Educators have made significant progress in the science of reading in recent decades. Teachers know how to get students to the point where they can take on simple declarative sentences. So Johnny and Jane can read — but they have trouble comprehending more complex ideas. There is still much work to do, said experts at an Ed School panel in a webinar on Thursday.
Moderated by Pamela Mason, senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the panel highlighted the need to improve literacy outcomes in light of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — which showed declines in reading scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders.
“If you can’t read words off the page, you’re not going to understand what you read.”
Phil Capin
Assistant professor of education Phil Capin.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Experts discussed the science of reading, an interdisciplinary body of research, based on the Reading Rope concept, which teachers have been using since the 2000s to help children become skilled readers, capable not only of reading words but fully comprehending what they read. According to the reading rope model, many strands are woven into skilled reading, the biggest of which are word recognition and language comprehension.
Educators have succeeded in teaching word-recognition skills, such as phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition, but they are missing the mark in helping children learn language-comprehension skills, such as background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge, said professor of education James Kim. Educators need to use the reading rope model more effectively, he said.
“We know how to help kids climb easy structures,” said Kim. “We know how to help kids read familiar narrative texts like ‘The ants ate the chips at the picnic,’ but where we are struggling is in helping kids use that rope to climb very tall and very difficult structures. And you know what those structures are? They are NAEP scores.”
Phil Capin, assistant professor of education, agreed with Kim that educators could do more to help students develop comprehension skills, which are crucial to critical thinking and problem-solving. There is an array of skills and knowledge that contribute to successful reading comprehension, and they are all intertwined, he said. Early reading instruction and being able to read words are necessary, but they are insufficient for students to understand what they read. Both steps are critical.
“If you can’t read words off the page, you’re not going to understand what you read,” said Capin. “It should also be just as obvious that if you don’t understand what the individual words mean, you’re very unlikely to be able to understand the text.”
Vocabulary and background knowledge are the strongest predictors of reading comprehension, said Capin. Educators can find practice guides on how to help students build language comprehension skills at What Works Clearinghouse, an initiative of the Department of Education, he said.
“We’ve made progress in the science of reading simple text, yes. Now we need to make progress in the science of reading difficult science, math and English language arts text.”
James Kim
Professor of education James Kim.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Research has found that students engaged in active and purposeful reading and collaborative learning tend to achieve the best results. “If we want students to get better at reading and understanding texts, it’s critical that teachers take a step back and allow students the opportunity to engage successfully in reading difficult texts and to make meaning together,” said Capin.
Parents can do their part to help children learn to read and understand what they read, said Kim, by reading aloud more difficult books and teaching them new words. “We have to remember that reading to learn and preparing kids to read to learn can happen from birth, basically from the time the kids are born,” he said.
If anything, the declines in fourth and eighth graders’ reading scores underscore how hard it is for children to gain effective reading comprehension skills, said Kim. As part of the NAEP test, students have to read complex nonfiction texts that require high background knowledge.
“Do you know what we ask kids to read on the NAEP test?” said Kim. “We ask them to read about the U.S. Constitution. We ask them to read about the human body system. We ask them to understand what metamorphosis is, and that is what we have to do next as we think about making progress in the science of reading …
“We’ve made progress in the science of reading simple text, yes. Now we need to make progress in the science of reading difficult science, math and English language arts text.”
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