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School-based Identification of Characteristics of Dyslexia

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School-based Identification of Characteristics of Dyslexia

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Decoding Tips for Parents: 5 common word reading errors and how to help

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Decoding Tips for Parents: 5 common word reading errors and how to help

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Structured Shared Reading: A Planning Guide to Support Shared Reading Experienced in the Home

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Structured Shared Reading: A Planning Guide to Support Shared Reading Experienced in the Home

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 Dyslexia Law Requirements for Districts and Schools

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 Dyslexia Law Requirements for Districts and Schools

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ODE Supporting Students with Dyslexia Toolkit

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ODE Supporting Students with Dyslexia Toolkit

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Supporting Students with Dyslexia

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This toolkit provides information about dyslexia and how to best support the literacy development of students with dyslexia. Explore the five sections to learn more about what dyslexia is, how schools can screen students for dyslexia risk, using data to identify supports for students with dyslexia,…

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Dyslexia Resource Guide for Ohio Families

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Dyslexia Resource Guide for Ohio Families

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Ohio's Statewide Family Engagement Center

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Delay in learning to talk

Pronouncing words can be a challenge ("pusgetti" for "spaghetti")

Persistent "baby talk"

Remembering nursery rhymes and chants can be a challenge

Difficulty naming letters/numbers

Telling stories that are hard to follow

K-2nd Grade

Doesn't associate letter or letter combinations with sounds

Sounding out simple words like cat, map, and nap is a challenge

A history of reading problems in parents or siblings

Reads slowly, reads words incorrectly or reads without expression

Confusion with pairs such as before/after, right/left, etc.

3rd-5th Grade

Often guessing words because they cannot sound them out

Better at answering questions about text if it is read aloud

Difficulty pronouncing words correctly (e.g., "mazigine" instead of "magazine")

Writing can be a challenge, with frequent spelling mistakes

Skipping or misreading common short words

6th-12th grade

Reads slowly and becomes frustrated; doesn't like to read

Often skips over small words or leaves out part of longer words when reading aloud

Prefers multiple choice questions over fill-in-the-blank or other questions with short answers

Learning a foreign language can be a challenge

Memorizing facts, lists or directions can be tough

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Dyslexia Resource Guide for Ohio Families (Available in 6 languages) - Ohio's Statewide Family Engagement Center

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Delay in learning to talk Pronouncing words can be a challenge ("pusgetti" for "spaghetti") Persistent "baby talk" Remembering nursery rhymes and chants can be a challenge Difficulty naming letters/numbers Telling stories that are hard to follow K-2nd Grade Doesn't associate letter or letter combinations with sounds Sounding out simple words like cat, map, and nap is a challenge A history of reading problems in parents or siblings Reads slowly, reads words incorrectly or reads without expression Confusion with pairs such as before/after, right/left, etc.

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.

"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.

That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.

As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.

A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.

Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers - and educators may not even know it.

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by - memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know - are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. 2

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders below basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. 3 A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system. 4

The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper, 5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)

syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)

semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

Goodman concluded that:

Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.

Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.

Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.

One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.

The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.

These two ideas - whole word and phonics - had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system."

In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right? Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.

Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.e., the letters in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s. 6

Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.

Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Clay wrote. 7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. 8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.

These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America. 9 Clay built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling first-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. 10

But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. 11

Scientists take on three cueing

It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.

Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. 12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition." 13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. 14

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.

Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.

Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. 16

The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Eagle Eye), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).

There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."

The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word.

The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.

In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.

"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the word. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the sentence together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.

This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop." 18 According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words." 19

But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns - hallmarks of the three-cueing system.

The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work. 20 She uses the term MSV - the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.

Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s. 21

Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment system that uses what are called "leveled books." 22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books - butterfly, caterpillar - are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.

When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.

'That is not reading'

Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach. 23

Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS. 24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.

Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."

Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.

One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.

She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. 25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.

The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. 26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because - according to the three-cueing theory - readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say. 27

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. 28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences. 29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school.

Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'm missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"

A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an expert on reading and not know about this?"

The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:

Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.

But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.

"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."

She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.

In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. 30

By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report. 31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion. 32

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it."-Stacey Cherny

Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.

And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

Mapping the words

To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.

Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words. 33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair. 34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." 35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters. 36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."

That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. 37 In other words, you need phonics skills.

Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.

By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory. 38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it as a visual image. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.

The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading. 39

But when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.

"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties. 40 "And they use context."

In other words, when people don't have good phonics skills, they use the cueing system.

"The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.

And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. 41

"The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.

In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers - until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind. 42

These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

'So what if they use the picture?'

Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too.

Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools. 43

They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read.

They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.

"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."

Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, which includes the "picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began about 10 years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.

The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words? 44

"I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got."

But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.

Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."

Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing.

To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy. 45

One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction. 46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.

There were also vocabulary lessons. 47 The entire class gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."

"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?"

The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."

Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.

This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things. 48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught.

After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.

"Ellen /m/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context - including a picture if there is one - helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.

Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education. 49

Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started teaching," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.

I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.

Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids - perhaps about 40 percent - who will learn to read no matter how they're taught. 50 According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.

When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.

Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.

"It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken."

'My science is different'

If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools?

One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports. 51

I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.

I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.

I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

He dismissed my question.

"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist - despite lots of evidence that it does. 52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

"My science is different," Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence.

Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.

"We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing," she said. "And if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."

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How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

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Classroom implications: For about 20% of students, direct, explicit phonological instruction working in concert with phonics is a critical aspect of reading instruction. Teachers need the knowledge base of how English sounds pair to their written counterparts to effectively support this instruction.

Learn more about our guest: You can learn more about the work Dr. Schuele is doing at the Child Language and Literacy Lab at Vanderbilt University Medical Center by going to ww2.mc.vanderbilt.edu/cll. Below are some links to her past research and published works referenced in this episode:

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Why Phonological Awareness is Important to Reading - Glean Education

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Classroom implications: For about 20% of students, direct, explicit phonological instruction working in concert with phonics is a critical aspect of reading instruction. Teachers need the knowledge base of how English sounds pair to their written counterparts to effectively support this instruction.

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Teaching, Reading, and Learning: The Reading League Podcast

Teaching, Reading, and Learning: The Reading League Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features people whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast will focus on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other "literacies" that impact children's learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.
Teaching, Reading, and Learning: The Reading League Podcast is taking a short break following our June 2022 episode.

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Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast

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Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children.

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Science of Reading: The Podcast, hosted by Susan Lambert, delivers the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Listen today!

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The Science of Reading - The Reading League

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The Reading League's mission is to advance the understanding and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction through the science of reading.

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When I began to learn about phonics instruction, I saw spelling puzzles in words I'd never noticed before, and I gained appreciation for the difficulty of learning to decode. Now, as an increasing number of students at my school can read accurately, the challenge of comprehension is looming large.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

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Explore reading basics as well as the key role of background knowledge and motivation in becoming a lifelong reader and learner. Watch our PBS Launching Young Readers series and try our self-paced Reading 101 course to deepen your understanding.

