Science of Reading - Research and Resources

This is the first page in Ohio's Reading Assessment and Intervention Sequence learning experience, covering Assessment. They also have pages covering Intervention and Progress Monitoring.

This is the first page in Ohio's Reading Assessment and Intervention Sequence learning experience for teachers of grades 6-12, covering Comprehensive Systems of Assessment. They also have pages covering Designing Intervention, Intervention Through Data-Based Decision Making and Progress Monitoring.

Tha author argues that despite the vast proliferation of scientific research, our understanding of dyslexia is marked by serious weaknesses of conceptualization, definition, and operationalization that are not only unscientific but also result in impoverished practice in schools, social inequity in both understanding and provision for many struggling readers, and ultimately, reduced life chances for millions of students worldwide.

Peng and Goodrich discuss that some students do not respond to evidence-based reading instruction. In order to support these students, they “propose a cognitive element model of reading instruction that provides a novel framework for considering how to embed supports for cognitive processes within evidence-based reading instruction.” Such work extends the SOR to consider supports for struggling readers by taking a different approach than currently considered.

"Three patterns of reading difficulties are common. This article explains how recognizing these three patterns can provide a valuable starting point for planning reading instruction and interventions."

"The goal of reading instruction is to enable students to look at written words in text and recognize their pronunciations and meanings automatically. How does this happen?"

Teachers are asked to use reading science to inform how they teach phonics and phonological awareness. As teachers look to the research base to guide their practice, some questions and concerns regarding what best practice looks like have come up. This article starts with a brief description of phonics and phonemic awareness and then discusses topics of issue in a developmental order, addressing phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphology. Current research is used to discuss 10 questions teachers are asking as they navigate applying reading research in the classroom.

"This article describes principles to clarify common misconceptions and dilemmas about phonics instruction. Read on to learn why differentation, orthographic mapping, and contextual reading are necessary in any phonics curriculum."

The “central issue of phonics in learning to read in English is carefully and strategically managing its complexity… There is not one, but many reasonable ways to deal with it. It also suitably makes room for professional judgment grounded in teachers’ knowledge of their own students and in their professional experience, both the successes and the inevitable failures.”

This resource describes the key components of phonemic awareness and how teachers can incorporate phonemic awareness instruction into their own practice.

This resource describes the importance of explicit and systematic phonics instruction to student reading and how teachers can incorporate this into their teaching.

This article argues against using only alphabetic information in word-solving attempts, stating that "long‐standing theories of the development of word‐reading skills support the value of teaching students to use both alphabetic and contextual information in word solving in interactive and confirmatory ways."

Linnea C. Ehri reviews a line of experimental research that has highlighted the role of orthography in reading and supports the importance of systematic phonics instruction.” Ehri provides additional nuance in understanding of how words are read and links to instruction.

Kearns pushes against an often used instructional move: teaching syllabication rules: "There are various strategies for helping students read long words that do not involve syllable division patterns. These strategies have supporting evidence and avoid the issues of utility and cognitive load raised by syllable division."

Roberts explores findings from four recent randomized control trials exploring alphabetics instruction for 3- and 4-year-olds with the interventions focusing largely on paired-associate learning, which encourages connecting visual letter forms with letter names and sounds. Such findings have important implications for practice. In this piece, Roberts describes the four studies and identifies big principles for letter learning, such as evidence of the effectiveness of using visual–verbal paired-associate learning of letters and sounds (i.e., printed letters, their spoken names or sounds); the benefits of decontextualized letter instruction as compared with instruction embedded within storybook reading, words, and names; and the fact that letter learning approached in these ways with repeated practice can be both motivating and engaging.

These authors show the promise of a handwriting intervention in supporting reading. This study extends the SOR by suggesting the importance of handwriting fluency in early reading, although further research, particularly with larger samples, is needed.

"To improve students’ reading comprehension, help them build their background knowledge."

