"At the same time, the brief seems to offer no role at all for comprehension skill or strategy instruction. That could provide fodder for the misconception that teachers need to choose between that kind of instruction and knowledge-building. Rather, it’s a question of what they put in the foreground."
This is EXTREMELY concerning. If you've got any sway with Fordham, I would urge an immediate rethink before we replace one set of misconceptions for another set. As someone who has taught comprehension to every grade-level K-12 (and has recently published an instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense), I recommend Tiffany Peltier's recent article, "The Science of Teaching Reading Comprehension". https://www.nwea.org/blog/2024/the-science-of-teaching-reading-comprehension/
She writes:
"Comprehension is a metacognitive skill, one that is developed through purposely choosing text sets to build knowledge and leveraging specific reading comprehension strategies to help students acquire this knowledge and apply these metacognitive skills on their own.
So how do we go about building knowledge?
Reading strategies should not be the focus of teaching reading comprehension. Instead, they should be used in service of teaching students new content. The most recent research suggests we use three strategies to help students learn the content of the texts they are reading. Specifically, when combined with instruction in vocabulary and background knowledge, these strategies are most helpful in building student knowledge and understanding. We can teach students to:
Identify the text structure
Using the text structure, identify the main idea
Summarize a text by expanding on the main idea
If students can summarize a text, they now have a situation model to work from. Think of it like helping them build a web of Velcro that all the details in the text can stick to. Teaching students to use these steps will help them build the metacognitive muscles they’ll need to do this type of understanding on their own. By helping students arrive at a coherent understanding, teachers position readers to do the deep work of making inferences, generating questions, and making connections."
I often wonder, how did I manage to graduate from an elite college with a degree in literature and Russian language, without ever having to identify text-to-text and text-to-self connections, or to enumerate the many strategies, such as the six traits of writing. Perhaps these are helpful for struggling readers, but they absolutely bore me to tears.
This is such an important discussion! Those of us with boots on the ground need to get this right because the academic trajectories of our most vulnerable students depend on it. Margaret McKeown, co-author of Bringing Words to Life, says:
“'Comprehending decoded text depends mostly on broad knowledge of the world.' --Not so fast. Comprehension MOSTLY depends on knowing how to identify important text info and connect it, and integrating knowledge that’s relevant to the content."
"I began with Galileo but will end with Caesar. Cassius says: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves. And I mean all of our selves. All of us—educators and experts alike, educational entrepreneurs and publishers peddling their wares—we all need to face our collective faults related to overconfidence and find the professional humility necessary to frame uncertainty within the realm of the day-to-day practicalities of teaching, within the coalface consequences—to borrow Emina’s evocative phrase—of the choices we make. In short, we need to bestow upon ambiguity and inconclusiveness the deep respect they deserve.
Let’s resign our heroes to Homeric legend and reassign a shared burden for decision-making in the school setting."
I don't know what "teach reading comprehension" would even be. Bizarre (red herring) title. Is this something done in Balanced Literacy? I don't track that world well since I work with SoR schools.
Instead - If your audience is SoR, then I worry this is an intentional Red Herring. Get people thinking about poorly taught strategies and attack those, rather than looking at nuance and how to teach these better.
This mentions the Stevens 2019 Meta on strategies that had an effect size of .97 which is strong.
And Peng's - who found that 'background knowledge instruction" (pre-teaching a topic, that's it) is important (teaching about gwoops before teaching strategies to understand gwoops), but he never implied anywhere anything about building knowledge generally - quite the leap. I hope this is unintentional and not aimed at discrediting the vast body of evidence that shows that teaching strategies done well, works.
Huang wrote "The results of the meta-analysis of the five studies showed that supporting content knowledge in ELA strengthened vocabulary related to content being taught (effect size g = .29)." Note: "related to content being taught". This does not mean that teaching knowledge will transfer to new topics and we know there is not way to teach all the content students would ever encounter. Strategies are important to help students approach unknown content. Teachers will not always be there to pre-teach everything. They need strategies.
Peng: Interpreters conflate "Background Knowledge Instruction" with "Building Knowledge" then say research that shows 'building knowledge" in general. These are not the same. Pre-teach knowledge of a topic, then have students use strategies to learn that content. This does not mean that building knowledge globally will raise ELA outcomes. Teach strategies, pre-teach the content you apply them on and students will learn them better. Knowledge building is good to do no one argues against it, but no evidence shows it will raise outcomes (Whenever I question this, I get attacked ad hominem as a straw man who dislikes knowledge building. It's a creative effort, but inaccurate in the ways your reporting on the research are as well.)
You cite a flawed CKLA study. Has it been through peer review? CKLA high ses charter vs public study in CO schools (the public schools used BL most likely) - Charters did better? This study had high attrition which means families that were 'randomized' to public schools that did not have CKLA left the study to go to private schools. We already know Charters outscore publix schools and this study is no different. Students were 'randomized' into very different conditions which means treatment and control were not similar settings.
Interesting 4 recommendations. Do these align with any of the USA's federal research organizations such as What Works Guides? They look different, and skewed toward encouraging the purchase of programs branded as knowledge building and books on this topic, but they are not supported by evidence.
This final conclusion is not supported by the studies cited. "Put simply, knowledge of the world, not generalizable reading comprehension skills, determines reading ability."
The equity implications of your saying we should stop teaching what decades of research shows to work (strategies) is staggering. It feels like 'whole language' saying don't teach phonics all over again. Perhaps it helps your book sales, but it does not help students, especially the most vulnerable who need strategies the most.
Marianne Rice, Tiffany Peltier, and Kacee Lambright “What’s the Main Idea?”: Using Text Structure to Build Comprehension. Alida K. Hudson, Julie Owens, Karol A. Moore, Kacee Lambright, Kausalai (Kay) Wijekumar First published: 27 April 2021https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/trtr.2016“Inference skills for reading: A meta-analysis of instructional practices
Having much experience working with teachers in the area of comprehension instruction, I just can’t agree with your characterization of mindless strategy-hopping. Maybe forty years ago. Teachers in classrooms tend not to be ideological but pragmatic if left to their professional good sense. It sounds a bit extreme to say that teachers should teach phonics first and then focus on teaching knowledge. Comprehension will take care of itself? Is this what you mean to say?
So what did you mean to say? Phonics works right? We must teach phonics as per LETRs or DISTAR, we must teach knowledge according to a prescribed blueprint. But we don’t teach comprehension as an interactive and transactive sociocultural practice? Are you familiar with the Four Resources model of reading? I question the reality of your claim that comprehension is taught without regard to managing prior knowledge and constructing new knowledge. Have you studied Patricia Alexander’s research on comprehension and relational reasoning? It’s all about building knowledge. I am reacting generally to the mischaracterization of current views on comprehension instruction and the oversimplification of the problem of knowledge construction in the context of literacy. Your article on summarizing as the pinnacle skill is relevant, too. Summarizing a text is a beginning point for comprehension, not an endpoint. Have you studied the field of reading enough to feel confident that you have all the answers?
Although I do agree that phonetics instruction is important, it is worth remembering that an overemphasis on this strategy also has its limitations (and let's face it, what doesn't?). If you haven't already read about this or seen the video, there is a hilarious news story about the recent graduation at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where the graduates' names were being egregiously mispronounced, even though the announcer was following the phonetic instructions on the speaker's cards.
This to me is such an instructive remembrance of how anything overused quickly devolves into self-parody.
I think you have completely misinterpreted what happened at Thomas Jefferson Uni's graduation.
The graduates, who most likely started their formal education in 2002 or 2003, were taught letter-sound correspondence so poorly (or not at all) that they were unable to write their own name phonetically. And the announcer, presumably at least slightly older, could not correctly decode and say what the students wrote!
I wasn't there. I don't know what happened to cause the problem. I just know what was widely reported in the media, which focused on the existence of the problem, rather than the reasons for it.
Sadly the skills-driven mindset is so deeply entrenched that when I present arguments from "The Knowledge Gap," I get incredulous stares. Sort of like when I argue against academic standards. Nothing is allowed to happen as a by-product. If it's not micromanaged and paperworked to death, it's just not a thing.
Our schooling system works like this: You need so many specific vitamins and minerals, so today we're just going to eat fistfuls of red Vitamin-X pills. And tomorrow we'll eat fistfuls of green Vitamin-Y pills. But if you dare advocate just eating broccoli--maybe a colorful plate--people think you hate eating itself.
Great analogy!! Pelletized nutrients vs actual food-- We forget that human beings come with appetites that motivate them to eat, they each possess a meaning drive that motivates them to make sense. Just as the body's secret processes inform its various parts w nutrients, there are meaning-making processes to which we do not have direct access as teachers. Appealing to deeper drives of interest, engagement, connection, relationship, agency puts these processes in motion.
Then there is the persistent neglect of the role of motivation. Teaching the knowledge and the skills in a way that causes the children to hate reading is counterproductive. The name for that is aliteracy, which is ultimately just as bad as illiteracy.
