or make it too general too soon, for a true novice who can't diagnose errors, you don't create productive struggle; you create confusion and frustration. The learner doesn't think, 'Let me evaluate my approach.' They think, 'I have no idea what's going on.' So the question is never 'Should we reduce feedback?'. The question is: 'When can this learner plausibly self-correct, and what supports help them reach that point?' That is why fading feedback, both in frequency and in specificity, is often safest way to go. You start supportive and become demanding as the learner becomes capable.

The best practical test is to watch what happens as you fade. If learners respond by checking, explaining, comparing their work to a standard, and correcting themselves, you're building the right kind of difficulty. If they respond by guessing, giving up, or repeating the same error blindly, you've removed guidance before they had the knowledge to use it. In other words, you haven't created independence; you've created abandonment. The art is to reduce feedback in ways that force learners to do the thinking you ultimately want them to own, while still ensuring that errors don't fossilise into misconceptions.

So yes, reduced feedback may make your lesson look and feel less smooth. It may even make you feel less helpful. But if your goal as a teacher is to develop learners who can perform without you, learners who can monitor, adapt, and transfer, then smoothness isn't the metric. The real metric is what students can do later, in a different context, without Waze o Google Maps. Reduced feedback, and especially feedback that's deliberately faded from specific to general, is a quiet but powerful way to shift responsibility from the teacher's correction to the learner's cognition. And that's exactly what education is supposed to do.
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The Forgotten Desirable Difficulty - Reduced Feedback

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Robert and Elizabeth Bjork originally spoke of five desirable difficulties.

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Learning to Read and Reading to Learn - Shanahan 

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Learning to Read and Reading to Learn - Shanahan 

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S10 E11: Learning to read vs. reading to learn, with Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D., distinguished professor emeritus from the University of Illinois at Chicago, joins Susan Lambert to distinguish between…