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Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don’t know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

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Once we know how to read, we read fast, recognizing a word in a fraction of a second. In fact, for most people, reading is not just easy, it's automatic. You can't stop yourself from reading words that you see; they just jump off of the page and into your brain (and out of your mouth if you're reading out loud). Here is a little demo. Try to quickly say aloud the colour of the font for each word.
red - orange - green - blue - purple - brown purple - blue - red - orange - brown - green
The Stroop effect is a classic demonstration of how our brains automatically process written words. Did you hesitate on the words in the second set? Maybe you even blurted out "purple" by mistake for the first word? It's harder to say the colour of the font in the second line, because reading is so automatic for your brain that it overrides colour recognition. This can seem a little counterintuitive. After all, kids learn their colours before they learn to read words, so shouldn't colour recognition be a simpler and therefore likely a faster job? Clearly, there is something special about the way the brain processes written words so efficiently. But kids obviously don't start out reading so efficiently, so how do we get there?

The best current answer to this is through orthographic mapping, the process by which we store written words in our long-term memory, for quick retrieval at a later time. This concept was first described by Linnea Ehri, who explains it as creating links that "glue" spelling to the pronunciation of words in long-term memory. To create these links, we need to be very good at two things:

1. breaking spoken words down into sounds (phonemic awareness)

2. knowing which sounds can be represented by which letters (letter-sound knowledge)

image by Shira Ronn

Here, a child encounters the word "fish" and attends to the sounds and the letters in the entire word. This child has good phonemic awareness: she knows that there are individual sounds in the spoken word and so is able to create strong links between the sounds and the letters.

Unfortunately, some children get stuck for a long time in the stage where they slowly, labouriously sound out words, or where they are relying on cues from the context to help them read words. Sometimes, these are children with a learning disability called dyslexia (also called Specific Learning Disorder in reading- word recognition, decoding, and spelling). One of the hallmarks of dyslexia is poor phonemic awareness, leading to poor orthographic mapping, and slow, inaccurate reading.

image by Shira Ronn

Here, the child has correctly figured out the word "fish" but has not made the links between the pronunciation and the spelling of the word, because the individual sounds within the word "f-i-sh" are not obvious to her. Perhaps she figured out the word by looking at the first letter, by thinking about what word would make sense in the sentence, by looking at the picture, or by some combination of these clues. Children who read this way may read simple texts accurately, but will not quickly progress to become efficient readers, and may continue to slowly sound out words, especially when clues are not readily available.

So how do we teach a child to apply orthographic mapping to learn the many complex words of our language? It's actually less complicated than it may seem. We start by showing children how sounds link to letters in simple words (phoneme-grapheme mapping), but we don't need to teach a child to map every single word. Once children have grasped the concept of mapping sounds to letters, something brilliant then happens: they do it on their own for new words! Orthographic mapping results from the prerequisite skills of hearing the sounds within words and having a good grasp of letter-sounds correspondences. Typically, children encounter a new word, figure it out, and then after only a few exposures to the word, it is "mapped" and will be quickly recognized on subsequent encounters. This may seem surprising, but as David Share pointed out in his 1995 paper first describing his self-teaching hypothesis, there's basically no other way. How else can kids learn to read so many words so quickly? Young kids typically learn to read in just a few years, so there would simply be no time to cram all the words in, if it were the case that many exposures were needed to learn to quickly recognize words.

But is English spelling actually too complicated to be learned this way? It's true that English has one of the more complex writing systems, but it's still an alphabetic (that is, sound-based) orthography. Speech sounds are represented by letters, just not in a 1-to-1 correspondence. For example, there are many ways to write the sound /f/ ( fun, cough, stuff, phone), and there are many ways to pronounce the letters <ough> ( though, thought, through). Due to the complexity, lots of people over the years thought that written English was simply too complex to learn through focusing primarily on the letter-sound relationships, and this is why we often see lists of "sight words" that students in early elementary must memorize, often as unanalyzed whole units. However, it turns out that even irregular words can be efficiently acquired through orthographic mapping. This is because: a) the majority of irregular words have only one or two unusual letter-sound correspondences and b) even unusual spellings can be anchored to sounds, if a child has good phonemic awareness.

Take the example "said" above. A child links the letters "s" and the "d" to their sounds, no problem. But it is very unusual for "ai" to link to the sound that is normally spelled with an "e" (as in "bed") or sometimes "ea" (as in "bread"). Even though this is an uncommon link, we can still apply orthographic mapping. So, to help students learn the word "said," we can explain, "Do you hear the "eh" sound? See how we write it with the letters "A-I" in this word!" Compared to learning the word as a whole visual unit ("take a mental picture of the word"), or by rote memorization ("S-A-I-D spells 'said'"), this approach promotes orthographic mapping and more efficiently leads to instant word recognition.

Orthographic mapping is enabled by phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) knowledge.
Ehri, 2014

So, when a child is good at orthographic mapping, they begin "self-teaching" new words, and are well on their way to becoming a great reader. For a child at this stage of reading acquisition, a great way to continue gaining skill is simply to read a lot. The more you read, the better you get at reading. Unfortunately, this is not so true for children who are not yet good at orthographic mapping. These are students who seem like they are encountering a word for the first time, even if it's a word they've seen many times before, maybe even as recently as in the previous sentence. In this case, simply increasing the volume of reading (a "practice makes perfect" approach) will not help very much. On the contrary, requiring a struggling reader to just buckle down and read more is almost guaranteed to lead to frustration that can be so significant that it causes the student to disengage from learning to read.

Kilpatrick theorizes that the best way to achieve proficient phonemic awareness is by focusing on phonemic manipulation. Manipulation goes beyond blending and segmenting sounds, and involves changing the sounds in words, by adding, deleting, or substituting sounds. He also advocates for ensuring that children can this quickly, aiming to manipulate the sounds mentally, without the use of manipulatives, such as letter tiles or blocks. Phonemic awareness really is just about the sounds of words... it can even be done with your eyes closed.

Some examples of phonemic manipulation tasks:

So why sound manipulation, rather than just sound blending and segmentation? Kilpatrick gives a few good reasons for using phonemic manipulation:

1. It's efficient. In one manipulation, you have to do a whole lot of work, including both blending and segmenting. Which is probably why...

2. It appears to be more effective. Interventions that focus on basic blending and segmenting do help kids make gains in their reading, but interventions that incorporate manipulation tasks show greater gains. (Standard score gains of 12-25 points for interventions that train phonemic awareness to the advanced level, versus 5-9 standard score points for basic phonemic blending and segmenting.)

3. It's fun, like mini word puzzles. Kids usually love to do them!

Compare the steps involved in segmentation versus manipulation:

Basically, manipulation tasks are 4 for the price of 1. You can do a lot of phonemic awareness practice using Kilpatrick's one-minute activities from his Equipped for Reading Success.

My little helper demonstrating phoneme manipulation, as found in Equipped for Reading Success (Kilpatrick, 2018). He's still learning!

Does it still seem a little strange to work on reading by doing auditory tasks? As we've seen, it is actually an effective strategy when difficulty with phonemic awareness is a barrier to orthographic mapping. Importantly, though, phonemic awareness would be just part of the plan to help a struggling reader. We would also need to work on other skills such as: phonics (up to more advanced phonics, as in the trigraph "igh"- high, sight, mighty), morphology (learning word-parts, as in in-de-struct-ible), and vocabulary development. And, of course, we need to apply newly learned skills to writing and reading in context.