Now I realize that motivation is often dismissed as irrelevant due to the short term effect size being small, however that does not make sense because it has cumulative effects that are profound. It would be like dismissing the effects of wind on an airplane because effects of the rudder and flaps are so much greater on the immediate orientation of the aircraft.
You raise an important point. Aliteracy is a by product of impersonal, generic instruction focused on the right answer and memorizing. Motivation and managing it is critical and can be taught. Comprehension is a strategic and intentional process involving motive and purpose.
Don, you are quite right. I taught high school junior English for 34 years in a public school, and I noticed when high stakes testing came in--during the early years of the 21st century--and the 9th and 10th grade English classes began to focus almost exclusively on test preparation (writing and reading comprehension strategies to game the test scores), I began to see an epidemic of students who not only were indifferent to writing and reading by the time they got to me, but who were openly hostile toward it.
First time I’ve heard the term “aliterate”—100% the term I’ve been searching for. I am an elementary teacher (Montessori certified)—relating to stories is such a creative, natural, human experience. Let’s keep it that way!
I went to a private school for the first 8 years and nary a class taught reading comprehension. Instead, from 3rd-4th grade, the teacher pointed to an oversized box in the corner of the classroom chock full of glossy, colorful oversized cards with tabs and said work on the SRA cards.
There were 36? different levels consisting of X cards in those tiers. You read the story, flipped over the card, answered the questions and filled in the circle on a scantron with a #2 pencil.
I did just fine having graduated from college and law school, subsequently.
Reading comprehension isn't taught. It's something you learn on your own when you read and are forced to answer questions about the story.
"At the same time, the brief seems to offer no role at all for comprehension skill or strategy instruction. That could provide fodder for the misconception that teachers need to choose between that kind of instruction and knowledge-building. Rather, it’s a question of what they put in the foreground."
This is EXTREMELY concerning. If you've got any sway with Fordham, I would urge an immediate rethink before we replace one set of misconceptions for another set. As someone who has taught comprehension to every grade-level K-12 (and has recently published an instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense), I recommend Tiffany Peltier's recent article, "The Science of Teaching Reading Comprehension". https://www.nwea.org/blog/2024/the-science-of-teaching-reading-comprehension/
She writes:
"Comprehension is a metacognitive skill, one that is developed through purposely choosing text sets to build knowledge and leveraging specific reading comprehension strategies to help students acquire this knowledge and apply these metacognitive skills on their own.
So how do we go about building knowledge?
Reading strategies should not be the focus of teaching reading comprehension. Instead, they should be used in service of teaching students new content. The most recent research suggests we use three strategies to help students learn the content of the texts they are reading. Specifically, when combined with instruction in vocabulary and background knowledge, these strategies are most helpful in building student knowledge and understanding. We can teach students to:
Identify the text structure
Using the text structure, identify the main idea
Summarize a text by expanding on the main idea
If students can summarize a text, they now have a situation model to work from. Think of it like helping them build a web of Velcro that all the details in the text can stick to. Teaching students to use these steps will help them build the metacognitive muscles they’ll need to do this type of understanding on their own. By helping students arrive at a coherent understanding, teachers position readers to do the deep work of making inferences, generating questions, and making connections."
I often wonder, how did I manage to graduate from an elite college with a degree in literature and Russian language, without ever having to identify text-to-text and text-to-self connections, or to enumerate the many strategies, such as the six traits of writing. Perhaps these are helpful for struggling readers, but they absolutely bore me to tears.
This is such an important discussion! Those of us with boots on the ground need to get this right because the academic trajectories of our most vulnerable students depend on it. Margaret McKeown, co-author of Bringing Words to Life, says:
“'Comprehending decoded text depends mostly on broad knowledge of the world.' --Not so fast. Comprehension MOSTLY depends on knowing how to identify important text info and connect it, and integrating knowledge that’s relevant to the content."
Just because she says it, it doesn't mean it's right, but it does mean that we need to listen to multiple perspectives and be very wary about the certainty with which we make recommendations. Steve Dykstra's webinar, An Adaptive, Scientific Response to Uncertainty https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=steve+dykstra+uncertainty, features in my piece, Do Our Literacy Heroes Fail Us, Or Do We Fail Ourselves? https://highfiveliteracy.com/2024/05/23/do-our-literacy-heroes-fail-us-or-do-we-fail-ourselves/, which discusses an overdependence on "expert" advice. I was inspired by Emina McLean's recent piece, Has the Science of Reading become a rampant, thought-terminating cliche? https://www.eminamclean.com/post/has-the-science-of-reading-become-a-rampant-thought-terminating-clich%C3%A9 I end with:
"I began with Galileo but will end with Caesar. Cassius says: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves. And I mean all of our selves. All of us—educators and experts alike, educational entrepreneurs and publishers peddling their wares—we all need to face our collective faults related to overconfidence and find the professional humility necessary to frame uncertainty within the realm of the day-to-day practicalities of teaching, within the coalface consequences—to borrow Emina’s evocative phrase—of the choices we make. In short, we need to bestow upon ambiguity and inconclusiveness the deep respect they deserve.
