Dosage: The Essential Missing Component in Science of Reading Conversations

The ‘science of reading’ conversation keeps expanding, and it’s a welcome development. We have moved well beyond foundational skills, into growing discussions of background knowledge, writing, vocabulary, reading strategies, fluency, reading stamina, and more.

Of course, this is daunting for teachers. More essentials equals more things to fit into a school day that isn’t getting any longer.

Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve: literacy advocates rarely talk in terms of dosage: the time, number or lessons, or number of repetitions recommended for success in the average classroom. How much time should be spent on the different aspects of instruction? How much practice is ideal? What’s actually supported by research? When do diminishing returns kick in?

Time is a precious commodity in the school day, yet matters of dosage are practically missing from the discussion. Rarely do advocates make their recommendations in terms of dosage. This treats the literacy block like an accordion file that can continually expand to fit each new thing. Teachers must figure out how to accomplish it all and manage tradeoffs, which is deeply unfair.

When we grapple with dosage, issues come into stark relief. In our experience, 90-minute ELA blocks are common; it’s rare to find schools that give more than 120 minutes to ELA. That’s what teachers are working with. In recent years, more than half of US schools began using Heggerty’s sounds-only phonemic awareness program, as it became almost a fad within the Science of Reading community. We now have conclusive evidence that sounds-only phonemic awareness programs aren’t effective. Yet some continue to use that Heggerty product because it takes “just 10 minutes per day.” Ten minutes may not sound like a lot… but it’s more than 10% of a 90-minute literacy block. Ten minutes per day is around 30 hours per school year. Stated that way, I bet you see the problem more clearly.

In an ideal world, teachers would have clear guideposts on the best use of instructional time. Well-crafted curriculum is intended to serve that role. Curriculum development is an exercise in prioritization, as authors pursue the most instructionally-nutritious use of limited time, with a careful balance across the school year. They craft lessons to serve multiple learning goals, to make the most of precious minutes.

Strong curriculum provides a template for teachers and school leaders. There is no perfect curriculum, so there will be no perfect template, but a quality blueprint is nonetheless a gift to school teams.

Mind you, well-crafted curriculum isn’t the norm in US schools.

The most popular ‘basal’ curricula throw everything but the kitchen sink into their programs, giving teachers far more lesson materials than any teacher could possibly teach in a school year. In doing so, they fall short of providing a clear template, creating usability issues for schools.

Many schools are cobbling together assorted programs as a curriculum. When you walk into elementary classrooms and find Heggerty, Fundations, Units of Study, IReady, and Lexia for intervention, you tend to find a stressed-out teacher who received zero realistic guidance on how to juggle these programs.

If we can bring dosage to the forefront of the conversation, we’ll support teachers more effectively.

To drive home the importance of dosage, we want to look the school day squarely in the face. Where is time going? How much time is going to the ELA block in the average school? If schools want to expand the ELA block, how difficult would it be to find that time?

We looked around for studies on typical school days, and we didn’t find much.

So, we are launching an elementary school day survey, asking teachers to give us a window into school schedules.

Elementary teachers, please take the survey here.

We’ll publish the results in a few weeks’ time, to support straight talk about the very real constraints faced by teachers.

In the meantime, we’d like to applaud the literacy leaders who talk in tangible terms about dosage. When Tim Shanahan pens “How much phonics should I teach,” or when Dan Willingham highlights studies that show diminishing returns for teaching comprehension strategies (with precise numbers of lessons!), and when Natalie Wexler illuminates the point, they bring critical tangibility to the conversation. More of this, please.