A new study touches every big conversation in literacy.
The study found that struggling third grade readers “could achieve better outcomes with challenging, content-rich texts supported by explicit multisyllabic word instruction,” compared to more traditional intervention, which puts kids in lower-level texts.
The outcomes were inspiring:
“Notably, students with the lowest initial accuracy showed the greatest gains in the challenging text condition, reversing the typical Matthew effect pattern.”
< swoon >
This important study mirrors other studies with similar findings. I collected a number of similar studies1 (and related writing) in my 2019 article on the flaws of the leveled reading group approach:
Unfortunately, the consistent finding—that struggling readers grow most when we help them work with challenging texts—hasn’t made its way into most classrooms. As the authors note, “conventional practices” involve “placing striving readers in simplified texts.”
And when they say “conventional practice,” they’re looking at you, iReady.
The Ed Tech Angle
Our last column explored the shortcomings of iReady for intervention. We noted a fatal flaw in its design:
“If schools are placing students in iReady’s supplemental/intervention products for core reading instruction, they have a big problem: the students who are below grade level will be ‘tracked’ into working with texts below their grade level. Research shows this to be the opposite of what readers need to grow…
Quality curriculum is designed around grade level text work for all students. iReady cannot be considered a good use of ELA instructional time, over this issue alone.”
The new study adds to the pile of evidence challenging iReady for reading intervention.
Still, we should broaden the conversation beyond iReady, because reading intervention programs are consistently designed to put kids in “just-right texts at their level.”
Which points to a limitation of Ed Tech: teachers use various forms of scaffolding in order to help below-benchmark readers work with complex texts. This scaffolding is nuanced, and thus hard for Ed Tech to replicate. In fact, without AI-that’s-as-savvy-as-a-teacher, it’s impossible for Ed Tech to get this scaffolding right. All by itself, that deserves a real conversation.
Every tech-enabled reading intervention should be looked at with this critical lens.
The Curriculum Angle
What’s good for intervention is good for everyday instruction.
The so-called2 “Knowledge-Building Curricula” are designed around grade level text work for all students, and it’s one of their greatest virtues. It can be easy to forget this detail; people get so busy talking about the knowledge-building part that the other virtues (text complexity, work with whole books, connected reading and writing, etc) can get lost.
I’m guilty of this, too. I have written about the curricula fueling gains in Louisiana and Tennessee as “book-rich,” “knowledge-rich,” and “tech-free,” but “designed around appropriately complex text” is a mouthful, and it requires insider knowledge, so I left it out of the headlines myself. Simply-put, we seldom make it the selling point.
So, it bears restating: the strongest elementary reading curricula were already designed around the insights of this research.
In fact, some educators using these programs believe the complex texts are their real secret sauce.
And when you visit schools using these programs, teachers share passionate stories of weaker readers rising to the occasion and showing drastic improvement when challenged.
Does your curriculum get all kids working with challenging texts at their grade level? If not, why not?
The Phonics Angle
We’re having a national conversation about the risk of “over-teaching phonics.” That conversation is important, even if it’s arguably poorly-named. (It’d probably be better to talk about the possibility that some programs are over-complicating phonics instruction.)
At the heart of this conversation lies an important question: are we too slow to introduce students to non-controlled books, and move them beyond a steady diet of decodables, even if they are early in the phonics scope and sequence?
In fact, before anyone ever penned a post about “overteaching phonics,” the question I heard raised most often is whether teachers needed to get kids into non-controlled texts much sooner, and for much more of the ELA block. I’d argue this is the biggest low-hanging fruit.
When we leave kids in decodables, rather than introducing non-controlled texts, we’re doing so out of an implicit belief that students aren’t capable of making swift progress and/or putting some of the language pieces together themselves.
So, while I know the study above isn’t directly relevant to the question of when to introduce non-controlled books, they both touch on the same mindset: a presumption that student progress can only happen in highly-controlled baby steps.
The practice shift starts with a mindset shift.
Please Make the Link Explicit
I’m closing with a reminder that people don’t always make the connections between Research I Should Follow and Shortcomings of Products in K-12. And by people, I especially mean superintendents and district leaders, who don’t live the products each day with students.
Just like students need to be explicitly taught the code, educators need us to make these program-practice links explicit.
It isn’t enough to say, “Don’t stick kids in lower-level books for intervention.”
