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.
🎃Special October Edition 🎃
Effects of teacher knowledge of early reading on students’ gains in reading foundational skills and comprehension
Video and Research Summary
What does reading/language have to do with magic, sorcery, and spells?
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke
This quote is applicable to the invention of the alphabet (literally!). People thought that writing, and the alphabet in particular, was so incredible, elegant, and powerful, that it could not have originated from humans, but rather had divine/mystical origins. From the beginning, across many alphabetic cultures (and even cultures that had writing systems that were non-alphabetic), magic became associated with writing and letters, spells/spelling, and literacy.
Here’s a little bit more about the interesting link I mentioned in the video version of the Recap about how the word grammar started out as gramma and morphed into the word glamour:
- Gramma: comes from the Greek for “something written” or “a letter of the alphabet”
- Grammar: “grammar” derives from “gramma” and comes to mean “art of letters” but, because only the elite learned and practiced writing letters, it was seen as something magical and even occult-like (many people believed writing came from the Gods, and was not invented by humans given how “advanced” of an idea it was). Therefore, writing and letters took on a magical quality in many cultures (think of how the Runic alphabet is still infused with fortune-telling and magic today).
- Glamour: the /r/ sound came to replace the /l/ sound in Scotland and the word came to mean something enchanting, alluring, like writing- which was associated with spells at that time. Over time, this morphed into enchanting and alluring in the physical sense of the word (i.e. “attractive” or “glamourous”).
Ok, on to the research…
Introduction
- This month I chose a research paper on the link between teacher knowledge and student performance: Effects of teacher knowledge of early reading on students’ gains in reading foundational skills and comprehension.
Background
- Many school districts are investing in teacher training and professional development. While it seems like a logical assumption that more teacher knowledge = better student outcomes, what does the research say on the topic?
Rationale
- Well, the existing research shows mixed results, perhaps because the prior studies had methodological limitations such as small sample sizes that limited the researchers’ ability to find effects (i.e., the study was underpowered). Therefore, this study addressed those limitations by using a large sample.
Method/Design
- Teacher knowledge was assessed using a researcher-created 50-item test of English language knowledge (it consisted of 5 domains: Phonological Sensitivity, Phonemic Awareness, Decoding, Spelling and Morphology). Student performance was measured by the MAP Growth (for primary grades) test in the fall and spring. The study included 9,640 K&1 students in 112 Arkansas classrooms.
Results
- Teacher knowledge reliably predicted (correlation, not causation) student’s spring foundational skills (after controlling for student- and teacher-level variables):
- “This finding provides empirical evidence to support the idea that teachers with a deep understanding of the content students are expected to learn positively influence their students’ reading outcomes.”
- However, the results for comprehension (vs. foundational skills – which was described above) were not significant. The researchers said this was not surprising:
- “The lack of a significant link between teacher knowledge and reading comprehension is not surprising. Our measure of teacher knowledge focused on knowledge of foundational reading skills and not specific knowledge of reading comprehension. Previous studies had found a modest effect of teacher knowledge on reading comprehension (Carlisle et al., 2009). However, Carlisle’s work used a teacher knowledge measure that included scenarios based on reading comprehension instruction, whereas our measure focused on foundational reading skills.”
Take-home Message
- Teacher knowledge is important!
- “These findings provide an empirical basis to support the growing number of legislative mandates focused on bolstering the training provided to teachers that in turn enables all students to learn to read.”
Future Research
- Future research should examine how teacher knowledge relates to effective classroom practice, and what threshold of teacher knowledge is adequate. Also, a valid and reliable measure of teacher knowledge would be useful when designing teacher prep programs and professional development opportunities.
Phonics, Word Reading, Decoding
- Seeing the mouth: the importance of articulatory gestures during phonics training
- The relations of kindergarten early literacy skill trajectories on common progress monitoring measures to subsequent word reading skills for students at risk for reading difficulties.
- Effects of a phonics intervention in a randomized controlled study in Swedish second-grade students at risk of reading difficulties (open access!)