I hope this post has been helpful in showing how the concepts of orthographic mapping, phonemic awareness, and self-teaching are crucial, if we want to help readers who struggle to efficiently recognize words. There is a sea of information available to help us find evidence-based strategies for efficiently helping all children reach their potential and become skilled readers, but the trick is making sense of it all! As always, if you have any questions or comments, I'd be thrilled to discuss. Leave a comment below or contact me!

References:

Ehri, L. C. (1998). Research on Learning to Read and Spell: A Personal-Historical Perspective. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(2), 97-114. doi:10.1207/s1532799xssr0202_1

Ehri, L. C. (2013). Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21. doi:10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2018). Equipped for reading success: A comprehensive, step-by-step program for developing phoneme awareness and fluent word recognition. Syracuse, NY: Casey & Kirsch.

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151-218. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)00645-2

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(6), 643-662. doi:10.1037/h0054651

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Orthographic Mapping: how we learn to read so fast!

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Once we know how to read, we read fast, recognizing a word in a fraction of a second. In fact, for most people, reading is not just easy, it's automatic. You can't stop yourself from reading words that you see; they just jump off of the page and into your brain (and out of your...

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The Science of Reading ﻿
EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP

Welcome to the Science of Reading Info.com website.

This website was created to organize information shared on the Facebook group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College. As educators, specialists, and parents have joined the Facebook page to gain knowledge on the science of reading, a community has been created. This knowledgeable community shares resources and experiences on the Science of Reading and implementation in schools and at home. It is my hope to provide you with as many resources available worldwide in order to improve literacy outcomes for all. This website is fluid and will be updated frequently.
Donna Schultz Hejtmanek

Science of Reading Info.com

This website is a collection of links to various sites, companies, services, etc. that focus on the Science of Reading. I am not familiar with all of the material listed and I am not endorsing one product, company, or service over another. This site is simply a reference of Science of Reading resources. Copyright 2020-2022 Donna Hejtmanek.

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The Science of Reading ﻿ EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP Welcome to the Science of Reading Info.com website. This website was created to organize information shared on the Facebook group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College.

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As educators, we are always learning and growing in order to improve reading instruction. It can be challenging to sift through the many resources available, so we have created a list for you. The following includes a list of 30 resources for educators who wish to further their knowledge about the Science of Reading.

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As educators, we are always learning and growing in order to improve reading instruction. It can be challenging to sift through the many resources available, so we have created a list for you. The following includes a list of 30 resources for educators who wish to further their knowledge about the Science of Reading.

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If you've been teaching in a balanced literacy approach for a while, then the idea of switching to Science of Reading strategies may be overwhelming....enough so to stop you from even trying! Don't feel like you need to do a complete overhaul of everything you've been doing in order to make some change! Yes, it feels overwhelming to think about changing your practices, but taking tiny steps at a time makes it feel attainable and productive.

Be open-minded to the science of reading: This is true for everyone, but especially if you've only ever worked in a balanced literacy approach. I get it; it's hard to hear that the way you've been teaching isn't the "right way" anymore. I'm not suggesting you walk into your classroom in August and throw away everything you ever have used. Just take the time to listen to experts and read some of the articles out there. You can start with my simple " Unpacking the Science of Reading " post. Being open to learning new things helps the overall goal: helping our students succeed.

Replace the 3 cueing system with decoding strategies: I'm sure every teacher in the world has at some point, used one of the three "strategies" from the 3 cueing system. If you're unfamiliar: 1) meaning drawn from context or pictures, 2) syntax, and 3) visual information, meaning letters or parts of words. When a student comes to an unfamiliar word, the prompting questions typically sound like this: "Look at the first letter. Can you guess which word it is? Look at the pictures if you still don't know. What word makes sense in the sentence?"

Hearing those questions now, it all sounds so ridiculous. We're not even giving students a chance to look past the first letter to decode the rest of the word. We immediately let them "give up" and just guess a word by looking at context or pictures.

Rather than engage in the three cueing system, teach them different decoding strategies they can try: break between two consonants in the middle, break off the endings, keep digraphs together, break before consonant -le, working methodically from beginning to end.

Use the "heart method" when teaching irregular words (sight words): Teaching students to memorize the "irregular" part of a sight word will be more impactful rather than trying to memorize the whole word. Take the time to teach which parts make the correct sound, which parts don't follow the typical rule. Draw a heart above the irregular sound to help identify that they need to memorize that part.

Click the picture to be taken to an amazing blog post from A Winter's Bliss, that explains "heart words" with much more depth. I've found it super helpful!!

Turn your word wall into a sound wall: I loved my word wall when I was in the classroom; I remember stapling all 26 letters to my board in a beautiful rainbow order and feeling so excited at the idea of having it all filled up by May. I used it practice all the sight words and content words. Did it always work? No. But I still did it. Looking back, I now know we can just expect our youngest learners to memorize over 200 sight words with nothing to anchor the learning. By making the switch to a sound wall, students are now able to hear the different phonemes and graphemes.

So what is a sound wall?? A sound wall is a place to display the different sounds heard in speech. There are two parts of a sound wall that can be displayed: consonant sounds and vowel sounds. In a sound wall, the focus is on the SOUND and not the letters. There are significantly more phonemes (44-ish) than there are graphemes (26), and it is important for students to learn the phonemes first in order to then develop an understanding of phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

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Tiny Steps to Incorporate Science of Reading

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If you've been teaching in a balanced literacy approach for a while, then the idea of switching to Science of Reading strategies may be overwhelming....enough so to stop you from even trying! Don't feel like you need to do a complete overhaul of everything you've been doing in order to make some change!

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See Brain. See Brain Read: Reading Instruction Changes the Brain

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Reading instruction changes the brain. New before- and after- images that show what happens to children’s brains after they get systematic, research-based reading instruction show that the right teaching methods can actually normalize brain function and thereby improve a child’s reading skills.

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The Science of Reading ﻿
EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP

Welcome to the Science of Reading Info.com website.

This website was created to organize information shared on the Facebook group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College. As educators, specialists, and parents have joined the Facebook page to gain knowledge on the science of reading, a community has been created. This knowledgeable community shares resources and experiences on the Science of Reading and implementation in schools and at home. It is my hope to provide you with as many resources available worldwide in order to improve literacy outcomes for all. This website is fluid and will be updated frequently.
Donna Schultz Hejtmanek

Science of Reading Info.com

This website is a collection of links to various sites, companies, services, etc. that focus on the Science of Reading. I am not familiar with all of the material listed and I am not endorsing one product, company, or service over another. This site is simply a reference of Science of Reading resources. Copyright 2020-2022 Donna Hejtmanek.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Science of Reading ﻿ EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP Welcome to the Science of Reading Info.com website. This website was created to organize information shared on the Facebook group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College.

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Align Instruction with the Science

TX Reads provides teachers with information about the science of reading. Resources can be difficult to find and many instructional materials do not fully align with the science, which is confusing to educators and parents. TX Reads will continue to add update this library. Please visit this page again.