"Much of the attention given to literacy, of late, has focused on ensuring that students can read, without consideration to what they are given to read. Kristin Conradi Smith & Elfrieda H. Hiebert discuss four general aspects of the texts used in elementary classrooms – text complexity, text type (narrative versus informational), text format (paper versus screen), and diversity of people presented in the text. They review recent research on each of these text characteristics and then make suggestions for how to apply the research in the classroom."

This article make a case for the importance of background knowledge in children's comprehension. It suggests that differences in background knowledge may account for differences in understanding text for low- and middle-income children. It then describes strategies for building background knowledge in the age of common core standards.

"This article presents a case against reading comprehension as a generic skill and instead advocates the idea that comprehension represents the development of knowledge networks built and sustained by applying research-based principles."

"This article discusses comprehension as skill myth, shares a more accurate and complex model of comprehension, highlights the role of knowledge and what it does for comprehension, and provides implications for instruction and assessment."

This article is an excerpt from the author's book, "The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix It."

This resource describes the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension and ways to better build background knowledge.

This resource describes the skills and processes necessary for students' reading comprehension and how to increase students' reading comprehension.

This resource describes the significance of vocbulary for reading comprehension and how to identify and implement effective strategies for teaching vocabulary.

This resource describes key components of academic language and their significance for adolescent literacy. It also describes how to improve students' use of academic language.

This resource describes the meaning of morphology and its importance for adolescent literacy. It also gives some strategies for incorporating morphology instruction into the classroom.

This is an overview of how knowledge matters to reading comprehension.

Professor Daniel Willingham describes why content knowledge is essential to reading with comprehension, and why teaching reading strategies alone is not sufficient that students read with good comprehension.

The authors explicate why knowledge building in English language arts instruction (i.e., content‐rich instruction) can support language and content knowledge, leading to better linguistic and reading comprehension, based on theoretical arguments and empirical studies. In particular, the authors review the evidence on this claim, paying special attention to experimental trials conducted in K–2 settings.

These authors provide a critical discussion of the role of knowledge in the SOR. The authors consider both how knowledge supports the reading process and whose knowledge matters. For example, Hattan and Lupo suggest moving beyond just content knowledge to attending to “cultural and linguistic knowledge, principled knowledge, strategic knowledge, knowledge of multimodal texts, knowledge of multiple-text use, and conditional knowledge.” They "caution educators, researchers, and other stakeholders to not oversimplify the role that knowledge plays in comprehension and, as a result, diminish learning from texts by positioning students as deficient."

Reading science has reached consensus that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension, but how to develop this background knowledge remains an open question. This study demonstrates that while students showed basic comprehension no matter when they learned the information, attention and more advanced comprehension skills were more successful when students already knew about a topic and merely had their knowledge activated. This suggests that common prereading activities may not be successful for students who are unfamiliar with the topic.

The Reading for Understanding initiative has provided evidence regarding the significance of the listening comprehension component of the SVR, often overlooked by advocates of the science of reading. This research has documented the importance of early oral language skills, which support both decoding and listening comprehension in young readers and plays a critical role in students' success as readers as they move through school. In addition, RfU research has identified a complicated constellation of skills and knowledge that impact reading comprehension as students advance in school.

The relationship between science knowledge and reading proficiency “is bidirectional and positive throughout the elementary years,” say the authors, “providing empirical evidence that domain knowledge and reading may mutually enhance each other… This finding indicates that students need consistent instructional support for developing both domain knowledge and reading from the beginning of schooling.” (Summary from Kim Marshall)

These authors investigate trends across 43 language comprehension elementary interventions, considering potential differences in effects depending on participant and intervention characteristics. According to the authors,
findings suggest positive effects on custom measures of vocabulary, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension but not on standardized measures of these outcomes. Results also indicate positive effects for English learners and promise for multicomponent interventions and those that include technology.

