The Kim study you mentioned (covid impacted) didn't test a knowledge building ELA curriculum, so we can't really make any conclusions about the knowledge building curriculum on the market as a result. It tested and integrated program using during social studies time.
And it's curriculum (the more curriculum) wasn't set up in a similar way to the knowledge building curriculum on the market and as cited by the KMC. The More curriculum has as much in common with the KMC cited curriculum as it does with basals like magnetic reading and the like.
You're right that the Kim study was not about an ELA curriculum, but it did use a combination of literacy and content-area instruction (actually science, not social studies). That's what knowledge-building ELA curricula do as well, to varying degrees. Other studies have also looked at a combination of literacy and content instruction (see the review of experimental studies in Cabell and Hwang 2020, https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rrq.338), and I think that's the crucial factor here--not the label.
It's true that the MORE curriculum was designed to spiral its knowledge-building in a more intentional way than readily available knowledge-building curricula do, but it still has a lot in common with the latter. If the situation were otherwise, I doubt that the lead researcher in the MORE study would be serving on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Knowledge Matters Campaign (which he is, see here: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/about-us/). It might take longer to see results on standardized measures with the readily available knowledge-building curricula, but the evidence indicates that they will appear eventually (see the Bookworms study).
Comment on SOR and your statement that: "..commentary about the “science of reading,” interpreted to mean “phonics”—despite the fact that the NAEP purports to test reading comprehension, not decoding ability..."
Our Canadian school division has gone whole hog into 'PHONICS IS GOD and thou shalt have no other concepts before thee!' As a Psychologist who experienced the '70s effort to open Teachers/Divisions minds to larger aspects of reading, i find the SOR fanaticism abhorrent.
Good teachers i know say: "Yes its good to know more about phonics and I'd add more to my Balanced Literacy approach..but not throw out context, sight words, background knowledge etc."
Our local school division has made it clear to CTs that CONTEXT IST VERBOTTEN which is such a loss to our students.
You criticize (subtly?) educators equating 'decoding = comprehension' - our educators are being railroaded into believing DECODING = COMPREHENSION. E.g. "DON'T USE GUESSING AS A STRATEGY" when Teachers actually teach "READ ON, ASK SELF IF YOUR PREDICTION FITS BY LOOKING AT THE (depending on student's level - first letter/end/blend) AND ....".
Good reading requires contextual skills. And contrary to SOR's refusal to consider VISUAL MEMORY - "OH MY GOD NEVER NEVER EVER TEACH SIGHT WORDS GACK PUKE RETCH!" - sight words drive increased comprehension and reading speed from at least Grade 4 onwards. (If anyone is interested I'll find the 40 page critique an SOR professor produced where he struggles mightily to use any synonym for sight words he can so that VISUAL MEMORY doesn't need to be recognized as a fact of human learning. The SORers settled on 'unitized' as their code word for the awful-wrong-stupid-disgusting term SIGHT WORD!)
HERE'S A USEFUL COMMENT FROM 2015 RESEARCHERS: " McArthur et al. (2015) found that struggling readers who received mixed phonics and sight-word instruction made just as strong gains in their alphabetic decoding ability as those receiving phonics instruction alone."
Apologies for rambling into (legitimate) anger about the fanaticism of many SORers. It hurts kids and Teachers who need all the tools of competent reading respected. Have a peek at Dr. Sam Bommarito's blog on WE NEED A NEW STORY to tell ourselves that respects all tools. SOR has become in effect a lie, a carefully constructed narratival lie about 'PHONICS IS THE MAGIC ANSWER'. Sad. And so sad intelligent educators are taken in.
Sight reading follows naturally from learning to read based on phonics. It's not something that needs to be practiced separately. Learn to decode with phonics and then practice reading a whole bunch.
Then magically you start sight reading everything.
Note sight reading is actually just decoding REALLY fast.
Work with some kids who are locked into sounding out. Direct instruction in sight words helps. And it is standard practice in successful Teachers' classrooms.