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TX Reads provides teachers with information about the science of reading. Resources can be difficult to find and many instructional materials do not fully align with the science, which is confusing to educators and parents. TX Reads will continue to add update this library. Please visit this page again.

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Yaacov Petscher,* Sonia Q. Cabell, Hugh W. Catts, Donald L. Compton, Barbara R. Foorman, Sara A. Hart, Christopher J. Lonigan, Beth M. Phillips, Christopher Schatschneider, Laura M. Steacy, Nicole Patton Terry, and Richard K. Wagner

Abstract

The science of reading should be informed by an evolving evidence base built upon the scientific method. Decades of basic research and randomized controlled trials of interventions and instructional routines have formed a substantial evidence base to guide best practices in reading instruction, reading intervention, and the early identification of at-risk readers. The recent resurfacing of questions about what constitutes the science of reading is leading to misinformation in the public space that may be viewed by educational stakeholders as merely differences of opinion among scientists. Our goals in this paper are to revisit the science of reading through an epistemological lens to clarify what constitutes evidence in the science of reading and to offer a critical evaluation of the evidence provided by the science of reading. To this end, we summarize those things that we believe have compelling evidence, promising evidence, or a lack of compelling evidence. We conclude with a discussion of areas of focus that we believe will advance the science of reading to meet the needs of all children in the 21st century.

For more than 100 years, the question of how best to teach children to read has been debated in what has been termed the "reading wars". The debate cyclically fades into the background only to reemerge, often with the same points of conflict. We believe that this cycle is not helpful for promoting the best outcomes for children's educational success. Our goal in this paper is to make an honest and critical appraisal of the science of reading, defining what it is, how we build a case for evidence, summarizing those things for which the science of reading has provided unequivocal answers, providing a discussion of things we do not know but that may have been "oversold," identifying areas for which evidence is promising but not yet compelling, and thinking ahead about how the science of reading can better serve all stakeholders in children's educational achievements.

At its core, scientific inquiry is the same in all fields. Scientific research, whether in education, physics, anthropology, molecular biology, or economics, is a continual process of rigorous reasoning supported by a dynamic interplay among methods, theories, and findings. It builds understandings in the form of models or theories that can be tested. Advances in scientific knowledge are achieved by the self-regulating norms of the scientific community over time, not, as sometimes believed, by the mechanistic application of a particular scientific method to a static set of questions (National Research Council, 2002, p. 2).

What is the Science of Reading and Why are we Still Debating it?

The "science of reading" is a phrase representing the accumulated knowledge about reading, reading development, and best practices for reading instruction obtained by the use of the scientific method. We recognize that the accrual of scientific knowledge related to reading is ever evolving, at times circuitous, and not without controversy. Nonetheless, the knowledge base on the science of reading is vast. In the last decade alone, over 14,000 peer-reviewed articles have been published in journals that included the keyword "reading" based on a PsycINFO search. Although many of these studies likely focused on a sliver of the reading process individually, collectively, research studies with a focus on reading have yielded a substantial knowledge base of stable findings based on the science of reading. Taken together, the science of reading helps a diverse set of educational shareholders across institutions (e.g., preschools, schools, universities), communities, and families to make informed choices about how to effectively promote literacy skills that foster healthy and productive lives ( DeWalt & Hink, 2009; Rayner et al., 2001).

An interesting question concerning the science of reading is "Why is there a debate surrounding the science of reading?" Although there are certainly disputes within the scientific community regarding best practices and new areas of research inquiry, most of the current debate seems to settle upon what constitutes scientific evidence, how much value we should place on scientific evidence as opposed to other forms of knowledge, and how preservice teachers should be instructed to teach reading ( Brady, 2020). The current disagreement in what constitutes the scientific evidence of reading (e.g., Calkins, 2020) is not new. During the last round of the "reading wars" in the late 1990's and early 2000's these same issues were discussed and debated. Much of the debate focused on conflicting views in epistemology between constructivists and positivists on the basic mechanisms associated with reading development. Constructivists, such as Goodman (1967) and Smith (1971), believed that reading was a "natural act" akin to learning language and thus emphasized giving children the opportunity to discover meaning through experiences in a literacy-rich environment. In contrast, positivists, such as Chall (1967) and Flesch (1955), made strong distinctions between innate language learning and the effortful learning required to acquire reading skills. Positivists argued for explicit instruction to help foster understanding of how the written code mapped onto language, whereas constructivists encouraged children to engage in a "psycholinguistic guessing game" in which readers use their graphic, semantic, and syntactic knowledge (known as the three cuing system) to guess the meaning of a printed word.

Research clearly indicates that skilled reading involves the consolidation of orthographic and phonological word forms ( Dehene, 2011). Work in cognitive neuroscience indicates that a small region of the left ventral visual cortex becomes specialized for this purpose. As children learn to read, they recruit neurons from a small region of the left ventral visual cortex within the left occipitotemporal cortex region (i.e., visual word form area) that are tuned to language-dependent parameters through connectivity to perisylvian language areas ( Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2018). This provides an efficient circuit for grapheme-phoneme conversion and lexical access allowing efficient word-reading skills to develop. These studies provide direct evidence for how teaching alters the human brain by repurposing some visual regions toward the shapes of letters, suggesting that cultural inventions, such as written language, modify evolutionarily older brain regions. Furthermore, studies suggest that instruction focusing on the link between orthography and phonology promote this brain reorganization (e.g., Dehaene, 2011). Yet, arguments between philosophical constructivists and philosophical positivists on what constitutes the science of reading and how it informs instruction remain active today (e.g., Castles et al., 2018). In a recent interview with Emily Hanford, Ken Goodman defended his advocacy for the three cuing system saying that the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their lab and later he stated that "my science is different" ( Hanford, 2019).

As scientists at the Florida Center for Reading Research, we are often frustrated when what we view to be the empirically supported evidence base about the reading process are distorted or denied in communications directed to the public and to teachers. However, Stanovich (2003) posited that "in many cases, the facts are secondary-what is being denied are the styles of reasoning that gave rise to the facts; what is being denied is closer to a worldview than an empirical finding. Many of these styles are implicit; we are not conscious of them as explicit rules of behavior" (pp. 106-107). Stanovich proposed five different dimensions that represent "styles" of generating knowledge about reading. For our purposes, here, we focus on the first dimension: the correspondence versus coherence theory of truth. It hits at the heart of how people believe something to be true. People who believe that a real world exists independent of their beliefs, and that interrogating this world using rigorous principles to gain knowledge is a fruitful activity are said to subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth. In contrast, those who subscribe to the coherence theory of truth believe that something is "true" if the beliefs about something fit together in a logical way. In essence, something is true if it makes sense.

Stanovich believed these differing truth systems might lie at the heart of the disagreements surrounding the science of reading. One side shouting, "Look at this mountain of evidence! How can you not believe it?" and the other side shouting, "It doesn't make sense! It doesn't match up with our experiences! Why should we value your knowledge above our own?!" By approaching the science of reading from the perspective of the correspondence theory of truth, we consider how compelling evidence can be generated, what we believe is the compelling evidence, what we think lacks evidence, and what we think is promising evidence.