Drawing on this research with the goal of informing the science of reading, the authors suggest that academic language comprehension involves for the reader (a) familiarity with a set of academic language forms commonly found in school texts, (b) experience with the sociocultural practices of understanding and using the academic language of text within a particular sociocultural community, and (c) aligning with or resisting the reader identities implied by the language of a text. The authors suggest that innovative research and pedagogical approaches are needed to broaden the conceptualization of language and reading comprehension relations from purely cognitive into one that embraces the reader's interaction with a text as a sociocultural phenomenon.

"By the beginning of the 21st century, there had emerged a mainstream view of reading comprehension and comprehension instruction. However, four factors distorted, impeded, and swamped the research findings. (1) Commercial publishers fit comprehension instruction into a curricular format that distorted the intent of the research. (2) The No Child Left Behind Act, with its high‐stakes testing and concomitant interim assessments, moved the focus in schools from developing comprehension to passing tests. (3) The publishers' criteria for the Common Core State Standards promoted instruction that ran contrary to research findings. (4) Problems with the educational research, publication, development, and dissemination process itself further weakened the effect of research on practice."

The current information society requires people to handle information from different sources, which entails specific skills beyond those needed to comprehend and use information from a single text... These findings shed light on how contextual‐ (i.e., text availability), task‐ (i.e., question type), and student‐related (i.e., reading skill) factors may influence both adolescents' question answering from multiple documents and their recall." Overall, this study extends the SOR to considering the reading of multiple texts, which “is a timely topic for the science of reading, as the ability to integrate information from different sources becomes a critical skill in today’s societies, especially for adolescent readers.

The authors “advocate reigniting inquiry into the sentence, or syntactic, level.” The authors review the research to identify theoretical and empirical supports for suggesting that syntax plays a particularly important role in reading comprehension. This piece contributes to the SOR by focusing on an important and understudied contributor to reading, syntax.

Students from diverse backgrounds read two texts, one of which was a science discovery narrative, a genre which describes how a scientist came to know something in a way that links to subjective perspectives and references cultural or political factors that affected the scientific work. “Findings suggest that the personal and sociohistorical elements of science discovery narratives were effective in engaging readers’ interest and helped highlight the culturally situated nature of knowledge and the nature and processes of scientific inquiry.” This piece adds to the SOR by highlighting the importance of text characteristics in fostering engagement and ultimately comprehension and learning from texts.

This resource explains the key processes associated with transcription and describes how teachers can improve their transcription instruction.

This resource describes the key role of syntax in successful writing and reading, and describes how to incorporate key strategies for teaching syntax.

This resource describes key processes and strategies for supporting students' paragraph writing and how to incorporate strategies to promote paragraph writing into instruction.

"Although writing is a set of skills, it is also intimately bound up with content knowledge. Unfortunately, most writing instruction in the U.S. overlooks this symbiotic relationship, as instruction has traditionally consisted of having students memorize parts of speech and rules of grammar."

Drawing on the literature on infrastructure for implementing instructional improvement, the authors explain the role of three infrastructural pillars for reading instruction. They discuss how curriculum, professional development, and leadership are mutually supportive, thus illuminating the pillars for reading reform at the classroom, school, and system levels.

The authors argue that... today's "science of reading" discourse does not fully capture the complexity of teaching students to read. Thus, it is not simply that new teachers are unaware of effective reading instructional techniques; the more fundamental issue is that these techniques are extremely complex to implement well and that teacher candidates likely need substantial scaffolding to use them. Finally, the authors explore one promising solution: embedding preservice training with focused, targeted interventions around reading instruction that have supported experienced teachers.

"We argue that the mantra of ‘science of reading’…is being used to silence the voices of literacy teacher educators and teachers rather than to invite the collective exploration of possibilities for reimagining teacher preparation, an essential part of the scientific process." Ultimately, the authors share what they suggest is “the science that matters in growing more powerful literacy teacher preparation practices [that] is the version of science that invites us to imagine, dialogue, design, and innovate.”

