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Third grade reading proficiency matters-enormously. It is eerily predictive of academic and career success; students who don't reach this benchmark are four times less likely to graduate from high school on time. Unfortunately, K-3 literacy instruction, on which so much depends, is often a misguided, inefficient mess. While it consumes a generous portion of the school day, it typically neglects the most vital elements of literacy. That's why our success rate, despite some progress, is still abysmal: only about half of our 3rd graders perform at grade level on their own state assessments. It is even lower for poor and minority students.

This is both horrific and unnecessary. According to literacy researcher Richard Allington, studies show that "virtually every student could be reading on grade level by the end of 1st grade." In my experience, most educators acknowledge the need for intensive, systematic phonics instruction. They also know that students need to read and talk and write far more than they currently do, across the curriculum. There is wide agreement that all of these elements must be in place for K-3 students to acquire the fluency, knowledge, and vocabulary needed to become literate and articulate. We've yet to capitalize on this consensus. Or to see what prevents us from acting on it: the structure and substance of the typical K-3 literacy block and our overhyped commercial literacy programs. Their failure can often be traced to the pervasiveness of small-group, ability-based instruction.

The most successful K-3 teachers I've observed use small groups sparingly. That's because their whole-class instruction consistently incorporates the most proven (but rarely implemented) elements of successful teaching. They master simple methods for ensuring that all students are attentive, and they conduct frequent, ongoing assessments of the class's progress throughout the lesson-and then re-teach accordingly. An Education Week article last year adds credence to this approach, reporting that whole-group instruction is "almost always" more effective than the small-group, ability-based model.

These facts point to an opportunity for dramatic improvements in 3rd grade literacy. Do the math: In a two-hour reading block, five groups of students will receive about 20 minutes of reading instruction per day. In a classroom that uses small groups more sparingly, students will receive about 80 minutes-three to four times as much.

Three to four times as much. This would allow for huge infusions of instructional time into the essential components of literacy. Teachers could use this additional time to incorporate more:

Intensive, sustained, systematic phonics. We could substantially accelerate students' mastery of the phonetic code in K-1-and still have time for kids to read and listen to far more fiction and nonfiction texts.

Reading/general knowledge. If most students have mastered decoding in the 1st grade, they could spend record amounts of time in 2nd and 3rd grade reading literature, history, and science texts to build their knowledge base and vocabulary, which are critical to effective comprehension.

Vocabulary instruction. Most of a rich vocabulary is acquired through abundant reading. But research also shows that we can reliably supplement this with targeted, embedded vocabulary instruction.

Discussion. To become confident, articulate speakers, students must engage in frequent, purposeful discussions about what they read. We could multiply the length and frequency of such discussions, which animate an appreciation of reading and are excellent preparation for writing.

Writing and writing instruction. Writing has an unsurpassed capacity to help us think logically, express ourselves clearly, and understand, analyze, and retain content. It often promotes dramatic, measurable improvements across the curriculum and is crucial to success in innumerable careers.

Let's be candid here: These core elements of literacy seldom get the time they deserve in most K-3 classrooms-or our inordinately praised commercial programs. A shift to larger amounts of well-executed, whole-class instruction would at least double the amount that students receive in these critical areas. The benefits, for K-3 and beyond, would be immense.

Of course, many will argue that students don't need more time with their teacher; they can learn to read and write on their own, at our now-ubiquitous independent learning "centers," which are set up with materials for students to work independently while the teacher works with small groups. But are they learning? "According to the studies," writes literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, "No." Time spent away from the teacher, he writes, should not be considered a "productive part of the school day." I consistently observe students languishing at these unsupervised centers, ambling slowly from station to station, aimlessly turning pages or talking quietly with a partner instead of reading. And that explains, as Michael P. Ford and Michael F. Opitz found nearly two decades ago, why only about a third of the overall literacy period has any academic value.

What should we do? Take Shanahan's advice: "Brush up your skills in working with larger groups," and use the windfall of precious time to multiply the amount of instruction we provide in the most indispensable elements of K-3 literacy. Then as night follows day, 3rd grade literacy rates will rise.

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How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient (Opinion)

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Scaling back small-group instruction could promise dramatic improvements in literacy, argues Mike Schmoker.

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Beyond Straw Men and False Choices: A Guest Post by Dr. G. Reid Lyon

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Beyond Straw Men and False Choices: A Guest Post by Dr. G. Reid Lyon

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Lyon and Carnine: The Unfinished Work of Professionalizing Reading Education

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Why a Common Knowledge Foundation and Professional Language Are Essential for Improving Reading Proficiency

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Story and multimedia by Joey Garcia, University Communications and Marketing

Reading seems like a straightforward process. The eyes scan the words, and the brain turns them into meaning. But it's not always that simple. Readers regularly skip words, sometimes without realizing it. New research from USF shows how the brain still processes those skipped words using peripheral vision, even as the eyes move past them.

Elizabeth Schotter, associate professor and director of the USF Eye Movements and Cognition Lab, worked alongside first author and postdoctoral research scholar Sara Milligan on the study published inPsychophysiology.

"Our findings suggest that readers aren't simply guessing words; they rely on detailed visual and linguistic processing," Milligan said. "This supports the importance of learning letter-sound relationships and spelling rather than relying solely on contextual guessing strategies."

The study shows that reading happens through teamwork between the eyes and the brain, which work together to read quickly while still understanding the text. While the team's research addresses basic science questions, it lays the groundwork for new ways to address reading challenges and improve instruction.

COMBINING EYE TRACKING WITH EEG TECHNOLOGY

Eye movements during reading occur roughly every 250 milliseconds, and many processes must happen simultaneously under the hood to make comprehension possible. To track such movements, the team used an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that measures brain waves, which requires careful setup to ensure accurate readings.

At the same time, they used a camera-based eye-tracking system to monitor participants' gaze as words appeared on the screen. This approach lets researchers link eye movements directly to real-time brain activity. Together, the tools revealed split-second choices about which words readers engaged with and the neural activity surrounding those moments.

"This study is unique because it allows participants to read naturally while simultaneously measuring eye movements and brain activity," Schotter said. "Many previous studies limited eye movements or relied on only one method. By combining both approaches, we can observe how real-time decisions during reading relate directly to brain activity."

The study included 55 participants, each of whom had a tracked reading session lasting approximately two hours. Participants silently read 180 sentences presented one at a time on a screen. In some cases, the researchers manipulated upcoming words to be expected, slightly altered or unexpected, allowing them to compare how the brain responded depending on whether a word was skipped or directly read. After finishing each sentence, participants pressed a button to continue.

"We are addressing two major issues: How people read and what separates skilled from less skilled readers," Schotter said. "Understanding these mechanisms can inform educational approaches and interventions. The second challenge is technical, since combining eye tracking with EEG required us to develop new tools and software. That work allows researchers to study reading in more realistic ways."

PROCESSING SKIPPED WORDS DURING READING

When the sessions concluded, the team gathered data from the brain-wave cap and the eye-tracking system. They matched the information to identify connections between what the eyes and the brain were doing while reading.

We found clear brain responses showing that readers processed information about skipped words before ever fixating on them. When upcoming words didn't make sense, the brain showed strong responses even when those words were skipped. This suggested that readers weren't just guessing; they were analyzing those words in advance using peripheral vision.