How We Build a Case for Compelling Evidence

Research is the means by which we acquire and understand knowledge about the world ( Dane, 1990) to create scientific principles. Relatively few scientists would argue with the importance of using research evidence to support a principle or to make claims about reading development and the quality of reading instruction. Where significant divergence often occurs is in response to policy statements that categorize research claims and instructional strategies into those with greater or lesser levels of evidence. This divergence is typically rooted in applied epistemology, which can be understood as the study of whether the means by which we study evidence are themselves well designed to lead to valid conclusions. Researchers often frame the science of reading from divergent applied epistemological perspectives. Thus, two scientists who approach the science of reading with different epistemologies will both suggest that they have principled understandings and explanations for how children learn to read; yet, the means by which those understandings and explanations were derived are often distinct.

The correspondence and coherence theories of truth described above are examples of explanations from contrasting epistemological perspectives. Consistent with these perspectives, researchers approaching the science of reading using a correspondence theory typically prioritize deductive methods, which embed hypothesis testing, precise operationalization of constructs, and efforts to decouple the researchers' beliefs from their interpretation and generalization of empirical evidence. Researchers approaching the science of reading using a coherence theory of truth typically prioritize more inductive methods, such as phenomenological, ethnographic, and grounded theory approaches that embed focus on the meaning and understanding that comes through a person's lived experience and where the scientist's own observations shape meaning and principles (e.g., Israel & Duffy, 2014).

When the National Research Council published Scientific Research in Education (2002), a significant amount of criticism levied against the report boiled down to differences in epistemological perspectives. Yet, these genuine contrasts can often obscure contributions to the science of reading that derive from multiple applied epistemologies. Observational research, using both inductive (e.g., case studies) and deductive (e.g., correlational studies) approaches, substantively informs the development of theories and of novel instructional approaches (e.g., Scruggs et al., 2007). Public health research offers a useful parallel. As it would be unethical to establish a causal link from smoking cigarettes to lung cancer through a randomized controlled trial, that field instead used well-designed observational studies to derive claims and principles. These findings then informed later stages in the broader program of research, including randomized controlled trials of interventions for smoking cessation.

In the science of reading, principles and instructional strategies should indeed capitalize on a program of research inclusive of multiple methodologies. Yet, as the public health domain ultimately takes direction from the efficacy of smoking cessation programs, so too must the science of reading take direction from theoretically informed and well-designed experimental and quasi-experimental studies of promising strategies when the intention is to evaluate instructional practices. The use of experimental (i.e., randomized trials) and quasi-experimental (e.g., regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, interrupted time series) designs, in which an intervention is competed against counterfactual conditions, such as typical practice or alternative interventions, provides the strongest causal credibility regarding which instructional strategies are effective. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) of the Institute of Education Sciences (e.g., What Works Clearinghouse, 2020) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015) are efforts by the US Department of Education to hierarchically characterize the levels of evidence currently available for instructional practices in education. The WWC uses a review framework, developed by methodological and statistical experts, for evaluating the quality and scope of evidence for specific instructional practices based on features of the design, implementation, and analysis of studies. Similarly, ESSA uses four tiers that focus on both the design of the study and the results of the study in which the tiers differ based on the quantity of evidence and quality of evidence supporting an approach. For both WWC and ESSA, quantity of evidence refers to the number of well-designed and well-implemented studies, and quality of evidence is defined by the ability of a study's methods to allow for alternative explanations of a finding to be ruled out, for which the randomized controlled trial provides the strongest method.

As outlined above, the "science of reading" utilizes multiple research approaches to generate ideas about reading. Ultimately, the highest priority in the science of reading should be the replicable and generalizable knowledge from observational and experimental methods, rooted in a deductive research approach to knowledge generation that is framed in a correspondence theory of truth. In this manner, the accumulated evidence is built on a research foundation by which theories, principles, and hypotheses have been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny to determine the degree to which they hold up across variations in samples, measures, and contexts. In the following sections, we summarize issues related to the nature, development, and instruction of reading for which we believe the science of reading either has or has not yielded compelling evidence, identify what we believe are promising areas for which sufficient evidence has not yet accumulated, and suggest a number of areas that we believe will help move the science of reading forward, increasing knowledge and enhancing its positive impacts for a variety of stakeholders.

Compelling Evidence in the Science of Reading

In this section, we focus on a number of findings centrally important for understanding the development and teaching of reading in alphabetic languages. The evidence base provides answers varying across orthographic regularity (e.g., English vs. Spanish), reading subskill (i.e., decoding vs. comprehension), grade range or developmental level (e.g., early childhood, elementary, adolescence), and linguistic diversity (e.g., English language learners, dialect speakers).

There are large differences among alphabetic languages in the rules for how graphemes represent sounds in words (i.e., a language's orthography). In languages like Spanish and Finnish there is a near one-to-one relation between letters and sounds. The letter-sound coding in these languages is transparent, and they have shallow orthographies. In other languages, most notably English, there is often not a one-to-one relation between letters and sounds. The letter-sound coding in these languages is opaque, and they have deep orthographies. Children must learn which words cannot be decoded based solely on letter-sound correspondence (e.g., two, knight, laugh) and learn to match these irregular spellings to the words they represent. Where a language's orthography falls on the shallow-deep dimension affects how quickly children develop accurate and fluent word-reading skills ( Ellis et al., 2004; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) and how much instruction on foundational reading skills is likely needed. Studies indicate that children learning to read in English are slower to acquire decoding skills (e.g., Caravolas et al., 2013). Ziegler et al. (1997) reported that 69% of monosyllabic words in English were consistent in spelling-to-phonology mappings and 31% of the phonology-to-spelling mappings were consistent. Thus, in teaching children to read in English, the "grain size" of phoneme, onset-rime, and whole word matters ( Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) and the preservation of morphological regularities in English spelling matters (e.g., vine vs. vineyard).

Gough and Tunmer's (1986) "simple view of reading" model, which is supported by a significant amount of research, provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the development of reading skills across time. It also frames the elements for which it is necessary to provide instructional support. The ultimate goal of reading is to extract and construct meaning from text for a purpose. For this task to be successful, however, the reader needs skills in both word decoding and linguistic comprehension. Weaknesses in either area will reduce the capacity to achieve the goal of reading. Decoding skills and linguistic comprehension make independent contributions to the prediction of reading comprehension across diverse populations of readers ( Kershaw & Schatschneider, 2012; Sabatini et al., 2010; Vellutino, et al., 2007). Results of several studies employing measurement strategies that allow modeling of each component as a latent variable indicate that decoding and linguistic comprehension account for almost all of the variance in reading comprehension (e.g., Foorman et al., 2015; Lonigan et al., 2018). The relative influence of these skill domains, however, changes across development. The importance of decoding skill in explaining variance in reading comprehension decreases across grades whereas the importance of linguistic comprehension increases (e.g., Catts et al., 2005; Foorman et al., 2018; García & Cain, 2014; Lonigan et al., 2018). By the time children are in high school linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension essentially form a single dimension (e.g., Foorman et al., 2018).