For the "science of reading" community, I frame equitable teaching as effective in assisting student reading performance and meaningful in terms of integrating values and practices from minoritized students' everyday lives. Drawing largely on interpretive research, I identify sociocultural processes in teaching reading that connect with minoritized students' everyday identities and experiences, support student initiative and expression, and foster collaborative relationships in the classroom to assist student participation and performance in reading. To advance the science of teaching reading equitably, I recommend that pluralistic research build generalizable evidence regarding effects of equitable teaching on reading and language gains for minoritized students, mechanisms in teaching reading equitably, and processes and materials to support teacher learning to sustain implementation of equitable practices to teach reading.

Fien et al. provide multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) as a systems approach that can facilitate the application and scaling of evidence-based practices in schools. Because “MTSS–R [MTSS–Reading] refers to comprehensive approaches that begin with what the field knows from the current SOR, and use student and instruction data in a continuous improvement process.” Because MTSS is data driven and provided to all students, “MTSS–R offers an environment where researchers, policymakers, and practitioners can work together to study how schools can implement effective reading practices for all students (Solari et al., 2020).” This article adds to the SOR literature by framing the SOR within an evidence-based revolution, identifying needs, and identifying MTSS as a path toward greater collaboration and equity.

The authors identify limitations in current SOR understandings that stem from focusing only on one aspect of the binary (i.e., nature), resulting in "(1) too heavy a reliance on a narrow conception of science claimed to be authoritative and monolithic, (2) too little accounting for environmental factors that complicate the idea that the brain functions identically across the whole of the human population, (3) an exclusive view that experimental designs and replicability are the gold standard of scientific research when other approaches have generated many useful insights, and (4) dismissal of all other conceptions of reading as unscientific and, therefore, of marginal value in generating knowledge about reading and how to teach it."

In this historical analysis, we examine the context of debates over the role of phonics in literacy and current debates about the science of reading, with a focus on the work and impact of the late literacy scholar Jeanne Chall. Given that many of the debates the SOR deals with have endured across time, the authors advocate "keep[ing] the big picture with a historical perspective in mind while also seeking to encourage evidence-based instruction….educators need to fully understand the entire literacy spectrum, from early literacy through adult literacy, and grasp the complexities and nuances of the stage model."

Brown et al. review the alignment between commercial curricula and research, finding that the most widely used materials [used in Utah and 24 other states] have areas of inconsistency with the science of reading. Notably, the commercial materials reviewed here did not take orthographic development into sufficient account. Additionally, the materials did not use letters and did not limit focus to one or two skills. Brown et al. emphasize the importance of aligning curriculum with research and advocate further research to add additional understandings.

Generally, findings support the effectiveness of training and preparation programs in increasing elementary teachers' knowledge of foundational constructs. Training in which teachers have the opportunity to apply their learned knowledge and skills under expert guidance produced the largest growth in teacher knowledge.

This review is a response to the trend by SOR advocates to question teacher knowledge and understandings, particularly for code-related instruction, and blame teacher education programs for what they see as poor preparation of preservice teachers to teach reading skills. "We found that the research base largely relied on quantitative multiple‐choice assessments that privileged linguistic content knowledge over pedagogical and situated knowledge. The body of research was constrained by narrow definitions of science and knowledge, repetition across studies in methods and data sources, limited samples that overlooked diversity in preservice teachers and elementary contexts, and methodological problems." Overall, this piece adds to the SOR as a means to “contextualize and complicate claims that code-related skills are being neglected in teacher preparation programs” and presents avenues forward.

"We propose centering discussions of the science of reading around five values to increase the likelihood of bringing all students to high levels of literacy. These values are (1) collective responsibility, (2) equity through higher order thinking, (3) a rigorous system, (4) accountability with transparency, and (5) stability and sustainability."

"Despite scientific advances that have informed our understanding of reading acquisition and development, a profound gap exists between empirical findings and the implementation of evidence-based practices in the assessment and instruction of reading in school settings...We urge the multidisciplinary scholars that make up the larger body of literacy and reading researchers to more consistently engage in meaningful ways with schools and communities and to coalesce around a research agenda that values and promotes the translation of research findings into authentic school and classroom settings."