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Reading Research Recap

Neena’s Top Reading Research Picks for April

By Neena Saha, Ph.D., Research Advisor on

Neena's Top Reading Research Picks

Welcome to the Reading Research Recap!

I am Dr. Neena Saha, Research Advisor at MetaMetrics and founder and CEO of Elemeno, now a part of MetaMetrics. My focus is to bridge the research-practice gap so that educators can access real-time tools to support reading success. To expand 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.

Time to Transfer: Long-Term Effects of a Sustained and Spiraled Content Literacy Intervention in the Elementary Grades

Hi all! 😱Aaaaa!! It is getting really hard to choose papers for the deep dive! There seem to be so many good ones out there! I’ve been in touch with 3 different research groups — and I will do my best to cover their papers soon — but this month I just had to bump this paper on Sustained and Spiraled Content Literacy up in the queue!

Why? Well, the TL;DR version is that it was a large (30 schools), rigorous (RCT) study with amazing results for students on the following outcomes:

  • Vocabulary knowledge
  • Grade 3 science reading (ES = .14)
  • Domain-general reading comprehension (ES = .11)

…and as if that weren’t enough, students in the intervention also saw positive transfer to mathematics achievement (ES = .12). And, wait, there’s more! There were even treatment effects 14 months later (!) for reading comprehension (ES = .12) and mathematics achievement (ES = .16).

Background

Rationale

Furthermore, the lead author, James S. Kim, on the paper believes that existing knowledge-building programs are unlikely to result in transfer:

“About half a dozen other knowledge-building curricula are widely available, but Kim felt none of them connected simpler to more complex topics across grade levels in the way most likely to result in measurable transfer.”

— Excerpt from Forbes article, by Natalie Wexler, Senior Contributor

The Forbes article is on the results of the study after 2 years, before they found evidence of far transfer or sustained effects. The new study being reported below answers the question raised in the Forbes article and says, for far transfer effects, it takes about 3 years.

Sample

  • 30 elementary schools (N = 2,870 students) were randomized to a treatment or control condition.

Design

  • In the treatment condition (i.e., full spiral curriculum), students participated in content literacy lessons from Grades 1 to 3 during the school year and wide reading of thematically related informational texts in the summer following Grades 1 and 2.
  • In the control condition (i.e., partial spiral curriculum), students participated in lessons in only Grade 3.

Treatment Group Intervention: The MORE Curriculum

This study used the model of reading engagement (MORE) curriculum, which focuses on:

  • Fostering schema awareness.
  • Gradually introducing complex topics.
  • Developing academic vocabulary networks.
  • Promoting far-transfer.

There is a lot more 🙂  about MORE here.

Shameless Plug: The MORE curriculum had more complex texts as measured by Lexile measures!

“A notable difference between the two conditions was that the read-aloud books used in the MORE intervention consisted of informational texts with significantly higher readability levels as measured in Lexiles…”

Results

In short: It works! The children who received the MORE intervention outperformed control (business-as-usual) students on several outcome measures:

  • Vocabulary knowledge
  • Grade 3 science reading
  • Domain-general reading comprehension*
  • Mathematics achievement*

*the effects were still present 14 months later (!)

Classroom Implications

Sustained and spiraled content literacy programs should be implemented in grades 1-3.

“This experimental study illustrates how sustaining and spiraling science schemas (background knowledge) and vocabulary from Grades 1 to 3 can improve students’ ability to comprehend passages in science, English language arts, and mathematics. Furthermore, findings suggest that systematically building background and vocabulary knowledge can sustain positive gains in elementary-grade students’ reading comprehension ability through the end of Grade 4, 14 months after the conclusion of the intervention activities.”

What Are The Researchers’ Plans to Scale It? 

Given the pretty incredible results, I asked the authors what their plans were to try and scale it up. The short answer: yes, they are working on it:

“…our next project is about taking MORE to a larger scale through an Education Innovation and Research grant funded by DOE (read more here), so we are actively exploring strategies to replicate our work at large scale.”

“…we have some clear plans on how we’d like to scale, and we plan to scale it ourselves, as opposed to the more common approach of consulting for larger educational companies or creating a program and then selling it to a larger company. I think there are lots of examples where that model has failed students.”

Additional Resources on MORE:

Here are some additional resources provided by the paper authors:

Ok, that’s all I have for the deep dive for April! I hope you enjoyed it!!

Additional Research of Interest

Teacher Knowledge, Resources, Practices, and Professional Development

At-risk Readers, Dyslexia

Phonological Awareness, Decoding, Phonics

Oral Reading Fluency

Comprehension, Oral Language

Writing

Other

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