Children's knowledge of the alphabetic principle (i.e., how letters and sounds connect) and knowledge of the morphophonemic nature of English are necessary to create the high-quality lexical representations essential to accurate and efficient decoding ( Ehri, 2005; Perfetti, 2007). Acquiring the alphabetic principle is dependent on understanding that words are composed of smaller sounds (i.e., phonological awareness, PA) and alphabet knowledge (AK). Both PA and AK are substantial correlates and predictors of decoding skills (e.g., Wagner & Torgesen, 1987; Wagner et al., 1994). Prior to formal reading instruction, children are developing PA and AK as well as other early literacy skills that are related to later decoding skills following formal reading instruction ( Lonigan et al., 2009; Lonigan et al., 1998; National Early Literacy Panel [NELP], 2008; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Reading comprehension takes advantage of the reader's ability to understand language. In most languages, written language and spoken language have high levels of overlap in their basic structure. Longitudinal studies indicate that linguistic comprehension skills from early childhood predict reading comprehension at the end of elementary school ( Catts et al., 2015; Language and Reading Research Consortium & Chiu, 2018; Mancilla-Martinez & Lesaux, 2010; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; Verhoeven & Van Leeuwe, 2008). The developmental precursors to skilled reading are present prior to school entry. Consequently, differences between children in the development of these skills forecast later differences in reading skills and are useful for identifying children at risk for reading difficulties.

The science of reading provides numerous clear answers about the type and focus of reading instruction for the subskills of reading, depending on where children are on the continuum of reading development and children's linguistic backgrounds. Much of this knowledge is summarized in the practice guides produced by the Institute of Education Sciences ( Baker et al., 2014; Foorman et al., 2016a; Gersten et al., 2007, 2008; Kamil et al., 2008; Shanahan et al., 2010) and in meta-analytic summaries of research (e.g., Berkeley et al., 2012; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl et al., 2001; Ehri, Nunes, Willows et al., 2001; NELP, 2008; Therrien, 2004; Wanzek et al., 2013, 2016). Whereas the practice guides list several best practices, here we emphasize those practices classified as supported by strong or moderate evidence based on WWC standards.

Since the publication of the Report of the National Reading Panel ( National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) and supported by subsequent research (e.g., Gersten et al., 2017a; Foorman et al., 2016a), it is clear that a large evidence base provides strong support for the explicit and systematic instruction of the component and foundational skills of decoding and decoding itself. That is, teaching children phonological awareness and letter knowledge, particularly when combined, results in improved word-decoding skills. Teaching children to decode words using systematic and explicit phonics instruction results in improved word-decoding skills. Such instruction is effective both for monolingual English-speaking children and children whose home language is other than English (i.e., dual-language learners; Baker et al., 2014; Gersten et al., 2007) as well as children who are having difficulties learning to read or who have an identified reading disability ( Ehri, Nunes, Stahl et al., 2001; Gersten et al., 2008). Additionally, providing children with frequent opportunities to read connected text supports the development of word-reading accuracy and fluency as well as comprehension skills ( Foorman et al., 2016a; Therrien, 2004).

Similarly, a number of instructional activities to promote the development of reading comprehension have strong or moderate supporting evidence. For younger children, teaching children how to use comprehension strategies and how to utilize the organizational structure of a text to understand, learn, and retain content supports better reading comprehension ( Shanahan et al., 2010). For older children, teaching the use of comprehension strategies also enhances reading comprehension ( Kamil et al., 2008) as does explicit instruction in key vocabulary, providing opportunities for extended discussion of texts, and providing instruction on foundational reading skills when children lack these skills; such instructional approaches are also effective for children with significant reading difficulties ( Berkeley et al., 2012; Kamil et al., 2008).

Lack of Compelling Evidence in the Science of Reading

In the above section, practices were highlighted that have sufficient evidence to warrant their widespread use. In this section, we address reading practices for which there is a lack of compelling evidence. Some practices have simply not yet been scientifically evaluated. Other practices have been evaluated, but either the evidence does not support their use based on the generalizability of the results or the studies in which they were evaluated were not of sufficient quality to meet a minimal standard of evidence (e.g., WWC standards). Although we lack sufficient space to present a comprehensive list of practices that do not have compelling evidence, we provide examples of practices that are commonplace and vary in the degree to which they have been scientifically studied.

Evidence-based decision making regarding effective literacy programs and practices for classroom use can be difficult. Often, there is no evidence of effectiveness for a program or the evidence is of poor quality. For instance, of the five most popular reading programs used nationwide (i.e., Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Journeys, Into Reading, Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery; Schwartz, 1999) only Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery, both interventions for struggling readers, have studies that meet WWC standards. The evidence indicates that there were mixed effects across outcomes for Leveled Literacy Intervention and positive or potentially positive effects for Reading Recovery (e.g., Chapman & Tunmer, 2016). Classroom reading programs are typically built around the notion of evidence-informed practices - teaching approaches that are grounded in quality research - but have not been subjected to direct scientific evaluation. As a consequence, it is currently impossible for schools to select basal reading programs that adhere to strict evidence-based standards (e.g., ESSA, 2015). As an alternative, schools must develop selection criteria for choosing classroom reading programs informed by the growing scientific evidence on instructional factors that support early reading development (e.g., Castles et al., 2018; Foorman et al.2017; Rayner et al., 2001).

Common instructional approaches that lack generalizable empirical support include such practices as close reading ( Welsch et al., 2019), use of decodable text ( Jenkins et al., 2004), sustained silent reading ( NICHD, 2000), multisensory approaches ( Birsh, 2011), and the three-cueing system to support word recognition development (Seidenberg, 2017). Some of these instructional approaches rest on sound theoretical and pedagogical grounds. For example, giving beginning readers the opportunity to read decodable texts provides practice applying the grapheme-phoneme relations they have learned to successfully decode words ( Foorman et al., 2016a), thus building lexical memory to support word reading accuracy and automaticity (Ehri, this issue). However, the only study to experimentally examine the impact of reading more versus less decodable texts as part of an early intervention phonics program for at risk first graders found no differences between the two groups on any of the posttest measures ( Jenkins et al., 2004). Such a result does not rule out the possibility of the usefulness of decodable texts but rather indicates the need to disentangle the active ingredients of effective interventions to specify what to use, when, how often, and for whom.

Similarly, multisensory approaches (e.g., Orton-Gillingham) that teach reading by using multiple senses (i.e., sight, hearing, touch, and movement) to help children make systematic connections between language, letters, and words ( Birsh, 2011) are commonplace and have considerable clinical support for facilitating reading development in children who struggle to learn to read. However, there is little scientific evidence that indicates that a multisensory approach is more effective than similarly structured phonological-based approaches that do not include a strong multisensory component (e.g., Boyer & Ehri, 2011; Ritchey & Goeke, 2006; Torgesen et al., 2001). With further research, we may find that a multisensory component is a critical ingredient of intervention for struggling readers, but we lack this empirical evidence currently.

