Advice: Social media has of late allowed us to see the underside of a tavern bar brawl. Everyone is drunk with power over what they call “important words”. Please, everyone remember drunken brawls are just that. Uninhibited ramblings. Don’t be led by them. Smile, offer to drive them home and leave yourself.
Just a point on inference from a primary (elementary) teacher - it’s a really good example of needing minimal teaching because children grasp it very quickly. I often show a very simple text and ask very simple questions for which the answers are *not in the text*. Lots of engagement and then I ask how they know….they soon realise that we are inferring all the time! Yet it is sometimes portrayed as some higher-order skill which requires hours and hours of practice. In reality, the apparent difficulty of inferring comes because of the complexity of the text.
Yes, even toddlers can make inferences (e.g., if I touch that hot stove again it will hurt me again). The challenge isn't in making inferences per se but in making them in regard to increasingly complex text, often because students lack the vocabulary or familiarity with complex syntax used in those texts.
Years ago, ACT did an interesting study finding that students who met the benchmark for college readiness in reading weren't better at answering particular types of questions (e.g., making inferences). They were better at doing that in complex text. You can find the study here:
I think some of the data you select can appear to be selective and partial. For instance, the sentence about the meta-analyses that "found that one hour of strategy instruction yields the same benefit as 55 hours' is no doubt at the extreme end of claims about instructional time for RCS. The EEF Toolkit meta-analysis is live and regularly updated (here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/reading-comprehension-strategies/technical-appendix) and it indicates that shorter interventions 'of up to 10 weeks' shows a trend of shorter approaches, but that is less perplexing that the 1 > 55 hour claim!
Additionally, the evidence for strategy instruction is more typically at the programmatic level - e.g. 'Reciprocal reading' - and less so for typical classroom practices that attend the reading of complex texts. It is likely that the latter shouldn't be determined by a number of weeks, but by the complexity of the text, and/or the prior reading/background knowledge of the pupils, and so reading comprehension strategy instruction is something deployed intelligently and adaptively by the teacher - akin to careful knowledge building when it comes to topics and reading.
Intuitively, I find that building knowledge is inextricably from developing reading comprehension, but it is not yet clear from programmes how that should be done and the evidence is still nascent and developing. There are many programmes not cited here that show no impact. As such, most claims need to be tentative in nature about knowledge-building curricula...and we need to continue to pursue new and better research studies (often developed with teachers who implement this work).
I find your writing very helpful. By its nature, you have been advocating more instruction with a 'knowledge building' focus, which has often appeared combative towards reading comprehension instruction. We do work and write in an often combative culture where short articles lead to loss of nuance and a heightening of debate. I am glad to see this article clarify it is not 'reading comprehension strategies' *or* knowledge building, but that they are intimately, indeed near inextricably related. Teachers need guidance on how to enact them together, concurrently. I think the more worked examples of this the better, as the concreteness helps fend off ambiguity for busy teachers and leaders.
Natalie, what type of comprehension strategy instruction do you recommend? Something like reciprocal reading, collaborative strategic reasoning, or the key comprehension routine from keys to literacy? Or something else? I think clarifying this would go along way in bridging the divide.
Unfortunately, I can't provide that kind of clear recommendation. I imagine lots of different things CAN work, depending on the implementation and the circumstances. The key, in my view, is for the teacher (and/or the curriculum) to match the strategy to what's appropriate for the content. rather than settling on a particular skill or strategy to teach at the outset and then trying to use a text to teach it.
But I will say that I think summarizing can be very powerful, and there's evidence behind it. But it's got to be more than just telling kids to "find the main idea" and write it as a summary. Many will need to be explicitly guided in how to do that. I think The Writing Revolution method provides one good framework for that.
This is great! A very we’ll consider argument. It is always a powerful move to register the proximity between your perspective and your opposition’s. Argument through neutralization.
Thank you, Natalie, for yet another article on this important topic. You express frustrations that confusion persists, so I'd like to try and offer a few reasons for that confusion. I found the Murray/Laud webinar very interesting and informative and highly recommend it. I also recommend a recent podcast on The Literacy View on the research behind using inference and text structure, Text Structure and Inference Skills: The Latest Instructional Research--a discussion with Marianne Rice, Tiffany Peltier, and Tracee Lambright.
And the question isn’t whether students need to learn how to do things like paraphrasing or summarizing. They do. The question is whether it’s better for them to learn those strategies in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum—once they’ve acquired some familiarity with a topic—or to learn them in the context of unfamiliar, random topics.
I believe there's a third category: teach what's necessary to understand a text in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum EVEN IF THE STUDENTS DON'T HAVE FAMILIARITY WITH A TOPIC. I'm thinking of an animal adaptations unit I taught my third graders where I followed Trina Spencer's recommendation in the webinar: "If we actually teach the patterns of language--the content comes for free. And the patterns of language are what's transportable across content."
Teaching students sentence, paragraph, and whole-text "patterns" gives them the tools they need to analyze complex text. Here's how I explain in chapter 6 (Making Sense of Words We Analyze) in my instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense.
"The next section guides us through integrated and contextualized instruction in reading strategies with the goal of examining global coherence (how the text is put together to make a unified whole) through an understanding of paragraph and text structure and employing techniques to determine what is important within the text. Daniel Willingham says the brain uses three processes to understand a complex text: extracting ideas from individual sentences; stringing together sentences and the concepts they convey to build sequential meaning; and finally, forming an overarching, deeper understanding of the text. It is this extracting, stringing, and forming that we will be examining through the use of reading strategies. It is important to note that the current emphasis on knowledge-building de-emphasizes the use of reading strategies as stand-alone exercises applied to snippets of reading. However, as we shall see, applying reading strategies as an integral part of reading complex text can scaffold reading comprehension by guiding students through textual analysis within and across paragraphs. Teaching students to extract important information as they read has value; assigning isolated exercises in finding the main idea of a decontextualized paragraph does not."
After reading Daniel Willingham's piece in the latest issue of Nomanis, Can Children Be Taught to Comprehend What They Read, I've been thinking about whether there is a difference between "practice" and "practical application" of a strategy. If I teach a strategy and then guide students to apply it in groups, pairs, and individually, does that count as practice, or is it merely a practical application of the process, which can be applied to each subsequent encounter with complex text. I'm no longer teaching the strategy, but the application to text provides ongoing "practice".
I'm reminded of something someone (Robert Pondiscio?) said early on in the pandemic regarding the effect school closures would have on students. "Call it learning loss, missed learning--or a banana. The effect is real". (I'm paraphrasing.)
I want to say: Call it practice, practical application--or a banana. The effect is real. Teaching students to tackle complex text by applying taught strategies is a thing. And this thing matters.
If what you're advocating for is essentially the same as what Laud and Murray were advocating for in their presentation, then I don't think there's that much daylight between us. So again, I find it sad and troubling that some people (though not you) are trying to create mountains out of molehills and make it seem as though there are two warring "camps" here when in fact there are not.
Of course there will be times when students are unfamiliar with a topic, even in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum, and certain kinds of strategy instruction--or teaching the patterns of language--can be useful. I'm not sure that anyone is denying that. I'm certainly not. I've just been arguing against an approach that puts skills and strategies in the foreground, as in "skill of the week," and uses texts on random topics as a means of teaching the skills and strategies. That approach has been dominant for a long time, and still is.
I don't want to rehash everything I said in my post, but I will say that the kind of strategy instruction that you and perhaps others are advocating for can be accomplished effectively, in my opinion, through explicit writing instruction embedded in the content of the curriculum. Writing activities can guide students to learn and apply skills and strategies like finding the main idea (creating a topic sentence, summarizing). Through writing instruction, students can generally learn to make connections between bits of information and develop analytical abilities, and I think that's essentially what "strategies" are all about.
Not all knowledge-building curricula do as effective a job of using writing in that way as they could, but they do at least provide the rich content that can be used for such activities.
Once again, I totally understand your frustration, but what you said about the Fordham brief bears repeating and shows where much continued confusion lies:
"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."
I definitely agree that skill-of-the-week and decontextualized strategy instruction on random passages is a disaster, which is why yours is the book I recommend in my comprehension chapter. I also couldn't agree more with what you say about writing, which should be an integral part of comprehension instruction. Here's how I explain it:
"Just as spelling facilitates word recognition, writing facilitates language comprehension through its reciprocal process of language expression. The relationship between writing and reading comprehension is explained in a report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (See Resources). Note that the report's authors, Steve Graham and Michael Hebert, recommend teaching both the skills for word recognition and the processes for language comprehension that go into reading comprehension by teaching their counterparts in writing, thus reinforcing the reciprocity between reading and writing. Note, too, that the first recommendation is to “have students write about the texts they read,” and they list science and social studies in addition to language arts. We will see in this chapter the crucial importance of knowledge-building."
Integration is the theme of my book, what Nell Duke is calling "instructional simultaneity." My conclusion:
"One thing is certain: teachers are time-strapped and rarely find themselves with too much time on their hands as they attempt to address all the physical, social, emotional, and academic needs of their students. For this reason, the authors of "Feeding Two Birds with One Hand: Instructional Simultaneity in Early Literacy Education'' (See Appendix D) recommend utilizing "instructional simultaneity"—the integration of multiple skills into one lesson. This is what this reading guide has attempted to do: emphasize the importance of integration throughout the literacy block. Practitioners can be stymied by choice overload, and the basal bloat in many programs only complicates our predicament. With everything thrown in—all but the classroom sink—plumbing the depths of these programs to tease out the core concepts and skills that really matter in reading instruction—and then developing routines to teach them—can be both daunting and debilitating. And just too darn time-consuming. But choose we must, so let’s simplify the process through intentional integration of literacy components whenever possible to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness."
"Writing activities can guide students to learn and apply skills and strategies like finding the main idea (creating a topic sentence, summarizing). Through writing instruction, students can generally learn to make connections between bits of information and develop analytical abilities, and I think that's essentially what "strategies" are all about."
Thank you for reposting this article. I agree that what you describe is essentially what strategies are all about. Maybe we need a paradigm shift: ditch the term comprehension strategies and think in terms of 'composing to comprehend.'
I do think we must be mindful of using absolutes with respect to claims about research and pedagogy.
Your comments: "...teaching vocabulary words in isolation doesn't work" and "grammar and syntax need to be taught in a meaningful context... through a knowledge-building curriculum" reach unwarranted conclusions.
Were you to apply these same absolutes to teaching multiplication, students would never get the amount of isolated, rote memory practice they need to master their "9s" to automaticity.
Perhaps I should have said "doesn't work for most students," but there is research to back up those claims.
On grammar instruction in the abstract, for example, I would refer you to this passage from a meta-analysis by Graham & Perin, Writing Next (2007) :
"Grammar instruction in the studies reviewed involved the explicit and systematic teaching of the parts of speech and structure of sentences. The meta-analysis found an effect for this type of instruction for students across the full range of ability, but surprisingly, this effect was negative. This negative effect was small, but it was statistically significant, indicating that traditional grammar instruction is unlikely to help improve the quality of students’ writing. Studies specifically examining the impact of grammar instruction with low-achieving writers also yielded negative results (Anderson, 1997; Saddler & Graham, 2005). Such findings raise serious questions about some educators’ enthusiasm for traditional grammar instruction as a focus of writing instruction for adolescents. However, other instructional methods, such as sentence combining, provide an effective alternative to traditional grammar instruction, as this approach improves students’ writing quality while at the same time enhancing syntactic skills. In addition, a recent study (Fearn & Farnan, 2005) found that teaching students to focus on the function and practical application of grammar within the context of writing (versus teaching grammar as an independent activity) produced strong and positive effects on students’ writing. Overall, the findings on grammar instruction suggest that, although teaching grammar is important, alternative procedures, such as sentence combining, are more effective than traditional approaches for improving the quality of students’ writing."
As has been the case with so many grammar research studies, the "traditional" control groups are red herrings, focusing primarily on terminology and identification.
To my point, students don't need ti connect complex sentence construction to a knowledge-based curriculum. Far better to practice to practice these skills efficiently in isolation and apply them in their own writing. Yes, via expansion and combining. However, content need not be front and center for skill development.
A good isolated worksheet requiring students to manipulate positioning of subordinate clauses, combining simple sentences into complex ones, creating one's own complex sentences with a list of common subordinate conjunctions is applicable and targeted practice.
I'm not opposed to applying explicit grammar instruction to writing in the content areas. It's more a matter of getting more bang for the buck--not that skills instruction and practice must be tied to content.
Natalie, keep up the important mission of educating those in education about what is most effective. As a public school teacher for 34 years, I absolutely have seen the positive results of advocating knowledge-based comprehension as a primary (though not exclusive) strategy for increasing reading ability. And students like it--because children enjoy learning new things! Just like the rest of us!
Hi Natalie - and many thanks for your post - it is much appreciated, like all your posts & research, your discussion is founded on evidence-based research! As someone whose PhD used explicit instruction to teach both conceptual knowledge & strategy instruction (together) 20 years ago - I’m thrilled! My doctoral research results were statistically significant back then & many Australian students have benefited…
My work has stood the test of time - in formal & classroom action research - and I believe it’s made a difference. Thanks again! 👍best always Gail
Thank you for these clarifications. In listening to conversations on this topic, I've been frustrated by the amount of talking past each other and failure to carefully articluate claims and positions. This post is very helpful.
I listened to Meredith and David Liben on the recent Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast. It resonated with me when Meredith talked about how "deadening and dull" it is for kids to focus on these abstract strategies year after year instead of having the knowledge and language of rich texts in the foreground. That was certainly true for my kids in elementary school in their "balanced literacy" classrooms. She calls it a "disastrous state of affairs with reading comprehension strategies".
The work of Margaret McKeown and colleagues on "Concept-Oriented Instruction" (or Questioning the Author) also came up in the conversation with the Libens. This relates somewhat to misconception #1 in your post. What you describe as "bringing in" a strategy or skill without naming it or teaching it *as* a skill or strategy per se seems very different from what the proponents of strategy instruction describe, and I'm guessing different from the strategy instruction that has been studied empirically. It doesn't surprise me that this wouldn't be called "teaching a reading comprehension strategy". The "queries" that are part of the Questioning the Author method are somewhat different, but also not described by McKeown as teaching a "strategy". I think that both could in fact accurately be described as a *rejection* of strategy instruction!
In discussing the McKeown study (which I think you've referenced in previous posts), and related to your misconception #2 about the evidence for strategy instruction, David Liben says in the podcast:
"The better point is that there's research that doesn't address the question of "Are comprehension strategies effective?", but addresses what I think is the *right* question: Is there a method that is *more* effective than comprehension strategies? And that's what that study does and at the very least that should be out there as part of the debate and I don't think it is".
Spoiler alert: Based on the study, the answer to this "right" question is "Yes, there is".
As Meredith says, "Nobody's ever disproved or been able to pick at it, but they just pretend it doesn't exist....It's really good research that the field loves to shun". Why?
I wonder a lot about what research gets done and what doesn't -- and what that means for how much we should rely on research. There might be really effective approaches out there that aren't seen as "evidence-based" simply because, for whatever reason, there are few or no studies on them. The available evidence depends in part on the vagaries of funding, what's fashionable or trendy, etc.
McKeown's study may have rested on an actual rejection of strategy instruction, but I think the approach taken by the knowledge-building curricula is somewhat different. I'm not that familiar with the technique of Questioning the Author, but judging from what was in the study, the questions teachers asked were pretty open-ended, like "What do you think is happening here?" That may work fine for most fiction, but for some kinds of nonfiction I think something more targeted may be needed -- questions that do call for kids to engaged in comparing and contrasting, or explicitly ask them to connect the content to something they've learned previously, or whatever.
Maybe you're right that proponents of strategy instruction wouldn't consider that strategy instruction because it isn't named as such, but it might actually be more effective. There was an interview with McKeown, years ago, about her study, in which she speculated that if kids have to think about a particular strategy or routine and then apply it, that actually interferes with their comprehension because it's an additional cognitive hoop they have to jump through.
Also, as I explained in my most recent post, I do think there's a place for explicit, "named" strategy instruction, albeit also embedded in the content of the curriculum--and that's instruction in writing strategies.
It makes sense to me that focusing on the content would be more effective than adding "a layer of strategic actions" and that is what they found in the study. Maybe all this talk about strategies will spark the interest of a researcher who would like to try and replicate it!
The "open-endeness" of the QtA queries is deceptive. The approach involves the teacher identifying major understandings and potential obstacles in advance (including challenging vocabulary and syntax) and planning for specific stopping points and follow-up queries after the initial ones. Helping students make connections to something they've learned previously and comparing and contrasting would definitely happen when relevant and helpful. I think the method is just as useful for expository text as it is for narrative. It's deeper and more systematic and rigorous than it appears on the surface. If you ever read the book, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
I completely agree that explicitly named, taught, and practiced strategies and routines make sense for writing.
I'm returning to this thread to make a correction: I was confused and thought "Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction" (CORI) was synonymous with "Questioning the Author". It's not. CORI was developed by John Guthrie and is framework meant to increase many things:volume and breadth of reading, motivation, comprehension, etc. through reading sets of conceptually related texts and using a variety of methods.
Questioning the Author is a particular method of discussion-based reading comprehension instruction that helps students with the bottom-up process of making sense of a text. It was developed by Margaret McKeown, Isabel Beck and colleagues and is the method used in the "content" group that was compared to a "strategies" and "basal" group in their 2009 study.
These are two different things but could be used in tandem which I think is what Meredith and David Liben advocate in their recent book and in the new Knowledge Matters podcast season.
I don't mean this to be offensive, but have you considered deferring judgment to qualified professionals on important issues such as those being discussed in this blog? I can't imagine any other fields leaning on people with no experience or qualifications in the field when giving professional advice, delivering practionior focused professional development, and writing practionior focused books.
I support educational reporting by journalists, authors, and bloggers, but there is a line between 'reporting' and 'advising' that has been crossed.
As a multilingual learner and reading intervention teacher at a school who uses Core Knowledge I think it i important to label the reading comprehension strategies you are implying within the knowledge curriculum. Students need to know that they are “summarizing” or “restating” important points from the text. The reality is they have to take state tests that request these very specific standards based strategies and they need to use them with confidence in situations unrelated to their curriculum. I think teachers need to integrate comprehension strategies into text from the curriculum but also use explicit instruction for students to embed these techniques in their long-term memory with the ability to recall them later.
Advice: Social media has of late allowed us to see the underside of a tavern bar brawl. Everyone is drunk with power over what they call “important words”. Please, everyone remember drunken brawls are just that. Uninhibited ramblings. Don’t be led by them. Smile, offer to drive them home and leave yourself.