Let’s resign our heroes to Homeric legend and reassign a shared burden for decision-making in the school setting."
I don't know what "teach reading comprehension" would even be. Bizarre (red herring) title. Is this something done in Balanced Literacy? I don't track that world well since I work with SoR schools.
Instead - If your audience is SoR, then I worry this is an intentional Red Herring. Get people thinking about poorly taught strategies and attack those, rather than looking at nuance and how to teach these better.
This mentions the Stevens 2019 Meta on strategies that had an effect size of .97 which is strong.
And Peng's - who found that 'background knowledge instruction" (pre-teaching a topic, that's it) is important (teaching about gwoops before teaching strategies to understand gwoops), but he never implied anywhere anything about building knowledge generally - quite the leap. I hope this is unintentional and not aimed at discrediting the vast body of evidence that shows that teaching strategies done well, works.
Huang wrote "The results of the meta-analysis of the five studies showed that supporting content knowledge in ELA strengthened vocabulary related to content being taught (effect size g = .29)." Note: "related to content being taught". This does not mean that teaching knowledge will transfer to new topics and we know there is not way to teach all the content students would ever encounter. Strategies are important to help students approach unknown content. Teachers will not always be there to pre-teach everything. They need strategies.
Peng: Interpreters conflate "Background Knowledge Instruction" with "Building Knowledge" then say research that shows 'building knowledge" in general. These are not the same. Pre-teach knowledge of a topic, then have students use strategies to learn that content. This does not mean that building knowledge globally will raise ELA outcomes. Teach strategies, pre-teach the content you apply them on and students will learn them better. Knowledge building is good to do no one argues against it, but no evidence shows it will raise outcomes (Whenever I question this, I get attacked ad hominem as a straw man who dislikes knowledge building. It's a creative effort, but inaccurate in the ways your reporting on the research are as well.)
You cite a flawed CKLA study. Has it been through peer review? CKLA high ses charter vs public study in CO schools (the public schools used BL most likely) - Charters did better? This study had high attrition which means families that were 'randomized' to public schools that did not have CKLA left the study to go to private schools. We already know Charters outscore publix schools and this study is no different. Students were 'randomized' into very different conditions which means treatment and control were not similar settings.
Interesting 4 recommendations. Do these align with any of the USA's federal research organizations such as What Works Guides? They look different, and skewed toward encouraging the purchase of programs branded as knowledge building and books on this topic, but they are not supported by evidence.
This final conclusion is not supported by the studies cited. "Put simply, knowledge of the world, not generalizable reading comprehension skills, determines reading ability."
The equity implications of your saying we should stop teaching what decades of research shows to work (strategies) is staggering. It feels like 'whole language' saying don't teach phonics all over again. Perhaps it helps your book sales, but it does not help students, especially the most vulnerable who need strategies the most.
This podcast, Text Structure and Inference Skills: The Latest Instructional research, is worth listening to.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-literacy-view/id1614519794?i=1000651502855
Marianne Rice, Tiffany Peltier, and Kacee Lambright “What’s the Main Idea?”: Using Text Structure to Build Comprehension. Alida K. Hudson, Julie Owens, Karol A. Moore, Kacee Lambright, Kausalai (Kay) Wijekumar First published: 27 April 2021https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/trtr.2016“Inference skills for reading: A meta-analysis of instructional practices
Having much experience working with teachers in the area of comprehension instruction, I just can’t agree with your characterization of mindless strategy-hopping. Maybe forty years ago. Teachers in classrooms tend not to be ideological but pragmatic if left to their professional good sense. It sounds a bit extreme to say that teachers should teach phonics first and then focus on teaching knowledge. Comprehension will take care of itself? Is this what you mean to say?
No, that's not what I mean to say. I'm not sure how anyone who reads the post (as opposed to the headline) could come away with that impression.
