Neena’s Top Reading Research Picks for July - MetaMetrics Inc.
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Reading Research Recap

Neena’s Top Reading Research Picks for July

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

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.

Happy summer!☀️🏖️😎

Hi all! Happy July! It’s summer vacation woo-hoo!! (unless you have year-round school, like my son does). But, for most people, it is summer vacation so I wanted to cover a different type of paper that does not have direct classroom implications — one on home literacy environment and genetics!! Teachers have very little influence on these variables, but they are fascinating and definitely contribute to reading success!

First, a Recap of Recaps! ✏️📹📚

Before I deep dive into this month’s research, I wanted to do a recap of the Recaps. This is the first full school year with blogs in the video style (vlogs). Since last July we have covered a wide variety of topics: sound walls, decoding, decodable books, fluency, background knowledge, comprehension strategies, and sustained silent reading. We also covered different types of rigorous research with 5 Meta-Analyses (or systematic reviews) and 3 randomized controlled trials or experiments. Here they are linked below and remember there is always the written blog that is packed with tons more useful information than I can cover in the videos!

Judging by the number of views, I think the audience favorite was this one on sound walls. My favorite 😍 is still this Bayesian Network Meta-analysis on Comprehension Strategies.

Ok, onto Genes! 🧬🏡

This fascinating paper examined the interplay between home environment, genes, and phonological awareness on reading skill.

One of my majors in college was biology, but that was nearly 20 years ago (!), and so even I had to brush up on basic bio.

Quick Primer on Biology 

  • In the nucleus of nearly every cell in your body, you have DNA tightly coiled into chromosomes.
  • On these chromosomes, you have stretches of DNA called genes.
  • You get your genes from your parents and random mutations that occur.
  • Different forms of a gene are called alleles and different alleles can lead to different proteins being made, which can lead to differences in development outcomes.
  • But, (and this is a really important “but”!) genes are influenced by the environment and interactions with the environment can turn genes on and off.

Rationale

  • There are about 18 genes associated with reading skill.
  • But, only 8 genes have been replicated 3x or more in studies.
  • And; only 2 genes are on the region that has been most associated with reading skill (and area on chromosome 6, band 2).
  • DCDC2 is one of the genes located in that region that these researchers looked at.
  • And, more specifically; they looked at the version/variant/allele of the DCDC2 gene known as RU-short. It is named that because it contains fewer (shorter) elements of the Regulatory Unit).

Sample & Measures

  • 1,419 African-American & Hispanic-American children aged 8-15
  • They administered saliva tests to get DNA, and, specifically; to check for the RU2-short allele

Results

Their results support the following moderated mediation model picture below:

The relationship between RU2-Short and reading outcomes was mediated by the phonological awareness. And this relationship was moderated by different values of parental education and SES.

You don’t need to worry about what “moderated mediation” means. However, if you are curious, it simply means that phonological awareness influences reading outcomes (it is a mediator), but the amount that phonological awareness influences reading outcomes depends upon the student’s home environment (home environment moderates the interaction between genes and PA).

Another way to put it:

“The strength of the indirect effect between risk genes and reading outcomes is conditional on the value of the home environment factors. When parental education and SES were low, there was a strong relationship between RU2-Short and reading performance.”

Implications

“The finding is important because it suggests that despite a strong relationship between genes and phonological awareness, which in turn affects reading performance, the linkage between genes and phonological awareness is diminished when home environment is positive, and only becomes strong in more stressful environments.”

Limitations

  • This was a cross-sectional study.
  • They only examined one risk variant/allele (RU2-short).
  • Only two demographic groups were represented.
  • Results may not generalize to other countries where parents’ SES does not influence children’s outcomes as much.

Take-Home Message 

  • Genes are not destiny!
  • Genes are continually interacting with the environment and being influenced by the environment — so setting up a good classroom environment is critical!
  • Providing students with explicit, systematic phonics instruction (structured literacy) and other evidence-based practices will help students who enter your classroom even if they have at-risk alleles.

From the paper:

“The findings highlight the importance of phonological processing skill – particularly phonological awareness – as the main factor to explain the connection between genes and reading ability. In the classroom, teachers should continue to target phonics training to enhance reading performance.”

That’s all for this month’s deep dive! I’ll see everyone in August, hopefully with some highlights from the SSSR reading conference in Copenhagen!! 🚲🇩🇰✈️ You can check out the program here.

Additional Research of Interest

Teacher Knowledge, PD

Alphabetics, phonemic awareness, phonics, word-reading

At-risk or struggling readers, Dyslexia

Fluency, Comprehension, Vocabulary

Text Types

Writing

Other

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