Just a point on inference from a primary (elementary) teacher - it’s a really good example of needing minimal teaching because children grasp it very quickly. I often show a very simple text and ask very simple questions for which the answers are *not in the text*. Lots of engagement and then I ask how they know….they soon realise that we are inferring all the time! Yet it is sometimes portrayed as some higher-order skill which requires hours and hours of practice. In reality, the apparent difficulty of inferring comes because of the complexity of the text.
Yes, even toddlers can make inferences (e.g., if I touch that hot stove again it will hurt me again). The challenge isn't in making inferences per se but in making them in regard to increasingly complex text, often because students lack the vocabulary or familiarity with complex syntax used in those texts.
Years ago, ACT did an interesting study finding that students who met the benchmark for college readiness in reading weren't better at answering particular types of questions (e.g., making inferences). They were better at doing that in complex text. You can find the study here:
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/reading_summary.pdf
Thank you for this clarification and for making clear that it’s not an either or… It’s both and.
Well said! Thanks for sharing
Here's the link to Sharon Vaughn's webinar Misunderstandings about the Science of Reading.
https://www.corelearn.com/resource-posts/misunderstandings-about-the-science-of-reading/
I think some of the data you select can appear to be selective and partial. For instance, the sentence about the meta-analyses that "found that one hour of strategy instruction yields the same benefit as 55 hours' is no doubt at the extreme end of claims about instructional time for RCS. The EEF Toolkit meta-analysis is live and regularly updated (here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/reading-comprehension-strategies/technical-appendix) and it indicates that shorter interventions 'of up to 10 weeks' shows a trend of shorter approaches, but that is less perplexing that the 1 > 55 hour claim!
Additionally, the evidence for strategy instruction is more typically at the programmatic level - e.g. 'Reciprocal reading' - and less so for typical classroom practices that attend the reading of complex texts. It is likely that the latter shouldn't be determined by a number of weeks, but by the complexity of the text, and/or the prior reading/background knowledge of the pupils, and so reading comprehension strategy instruction is something deployed intelligently and adaptively by the teacher - akin to careful knowledge building when it comes to topics and reading.
Intuitively, I find that building knowledge is inextricably from developing reading comprehension, but it is not yet clear from programmes how that should be done and the evidence is still nascent and developing. There are many programmes not cited here that show no impact. As such, most claims need to be tentative in nature about knowledge-building curricula...and we need to continue to pursue new and better research studies (often developed with teachers who implement this work).
I find your writing very helpful. By its nature, you have been advocating more instruction with a 'knowledge building' focus, which has often appeared combative towards reading comprehension instruction. We do work and write in an often combative culture where short articles lead to loss of nuance and a heightening of debate. I am glad to see this article clarify it is not 'reading comprehension strategies' *or* knowledge building, but that they are intimately, indeed near inextricably related. Teachers need guidance on how to enact them together, concurrently. I think the more worked examples of this the better, as the concreteness helps fend off ambiguity for busy teachers and leaders.
Natalie, what type of comprehension strategy instruction do you recommend? Something like reciprocal reading, collaborative strategic reasoning, or the key comprehension routine from keys to literacy? Or something else? I think clarifying this would go along way in bridging the divide.
Unfortunately, I can't provide that kind of clear recommendation. I imagine lots of different things CAN work, depending on the implementation and the circumstances. The key, in my view, is for the teacher (and/or the curriculum) to match the strategy to what's appropriate for the content. rather than settling on a particular skill or strategy to teach at the outset and then trying to use a text to teach it.
But I will say that I think summarizing can be very powerful, and there's evidence behind it. But it's got to be more than just telling kids to "find the main idea" and write it as a summary. Many will need to be explicitly guided in how to do that. I think The Writing Revolution method provides one good framework for that.
This is great! A very we’ll consider argument. It is always a powerful move to register the proximity between your perspective and your opposition’s. Argument through neutralization.
Thank you, Natalie, for yet another article on this important topic. You express frustrations that confusion persists, so I'd like to try and offer a few reasons for that confusion. I found the Murray/Laud webinar very interesting and informative and highly recommend it. I also recommend a recent podcast on The Literacy View on the research behind using inference and text structure, Text Structure and Inference Skills: The Latest Instructional Research--a discussion with Marianne Rice, Tiffany Peltier, and Tracee Lambright.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-69-text-structure-and-inference-skills-the/id1614519794?i=1000651502855
You write:
And the question isn’t whether students need to learn how to do things like paraphrasing or summarizing. They do. The question is whether it’s better for them to learn those strategies in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum—once they’ve acquired some familiarity with a topic—or to learn them in the context of unfamiliar, random topics.
I believe there's a third category: teach what's necessary to understand a text in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum EVEN IF THE STUDENTS DON'T HAVE FAMILIARITY WITH A TOPIC. I'm thinking of an animal adaptations unit I taught my third graders where I followed Trina Spencer's recommendation in the webinar: "If we actually teach the patterns of language--the content comes for free. And the patterns of language are what's transportable across content."
Teaching students sentence, paragraph, and whole-text "patterns" gives them the tools they need to analyze complex text. Here's how I explain in chapter 6 (Making Sense of Words We Analyze) in my instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense.
"The next section guides us through integrated and contextualized instruction in reading strategies with the goal of examining global coherence (how the text is put together to make a unified whole) through an understanding of paragraph and text structure and employing techniques to determine what is important within the text. Daniel Willingham says the brain uses three processes to understand a complex text: extracting ideas from individual sentences; stringing together sentences and the concepts they convey to build sequential meaning; and finally, forming an overarching, deeper understanding of the text. It is this extracting, stringing, and forming that we will be examining through the use of reading strategies. It is important to note that the current emphasis on knowledge-building de-emphasizes the use of reading strategies as stand-alone exercises applied to snippets of reading. However, as we shall see, applying reading strategies as an integral part of reading complex text can scaffold reading comprehension by guiding students through textual analysis within and across paragraphs. Teaching students to extract important information as they read has value; assigning isolated exercises in finding the main idea of a decontextualized paragraph does not."
After reading Daniel Willingham's piece in the latest issue of Nomanis, Can Children Be Taught to Comprehend What They Read, I've been thinking about whether there is a difference between "practice" and "practical application" of a strategy. If I teach a strategy and then guide students to apply it in groups, pairs, and individually, does that count as practice, or is it merely a practical application of the process, which can be applied to each subsequent encounter with complex text. I'm no longer teaching the strategy, but the application to text provides ongoing "practice".
(https://info.multilit.com/hubfs/NOMANIS-17-JUN24/PDFS/WILLINGHAM-JUN-24.pdf?__hstc=131911440.d7534ea3b35f4d0b20fd75b150ad2fc8.1720452904809.1720893393734.1721065679650.5&__hssc=131911440.1.1721065679650&__hsfp=253062604)
I'm reminded of something someone (Robert Pondiscio?) said early on in the pandemic regarding the effect school closures would have on students. "Call it learning loss, missed learning--or a banana. The effect is real". (I'm paraphrasing.)
I want to say: Call it practice, practical application--or a banana. The effect is real. Teaching students to tackle complex text by applying taught strategies is a thing. And this thing matters.
If what you're advocating for is essentially the same as what Laud and Murray were advocating for in their presentation, then I don't think there's that much daylight between us. So again, I find it sad and troubling that some people (though not you) are trying to create mountains out of molehills and make it seem as though there are two warring "camps" here when in fact there are not.
Of course there will be times when students are unfamiliar with a topic, even in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum, and certain kinds of strategy instruction--or teaching the patterns of language--can be useful. I'm not sure that anyone is denying that. I'm certainly not. I've just been arguing against an approach that puts skills and strategies in the foreground, as in "skill of the week," and uses texts on random topics as a means of teaching the skills and strategies. That approach has been dominant for a long time, and still is.
I don't want to rehash everything I said in my post, but I will say that the kind of strategy instruction that you and perhaps others are advocating for can be accomplished effectively, in my opinion, through explicit writing instruction embedded in the content of the curriculum. Writing activities can guide students to learn and apply skills and strategies like finding the main idea (creating a topic sentence, summarizing). Through writing instruction, students can generally learn to make connections between bits of information and develop analytical abilities, and I think that's essentially what "strategies" are all about.
Not all knowledge-building curricula do as effective a job of using writing in that way as they could, but they do at least provide the rich content that can be used for such activities.
Once again, I totally understand your frustration, but what you said about the Fordham brief bears repeating and shows where much continued confusion lies:
"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."
I definitely agree that skill-of-the-week and decontextualized strategy instruction on random passages is a disaster, which is why yours is the book I recommend in my comprehension chapter. I also couldn't agree more with what you say about writing, which should be an integral part of comprehension instruction. Here's how I explain it:
"Just as spelling facilitates word recognition, writing facilitates language comprehension through its reciprocal process of language expression. The relationship between writing and reading comprehension is explained in a report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (See Resources). Note that the report's authors, Steve Graham and Michael Hebert, recommend teaching both the skills for word recognition and the processes for language comprehension that go into reading comprehension by teaching their counterparts in writing, thus reinforcing the reciprocity between reading and writing. Note, too, that the first recommendation is to “have students write about the texts they read,” and they list science and social studies in addition to language arts. We will see in this chapter the crucial importance of knowledge-building."