Sara Milligan
Postdoctoral Research Scholar

The study further shows that skipping a word does not mean it was ignored. Brain data demonstrated that readers often partially register skipped words in advance, and this processing can be deep enough to detect whether a word is expected or irregular. However, decisions to skip are made before full word recognition and integration are complete, meaning the brain operates on a fast, predictive system that prioritizes efficiency.

Now with a clearer understanding, the lab aims to explore how reading strategies change depending on goals, such as reading for comprehension versus skimming. Researchers also want to study individual differences, including why some people read faster or more efficiently, and how reading strategies and brain processing change across the lifespan.

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How eye movements and brain activity shape reading comprehension

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Reading seems like a straightforward process, but it's not always that simple. Readers regularly skip words, sometimes without realizing it. New research from USF shows how the brain processes those skipped words using peripheral vision, even as the eyes move past them.

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From Knowing Better to Teaching Better In this week’s Sundays with Sarah, Doc Holbrook launches The Science of Reading in Action: moving from knowing the research to teaching it.

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The Middle School Literacy Project by Luke Morin

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Wading Into the Deep End: What Reading Actually Requires When the Text Gets Hard

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Explicit, text-driven modeling unlocks the rigor of complex texts. It’s messy, and we should be doing far more of it.

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Copyright © 2026 Reading Reimagined | Website design by Ratkaj Designs

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Science of Reading Classroom and Faith Howard

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It’s Not Too Late: Teaching a High School Student to Read From the Ground Up

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In November of 2024, I started working with a high school sophomore who was functionally illiterate. Her reading accuracy was below 50%. She read at about 35 words per minute and tested in the 1st percentile in foundational skills and reading comprehension. Her reading was broken, choppy, flat, and void of expression. Like many students in her position, she had developed an incredibly sophisticated compensation strategy: she used context to guess. She could produce something that sounded close enough to pass in some classrooms, but she wasn’t actually reading the words on the page.

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Rethinking Phonemic Awareness: When Research and Classroom Practice Converge

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Yes, Small-Group Reading Instruction Works. But Use It Wisely (Opinion)

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When is the best time to use the approach over whole-class literacy instruction?

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Reading comprehension is hard to define, hard to teach, hard to improve on (particularly if you want to do so quickly), and hard to measure and assess.

And because comprehension is difficult to define and measure, school systems rely on standards to create the appearance of greater learning certainty.

As I wrote about last week, standards work best when there is a definable target. They allow vastly different systems to "talk to each other" by creating consistency and removing variance. As long as the sending system packages information to conform to the standard, the receiving system can "read" and understand it the same way every time.

Learning standards conceptually describe the knowledge and skills we want students to possess. Of course, we're not passing information or data directly between our brains. Teachers create learning experiences. Students then cognitively process what is shared with their relevant prior knowledge, generating new knowledge they can draw on in future learning experiences.

The goal of teaching is learning, but what we mean by "learning" is still hotly debated. As a result, standards are typically correlates rather than a 1-to-1 match for the learning we want to happen. For example, if a standard expects students to identify a main idea, while that might be an aspect of understanding the text, it does not capture the full extent of comprehension.

This complicates our relationship with learning standards. Thinking back on my examples of standards in real life from last week's post, when one runner passes the baton to the next in a track-and-field relay or a mail carrier delivers mail through a mail slot, they are performing the direct handoff. They aren't doing a thing that represents only a portion of it. I'm arguing, then, that meeting a standard is only approximating learning.

And why is that?

For one, cognitive science shows that we process new information in the context of what we already know, and we can't fully map the knowledge in each student's brain. It's difficult to directly know what students have already learned and whether they have learned incorrect information. So while the general cognitive process might be clear, when we teach students, it's much more difficult to track if and how they are building their knowledge aligned to standards.

We also can't measure all aspects of learning. Standards-based assessments reflect what can be reliably measured and psychometrically scaled, which is a subset of what we actually want kids to learn. When performing well on assessments becomes the focus of teaching and learning, we end up narrowing what we teach to what can be assessed. While this generally impacts all learning negatively, it often has a greater negative impact on reading comprehension.

For example, take this Common Core standard from grade 3 for reading literature:

"Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text, using terms such as chapter, scene, and stanza; describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections."

This standard defines a skill ("describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections") and a set of knowledge ("terms such as chapter, scene, and stanza").

Being able to describe how a story builds might contribute to a student's comprehension of it when the structure of the story plays an important role in its meaning. This is not true for all texts. Knowing and using terminology seems helpful, but what makes this knowledge that a third grader needs versus a second grader or fourth grader? And what happens if students don't read a play in third grade? Should teachers still teach "scene"?

To further complicate things, the stated expectation of standards is for students to "master" them. As Luke Morin compellingly describes in " Why Mastery Doesn't Matter," mastery of standards has become a problematic teaching obsession.

The idea of mastery signals an end to the learning. Like the first relay runner who passes the baton to the next is done racing, when students "master" a learning standard, they have successfully completed that task. Some learning standards work this way. Consider this portion of a grade 3 math standard: "By the end of Grade 3, know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers." Being able to provide the products from memory when questioned is a clear end point. In that sense, it behaves much more like a true standard: there is a clearly defined target and we can see and measure whether that target is achieved. These "math facts" are also foundational knowledge for doing more advanced math.

But in the example grade 3 reading literature standard above, describing how each successive part builds on earlier sections will greatly vary depending on whether you're reading The Stories Julian Tells in grade 3 or Romeo and Juliet in high school. There are many more factors that go into that skill that are not represented by the standard and are never mastered, only practiced and refined with each new text we read. This is like trying to pass the baton to a runner who is running forwards one time, backwards the next time, and then unable to use their hands the third time. As the conditions change, so do the knowledge and skills, and there is no longer a standard to follow. What works for passing the baton off at first no longer applies if the next runner can't use their hands.

Each text we read introduces different conditions for what is needed to comprehend it. We've dealt with this complication over the years by centering standards over text. We teach the standards either without texts or with contrived texts that perform in the same way every time (i.e., the texts are short and the associated questions have a single right answer and don't invite different interpretations).

We then expect students to apply their knowledge of the standard to different types of texts on their own. We send them off to do the hard work without us and then wonder why they can't: "I taught them the standard and they mastered it. I can't understand why they didn't perform well under these new and different conditions!" [Sarcasm definitely implied.]

If we were to instead center texts and understanding them over mastering standards, our focus would be more clear: can students read and understand this text and express their understanding? As I described in " The Comprehension Machine is Smoking," the essence of the standards across grade levels become concepts and ideas for teachers to talk about with students in a text. They are not a checklist of things to do, and they definitely don't define learning expectations at each grade.

If our focus is on understanding texts, then teachers can equip students to diagnose what's in front of them (e.g., I'm reading this text, and I do not understand this sentence. Does it matter for my overall comprehension?) and to flexibly select the cognitive tools they will need to get the job done well (e.g., If it does matter, what can I do to parse it?). Paul van den Broek and others describe this idea in more detail in " When a Reader Meets a Text: The Role of Standards of Coherence in Reading Comprehension." The gist is that proficient readers have varied expectations for comprehension based on what they plan to do with their understanding. They then apply different strategies and approaches when their comprehension does not meet their expectation of the text making sense.

Text-centered reading comprehension instruction implies that there is no standard way because each text is different. Instead of transferring information to students, we're building their cognitive toolkit and then giving them lots of practice making decisions and using those tools.

Because of our focus on standards, we spend an enormous amount of energy trying to answer questions like:

How can we help teachers "unpack the standards" so their teaching aligns more closely to them?

How can we evaluate instructional materials to ensure they will lead students to master the standards?

What skills from the standards should we monitor and track throughout the year to predict performance on statewide assessments?

When students don't perform how we want on particular standards, how can we use data to identify and reteach the missing skills?

While these questions might feel practical and actionable, they focus our attention on standards rather than helping students understand texts.

Of course, we rarely attribute reading struggles to learning standards. We point to curriculum quality, insufficient background knowledge, weak decoding instruction, lack of student motivation, inadequate teacher preparation, or the influence of technology. While many of these are also factors, we rarely question the structure of our learning systems. We treat standards as if they are neutral goals that describe the learning we want, but what we know about comprehension from cognitive science stands in contradiction to how we're teaching comprehension.

Once we understand what standards are and their purpose and we look at learning, particularly reading, it becomes easier to see why learning standards often struggle to capture what is actually happening in comprehension. Even so, our educational systems live and die by standards. It is therefore worth asking whether our reliance on a standards-based approach might itself be contributing to the struggles we are seeing in reading comprehension.

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Because comprehension is difficult to define and measure, school systems rely on standards to create the appearance of greater learning certainty.

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“Orthographic Skeletons”: Can children start learning how a word is spelled before they’ve seen it in print?

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Why oral vocabulary predicts reading ability.

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Science of Reading Classroom and Anjanette McNeely

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We know that oral language and literacy achievement are highly correlated.

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https://www.aei.org/events/how-can-we-teach-whole-books-effectively/?fbclid=IwVERFWAQ1lmdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEegkvJ7GqSVPnZ2uXsBI7gZOUnmA5VvCNHeo_-6rJuM3MdlrOqwIA94Lss_FY_aem_-Fd0W4IhXFkOnq80yQ7G-w

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How do we introduce (science) content to our youngest students?

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Toward an explicit instruction framework for early elementary science.

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When Into Reading misses the knowledge-building mark by a mile

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Laura Patranella shows how an excerpt, a confusing illustration, and a fluffy passage add up to a missed opportunity for knowledge-building in ELA.

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How Can You Tell If a Curriculum Truly Builds Knowledge?

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It’s not always easy--and a lot of districts are being misled.

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Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading

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Two champions of knowledge-rich instruction reflect on its current momentum

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Tier 1: What Core Instruction Looks Like

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The Paper Trail #7: Tier 1 — What Core Instruction Looks Like

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220272.2019.1616116?fbclid=IwdGRleAQyOZhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEePHeGCuVBJFG85UYhVZg1ji7Cv8WS4j_pd1O7LRh8_LWqlStJmXmlUIRSd3Y_aem_cSqwGj38jKnNEr9eGzK5Xg

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The hidden curriculum of reading intervention: a critical content analysis of Fountas & Pinnell’s leveled literacy intervention

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In an age of increased accountability and high-stakes testing, educators continuously seek to locate quality reading intervention curricula intended to improve students’ reading performances. Yet,…

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Accuracy of student performance while reading leveled books rated at their instructional level by a reading inventory

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Identifying a student’s instructional level is necessary to ensure that students are appropriately challenged in reading. Informal reading inventories (IRIs) purport to assess the highest reading level at which a student can accurately decode and comprehend text. However, the use of IRIs in determining a student’s instructional level has been questioned because of a lack of research. The current study examined the percentage of words read correctly with 64 second- and third-grade students while reading from texts at their instructional level as determined by an IRI. Students read for 1min from three leveled texts that corresponded to their instructional level as measured by an IRI, and the percentage of words read correctly was recorded. The percentage read correctly correlated across the three books from r = .47 to r = .68 and instructional level categories correlated from tau = .59 to tau = .65. Percent agreement calculations showed that the categorical scores (frustration, instructional, and independent) for the three readings agreed approximately 67% to 70% of the time, which resulted in a kappa estimate of less than .50. Kappa coefficients of .70 are considered strong indicators of agreement. Moreover, more than half of the students with the lowest reading skills read at a frustration level when attempting to read books rated at their instructional level by an IRI. The current study questions how reliably and accurately IRIs identify students’ instructional level for reading.

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The Read Like Us Protocol with Jake Downs

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A 5-Step Protocol for Repeated Oral Reading for Fluency

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Most Struggling Students Get “Incoherent” Instruction

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Schools need to ensure that extra support aligns with their core curriculum--if, that is, their core curriculum makes sense.

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Right now I feel like every time I turn around there is something new I am supposed to incorporate into my teaching. It can feel overwhelming. Sometimes, I think we need to give ourselves permission to get messy with new learning and experiment as we figure it all out.

And that's what I've been doing this year-especially when it comes to the Science of Learning and writing instruction: two areas I'm really trying to grow in.

After scoring our mid-year writing assessments and hearing from upper grade teachers how many students have been struggling with our state timed writing assessments, I decided I wanted to try to help my 1st graders become more independent writers. I knew this would be a big challenge, especially when I have a large class, many of whom are working on being independent in general.

I started with the basics of a topic sentence. Even though many students were able to write a topic sentence, most didn't match the task. For example, if the task was "Describe what bats can do," many students' topic sentences would be something like, "I know about bats". For some, this led to information and details like "Bats are scary." or even "I like bats" which did not match the texts and the task.

I decided to make a goal, that after a week of quick targeted instruction outside of writing time, students would be able to compose a topic sentence that matched the task in 5 minutes or less. As a scaffold, I would provide a sentence starter, but students would be encouraged to say the topic in their own way, as long as it matched the task.

Since many are still learning to read, I read a sample task with the students, using a strategy called "Dot and Dash." It's an EBLI (Evidence Based Literacy Instruction) strategy that I learned from Lindsay Kemeny's book, "Rock Your Literacy Block." I am not trained in EBLI and I'm probably not doing it perfectly, but I find there is so much value in decoding with the students.

The gist is, as you decode and blend words aloud, if one letter makes a sound put a dot under it and if more than one letter makes a sound, add a dash. I explain more about this strategy here on my instagram.

I also provided the sentence starter "This is___" and encourage them to check their sentence for "CUPS" (Capitals, Understanding, Punctuation, and Spelling) when done.

Students had five quiet minutes at their desks to write a topic sentence. Since we have been practicing using silence in our classroom during math, a strategy I learned from former Goyen Fellow , students were able to work quietly and independently during the 5 minute time period.

After scoring, I found that 15 out of the 28 students were either writing details instead of a topic or produced a topic sentence that did not match the prompt. 46% of my students could craft a topic sentence that matched the prompt. Since it was almost half the class, I opted for whole group instruction. During our practice, I used content we were already studying, so it would be good practice for all students.

1. I included daily practice of thinking and then either saying or writing a topic sentence. I either did this during our morning meeting, or after recess which I tend to always use for retrieval practice about content we're learning.

2. Most times we read the task together using "Dot and Dash".

Each time, we pulled apart the prompt by asking "Do/What?" This is something I learned as part of my thinkSRSD training. Channeling my inner Dr. Anita Archer, I modeled on the first day, we did it together the next day, and then we used a variety of ways for the remaining days including think/pair/share and cold calling for independent practice.

1. When it was time for students to craft a topic sentence, I used a variety of response protocols including turn and talk, stop and jot on mini whiteboards, think/pair/share, and cold calling. Again, I modeled on the first day, we did it together on the 2nd day, and students did this independently on the last 3 days. I made sure to give wait time as seen in this video. At first when doing cold calling, I purposely called on students who were struggling after a peer model. Sometimes I would call two students together for even more support.

2. I did an activity outside of writing time using content we were learning to practice labeling the parts of TIDE (Topic, Information, Detail, Ending). I focused on the topic, information, and detail. You can watch a snippet here.

After practice on the 5th day (not right after), I gave the 2nd assessment. This time, 86% of my students were able to write a topic sentence that matched the task in 5 minutes or less. Only 14% of students were unable to do so. After only 5 days of a little extra practice, I was very pleased with those results.

Those 4 remaining students will get some extra support during a small group. The old workshop teacher in me would have initially wanted to pull small groups or confer individually instead of focusing on whole class Tier 1 instruction. I'm finding more and more that there is a lot of power in quality, intentional, Tier 1 instruction. This is one of the many little nuggets I picked up from Dr. Nathaniel Swain's book, "Harnessing the Science of Learning."
Rock Your Literacy Block by Lindsay Kemeny Harnessing the Science of Learning by Nathanial Swain, PhD
Now, this does not mean that our writing is perfect or that we're completely independent. This does mean that now most students can craft a topic sentence that matches the task in a snap. But this does mean that they will have more space in their working memories to work on the harder parts of writing, including crafting those information and detail sentences.

If you're like me, a bit overwhelmed by all of the new information out there, I encourage you to keep going. It's very satisfying to find ways to work smarter and not necessarily harder. Lean into evidence-based practices in both the science of learning and the science of reading and writing. With small shifts you can also see some big results in not much time.

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Tinkering with Writing Instruction: How I Got 86% of my 1st Graders Writing Solid Topic Sentences

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Right now I feel like every time I turn around there is something new I am supposed to incorporate into my teaching.

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wordmappingproject.com is your first and best source for information about wordmappingproject. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!

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Iowa Reading Research Center - The University of Iowa

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Two Buckets, Same Well? The Relationship Between Reading and Writing Automaticity

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Research shows that reading and writing automaticity are associated in upper-elementary grades, especially among the highest performing writers.

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Implementation - Issues With a Leveled-Only Text Approach[1]

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Meet the Word Mapping Project, the new cult favorite curriculum supplement

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A teacher-authored program from Sean Morrisey has a lot to offer for teachers—and curriculum developers

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The TExT model evaluates text difficulty based on linguistic content (phonetically-regular words) and cognitive load (high-frequency words).

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The Case for Reading Tutoring Before 3rd Grade, Not After

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New research suggests virtual tutoring can boost literacy learning before kids begin to struggle.

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Flattening the Developmental Staircase: Lexical Complexity in Elementary Reading Texts Across Six Decades

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This study examined how the lexical complexity of elementary reading textbooks has changed over six decades, finding that the issue is not declining rigor, but rather compressed progression.

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1. From Language to Literacy: The Critical Role of Language Comprehension in Reading Comprehension, Rebecca D. Silverman & Kristin Keane

2. Content-Rich Classroom Conversations That Improve Language Comprehension in the Early Grades, Sonia Q. Cabell, C. J. Espittia, & Tricia A. Zucker

3. Gaps and Opportunities for Supporting Language and Comprehension in Early Childhood Classrooms, Shayne B. Piasta, Hyejin Kim, & Yeqing Liu

4. From Ears to Eyes: Supporting Reading Comprehension through Systematic Instruction on Listening Comprehension, Young-Suk Grace Kim & Molly Leachman

5. Improving Elementary Students' Reading Comprehension through Structured and Systematic Translation of Research to Practice, Kausalai Kay Wijekumar, Kacee Lambright, Ashley Stack, Javier Garza, & Pilar Sierra

6. Best Practices for Supporting Motivation during Reading Comprehension Instruction, Eunsoo Cho, Sarah Reiley, & Philip Capin

7. Inferencing and Reading Comprehension, Gina Biancarosa

8. Effects of Language Components on Language and Reading Comprehension, Doris Luft Baker, Yixian Huang, Cinthia Berenice Herrera, Sholeh Moradibavi, & Hanyue Sha

9. Hearing Themselves in Books: Using Authentic Children's Literature to Support the Language of African American Students, Ramona T. Pittman, Endia Lindo, Whitney N. McCoy, & Jasmine Rogers

10. Language and Reading Assessment Practices for Multilingual Learners from Spanish-Speaking Homes, Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, Bhabika Joshi, & Phoebe J. Ahn

11. The Role of Language in Reading Comprehension: Instructional Implications for Teachers of Multilingual Learners, C. Patrick Proctor & Rebecca D. Silverman

12. "What If I Don't Speak Their Languages?": Engaging Educators and Multilingual Learners in Collaborative Exploration of the Language for School Literacy, Emily Phillips Galloway

Index

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Language and Literacy Beyond Decoding: Evidence-Based Instruction in Grades PreK-6

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Successful reading comprehension requires readers to draw on a range of language comprehension abilities alongside decoding. This timely teacher reference and text explains how language comprehension develops throughout grades PreK-6 and presents evidence-based instructional strategies. The volume reviews innovative ways to conduct content-rich classroom conversations, deliver strategy and text structure instruction, target motivational aspects of comprehension, use assessment to guide comprehension-focused instruction, and more.

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Welcome! Let's get right to it.

Nick Kristof brought the Southern Surge story to the New York Times. His viral column featured the policies fueling reading and math gains, plus a spotlight on attendance.

Congress held hearings on the Science of Reading (!!). They called for National Reading Panel, The Sequel, and I'm here for it.

Linguistic phonics is a heckuva hot topic right now. A recent paper is fueling interest. Recently, Donna Hejtmanek hosted a pair of webinars with educators who've made the shift. SoR Classroom teachers have shared videos of their routines and explained why linguistic phonics connects better for their multilingual learners. The question people are asking: Can LP offer a more efficient and/or book-rich path to learning the code? The question I'm asking: Is the success about Linguistic Phonics specifically, or is it really about breaking up with the complexity and slow pace of OG-style approaches? Also, why is there no research comparing the approaches head-to-head??

Speaking of writing supplements... Chad Aldeman published an interview with The Writing Revolution team, in which they describe their new AI tool, Ask Judy.

Content areas are trending: Ben Zulauf is talking about content-starved school schedules. Olivia Mullins is talking oral language development in science lessons, and Ms. Sam has a whole series on building Tier 2 words into science instruction.

The disconnect between school enrollment (declining) and staffing (increasing) remains topical. Chad Aldeman captured last year's dichotomy: "public schools added 118,000 employees last year even as they served 135,000 fewer students." Edunomics launched a tool for exploring district-level staffing changes.

Next Wednesday at 7pm, Marnie Ginsberg and I will be discussing the reasons Everyone's Sweating State Curriculum Lists. (Don't get me started on this... or do!) Join us.

Studies show that resistance training is good for your mental health. Go lift something heavy this weekend!

Technically, this is also my Valentine's Day Love Note to the Artists Formerly Fueling Literacy Twitter. ❤️❤️❤️

Remember EduTwitter? It was pretty awesome. All that student work and open discussion about instruction, posted by sharp educators. Also, it was easily the best place to spot breaking news and must-read articles. We've lost that, and I've been grieving it lately.

No platform is naturally-suited to replacing EduTwitter. The algorithms in FB and Insta are too screwy to be reliable. Insta's also too focused on bite-size takes, rather than substance and discussion. Blue Sky is all-politics, mirroring Twitter's evolution. Substack is the Least Worst option, in spite of its own quirky algorithm.

This post is an experiment in trying to revive The Spirit of Literacy Twitter via Substack. Can collections like this one make it easier to find literacy discourse? Almost certainly Yes.

Do I have the capacity to maintain this? 😬 Open question. I'm not ready to commit to frequency for this newsletter, but I'll see what I can do.

You can help!

Thanks for reading and keeping literacy in the zeitgeist.

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Introducing 'The Latest in Literacy,' a Marshall Memo for literacy (and more)

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Can a Substack newsletter save us from the death of Literacy Twitter? Let's find out.

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Literacy refers to the ability to read and write. Literacy is fundamental to many aspects of modern life, but it is not a capacity that humans develop naturally. Instead, children need to be taught to read, and as a result, a large proportion of the world’s population never becomes literate. Yet, reading and reading acquisition are among the most well-studied topics in the cognitive sciences. This body of research shows that reading is a multidimensional skill involving the perception of visual symbols, the analysis of linguistic information, and the coordination of eye movements. Learning to read requires the repurposing of these visual, language, and motor systems, none of which evolved specifically for reading, and therefore takes years to master.

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I drive by the campus several times a week. I know families who sent their children there. I am familiar with and have even used some of the curriculum materials created by the founders. I'm even friends with one of the co-founders and have learned a great deal from him in our conversations and through his writing. It wasn't until recently, though, that I had the opportunity to spend a morning at the beautiful classical school in my community. I went into it with high expectations. What I observed met and far exceeded those expectations.

I arrived on campus just as the students were being dropped off in the carpool and getting ready for the day. As I was ushered into the first building, the youngest students were lined up in the hall outside the three kindergarten classrooms. Before they even entered their classrooms, one of the teachers gave a brief lesson on the "Manner of the Week".

First, she asked the students to recap last week's manner and share a time when they had put it into practice. Several students raised their hands and recalled times when they had to practice patience. One student didn't have a past time to recall, but knew that when he traveled to Arizona soon, he would have to be patient as he waited in lines at the airport and on the long flight. I was already impressed by their ability to listen to their teacher and peers, wait their turn, and articulate their thoughts so clearly, even before we entered the classroom. It only got better.

After the students recited the morning prayer and Pledge of Allegiance, they quietly dispersed to their classrooms, where they put their backpacks and coats away and placed their homework in the appropriate spots. Although kindergarten students only attend two days a week, the routines have clearly been taught and established, creating a calm, orderly environment. Once their belongings were put away, they sat at their desks and got started in their workbooks. Again, everyone knew the expectations and routine.

As the students worked and settled in for the day, I took the opportunity to look around the classroom. What I first noticed was how simply decorated it was and that everything displayed had a purpose. The alphabet, a number line, a map of the United States, and reminders about proper writing posture, with a few other items, were in constant view of the students. A small bulletin board displaying the "Art of the Week" and the "Composer of the Week" was just off to the side.

The bulletin board where they held "Calendar Time" had a bit more on it, but everything served a purpose and was used as the students moved from their desks to the carpet for that portion of the day. What they did during "Calendar Time" was also directly connected to what they did at their desks.

After the students finished their workbook assignment, it was time for their "Recitation". It was fascinating to watch kindergarteners answer questions about which continent they live on, how many continents there are, and then name them all. Sadly, there are probably some high school students who can't do that. There were other questions that surprised me as well, but the students were ready and eager to answer whatever was thrown at them.

I could have spent all day in that classroom, but I wanted to see what amazing things were happening in the other grades. What I witnessed in the first-, second-, and third-grade classrooms was no less remarkable. First graders were writing spelling words in the most beautiful cursive; second graders were grouping their spelling words by vowel sound and breaking them into syllables; and third graders were working multiplication and division problems and learning Roman numerals. All of this was taking place in the most calm, orderly fashion, and no time was wasted searching for materials or transitioning from one activity to another.

As I marveled at the rigor and depth of learning taking place, I kept wondering why on earth we ever stopped teaching this way. I also struggled with the reality that this kind of education isn't available to all parents who want it for their children. That needs to change. States need to make it less complicated and less painful to open classical charter schools. Colleges and universities need to create programs that train teachers in the classical model. Public school districts across the country need to research ways to create this model within their districts.

I am already planning my next visit to this amazing school to witness the excellent teaching and robust learning happening in the upper grades. I suspect I will leave with an even greater appreciation for classical education and probably a bit of knowledge I wish I'd been taught in school.

Classically educated individuals are largely responsible for our country's founding and the creation of our government. I believe that classically educated individuals will be credited with restoring the ideals our founding fathers held. It's a shame we ever stopped teaching according to the classical model, but as C.S. Lewis wrote, "If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road...". It's time to do an about-turn in K-12 education.

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The Dramatic Impact of Explicit Instruction on Learning to Read in a New Writing System - Kathleen Rastle, Clare Lally, Matthew H. Davis, J. S. H. Taylor, 2021

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There is profound and long-standing debate over the role of explicit instruction in reading acquisition. In this research, we investigated the impact of teachin…

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Reading Growth Report: Fifth Grade, 2025–2026 School Year

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A Period in the Life of a HS interventionist: FASE Reading, Retrieval Practice, and Gist Statements

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This is the fifth piece in our series “What does the science of reading look like in high/middle school?”

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Achievethecore.org :: A Short Guide to Placing Text at the Center of Learning

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This supplemental, quick-reference guide addresses both short and long-term strategies for improving reading skills. It is based on research outlined in Placing Text at the Center of the Standards-Aligned ELA Classroom.

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Welcome to SPOCK: The Society for the Prevention of Children’s Knowledge aka Know-How for the In-Crowd

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An exploratory quantitative analysis of research on balanced literacy and structured literacy - Discover Education

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Discover Education - Effective literacy instruction is crucial for educational success, and the debate between phonics and Whole Language approaches has been longstanding. In 2000, the National…

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Lately, a debate has taken over the science of reading community: should we read whole books in ELA class? While this might seem like a no-brainer to the general populace (uh, of course we should, the average person on the street might say), it’s a big question for teachers.

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The Workshop Model defined the way teachers talk about “love of reading.” Catlin Goodrow wants to reclaim it.

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Children who are struggling to learn to read often need intervention-targeted instruction beyond what they receive in class to help grow their skills.

But not every intervention is a good one, says reading researcher Matt Burns.

Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Florida who studies academic interventions, recalled one observation he made of a special education teacher conducting a lesson with a student.

The boy was reciting letters while jumping up and down on a miniature trampoline-an activity that was supposed to serve as multisensory instruction, a way of teaching reading that incorporates touch and movement. But the jumping wasn't serving any instructional purpose, Burns said.

"I don't even need to look that up to know it's not aligned to the science of reading," Burns said here at the annual conference of the Reading League, an organization that promotes evidence-based reading instruction, on Oct. 10.

The past decade has seen the rise of the "science of reading" movement, a push to align reading instruction in schools with practices supported by research studies. Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation mandating schools to train teachers, select appropriate materials, and use evidence-based practices in classrooms. Many of them also say educators must identify struggling readers and provide them with interventions.

But as part of this effort, researchers have called into question the efficacy and accuracy of some of the most widely used intervention approaches, arguing that they don't pinpoint students' specific needs and as a result, can't target instruction in a way that will move kids forward.

In this landscape, it can be hard for schools and teachers to know what types of intervention to use-or even what criteria they should consider when selecting an intervention program.

While teachers can review research on their own, they often don't have the time to do so, or the resources to access paywalled journals.

"I think that's an unfair expectation," Burns told the room filled with classroom teachers, of the idea that they should search for studies on every tool they bring into the classroom. "That's my job. That's what I do. Your job is to teach kids."

At the Reading League conference, Burns shared tips from a set of guidelines he created with his colleague, Valentina Contesse, that outline five factors educators should take into consideration. Interventions should, they write:

1. Be appropriately challenging,

2. Be correctly targeted,

3. Give students opportunities to respond,

4. Offer explicit instruction, and

5. Provide immediate feedback.

For specifics on these criteria, see the paper. And read on for three other takeaways from Burns's talk.

1.Reading 'levels' aren't the right tool to pinpoint students' individual needs

Elementary teachers have used reading "levels" for decades-a ranking system that categorizes children by a composite score of their reading ability across several metrics. In a 2020 EdWeek Research Center survey, 61% of K-2 teachers said they use leveled texts in small group work.

But previous research from Burns has shown that one of the most popular leveling systems only accurately predicts students' reading ability a little more than half of the time.

A more precise way is to test students' discrete skills-phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, as examples-and then target intervention accordingly, Burns said.

"People ask me all the time, 'What's the best intervention?'" he said. "My response is, 'What's the kid's need?'"

2. Practice solidifies students' knowledge, but not all practice is created equal

Effective practice shares some key qualities, Burns said. Students generate their own response-segmenting the sounds in words themselves in a phonemic awareness drill, for example, rather than listening to a teacher break down the sounds in different ways and choosing which one is correct.

Teachers mix in information students have newly learned with skills what they've already mastered, a technique called "interleaved practice." And students get lots of repetitions of new information.

Just how many repetitions is enough? "We see a direct, strong relationship between number of opportunities to respond and retention. Around 20 repetitions, that number starts to level off," Burns said.

3. Beware of 'cognitive overload'

Kindergartners famously have short attention spans. And research shows that trying to cram too much information into elementary schoolers' heads at once isn't just a challenge for the teacher-it can also short-circuit the learning process.

Burns shared multiple studies showing that when students were introduced to more new words than they could process in one session, not only did they retain fewer of those new words, they forgot some words they had learned previously.

When working with a teacher or interventionist, if students start getting things wrong that they were previously getting right, it might be a sign that they're reaching their limit for the moment, Burns said.

"When you see kids getting squirmy and start making mistakes, they're done," he said. "They're telling you they're done."

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What Makes an Effective Reading Intervention? One Researcher's 5 Criteria

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Studies highlight targeting specific skills and offering opportunities for practice, among others.

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there's another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.

We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is "below basic"-meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4-the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.
Read: The teen-disengagement crisis
American schoolchildren have given up almost all of the gains they achieved at the start of the century. These learning losses are not distributed equally. Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse. From 2000 to 2007, the bottom tenth of fourth graders in reading ability showed substantial improvement, before stagnating. But by 2024, those gains had been erased. In 49 out of the 50 states (all except Mississippi), the gap between the top tenth and the bottom tenth grew. Nat Malkus, of the American Enterprise Institute, has pointed out that this surging inequality has grown faster in America than in other developed countries. The upshot is grim: The bottom tenth of 13-year-olds, according to NAEP's long-term-trend data, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since these tests began in 1971 and 1978, respectively.

A seemingly plausible culprit, and a familiar boogeyman for progressives, is insufficient spending. The problem with this tidy explanation is that it's not tethered to reality. School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from $14,000 a student to more than $16,000.

Besides, America recently ran a very large natural experiment in dropping money on schools that, in a word, failed. During the pandemic, Congress appropriated a gargantuan sum of money, $190 billion, to ameliorate learning loss, most of it as part of the Biden administration's American Rescue Plan. (For scale, this is roughly the sum recently given to the Trump administration to fund its border wall and immigration-enforcement agenda.) States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses. "The scientific term for this is that we didn't get jack shit out of that money," says Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank. "There are some studies that can detect small impacts, but they're small. I think it's also fair to say that a lot of the money was wasted."

A more likely culprit for learning loss is smartphones. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, is the most prominent evangelist of this thesis. He argues that declining school performance and other worrying trends among Gen Z, such as the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide, can be traced to the new " phone-based childhood." And his argument matches the time trend well. Smartphone ownership rocketed upwards around the time that American educational performance crested: In 2011, just 23 percent of teenagers had smartphones. By 2013-roughly the peak of American education-37 percent did. By 2015, 73 percent had access to one. And by 2018, that figure was 95 percent, where it remains today. Nearly half of teenagers say that they use the internet almost constantly. For parents, this explanation is also intuitive. You can apply your own experience of smartphone-induced self-sabotage to children (who do not have the biological benefit of a mature prefrontal cortex) and conclude that unregulated phone use is destructive to learning and creativity.
Gail Cornwall: What many parents miss about the phones-in-schools debate
But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It's not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it's also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses. The thesis needs some elaboration to explain this dispersion pattern. Perhaps kids who have higher levels of executive functioning and impulse control (or are lucky enough to have parents who do) are better able to navigate the sea of distractions. At any rate, few broad social trends-whether the decline of marriage in America or the slow rate of productivity growth in Europe -are monocausal. It would be surprising if the decline in American education were.

An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have demanded less and less from students-who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less. The timing lines up here, too. Around the same time that smartphones were taking off, a counterrevolution was brewing against the old regime of No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush-era law passed in 2002 that required schools to set high standards and measured school progress toward them through stringent testing requirements. Bush famously said that he wanted to tackle "the soft bigotry of low expectations," and there's real evidence that he did. As controversial as it was, No Child Left Behind coincided with increased school performance, especially for those at the bottom.

That's not to say the regime was perfect. The No Child Left Behind approach to struggling schools was largely punitive, including threats of mandatory restructuring for institutions that failed to meet targets. And expectations for progress rose higher and higher each year, ultimately seeding the demise of the law. Schools were supposed to have all their kids at grade level by 2014. But as this deadline approached, it became clear that schools would miss it. In 2012, the Obama administration began giving states waivers from the requirements. Then, in 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which returned responsibility for improving low-performing schools to the states. But according to Martin West, the academic dean of Harvard's education school, "most states have not been particularly ambitious in the design of those systems."

