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.
Integrated Teaching of Reading and Writing
Happy (early) Halloween!!
I love October and have a special segment of the Recap (from France!) but it is only part of the video only. So, be sure to watch the vlog version of this blog on YouTube if you want to see it!
As a teacher, it can be scary to try and teach all the skills that children need in an efficient, research-backed way. That is why this month I chose to cover a new research paper on a Randomized Control Trial of a new program that combines two very important early literacy skills: reading and writing.
Rationale
Researchers know that reading and writing are interrelated, but as a teacher how do you integrate the two in your instruction?
These researchers wanted to see if a new, integrated program called SRSD Plus could enhance both reading and writing skills in an efficient way without overburdening teachers.
Sample
- 248 1st & 2nd graders (across 10 teachers in 4 schools) in the US
- 46% Asian American, 33% Hispanic, 14% White, 5% multiracial
Methods
- The 10 teachers were randomly assigned to SRSD Plus or Business-as-usual (control condition)
- The study took place over 12-14 weeks in the winter and spring with testing done pre and post-intervention on several early literacy measures (most of which were researcher-created)
- The SRSD Plus intervention consisted of 50-60 minute teacher-led instruction, 3 times a week for 12-14 weeks ( a total of 36 sessions)
The Intervention
SRSD
There is a lot of existing research on and evidence for SRSD (e.g., Graham et al., 2018), so I won’t cover it in-depth here. But, briefly, here is what it covers:
“SRSD instruction is characterized by active, discussion-based, differentiated, scaffolded, and explicit learning about the writing process and powerful, validated strategies for writing. SRSD instruction also focuses on the knowledge (e.g., academic and general vocabulary, genre and general writing knowledge, declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge) needed to use these strategies.”
Note that the students in the SRSD Plus intervention received about 25-30 minutes of SRSD instruction (described above) plus the “Plus” component (described next).
SRSD Plus
The “Plus” component of SRSD Plus consisted of 25-30 minutes and added instruction to address: “…reading, spelling, handwriting fluency, vocabulary, and sentence structure and students were guided and instructed to apply their learning of handwriting, spelling, vocabulary, and sentence construction during the SRSD instruction.”
Measures
The researchers assessed students immediately before and after the SRSD Plus intervention on the following measures (grouped into general categories):
- Written Composition (The Essay Composition task from the WIAT-III, Writing Productivity/text length, Writing Quality, Planning)
- Discourse Knowledge was assessed via 10 open-ended questions (e.g., “1) What do good writers do when they write? 2) Why do you think some kids have trouble writing?”)
- Oral language, transcription, and word reading skills (researcher-created measures of Vocabulary, Sentence proficiency, Spelling, Handwriting fluency, and the Test of Word Reading Efficiency-2nd Edition for Word reading)
Results
- The SRSD Plus students performed better than students in the control group on the following measures:
- Writing Productivity
- Writing Quality
- Planning
- Vocabulary
- Sentence Proficiency
- Spelling
- The SRSD Plus students also outperformed the control condition on Discourse Knowledge: (ES = .23) although it did not reach statistical significance at the conventional .05 level (p = .07).
- There were no significant differences between groups on measures of Handwriting Fluency and Word Reading. The researchers believe that there were no effects for word reading or handwriting fluency because the dosage (the amount of instructional time) was not enough.
Limitations
- Next time the researchers should use both proximal (research-created) and more distal (standardized) measures to assess the skills.
- The researchers had to use a flexible approach when assigning teachers to conditions and different structures were implemented across various schools (this is not ideal)
Take-Home Message
Overall, the results showed that SRSD is both effective (students made gains) and efficient (teachers were able to implement it with fidelity).
Here is a quote from the paper:
“These results indicate that teaching reading and writing together along with instruction on multiple skills is effective in improving children’s literacy skills.”“The present study has shown that it is feasible for classroom teachers to implement integrated teaching of reading and writing in classroom settings in Grade 1 and Grade 2.”
And, I also really liked this quote:
“In other words, evidence suggests that when reading instruction fails to capitalize on writing instruction and when writing instruction fails to capitalize on reading instruction, students are being deprived of valuable learning opportunities.”
If you want to read more about integrating reading and writing instruction, you can take a look at this practitioner-friendly open-access article, Enhancing Reading and Writing Skills through Systematically Integrated Instruction.