I appreciate the information I get from this blog and I sense your passion for making things right for students.
I agree that prior knowledge, vocabulary and knowledge of syntax are the most significant variables affecting reading comprehension ability. Nevertheless, some people have difficulty making inferences even while listening. Teaching them to make inferences while reading through focusing on the use of selected pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions can improve their reading comprehension and may carry over to their oral language comprehension as well.
This is where the flaws of stressing the importance of "background knowledge" above all other elements of reading begin to show. There is a reason that standardized tests in reading are skills-based and not knowledge-based. It is because we all come to the classroom with different experiences and knowledge. The idea of introducing a national curriculum in reading prioritizes some background knowledge over others.
I agree that activating and growing student knowledge is important, but it gets tricky when curriculum or tests focus on specific "national" knowledge.
Is there any talk of a national curriculum with the new administration? Has there ever been talk of a national curriculum with any administration? If comprehension can only (well maybe not only) occur through better content teaching and then tested statewide or nationally,we’d better align what’s going to be tested.
There has never been talk of a national curriculum, and I doubt the new administration will go that far. They're more likely to try to provide incentives to adopt a particular curriculum. The most recent effort to promulgate national VOLUNTARY history standards went down in flames in the 1990s because of a campaign of political opposition from the right. The right would surely look more kindly on a Trump-proposed curriculum, but there's still a very deeply rooted US tradition of local control over curriculum that I think would give them pause.
But states all have content standards (social studies, science), and they could align their state tests to those. It's not as useful as aligning tests to an actual curriculum, but it's better than a bunch of random topics.
I appreciate your analysis and recommendations and agree completely. As a veteran ESL teacher, decoding without strong instruction in meaning and background knowledge/content is useless for my language learners.
You always get to the heart and dig out the important facts! It is so true that "reading tests" are not all equal. Are they testing decoding, fluency (speed and accuracy of the 'word reading'? Factual and inferential reasoning, vocabulary? What background knowledge is needed for a student to understand the text? I like your idea for the NAEP Test to separate the components of reading because this data will help drive instruction and remediation and help students become skilled readers- the end goal.
That Hechinger Report article had a really unfortunately headline ("The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it") and I think presented an overly negative picture of the research supporting building knowledge as a means to improve reading comprehension. I'm thinking of writing a post about it, but briefly:
First, building knowledge is about a lot more than "teaching facts." But more fundamentally, the study that was the focus of the article lasted only one semester. The researchers had planned for the study to last, I think, 3 years, but it was derailed by Covid.
We have other evidence indicating that it probably takes 3 years or more for the effects of a knowledge-building curriculum to show up on standardized reading comprehension measures. So it would have been really surprising if this study had turned up such evidence. The kids did learn a lot about what they were taught, but it just wasn't enough time for that to translate into the ability to understand vocabulary or texts on topics that they HADN'T been taught.
It's true that there isn't a lot of evidence that specific knowledge-building curricula boost standardized reading test scores (although there's at least one study showing significant positive effects that was not mentioned in the Hechinger Report piece). But we have lots of indirect evidence from cognitive science to support that claim. And we'll probably never have a lot of direct evidence, because it's really expensive and difficult to conduct studies that last three years or more.
Mostly from the Kim studies. But I think a three-year study of the Bookworms curriculum is also relevant. It showed gains compounding over time on a standardized measure, which is what you would expect as students acquire an increasingly greater base of knowledge over the years.
Background knowledge and experiences are critical for reading material that is outside their everyday lives
The Kim study you mentioned (covid impacted) didn't test a knowledge building ELA curriculum, so we can't really make any conclusions about the knowledge building curriculum on the market as a result. It tested and integrated program using during social studies time.
And it's curriculum (the more curriculum) wasn't set up in a similar way to the knowledge building curriculum on the market and as cited by the KMC. The More curriculum has as much in common with the KMC cited curriculum as it does with basals like magnetic reading and the like.
You're right that the Kim study was not about an ELA curriculum, but it did use a combination of literacy and content-area instruction (actually science, not social studies). That's what knowledge-building ELA curricula do as well, to varying degrees. Other studies have also looked at a combination of literacy and content instruction (see the review of experimental studies in Cabell and Hwang 2020, https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rrq.338), and I think that's the crucial factor here--not the label.
It's true that the MORE curriculum was designed to spiral its knowledge-building in a more intentional way than readily available knowledge-building curricula do, but it still has a lot in common with the latter. If the situation were otherwise, I doubt that the lead researcher in the MORE study would be serving on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Knowledge Matters Campaign (which he is, see here: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/about-us/). It might take longer to see results on standardized measures with the readily available knowledge-building curricula, but the evidence indicates that they will appear eventually (see the Bookworms study).
Having specific knowledge in the reading tests will likely lead to an over teaching of those topics.
You can bet that in an effort to raise scores, schools will teach the topics/knowledge in ways that don't align with literacy research.
Comment on SOR and your statement that: "..commentary about the “science of reading,” interpreted to mean “phonics”—despite the fact that the NAEP purports to test reading comprehension, not decoding ability..."
Our Canadian school division has gone whole hog into 'PHONICS IS GOD and thou shalt have no other concepts before thee!' As a Psychologist who experienced the '70s effort to open Teachers/Divisions minds to larger aspects of reading, i find the SOR fanaticism abhorrent.
Good teachers i know say: "Yes its good to know more about phonics and I'd add more to my Balanced Literacy approach..but not throw out context, sight words, background knowledge etc."
Our local school division has made it clear to CTs that CONTEXT IST VERBOTTEN which is such a loss to our students.
You criticize (subtly?) educators equating 'decoding = comprehension' - our educators are being railroaded into believing DECODING = COMPREHENSION. E.g. "DON'T USE GUESSING AS A STRATEGY" when Teachers actually teach "READ ON, ASK SELF IF YOUR PREDICTION FITS BY LOOKING AT THE (depending on student's level - first letter/end/blend) AND ....".
Good reading requires contextual skills. And contrary to SOR's refusal to consider VISUAL MEMORY - "OH MY GOD NEVER NEVER EVER TEACH SIGHT WORDS GACK PUKE RETCH!" - sight words drive increased comprehension and reading speed from at least Grade 4 onwards. (If anyone is interested I'll find the 40 page critique an SOR professor produced where he struggles mightily to use any synonym for sight words he can so that VISUAL MEMORY doesn't need to be recognized as a fact of human learning. The SORers settled on 'unitized' as their code word for the awful-wrong-stupid-disgusting term SIGHT WORD!)
HERE'S A USEFUL COMMENT FROM 2015 RESEARCHERS: " McArthur et al. (2015) found that struggling readers who received mixed phonics and sight-word instruction made just as strong gains in their alphabetic decoding ability as those receiving phonics instruction alone."
Apologies for rambling into (legitimate) anger about the fanaticism of many SORers. It hurts kids and Teachers who need all the tools of competent reading respected. Have a peek at Dr. Sam Bommarito's blog on WE NEED A NEW STORY to tell ourselves that respects all tools. SOR has become in effect a lie, a carefully constructed narratival lie about 'PHONICS IS THE MAGIC ANSWER'. Sad. And so sad intelligent educators are taken in.
https://doctorsam7.blog/
https://doctorsam7.blog/2025/02/08/my-take-on-dr-paul-thomass-idea-that-the-decline-in-naep-reading-scores-shows-it-is-time-for-a-new-story-by-dr-sam-bommarito/
Sight reading follows naturally from learning to read based on phonics. It's not something that needs to be practiced separately. Learn to decode with phonics and then practice reading a whole bunch.
Then magically you start sight reading everything.
Note sight reading is actually just decoding REALLY fast.
Work with some kids who are locked into sounding out. Direct instruction in sight words helps. And it is standard practice in successful Teachers' classrooms.
Really interesting. I appreciate the balanced approach on this one. Lots of helpful pros and cons laid out
I appreciate the information I get from this blog and I sense your passion for making things right for students.
I agree that prior knowledge, vocabulary and knowledge of syntax are the most significant variables affecting reading comprehension ability. Nevertheless, some people have difficulty making inferences even while listening. Teaching them to make inferences while reading through focusing on the use of selected pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions can improve their reading comprehension and may carry over to their oral language comprehension as well.
This is where the flaws of stressing the importance of "background knowledge" above all other elements of reading begin to show. There is a reason that standardized tests in reading are skills-based and not knowledge-based. It is because we all come to the classroom with different experiences and knowledge. The idea of introducing a national curriculum in reading prioritizes some background knowledge over others.
I agree that activating and growing student knowledge is important, but it gets tricky when curriculum or tests focus on specific "national" knowledge.
I have it on good authority that they are also getting rid of the IES and WWC website. So all that research we have will be GONE. Deplorable.
Is there any talk of a national curriculum with the new administration? Has there ever been talk of a national curriculum with any administration? If comprehension can only (well maybe not only) occur through better content teaching and then tested statewide or nationally,we’d better align what’s going to be tested.
There has never been talk of a national curriculum, and I doubt the new administration will go that far. They're more likely to try to provide incentives to adopt a particular curriculum. The most recent effort to promulgate national VOLUNTARY history standards went down in flames in the 1990s because of a campaign of political opposition from the right. The right would surely look more kindly on a Trump-proposed curriculum, but there's still a very deeply rooted US tradition of local control over curriculum that I think would give them pause.
But states all have content standards (social studies, science), and they could align their state tests to those. It's not as useful as aligning tests to an actual curriculum, but it's better than a bunch of random topics.
I appreciate your analysis and recommendations and agree completely. As a veteran ESL teacher, decoding without strong instruction in meaning and background knowledge/content is useless for my language learners.
The NAEP has no meaning for the students either since it has no impact on anything with their education.
You always get to the heart and dig out the important facts! It is so true that "reading tests" are not all equal. Are they testing decoding, fluency (speed and accuracy of the 'word reading'? Factual and inferential reasoning, vocabulary? What background knowledge is needed for a student to understand the text? I like your idea for the NAEP Test to separate the components of reading because this data will help drive instruction and remediation and help students become skilled readers- the end goal.
I appreciated your well reasoned comments which appear to contrast with: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/
That Hechinger Report article had a really unfortunately headline ("The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it") and I think presented an overly negative picture of the research supporting building knowledge as a means to improve reading comprehension. I'm thinking of writing a post about it, but briefly:
First, building knowledge is about a lot more than "teaching facts." But more fundamentally, the study that was the focus of the article lasted only one semester. The researchers had planned for the study to last, I think, 3 years, but it was derailed by Covid.
We have other evidence indicating that it probably takes 3 years or more for the effects of a knowledge-building curriculum to show up on standardized reading comprehension measures. So it would have been really surprising if this study had turned up such evidence. The kids did learn a lot about what they were taught, but it just wasn't enough time for that to translate into the ability to understand vocabulary or texts on topics that they HADN'T been taught.
It's true that there isn't a lot of evidence that specific knowledge-building curricula boost standardized reading test scores (although there's at least one study showing significant positive effects that was not mentioned in the Hechinger Report piece). But we have lots of indirect evidence from cognitive science to support that claim. And we'll probably never have a lot of direct evidence, because it's really expensive and difficult to conduct studies that last three years or more.
Is that evidence from the James Kim studies or other studies?
Mostly from the Kim studies. But I think a three-year study of the Bookworms curriculum is also relevant. It showed gains compounding over time on a standardized measure, which is what you would expect as students acquire an increasingly greater base of knowledge over the years.
The study is here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2023.2284811#d1e1582