Integration is the theme of my book, what Nell Duke is calling "instructional simultaneity." My conclusion:
"One thing is certain: teachers are time-strapped and rarely find themselves with too much time on their hands as they attempt to address all the physical, social, emotional, and academic needs of their students. For this reason, the authors of "Feeding Two Birds with One Hand: Instructional Simultaneity in Early Literacy Education'' (See Appendix D) recommend utilizing "instructional simultaneity"—the integration of multiple skills into one lesson. This is what this reading guide has attempted to do: emphasize the importance of integration throughout the literacy block. Practitioners can be stymied by choice overload, and the basal bloat in many programs only complicates our predicament. With everything thrown in—all but the classroom sink—plumbing the depths of these programs to tease out the core concepts and skills that really matter in reading instruction—and then developing routines to teach them—can be both daunting and debilitating. And just too darn time-consuming. But choose we must, so let’s simplify the process through intentional integration of literacy components whenever possible to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness."
"Writing activities can guide students to learn and apply skills and strategies like finding the main idea (creating a topic sentence, summarizing). Through writing instruction, students can generally learn to make connections between bits of information and develop analytical abilities, and I think that's essentially what "strategies" are all about."
Thank you for reposting this article. I agree that what you describe is essentially what strategies are all about. Maybe we need a paradigm shift: ditch the term comprehension strategies and think in terms of 'composing to comprehend.'
I do think we must be mindful of using absolutes with respect to claims about research and pedagogy.
Your comments: "...teaching vocabulary words in isolation doesn't work" and "grammar and syntax need to be taught in a meaningful context... through a knowledge-building curriculum" reach unwarranted conclusions.
Were you to apply these same absolutes to teaching multiplication, students would never get the amount of isolated, rote memory practice they need to master their "9s" to automaticity.
Perhaps I should have said "doesn't work for most students," but there is research to back up those claims.
On grammar instruction in the abstract, for example, I would refer you to this passage from a meta-analysis by Graham & Perin, Writing Next (2007) :
"Grammar instruction in the studies reviewed involved the explicit and systematic teaching of the parts of speech and structure of sentences. The meta-analysis found an effect for this type of instruction for students across the full range of ability, but surprisingly, this effect was negative. This negative effect was small, but it was statistically significant, indicating that traditional grammar instruction is unlikely to help improve the quality of students’ writing. Studies specifically examining the impact of grammar instruction with low-achieving writers also yielded negative results (Anderson, 1997; Saddler & Graham, 2005). Such findings raise serious questions about some educators’ enthusiasm for traditional grammar instruction as a focus of writing instruction for adolescents. However, other instructional methods, such as sentence combining, provide an effective alternative to traditional grammar instruction, as this approach improves students’ writing quality while at the same time enhancing syntactic skills. In addition, a recent study (Fearn & Farnan, 2005) found that teaching students to focus on the function and practical application of grammar within the context of writing (versus teaching grammar as an independent activity) produced strong and positive effects on students’ writing. Overall, the findings on grammar instruction suggest that, although teaching grammar is important, alternative procedures, such as sentence combining, are more effective than traditional approaches for improving the quality of students’ writing."
As has been the case with so many grammar research studies, the "traditional" control groups are red herrings, focusing primarily on terminology and identification.
To my point, students don't need ti connect complex sentence construction to a knowledge-based curriculum. Far better to practice to practice these skills efficiently in isolation and apply them in their own writing. Yes, via expansion and combining. However, content need not be front and center for skill development.
A good isolated worksheet requiring students to manipulate positioning of subordinate clauses, combining simple sentences into complex ones, creating one's own complex sentences with a list of common subordinate conjunctions is applicable and targeted practice.
I'm not opposed to applying explicit grammar instruction to writing in the content areas. It's more a matter of getting more bang for the buck--not that skills instruction and practice must be tied to content.
Natalie, keep up the important mission of educating those in education about what is most effective. As a public school teacher for 34 years, I absolutely have seen the positive results of advocating knowledge-based comprehension as a primary (though not exclusive) strategy for increasing reading ability. And students like it--because children enjoy learning new things! Just like the rest of us!
Hi Natalie - and many thanks for your post - it is much appreciated, like all your posts & research, your discussion is founded on evidence-based research! As someone whose PhD used explicit instruction to teach both conceptual knowledge & strategy instruction (together) 20 years ago - I’m thrilled! My doctoral research results were statistically significant back then & many Australian students have benefited…
My work has stood the test of time - in formal & classroom action research - and I believe it’s made a difference. Thanks again! 👍best always Gail
Thank you for these clarifications. In listening to conversations on this topic, I've been frustrated by the amount of talking past each other and failure to carefully articluate claims and positions. This post is very helpful.
I listened to Meredith and David Liben on the recent Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast. It resonated with me when Meredith talked about how "deadening and dull" it is for kids to focus on these abstract strategies year after year instead of having the knowledge and language of rich texts in the foreground. That was certainly true for my kids in elementary school in their "balanced literacy" classrooms. She calls it a "disastrous state of affairs with reading comprehension strategies".