So what did you mean to say? Phonics works right? We must teach phonics as per LETRs or DISTAR, we must teach knowledge according to a prescribed blueprint. But we don’t teach comprehension as an interactive and transactive sociocultural practice? Are you familiar with the Four Resources model of reading? I question the reality of your claim that comprehension is taught without regard to managing prior knowledge and constructing new knowledge. Have you studied Patricia Alexander’s research on comprehension and relational reasoning? It’s all about building knowledge. I am reacting generally to the mischaracterization of current views on comprehension instruction and the oversimplification of the problem of knowledge construction in the context of literacy. Your article on summarizing as the pinnacle skill is relevant, too. Summarizing a text is a beginning point for comprehension, not an endpoint. Have you studied the field of reading enough to feel confident that you have all the answers?
Although I do agree that phonetics instruction is important, it is worth remembering that an overemphasis on this strategy also has its limitations (and let's face it, what doesn't?). If you haven't already read about this or seen the video, there is a hilarious news story about the recent graduation at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where the graduates' names were being egregiously mispronounced, even though the announcer was following the phonetic instructions on the speaker's cards.
This to me is such an instructive remembrance of how anything overused quickly devolves into self-parody.
To learn to sight read properly though you still have to sound out the words EVEN when the sounds don't make any sense phonetically.
It's part of imprinting it on the brain properly
True, but presumably the announcer at a college graduation ceremony should have been well-beyond that point.
fair enough.
the funniest take I've ever seen on this exact subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw
I've seen this before but you're right--it's brilliant!
I think you have completely misinterpreted what happened at Thomas Jefferson Uni's graduation.
The graduates, who most likely started their formal education in 2002 or 2003, were taught letter-sound correspondence so poorly (or not at all) that they were unable to write their own name phonetically. And the announcer, presumably at least slightly older, could not correctly decode and say what the students wrote!
I wasn't there. I don't know what happened to cause the problem. I just know what was widely reported in the media, which focused on the existence of the problem, rather than the reasons for it.
Sadly the skills-driven mindset is so deeply entrenched that when I present arguments from "The Knowledge Gap," I get incredulous stares. Sort of like when I argue against academic standards. Nothing is allowed to happen as a by-product. If it's not micromanaged and paperworked to death, it's just not a thing.
Our schooling system works like this: You need so many specific vitamins and minerals, so today we're just going to eat fistfuls of red Vitamin-X pills. And tomorrow we'll eat fistfuls of green Vitamin-Y pills. But if you dare advocate just eating broccoli--maybe a colorful plate--people think you hate eating itself.
Great analogy!! Pelletized nutrients vs actual food-- We forget that human beings come with appetites that motivate them to eat, they each possess a meaning drive that motivates them to make sense. Just as the body's secret processes inform its various parts w nutrients, there are meaning-making processes to which we do not have direct access as teachers. Appealing to deeper drives of interest, engagement, connection, relationship, agency puts these processes in motion.
Then there is the persistent neglect of the role of motivation. Teaching the knowledge and the skills in a way that causes the children to hate reading is counterproductive. The name for that is aliteracy, which is ultimately just as bad as illiteracy.
Now I realize that motivation is often dismissed as irrelevant due to the short term effect size being small, however that does not make sense because it has cumulative effects that are profound. It would be like dismissing the effects of wind on an airplane because effects of the rudder and flaps are so much greater on the immediate orientation of the aircraft.
You raise an important point. Aliteracy is a by product of impersonal, generic instruction focused on the right answer and memorizing. Motivation and managing it is critical and can be taught. Comprehension is a strategic and intentional process involving motive and purpose.
Don, you are quite right. I taught high school junior English for 34 years in a public school, and I noticed when high stakes testing came in--during the early years of the 21st century--and the 9th and 10th grade English classes began to focus almost exclusively on test preparation (writing and reading comprehension strategies to game the test scores), I began to see an epidemic of students who not only were indifferent to writing and reading by the time they got to me, but who were openly hostile toward it.
First time I’ve heard the term “aliterate”—100% the term I’ve been searching for. I am an elementary teacher (Montessori certified)—relating to stories is such a creative, natural, human experience. Let’s keep it that way!
Not enough LOL
And NOT a boomer here.
I went to a private school for the first 8 years and nary a class taught reading comprehension. Instead, from 3rd-4th grade, the teacher pointed to an oversized box in the corner of the classroom chock full of glossy, colorful oversized cards with tabs and said work on the SRA cards.
There were 36? different levels consisting of X cards in those tiers. You read the story, flipped over the card, answered the questions and filled in the circle on a scantron with a #2 pencil.
I did just fine having graduated from college and law school, subsequently.
Reading comprehension isn't taught. It's something you learn on your own when you read and are forced to answer questions about the story.