Learning science may improve children’s reading comprehension

Education researchers, experts and advocates of the science of reading are increasingly calling for young children to be taught more about the world around them. It is an indirect method of teaching reading comprehension. The theory is that what you understand from what you read depends on whether you can connect it to concepts and topics you already know. Natalie Wexler’s bestselling 2019 book, The Knowledge Gap, champions knowledge-building curriculum, and more schools across the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado We employ these content-packed lesson plans to teach.

Creators of knowledge-building curricula say their lessons are research-based, but in reality, there is little evidence in the classroom that building knowledge first improves future reading comprehension. .

In 2023, researchers at the University of Virginia conducted a study of Colorado charter schools that adopted E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. Children who won the lottery to attend these charter schools had higher reading comprehension scores than students who were not in the lottery. However, it is impossible to determine whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made a difference or whether the reading gains were due to charter schools’ other efforts, such as hiring better teachers and providing adequate training. did.

More importantly, most of the students in these charter schools come from middle-class and upper-middle-class families. And what we really want to know is whether building knowledge in school helps poor children who are less likely to interact with the world through travel, live performances, and other experiences that money can buy.

2024 research shows building background knowledge is important

A new study published online in the peer-reviewed journal Developmental Psychology on February 26, 2024 provides stronger causal evidence that building background knowledge may lead to improved reading performance in low-income children. provided evidence of the relationship.The study was conducted in an unnamed metropolitan school district in North Carolina. Most of the students here are black and Hispanic, and 40% come from low-income families.

In 2019, a group of researchers led by Professor James Kim of the Harvard Graduate School of Education randomly selected 15 of the district’s 30 elementary schools and offered special knowledge-building lessons to first-graders for three years through third grade. I did it. