The Top 10 Minding the Gap Posts of 2025

NAEP reading scores, a new approach to teaching history, and ... Australia?

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As the year draws to a close, your inbox, like mine, is probably filling up with “top ten post” lists—or sometimes top 11 or even 20 or 25. I hesitate to add to the pile, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Why? It’s interesting for me to see which posts have gotten the most views, and I hope it will interest some of you as well. Maybe you’ll come across a post you missed earlier this year and be moved to click on it, as I have with several of the “top post” lists I’ve read recently.

Also, it’s relatively easy to write one of these posts, and I’m told by no less an authority that the uber-blogger Matt Yglesias that no one reads posts that go up over the holidays. I have a long list of ideas for posts, but I’m loath to invest the effort in putting out a new one now if it’s not going to find readers.¹

But enough throat-clearing. Let’s cut to the chase. The Number One post on Minding the Gap this year was … drum roll:

#1. What Nobody Is Saying About the NAEP Reading Scores

This post got almost twice as many views as its nearest competitor. I suspect the reason was a combination of its being about something that was in the news (dismal scores on the national reading test) and a headline that might be considered clickbait. Maybe people just nibbled at the headline but didn’t take the bait?

Actually, the “engagement rate” for this post, which includes the number of readers who make it all the way to the end, was considerably higher than average—although still a distinct minority.

What those persevering readers found was, in sum, this: Almost across the board, commenters on the distressing decline in NAEP scores—and the single bright spot, Louisiana—linked it to “phonics.” But the NAEP is actually supposed to be a test of reading comprehension.

True, you can’t comprehend a text if you can’t decode the words, but to get a clear picture of the problem, we should measure decoding separately from comprehension. And faithful readers of this Substack won’t be surprised to learn that the post also argues that we have a serious problem with the way we try to teach reading comprehension.

#2. What’s Really Behind the “Southern Surge”?

This post also capitalized on an issue that was in the news—the “Southern Surge” has been called the “education story of the year”—and also arguably had a clickbait title. But again, the engagement rate was above average.

The “Southern Surge” refers to the fact that four Southern states—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee—have seen improvements in their NAEP reading scores at a time of general decline. Many media outlets have lumped all these states together and attributed their relative success to—wait for it—phonics.

But these states aren’t all doing the same thing. Mississippi and Alabama have focused just on phonics, while Tennessee and especially Louisiana have succeeded in getting districts to adopt curricula that also build academic knowledge beginning in the early grades. On its own, effective phonics instruction, while crucial, leads only to short-term gains. Combined with a knowledge-building curriculum in the early grades, it lays the groundwork for success at higher grade levels.

#3. A New Way to Teach History

I was delighted to see this post coming in at #3, and I hope it reflects a surge of interest in history—which is often either not taught at all, especially in elementary school, or else is taught in a way that isn’t engaging or effective. Learning about history is crucial for enabling students to become responsible citizens. There’s also evidence that social studies boosts reading comprehension, especially for students from low-income families.

This post described a framework for teaching history called the Four Question Method and featured interviews with teachers piloting a U.S. history curriculum developed by the creators of the method. The teachers reported that compared to their previous approaches, the new curriculum engaged students more and enabled them to retain and understand more content. (I serve on the advisory board of 4QM Teaching.)

#4. What Do We Mean By “Reading Comprehension Instruction”?

This post focused on a study finding that teachers spend very little time on reading comprehension instruction—less than a quarter of instructional time. But I and others have argued that teachers spend too much time trying to teach comprehension skills like “making inferences,” in the abstract. So who’s right?

The study’s findings actually support many of the points I and others have been making—for example, that elementary teachers spend more time on comprehension, and that teachers ask “generic” questions like “what is the main point” rather than tailoring questions to the text at hand.

Those findings also dovetail with another recent study finding that this often happens even in schools that have adopted curricula designed to guide teachers away from those generic questions—in other words, knowledge-building curricula. I discussed that study in a recent post that didn’t quite make it into the top ten, which you can read here.

#5. Struggles with “Bleak House”

This post was on a study finding that many college English majors were unable to understand the first several paragraphs of the Dickens novel. I noted some amusing tidbits, like the student who thought the phrase “a large advocate with great whiskers” referred to a cat, but the point wasn’t to ridicule these undergraduates. Given the ornate language and the many obscure allusions to 19^th-century British culture, their confusion was understandable.

The larger point is that if we want English majors to read and understand 19^th-century novels, we need to start laying the groundwork before they get to college. Evidence suggests that even in high school, fewer and fewer students are being asked to read such novels—or any books at all. If that’s the case, it’s not surprising that college students opt for Cliff Notes or an AI summary as a substitute for struggling through a challenging text.

#6. Debunking the Leveled Reading Myth

For decades, reading instruction has rested on the assumption that each child has an “instructional” reading level, which they should be restricted to even if it’s well below their grade level. In this review of Timothy Shanahan’s Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, I praised his revelation that the concept of instructional reading level rests on extremely shaky evidence.

I also agreed with his argument that all students should have access to “grade-level” or complex texts, but I expressed disappointment that he omitted a key lever that can enable students to understand such texts: a knowledge-building curriculum.

#7. How Generative AI Can Rot Your Brain

Maybe another clickbait title, but again, engagement was higher than average! Generative AI—ChatGPT and the like—is obviously a hot topic. This post focused on a paper explaining why overreliance on it can result in the atrophy of cognitive abilities.

The paper, co-authored by Barbara Oakley, explains why it’s important to have lots of knowledge stored in long-term memory. It’s called “The Memory Paradox,” a reference to the fact that, as the authors say, “in an age saturated with external information, genuine insight still depends on robust internal knowledge.”

#8. Beyond the Science of Reading

This post explained why I wrote a book, which came out early in 2025, with the same title as the post. One reason is that the term “science of reading” too often gets reduced to “phonics,” when in fact there’s also a lot of science related to reading comprehension. We need to expand the term to include that evidence. More fundamentally, if we want all students to reach their full potential, we need to connect the science of reading to the science of learning, or cognitive science.

When we apply the concept of cognitive load theory to typical literacy instruction, for example, it becomes clear that we’ve been making reading and writing much harder for kids than they need to be. That’s because we’ve been routinely asking them to read and write about subjects they’re not familiar with, overwhelming working memory.

#9. What Makes a School “Good”?

This post was inspired by two articles I’d read. One described the disdain of some affluent parents for test scores as a measure of school quality. The other was about a school in a low-income area of London that, by aligning its methods with cognitive science, has produced results on national tests that rival Eton’s.

Tests can measure school quality, but the ones typically given in the U.S., which don’t relate to content that has actually been taught, can be misleading. As I’ve discussed in another post, the tests in England are fundamentally different in that they’re tied to curriculum content—and they measure a school’s ability to improve its students scores over a period of several years.

#10. Education News from Down Under

I was surprised that a post about what I’d observed during a speaking tour of Australia, which included visits to classrooms, made the top ten. Either Americans are more interested in Australia than I’d anticipated or I have more Australian readers than I realized—or both.

Awareness of cognitive science concepts like retrieval practice seems more widespread in Australia than in the U.S., and those concepts are more likely to be implemented in classrooms. On the other hand, Australia doesn’t yet have the infrastructure of knowledge-building curricula that we have in the U.S., with the result that teachers there bear more of the burden of figuring out how to translate cognitive science into classroom practice.

I also observed, in most of the classrooms I visited, a lack of emphasis on what cognitive scientists call “elaboration”—having students reflect on information they’ve retained and add their own thoughts and observations. Retaining information and being able to retrieve it is vital, but doesn’t education need to go beyond that?

That’s a question I plan to explore in more detail soon—although I may wait until after the holidays in hopes it will reach a wide readership. See you then!

And in the meantime, happy holidays.

1. But maybe some of you, like me, find yourself reading at least as much if not more during the relative languor of the holidays than you usually do. After all, Yglesias’s post—titled “Nobody will read this article”—got 382 views, 290 replies, and 20 restacks, as of this writing, appearing to undercut his claim.