Ok, that’s all that I have for the research section this month! Check out the YouTube video to see the special Halloween-themed segment that may or may not involve a costume change + some fun facts about the English language that I discovered on my trip to France:)
Teacher & Parent Knowledge, Practices, Beliefs, Curricula
- Implementation Takes Time: Reduction of Literacy Problems in Schools Implementing an Early-Literacy Intervention
- What we have learned about learning to read in a digital age and children’s contemporary reading experiences
- Ongoing Teacher Support for Data-Based Individualization: A Meta-Analysis and Synthesis
- Does the effectiveness of a reading intervention differ dependent on students’ Spanish or English proficiencies?
- Does Teacher Professional Development Improve Student Learning? Evidence from Leading Educators’ Fellowship Model
- “Making Sure the Books Check Every Box”: Preservice Teachers Learning to Select Texts for Reading Instruction
- What Does Research Say About the Science of Reading for K-5 Multilingual Learners? A Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews
- Exploring Predictors of Teachers’ Sustained Use of Data-Based Instruction
- Florida’s 2021 Law Supporting Students with Substantial Reading Deficits: Perspectives of Florida Principals and Reading Coaches in Small, Rural Districts (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Comparison of Public and Private K-3 Teachers’ Knowledge and Instructional Practices of Phonemic Awareness and Phonics (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Administrator Knowledge of Early Reading Instruction (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
Dyslexia, Struggling or At-Risk Readers
- People with dyslexia or dyscalculia are less biased: Results of a preregistered study from over 450,000 people on the implicit association test
- Further exploration of the predictive validity of growth on early reading curriculum-based measures among students at risk for reading difficulties
- Special Educational Needs and Disability tribunals: Dyslexia, scientific validity and equity
- Is Chinese Dyslexia Similar Across Chinese Societies? Evidence from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taipei
- Strategies Used by University Students With Dyslexia: A Narrative Review
- A critique of behavioural vision therapy techniques for children with reading difficulties including dyslexia
- Bridging the Gap in Adult Dyslexia Research: Assessing the Efficacy of a Linguistic Intervention on Literacy Skills
- The Effects of a Morphological Awareness Intervention on Reading and Spelling Ability of Children With Dyslexia
- The Role of Phonological Decoding on the Reading Skills of Beginning Readers With Reading Disabilities in a Highly Transparent Orthography
Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Word-Reading
- Strict phonics beats mixed phonics: Effective teaching improves reading acquisition and reduces social inequalities (Preprint, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Lessons learned from remote, early-literacy instruction
- The Effects of Invented Spelling Instruction on Literacy Achievement and Writing Motivation
- Inadequate Foundational Decoding Skills Constrain Global Literacy Goals for Pupils in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
- The Effectiveness of Music and Movement on the Automaticity of Sight Word Identification in Kindergarten (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- A Study of the Effectiveness of Including Additional Encoding Activities into Daily Instruction to Improve Student Ability to Spell Sight Words (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Examining the effectiveness of a multicomponent reading intervention for 6–7 year olds in the UK: a mixed methods matched pairs crossover trial (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Is the role of set for variability in word reading influenced by conditions leading to partial decoding? (Preprint, unclear if this is peer-reviewed yet)
Fluency
- What do they say? Assessment of oral reading fluency in early primary school children: A scoping review
- Effectiveness of peer-assisted learning strategies on oral reading fluency for students with a learning disability (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- The Effects of a Repeated Reading Intervention on a High School Student’s Oral Reading Fluency (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
Comprehension
- Fair or Foul? Interrogating the Role of Baseball Knowledge in Studies of Knowledge and Comprehension
- The common element of test taking: Reading and responding to questions.
- How parenting styles affect the development of language skills and reading comprehension in primary school students
- The Role of Domain-General, Behavioral, and Reading-Specific Executive Function in Reading Comprehension: Does Context-Specific Executive Function Matter?
- Direct and Indirect Effects of Inhibition, Working Memory and Cognitive Flexibility on Reading Comprehension of Narrative and Expository Texts: Same or Different Effects?
- Dynamic Interaction Between Text Characteristics, Order and Time of Assessment on Bilingual Student Reading Efficiency in Spanish and in English
- Transfer between reading comprehension and word-problem solving among children with learning difficulty in both domains
- Effect of reading attitudes on reading habits and writing tendencies: Structural equation modeling
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