- Effects of Adaptations of a Phonics-based Reading Intervention Program on Reading and Spelling Skills of Students with Intellectual Disability who require Augmentative and Alternative Communication
- Texting and tutoring: Short-term K-3 reading interventions during the pandemic
- Learning to Read: Variability, Continuous Change and Adaptability in Children’s Use of Word-Solving Strategies
- Digital game-based spelling intervention for children with spelling deficits: A randomized controlled trial
- The Impact of Shared Book Reading on Children’s Phonological Awareness Skills: A Meta-analysis
- Teaching Remotely without Being Distant: Implications for Primary Age Students’ Learning of Foundational Reading Skills
- ROAR-CAT: Rapid Online Assessment of Reading ability with Computerized Adaptive Testing (preprint, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Global Variation in Literacy Development (book)
Dyslexia & Struggling Readers
- Dyslexia Data Consortium Repository: A Data Sharing and Delivery Platform for Research (conference paper)
- How do technologies meet the needs of the writer with dyslexia? An examination of functions scaffolding the transcription and proofreading in text production aimed towards researchers and practitioners in education (open access!)
- Auditory Processing and Reading Disability: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- Disentangling dyslexia from typical L2-learning in emergent literacy
- Detecting reading difficulties in Spanish in older elementary students in the context of the Response to Intervention model (open access)
- Conceptions and Misconceptions: What Do School-Based Speech-Language Pathologists Think About Dyslexia?
Fluency
- Multilingual Implications for Reading Prosody Assessment
- Impact of Text Complexity Effects Across Student Reading Skills
- Charting the Path to Equality in Literacy Instruction: A Precision Teaching Project in a Title-1 School
- The Effects of Repeated Reading on Fluency for Students With and at Risk for EBD: An Evidence-Based Review
Vocabulary & Comprehension
- What’s Up With Words? A Systematic Review of Designs, Strategies, and Theories Underlying Vocabulary Research
- Reading comprehension on handheld devices versus on paper: A narrative review and meta-analysis of the medium effect and its moderators
- Teacher Vocabulary Use and Student Language and Literacy Achievement
- A Role of Gender in the Reciprocal Relations Between Intrinsic Reading Motivation and Reading Comprehension
- Investigating the Reading Profiles of Middle School Emergent Bilinguals with Significant Reading Comprehension Difficulties
- Matthew effect in vocabulary and reading: A comparison of good and average readers in Grade 1 to Grade 3
- Meta-strategic Learning of Structure Strategies in Reading Comprehension of Expository Texts
- Dynamic reading in a digital age: new insights on cognition
- What’s format got to do with it? A comparison of three syntactic comprehension measures
Teacher Education, Teacher Perceptions
- Are Observed Classroom Practices Related to Student Language/Literacy Achievement?
- A Rationale for Promoting Cognitive Science in Teacher Education: Deconstructing Prevailing Learning Myths and Advancing Research-Based Practices
- Arkansas K-2 Teachers’ Perceptions of the Science of Reading: A Case Study
- Fourth and Fifth Grade Reading Teachers’ Perceptions of Differentiated Reading Instruction (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Teacher Professional Development and Student Reading Comprehension Outcomes: The Heterogeneity of Responsiveness to Text Structure Instruction in Grade 2
Other
- Effects of a Summer Tutoring Program on Reading Achievement in Grades K-5
- Literacy Measures That Leverage the Strengths of Spanish-Speaking Latino Kindergarteners
- Exploring Literacy Practices of Families Enrolled in the Imagination Library Book Gifting Program
- It’s the talk that counts: a review of how the extra-textual talk of caregivers during shared book reading with young children has been categorized and measured
- The Keys of Keyboard-Based Writing: Student and Classroom-Level Predictors of Keyboard-Based Writing in Early Primary
- “A First Look at Teaching”: The Impact of a Tutorial Program on First-Grade Children and Their Tutors
- Reading intervention research with emergent bilingual students: a meta-analysis
- Literacy and reading behaviors in adolescence
- Book Choice and the Affective Economy of Literacy
- Modeling Item-Level Spelling Variance in Adults: Providing Further Insights into Lexical Quality
- A Model of the Home Literacy Environment and Family Risk of Reading Difficulty in Relation to Children’s Preschool Emergent Literacy
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