Low-expectations theory explains other trends that the smartphone thesis, by itself, does not. If the bar for grading and graduating were constant year over year, we would expect both to decline in line with student performance. Instead, we see the opposite. An ACT study found that the share of students getting A's in English rose from 48 percent in 2012 to 56 percent in 2022, even as their demonstrated mastery of the subject declined over that period. (The same is true of other subjects, including math, social studies, and science.) Over the same decade, high-school graduation rates improved from 80 to 87 percent despite objective declines in academic achievement.
Rose Horowitch: The perverse consequences of the easy A
If the incentives to learn decrease, children-just like adults-will respond to that. One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. The past decade also marked a shift in concern among educators, toward equity and away from excellence. Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests.

What would it take to reverse America's educational declines? In good part because of Haidt's arguments that smartphones are both dulling and immiserating children, states are now instituting bans on smartphone use during the school day. If districts that ban smartphones see swifter improvements in academic outcomes than those that do not, that will provide solid evidence that Haidt was correct. But getting screens out of the classroom likely won't be enough to escape the malaise of the past decades. What lower expectations have inflicted in the past, only higher expectations in the future can remedy.

The experience of a few outlier states gives reason for optimism. Matthew Chingos and Kristin Blagg, two scholars at the Urban Institute, computed "demographically adjusted NAEP scores," examining how effective states are at educating kids after accounting for significant differences in socioeconomic status. Their analysis of the 2024 NAEP results found that Mississippi was best at educating kids in fourth-grade math, fourth-grade reading, and eighth-grade math. (In 2013, Mississippi was at the bottom of the unadjusted league table.) When I computed the correlation between these demographically adjusted scores and state spending, I found that there was none. If you're an underprivileged kid in America, you will, on average, get the best education not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is half as high.

This is a recent phenomenon. Some have called it the "Mississippi miracle" or-if you include relative outperformance in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee-the "southern surge." From 2013 to 2024, reading performance declined among fourth graders in 46 out of 50 states. In only two states, Mississippi and Louisiana, did they meaningfully improve.

A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn't just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana's improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021. And this outperformance might continue in the future: The state recently reported that the number of kindergartners reading at grade level more than doubled in the past academic year- rising from 28 percent to 61 percent.

The "Mississippi miracle" should force a reckoning in less successful states and, ideally, a good deal of imitation. But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, "science of reading" approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis. "The same people who are absolutely outraged about what" Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "is doing on vaccines are untroubled by just ignoring science when it comes to literacy," Andrew Rotherham, a co-founder of the education-focused nonprofit Bellwether, told me.

Some promising educational reforms, moreover, seem to brush up uncomfortably against liberal political priors. Progressive Democrats, for instance, still regard charter schools with suspicion and tend to fight to cap their number. But in a lot of places, that only hinders the equity these people profess to care about: High-performing charter networks in American cities have registered serious improvements in learning for some of the most disadvantaged children in the country. These have been verified through several lottery studies, comparing students who got into those schools with those who didn't based on random chance alone, which is the gold standard for policy research. Another evidence-supported reform that upsets teachers' unions, and their partners in the Democratic Party, is merit-based pay. We could "move to a system where teachers are rewarded based on their performance, not just a simple salary matrix, especially early in their careers," says Jim Wyckoff, an education-policy professor at the University of Virginia, citing success with the policy in Washington, D.C.

The economic costs already incurred by declining academic achievement are immense. Eric Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, calculated that recent students will earn 7.7 percent less over their lifetime than they would have had they graduated at the time of peak educational performance. And because learning lost today means forgoing growth for decades in the future, Hanushek calculates that GDP will be 6 percent lower for the remainder of the century than if scores had stayed level. (This adds up to the modest sum of $90 trillion in present-day dollars).
Listen: Bring back high-stakes school testing
One optimistic theory is that artificial-intelligence tools, which will only grow more powerful over the coming decades, will correct for this economic catastrophe by letting everyone externalize their thinking to superintelligent computer programs. The once-ironclad relationship between schooling quality and earnings might break down just in time, a somewhat literal deus ex machina. Hanushek thinks that is too rosy, though. In fact, the opposite might occur: "If we look at all the inventions in the past," he told me, "they're complementary to the high-skilled people and substitutes for low-skilled people."

In 1983, after another sustained decline in academic performance, a government commission released a landmark report titled " A Nation at Risk." The authors argued that "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people," because America had "squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge." You could make a similar argument today as great-power competition between America and China intensifies.

America's scientific and technological hegemony is being seriously challenged, and China already leads in industries such as electric-vehicle production and solar-cell manufacturing. In the industries where America still leads, much technical prowess is owed to immigration policies that have attracted the brightest and most ambitious from around the world and to the research universities that train them. The Trump administration is pursuing a policy of browbeating these universities and of restricting visas, including for high-skilled workers-turning away talent amid an international talent war. The idea is that students in America today, and not those educated elsewhere, will be the labor force holding up the economy. That bet-like America's students-may be mathematically unsound.

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Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.

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Developing a schema for learning to read and write

I've been thinking for some time about the usefulness of schema theory in helping us to understand better how we teach young children to read and spell when they enter school.

Let's start by asking what a schema is. According to Kirschner and Hendrik, a schema is a ' way of organising knowledge; a mental structure of already learned and available knowledge, skills, and even ideas that is used for organising and perceiving new information'. How Learning Happens*.

In our everyday experience, we will encounter situations, what Mica R. Endsley* refers to as those in which we 'develop a set of prototypical situations or schemas'. Such schemas are mental models or 'patterns consisting of the state of each of the relevant elements for that schema or situation type'. What we are doing all the time, writes Endsley is 'pattern matching between the current situation and the schema' and it is this that enables us to be able instantly to recognise different classes of situations. Endlsey describes it as the 'Oh, this is what happened last month'.

In one of his lectures on the work of the Swiss scientist Jean Piaget, Jordan Peterson talks about the 'transformation of knowledge structures' and how infants produce a representation of the world which is 'low resolution but quite tool-like': the tool works in the world even if the representation is crude or even incorrect.

Of course, as Peterson implies above, schema patterns are not static; they can be highly dynamic and in quite an exciting way. When our understanding comes butting up against the boundaries of our own thinking in a way in which the mental model we have currently is at odds with the reality of a new situation, we have either to abandon what we previously believed or we have to accommodate to a new and more sophisticated way of thinking. In so doing, the structure of our schema is transformed.

As an example, I'm thinking here about our early understanding of how the sun appears to rise and set. As we have known since Copernicus, the sun doesn't either rise or set; it remains immobile and it is the rotation of the earth that creates the illusion that it is the Sun that is moving.

As Peterson says, these knowledge structures are low resolution and they become, over time, more sharply defined as the process of assimilation takes place and the detail of the schema is filled in. And this process continues until something happens. Usually, the something that happens is when our thinking crashes up against the boundaries of our present understanding to contradict our previous view of the way in which the world works. In that circumstance, to enhance the model or schema, one has to change it completely, a process Piaget called accommodation. Furthermore, the new schema should be better than the old one in that it includes what the previous schema covered and extends into new territory, which is how you know it is better.