We need to say, “Read Like Us (the intervention tested in the study) gets struggling readers working with higher-level texts. Check it out.”
And “iReady sticks kids in lower-level books for intervention. Don’t use it.”
And “Wit & Wisdom, Bookworms, Core Knowledge, EL Education, Reading Reconsidered, Fishtank, Guidebooks, Arts and Letters, and ARC Core all expose every student to grade level texts. Consider those options.”
And “Fountas & Pinnell and TCRWP, as well as other Balanced Literacy programs where students do leveled text work for much of the ELA block, fall short on grade level text exposure. They slow the growth of your weaker readers.”
The Curriculum Insight Project was founded on the principle that these linkages need to be explicit, for the field. We can’t leave it to school board members and superintendents to piece these things together.
On that note, we need to connect the over-complicating phonics conversation to curriculum options. Coming soon.
We can’t do it alone. It takes a village to illuminate the curriculum landscape. We hope the educators in the village will keep making these connections explicit, for the good of the field.
Related Reading
I praise this new study specifically because it is echoed in other, similar studies. So, I must suggest the new, viral article on the tragic research landscape: Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?
On point, Jared Cooney Horvath detailed the lack of research for iReady.
Horvath also made a research-rich case that Digital Tests Don’t Require Digital Classrooms.
We don’t have a research base for some of the practices in popular phonics programs, and if you haven’t read The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics, it’s a must.
I do try to keep my most-read posts ‘evergreen’ where possible, and I’ll add this study to that running collection.
There’s a fascinating oral history about how these materials came to be called “knowledge-building” curricula, in the first place. We have the failure at EdReports to thank for it.
The story starts in the Common Core era. Early in the Common Core years (~2013-2016) major publishers notoriously proclaimed their materials to be Common Core-aligned, even when they were very-much-not, causing consternation in the field.
Supporters of the Common Core took two steps to address the publisher bad behavior:
First, they founded EdReports, to review curriculum for alignment to the CCSS.
Also, they gave funding to a number of organizations, mostly nonprofits, to develop new curricula to help schools meet the new, higher standards. By 2016-2019, a new set of vastly-better curricula hit the market. Literacy leaders proclaimed a “curriculum renaissance.” These higher-quality materials earned “all-green” reviews from EdReports. Everything was going to plan.
The term “high-quality instructional materials” or “HQIM” was coined to describe these curriculum. People came to use this term interchangably with “all-green” from EdReports.
Then, around 2019, EdReports began issuing questionable reviews. By 2020, “HQIM” was no longer a good marker of quality. The field needed another way of separating the legitimately-good programs from the weaker programs.
At the time, a Knowledge Matters Campaign was underway, working to raise awareness of the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. The campaign talked about the better curricula as “knowledge-building curricula,” and also put out a list of those programs. Its list was a better guidepost than EdReports.
Literacy leaders (including myself) started using “knowledge-building curriculum” to distinguish between “HQIM” and better stuff. Gradually, the name stuck.
However, other names for the category would have been equally valid. We could have called these programs “book-centered curriculum” or “whole class novel curriculum” or “daily writing curriculum” or “grade-level reading programs” or “Does All The Important Things” curriculum. They’d be equally accurate labels for the category.
In fact, I think they would be better labels, because they are clearer.
To know why “knowledge-building curriculum” is good, one needs to understand the research on the role of content knowledge to comprehension. Most educators don’t know that research very well.
In other words, one needs background knowledge to understand the category name. Speaking as a former Chief Marketing Offer, that’s not ideal.
By the way, I don’t mean to imply that these curricula are perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect curriculum, each has its own shortcomings, and we are witnessing ongoing innovation in the field as providers continue refining materials. The space evolves. I’ve been following trends in districts using these programs, and I notice that increasingly, districts are trading in the foundational skills components of knowledge-building programs for the viral and beloved UFLI materials.
Regardless, even if the materials in this category aren’t perfect, they are head and shoulders above the alternatives. Let’s give teachers the best stuff, and keep refining our advocacy with the continuous improvement in the field.
Another brilliant investigation.
Bill Gates funding and influence was behind the creation of CCS and he is also created edreports, which evaluates “HQCM’s” on usability and connection to CCS, not achievement. There is so much wrong with edtech and expecting students to learn on internet connected devices.
On another note, have you looked into HMH Into Reading? The passages and excerpts forced on kids are awful, it does not inspire reading at all!