Neena’s Top Reading Research Picks for February

Welcome to the Reading Research Recap!

I am Dr. Neena Saha, Vice President of Science of Reading at MetaMetrics and founder and CEO of Elemeno, now a part of MetaMetrics. My focus as an executive is the same as it is as a researcher — to bridge the research-practice gap so that educators can access real-time tools to support reading success. In my role expanding the understanding of research to inform teaching and learning strategies, I put together this monthly compendium of the relevant and must-read research that impacts the reading and learning landscape. I offer research highlights in digestible summary slices. Hopefully, the data and findings you see here are useful to you as researchers, educators, and district and edtech leaders. Email me at nsaha@lexile.com to share what you find insightful, and how we can make this regular installment more useful to you in your work supporting early learning success.

Hi Everyone, before I get to the research summary this month, I have an important announcement:

Lexile® Find a Decodable Book and Lexile® Decodable Passages are now available at the: Lexile® & Quantile® Hub

Ok, onto the research…

This month I covered the paper: Making Too Much of Estimates: Levels, Readability Formulas, and Decodability in Helping Readers Find the “Right Book”.

A Few Key Points from the Paper

Readability formulas are just estimates and should be treated as such.
Free choice of books is important, and so is student interest.
Decodable books should be during instructional time, and not forced upon children during library/media time or at home (unless related to some homework).

But, There Were Some Errors in the Paper

While I agree with the main points listed above, there were some factual errors in the paper. This is a good reminder to be a critical consumer of research (just because an article passes peer-review does not mean it is always correct).

Perhaps the most egregious error is the statement that no children were in the room when Lexile measures were created:

“Readability rankings such as Lexile and ATOS are purely text based, meaning only linguistic features of the books’ words were analyzed. “Readability” is misleading, implying that some average number of readers in a statistical study experienced success with identifying correct words and understanding the text. But there were no children in the room when readability rankings were set.”

Here are two quotes from researchers at MetaMetrics who have knowledge of how the Lexile Framework for Reading was created and were deeply involved in subsequent updates and extensions such as early reading text analysis:

“Students were part of the development of the Lexile Framework for Reading (and every other framework developed by MetaMetrics). The Lexile Framework for Reading was developed by examining the features of text. Then, samples of text were administered to students to determine how difficult each sample text was for students. Finally, a specification equation was developed where the features of the sample texts (the independent variables) were used to predict the student difficulties of the sample texts (the dependent variable). This resulted in the Lexile scale.”

“The formula used by the Lexile Text Analyzer to assign Lexile text measures was developed using thousands of data points from students reading texts and answering vocabulary questions. The final algorithms are the result of examining hundreds of factors that predict student reading comprehension and selecting the final few that best predicted the texts’ difficulty.”

One Last Point About Student Interest

The authors state the following:

“When a commercial system offers casual counsel that people should “consider interest” it feels disingenuous to find the advice buried on a web page, but not built into the reports the system generates for use in instructional decision-making.”

While I can’t speak to the other products they mention, MetaMetrics does incorporate student interest as a key way to search for a book using Lexile® Find a Book on the Lexile & Quantile Hub. There are several categories as well as subcategories to select from. You can also search by book type (fiction, nonfiction) as well as interests (ELL, In a Series, Award Winning).

Teacher Knowledge

“Batting” around Ideas: A Design/Development Study of Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge of Text Difficulty and Text Complexity

Phonics

Fluency

A Synthesis of Reading Prosody: Evaluating Phrasing and Syntax Interventions

Vocabulary

A Comparison of Vocabulary Instruction Using Word Meaning Versus a Combined Sound-Meaning Approach on Outcomes of Vocabulary, Phonemic Awareness and Nonword Reading in 5-6 Year Olds (not yet peer-reviewed)