So, assimilation happens through a series of micro alterations - filling in the detail of the knowledge structure - and accommodation involves the transformation of the knowledge structure itself.

The way this works in regard to learning to read and write is that the child enters school and has all sorts of everyday, common or garden ideas about how reading works. And these ideas are grounded in reality. After all, they've been around long enough to have seen lots of people reading in all sorts of different situations. For the most part, their ideas about what reading is will have been picked up from parents, nursery, relatives and the like and will almost certainly resemble something like the understanding humans had of the daily appearance of the sun before Copernicus posited another model. The problem is that they are almost always wrong and it is our job as teachers to scientifise their understanding.

At some point, what beginning readers have to accommodate to is the alphabetic principle: the idea that units of print map to sounds in speech. And the place for the beginning reader to start is with one-to-one correspondences between sound and print. I've argued that this is best achieved through the procedure of word building, a process in which children are taught through a carefully structured activity that, in English, sounds can be represented by letters, one at a time, from left to right across the page. Some children will already tacitly know this from having been read to in nursery, by parents/carers, and so on. Nevertheless, from word building and from writing very simple three-word CVC sentences in the beginning stages of learning to read and write, orientation is made explicit: letters or single-letter spellings represent sounds in speech.

It is through word-building that young children can be taught explicitly the concept that we can spell sounds with spellings of one letter. In fact, this understanding develops over time and with practice as we teach code knowledge incrementally, step by step, one sound-spelling correspondence at a time. With practice, new conceptual and factual knowledge is internalised (the micro additions).

How would this work in practical terms? To reduce cognitive load to a minimum, we introduce only three sound-spelling correspondences (SSCs) in the context of a real word in a lesson template that then remains constant. Having taught three SSCs, we can add one more at a time progressively in what has now become a process of assimilation. And this process goes on until all the single letter spellings in the alphabet have been introduced, all of them in the context of real words.

In practical terms and to make the example clear, we would teach 'mat' on the first day and follow that by adding on the following day < s > for the sound /s/ and build 'sat'. After adding in < i >, we'll have taught five sound-spelling correspondences, after which it's simply a matter of adding in the rest of the one-to-ones. All of this takes place in the context of real words and thus makes the process representative of the task (learning to read and write) as a whole.

This is exactly what Paul Kirschner was advocating in his talk at the researchEd conference in London last year: present the simplest, most complete example - in this case, the word and a word with which the novice learner is familiar ('mat' or 'sat'). Now, add complexity, one piece at a time. In parallel, the procedural elements of word-building - the skills of segmenting and blending - are practised to automaticity.

This isn't, of course, the whole story. The subject of the next post: accommodation, the next step.

*Kirschner, P.A. and Hendrick, C., (2020), How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice, Routledge, p.6

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Developing a schema for learning to read and write I've been thinking for some time about the usefulness of schema theory in helping us to understand better how we teach young children to read and spell when they enter school. Let's start by asking what a schema is.

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Teaching Less and Learning More: Five Shifts that Maximized Growth

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In August 2024, only 47 percent of my new first graders met grade-level expectations.

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Alfie Kohn misreads both the science and the spirit of Cognitive Load Theory: what he sees as dogma is, in fact, a model of intellectual humility and instructional precision.

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Has cognitive load theory been dealt a devastating blow?

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Is cognitive load theory facing a significant challenge from Alfie Kohn? Dive into the debate surrounding Kohn’s critique of cognitive load theory and its implications for education.

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Reading skills — and struggles — manifest earlier than thought — Harvard Gazette

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New findings underscore the need for interventions before children start school, said Harvard researchers.

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What does brain science have to say about teaching reading? Does it matter?

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Language, Learning, and the Reading Brain

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https://watershed-advisors.com/resources/naep-analysis/

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Reading Panel: The Nation’s Report Card 2024 - JHU School of Education

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View the recording of a panel of policymakers and researchers reacting to the just-released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results in Reading. Presented by the National Assessment Governing Board in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. What accounts for our results? How could we do better for our children?

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View Course: Building Vocabulary & Background Knowledge

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What Is the Evidence for an Uninterrupted, 90-Minute Literacy Instruction Block_

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What happens during a high quality primary literacy block?

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Melissa and Lori talk with two elementary teachers about the literacy block. April and Danielle are from Vista Peak Exploratory in Aurora, Colorado.

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Maximizing Small Group Reading Instruction

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Integrating Reading and Writing Instruction

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Integrating Reading and Writing Instruction

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Integrating Reading and Writing Instruction

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Seatwork that Makes Sense for Reading _ Shanahan on Literacy

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Literacy Statistics 2024- 2025 (Where we are now)

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The capacity to read and write, commonly known as literacy, stands out as a pivotal determinant in shaping an individual’s career trajectory. Individuals with literacy skills have access to a broad spectrum of career possibilities, including highly skilled and well-paying positions. Conversely, those lacking literacy face severely restricted options, with even entry-level, low-skilled jobs posing challenges to secure.Globally, the overall literacy rate stands at a commendable level. For individu

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DBI is a research-based process for individualizing and intensifying interventions through the systematic use of assessment data, validated interventions, and research-based adaptation strategies. DBI is a process, not a specific program or product. The process is driven by data, characterized by increased intensity and individualization, and considers the academic and behavioral needs of the student. In some schools, intensive intervention may be known as "Tier 3 intervention," and may be embedded within a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) framework.

DBI is the technical term for what many good teachers do naturally through the problem-solving process: frequently review student data and make changes to their teaching based on what works for students. DBI, however, makes this process systematic, explicit, and tailored to meet the needs of individual students through a multi-step process that gradually intensifies instruction and support. Learn more.
Click on each step of the DBI graphic to learn more about the DBI process and find relevant resources.
Why is DBI Important for Students?

Outcome data suggest that our current system does not adequately prepare students with the most intensive needs, particularly students with disabilities. Students with disabilities continue to fall behind their same-age peers in reading and math and are more likely to experience discipline problems at school. In addition, although validated intervention programs have been found to be effective for many students, some students will not respond to the intervention as designed.

Who needs DBI?

DBI is intended to help a small subgroup of students who:

1. Are not making adequate progress in their current intervention program (often, a Tier 2, evidence-based intervention)

2. Are not meeting individualized education program (IEP) goals

3. Have persistently low academic achievement

4. Have high-intensity/frequency behavior

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Data Based Individualization: Intensive Intervention | NCII

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Learn what data-based individualization is and how it is used to helps students with persistent learning & behavioral needs, including those with disabilities.

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Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is the new term to replace Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Developmental Language Disorder is diagnosed when children fail to acquire their own language for no obvious reason. This results in children who have difficulty understanding what people say to them, and struggle to articulate their ideas and feelings. Recent research has shown that, on average, 2 children in every class of 30 will experience DLD severe enough to hinder academic progress.

In 2017, the first DLD awareness campaign was introduced with the theme DLD 1-2-3 highlighting (1) DLD is a problem with speaking and/or listening, (2) it is hidden but common, and (3) support can help to improve the quality of life of affected children and their families.

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Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is the new term to replace Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Developmental Language Disorder is diagnosed when children fail to acquire their own language for no obvious reason. This results in children who have difficulty understanding what people say to them, and struggle to articulate their ideas and feelings.