The work of Margaret McKeown and colleagues on "Concept-Oriented Instruction" (or Questioning the Author) also came up in the conversation with the Libens. This relates somewhat to misconception #1 in your post. What you describe as "bringing in" a strategy or skill without naming it or teaching it *as* a skill or strategy per se seems very different from what the proponents of strategy instruction describe, and I'm guessing different from the strategy instruction that has been studied empirically. It doesn't surprise me that this wouldn't be called "teaching a reading comprehension strategy". The "queries" that are part of the Questioning the Author method are somewhat different, but also not described by McKeown as teaching a "strategy". I think that both could in fact accurately be described as a *rejection* of strategy instruction!
In discussing the McKeown study (which I think you've referenced in previous posts), and related to your misconception #2 about the evidence for strategy instruction, David Liben says in the podcast:
"The better point is that there's research that doesn't address the question of "Are comprehension strategies effective?", but addresses what I think is the *right* question: Is there a method that is *more* effective than comprehension strategies? And that's what that study does and at the very least that should be out there as part of the debate and I don't think it is".
Spoiler alert: Based on the study, the answer to this "right" question is "Yes, there is".
As Meredith says, "Nobody's ever disproved or been able to pick at it, but they just pretend it doesn't exist....It's really good research that the field loves to shun". Why?
I wonder a lot about what research gets done and what doesn't -- and what that means for how much we should rely on research. There might be really effective approaches out there that aren't seen as "evidence-based" simply because, for whatever reason, there are few or no studies on them. The available evidence depends in part on the vagaries of funding, what's fashionable or trendy, etc.
McKeown's study may have rested on an actual rejection of strategy instruction, but I think the approach taken by the knowledge-building curricula is somewhat different. I'm not that familiar with the technique of Questioning the Author, but judging from what was in the study, the questions teachers asked were pretty open-ended, like "What do you think is happening here?" That may work fine for most fiction, but for some kinds of nonfiction I think something more targeted may be needed -- questions that do call for kids to engaged in comparing and contrasting, or explicitly ask them to connect the content to something they've learned previously, or whatever.
Maybe you're right that proponents of strategy instruction wouldn't consider that strategy instruction because it isn't named as such, but it might actually be more effective. There was an interview with McKeown, years ago, about her study, in which she speculated that if kids have to think about a particular strategy or routine and then apply it, that actually interferes with their comprehension because it's an additional cognitive hoop they have to jump through.
Also, as I explained in my most recent post, I do think there's a place for explicit, "named" strategy instruction, albeit also embedded in the content of the curriculum--and that's instruction in writing strategies.
It makes sense to me that focusing on the content would be more effective than adding "a layer of strategic actions" and that is what they found in the study. Maybe all this talk about strategies will spark the interest of a researcher who would like to try and replicate it!
The "open-endeness" of the QtA queries is deceptive. The approach involves the teacher identifying major understandings and potential obstacles in advance (including challenging vocabulary and syntax) and planning for specific stopping points and follow-up queries after the initial ones. Helping students make connections to something they've learned previously and comparing and contrasting would definitely happen when relevant and helpful. I think the method is just as useful for expository text as it is for narrative. It's deeper and more systematic and rigorous than it appears on the surface. If you ever read the book, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
I completely agree that explicitly named, taught, and practiced strategies and routines make sense for writing.
I'm returning to this thread to make a correction: I was confused and thought "Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction" (CORI) was synonymous with "Questioning the Author". It's not. CORI was developed by John Guthrie and is framework meant to increase many things:volume and breadth of reading, motivation, comprehension, etc. through reading sets of conceptually related texts and using a variety of methods.
Questioning the Author is a particular method of discussion-based reading comprehension instruction that helps students with the bottom-up process of making sense of a text. It was developed by Margaret McKeown, Isabel Beck and colleagues and is the method used in the "content" group that was compared to a "strategies" and "basal" group in their 2009 study.
These are two different things but could be used in tandem which I think is what Meredith and David Liben advocate in their recent book and in the new Knowledge Matters podcast season.
I don't mean this to be offensive, but have you considered deferring judgment to qualified professionals on important issues such as those being discussed in this blog? I can't imagine any other fields leaning on people with no experience or qualifications in the field when giving professional advice, delivering practionior focused professional development, and writing practionior focused books.
I support educational reporting by journalists, authors, and bloggers, but there is a line between 'reporting' and 'advising' that has been crossed.
So is the question: what is more important, learning how to read or learning from what you’ve read….?
As a multilingual learner and reading intervention teacher at a school who uses Core Knowledge I think it i important to label the reading comprehension strategies you are implying within the knowledge curriculum. Students need to know that they are “summarizing” or “restating” important points from the text. The reality is they have to take state tests that request these very specific standards based strategies and they need to use them with confidence in situations unrelated to their curriculum. I think teachers need to integrate comprehension strategies into text from the curriculum but also use explicit instruction for students to embed these techniques in their long-term memory with the ability to recall them later.