Instruction in reading comprehension is another area where despite some studies showing moderate or strong support (see section on compelling evidence) other practices are employed despite limited support for them (e.g., Boulay et al., 2015). The complexity of reading comprehension relies on numerous cognitive resources and background knowledge; as a result, intervention directed exclusively at one component or another is not likely to be that impactful. For example, research shows a clear relation between breadth and depth of vocabulary and reading comprehension ( Wagner et al., 2007). One implication of this relation is that teaching vocabulary could improve reading comprehension. Numerous studies have tested this implication using instructional approaches that vary from teaching words in isolation to practices that involve instruction in the use of context to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. Instruction has also included strategies to determine meaning of words through word study and morphological analysis (e.g., Beck & McKeown, 2007; Lesaux et al., 2014). Although these practices have been effective in increasing vocabulary knowledge of the words taught, there is limited evidence of transfer to untaught words (as measured by standardized measures) or to improvement in general reading comprehension ( Elleman et al., 2009; Lesaux et al., 2010). Such findings do not mean that vocabulary instruction is not a useful practice; rather, by itself, it is not sufficient to improve reading comprehension. To make meaningful gains, intervention for reading comprehension likely requires addressing multiple components of language as well as teaching content knowledge (see next section) to make sizable gains.

Other instructional practices go directly against what is known from the science of reading. For example, the three-cueing approach to support early word recognition (i.e., relying on a combination of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic cues simultaneously to formulate an intelligent hypothesis about a word's identity) ignores 40 years of overwhelming evidence that orthographic mapping involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of specific words in memory (see Ehri, this issue). Moreover, relying on alternative cuing systems impedes the building of automatic word-recognition skill that is the hallmark of skilled word reading ( Stanovich, 1990; 1991). The English orthography, being both alphabetic-phonemic and morpho-phonemic, clearly privileges the use of various levels of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to read words ( Frost, 2012), with rapid context-free word recognition being the process that most clearly distinguishes good from poor readers ( Perfetti, 1992; Stanovich, 1980). Guessing at a word amounts to a lost learning trial to help children learn the orthography of the word and thus reduce the need to guess the word in the future ( Castles et al., 2018; Share, 1995).

Similarly, alternative approaches to improving reading skills for struggling readers often fall well outside the scientific consensus regarding sources of reading difficulties. Some of these approaches are based on the tenet that temporal processing deficits in the auditory (e.g., Tallal, 1984) and visual (e.g., Stein, 2019) systems of the brain are causally related to poor word-reading development. Although there is some evidence that typically developing and struggling readers differ on measures tapping auditory ( Casini et al., 2018; Protopapas, 2014) and visual (e.g., Eden et al., 1995; Olson & Datta, 2002) processing skill, there is little evidence to support the use of instructional programs designed to improve auditory or visual systems to ameliorate reading problems ( Strong et al., 2011). Further, interventions designed to decrease visual confusion (e.g., Dyslexie font) or modify transient channel processing (e.g., Irlen lenses) to improve reading skill for children with reading disability have also failed to garner scientific support ( Hyatt et al., 2009; Iovino et al., 1998; Marinus et al., 2016). Similarly, although use of video games to improve reading via enhanced visual attention is reported to be an effective intervention for children with reading disability ( Peters et al., 2019), studies of this supplemental intervention approach have not compared it to standard supplemental approaches. Finally, studies of interventions designed to enhance other cognitive processes, such as working memory, also lack evidence effectiveness in terms of improved reading-related outcomes (e.g., Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016).

Promising but Not (Yet) Compelling Evidence in the Science of Reading

There are many promising areas of research that are poised to provide compelling evidence to inform the science of reading in the coming years. As we do not have space to provide a comprehensive list, we highlight only a few promising areas in prevention research and elementary education research.

Promising Directions in Prevention Research

Research on the prevention of reading problems is critical for our ability to reduce the number of children who struggle learning to read. One area of prevention research that has great promise but needs more evidence is how to more fully develop preschoolers' language abilities that support later reading success. Both correlational and experimental findings indicate that providing children with opportunities to engage in high-quality conversations, coupled with exposure to advanced language models, matters for language development ( Cabell et al., 2015; Dickinson & Porche, 2011; Lonigan et al., 2011; Wasik & Hindman, 2018). Yet, most programs have a more robust impact on children's proximal language learning (i.e., learning taught words) than on generalized language learning as measured with standardized assessments ( Marulis & Neuman, 2010).

Promising studies that have demonstrated significant effects on children's general language development elucidate potential points of leverage. First, improving the connection between the school and home contexts by including parents as partners can promote synergistic learning for children as language-learning activities in school and home settings are increasingly aligned (e.g., Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998). A second leverage point is increasing attention to children's active use of language in the classroom to promote a rich dialogue between children and adults (e.g., Lonigan et al., 2011; Wasik & Hindman, 2018). A third leverage point is integrating content area instruction into early literacy instruction to improve language learning, for example, building children's conceptual knowledge of the social and natural world and teaching vocabulary words within the context of related ideas (e.g., Gonzalez et al., 2011).

Promising Directions in Elementary Education Research

We present two promising areas in reading research with elementary-age students, one focused on improving linguistic comprehension and one focused on improving decoding, consistent with the simple view of reading.

The knowledge a reader brings to a text is the chief determinant of whether the reader will understand that text ( Anderson & Pearson, 1984). Thus, building knowledge is an essential, yet neglected, part of improving linguistic comprehension (Cabell & Hwang, this issue). Teaching reading is most often approached in early elementary classrooms as a subject that is independent from other subjects, such as science and social studies ( Palinscar & Duke, 2004). As such, reading is taught using curricula that do not systematically build children's knowledge of the social and natural world. Instruction in reading and the content areas does not have to be an either/or proposition. Rather, the teaching of reading and of content-area learning can be simultaneously taught and integrated to powerfully impact children's learning of both reading and content knowledge (e.g., Connor et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2014). This area of research is promising but not yet compelling, due to the small number of experimental and quasi-experimental studies that have examined either integrated content-area and literacy instruction or content-rich English Language Arts instruction in K-5 settings (approximately 31 studies). Through meta-analysis, this corpus of studies demonstrates that combining knowledge building and literacy approaches has a positive impact on both vocabulary and comprehension outcomes for elementary-age children ( Hwang et al., 2019). Further rigorous studies are needed that test widely used content-rich English Language Arts curricula (Cabell & Hwang, 2020, this issue); also required is new development of integrative and interdisciplinary approaches in this area.

There is also promising research on helping students to decode words more efficiently. It is widely accepted that students with reading difficulties often have underlying deficits in phonological processing (e.g., Brady & Schankweiler, 1991; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Torgesen, 2000; Vellutino et al., 1996) and these deficits are believed to disrupt the acquisition of spelling-to-sound translation routines that form the basis of early decoding-skill development (e.g., van IJzendoorn & Bus, 1994; Rack et al., 1992). For developing readers, decoding an unfamiliar letter string can result in either full or partial decoding. During partial decoding, the reader must match the assembled phonology from decoding with their lexical representation of a word ( Venezky, 1999). For example, encountering the word island might render the incorrect but partial decoding attempt, "izland". A child's flexibility with the partially decoded word is referred to as their "set for variability" or their ability to go from the decoded form to the correct pronunciation of a word. This skill serves as a bridge between decoding and lexical pronunciations and may be an important second step in the decoding process ( Elbro et al., 2012).

The matching of partial phonemic-decoding output is facilitated by the child's decoding skills, the quality of the child's lexical word representation, and by the potential contextual support of text ( Nation & Castles, 2017). Correlational studies indicate that students' ability to go from a decoded form of a word to a correct pronunciation (their set for variability) predicts the reading of irregular words ( Tunmer & Chapman, 2012), regular words ( Elbro, et al., 2012), and nonwords ( Steacy et al., 2019a). Set for variability has also been found to be a stronger predictor of word reading than phonological awareness in students in grades 2-5 (e.g., Steacy et al., 2019b). Recent studies in this area suggest that children can benefit from being encouraged to engage with the irregularities of English ( Dyson et al., 2017) to promote the implicit knowledge structures needed to read and spell these complex words. Additional research suggests that set for variability training can be effective in promoting early word reading skills (e.g., Savage et al., 2018; Zipke, 2016). The work done in this area to date suggests that set for variability requires child knowledge structures and strategies, which can be developed through instruction, that allow successful matching of partial phonemic-decoding output with the corresponding phonological, morphological, and semantic lexical representations.

Where Do We Go Next in the Science of Reading?

Basic Science Research

The science of reading has reached some consensus on the typical development of reading skill and how individual differences may alter this trajectory (e.g., Boscardin et al., 2008; Hjetland et al., 2019; Peng et al., 2019). Less is known about factors and mechanisms related to reading among diverse learners, a critical barrier to the field's ability to address and prevent reading difficulty when it arises. Investigations with large and diverse participant samples are needed to improve understanding of how child characteristics additively and synergistically affect reading acquisition ( Hernandez, 2011; Lonigan et al., 2013). Insufficient research disentangles the influence of English-learner status for children who also have identified disabilities (Solari et al., 2014; Wagner et al., 2005). Greater attention to how language variation (e.g., dialect use) and differences in language experience affect reading development is crucial ( Patton Terry et al., 2010; Seidenberg & MacDonald, 2018; Washington et al., 2018). New realizations of the interaction between child characteristics and the depth of the orthography have also highlighted the importance of implicit learning in early reading ( Seidenberg, 2005; Steacy et al., 2019). Innovative cross-linguistic research is exploring how diverse methods of representing pronunciation and meaning within different orthographies, and children's developing awareness of these methods, jointly predict reading skills (e.g., Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Wade-Woolley, 2016). Furthermore, a better understanding of the role of executive function, socio-emotional resilience factors, and biopsychosocial risk variables (e.g., poverty and trauma) on reading development is critical. Additional research like this, in English and across languages, is needed to develop effective instruction and assessments for all leaners.

Intervention Innovations

Despite successes, too many children still struggle to read novel text with understanding, and intervention design efforts have not fully met this challenge ( Compton et al., 2014; Phillips et al., 2016; Vaughn et al., 2017). Greater creativity and integration of research from a broader array of complementary fields, including cognitive science and behavioral genetics may be required to deal with long-standing problems. For example, genetic information may have causal explanatory power; randomized trials are needed to evaluate the efficacy of using such information to select and individualize instruction and intervention ( Hart, 2016).

The field would benefit from increased attention to the problem of fading intervention effects over time. Although there can be detectable effects of interventions several years after they are completed (e.g., Blachman et al., 2014; Vadasy et al., 2011; Vadasy & Sanders, 2013), invariably effect sizes reduce over time. A meta-analysis of long-term effects of interventions for phonemic awareness, fluency, and reading comprehension found a 40 percent reduction in effect sizes within one year post-intervention ( Suggate, 2016). Perhaps reading interventions with larger initial effects or sequential reading interventions with smaller but cumulating effects would be more resistant to fade-out.

Translational and Implementation Science

If the science of reading is to be applied in a manner resulting in achievement for all learners, the field must increase its focus on processes supporting implementation of evidence-based reading practices in schools. The field can leverage its considerable evidence-base to systematically investigate, with replication, both the effectiveness of reading instructional practices with diverse learners and to investigate processes that facilitate or prevent adoption, implementation, and sustainability of these practices (National Research Council, 2002; Schneider, 2018; Slavin, 2002). Research on these processes in educational contexts may be best facilitated by making use of methodological and conceptual tools developed within the traditions of translation and implementation science research ( Gilliland et al., 2019; Eccles & Mittman, 2006). For example, these frameworks can support studies on whether and how educators and policymakers use information about evidence to inform decision making (e.g., Farley-Ripple et al., 2018) and studies on how institutional routines may need to be adapted to best integrate new procedures and practices (e.g., scheduling changes in the school day; Foorman et al., 2016b).

Conclusion

There has recently been a resurgence of the debate on the science of reading, and in this article, we described the existing evidence base and possible future directions. Compelling evidence is available to guide understanding of how reading develops and identify proven instructional practices that impact both decoding and linguistic comprehension. Whereas there is some evidence that is either not compelling or has yet to be generated for instructional practices and programs that are widely used, the scientific literature on reading is ever-expanding through contributions from the fields education, psychology, linguistics, communication science, neuroscience, and computational sciences. As these additions to the literature mature and contribute to an evidence base, we anticipate they will inform and shape the science of reading as well as the science of teaching reading.

Acknowledgments

First author was determined by group consensus. Authors equally contributed and are listed and alphabetically. The authors' work was supported by funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Institute of Education Sciences (R305A160241, R305A170430, R305F100005, R305F100027, R324A180020, R324B19002) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P50HD52120, P20HD091013, HD095193, HD072286).

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Science of Reading Informs 21st‐Century Education

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Yaacov Petscher,* Sonia Q. Cabell, Hugh W. Catts, Donald L. Compton, Barbara R. Foorman, Sara A. Hart, Christopher J. Lonigan, Beth M. Phillips, Christopher Schatschneider, Laura M. Steacy, Nicole Patton Terry, and Richard K. Wagner The science of reading should be informed by an evolving evidence base built upon the scientific method.

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Shame is a powerful emotion. Recently, the role of shame and its impact on struggling readers is gaining awareness. This two-part episode will share the stories of four adults and how undiagnosed dyslexia caused anxiety and shame-based trauma in their lives. Listen to Part II.

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The Emotional Impact of Undiagnosed Dyslexia, Part I

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Shame is a powerful emotion. Recently, the role of shame and its impact on struggling readers is gaining awareness. This two-part episode will share the stories of four adults and how undiagnosed dyslexia caused anxiety and shame-based trauma in their lives. Listen to Part II.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shame is a powerful emotion. Recently, the role of shame and its impact on struggling readers is gaining awareness. This two-part episode will share the stories of four adults and how undiagnosed dyslexia caused anxiety and shame-based trauma in their lives. This is part 2 of this episode. You can listen to part I here.

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The Emotional Impact of Undiagnosed Dyslexia, Part II

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shame is a powerful emotion. Recently, the role of shame and its impact on struggling readers is gaining awareness. This two-part episode will share the stories of four adults and how undiagnosed dyslexia caused anxiety and shame-based trauma in their lives. This is part 2 of this episode.

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Accessing the Introduction to Dyslexia Course

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Accessing the Introduction to Dyslexia Course

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Screening for risks and characteristics of dyslexia

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Screening for risks and characteristics of dyslexia

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Screening for risks and characteristics of dyslexia

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Knowledge is crucial for comprehension; it lays the foundation for building our understanding of text and provides an anchor for holding new information in memory. More from @CattsHugh & @AlanKamhi in #AmericanEducator: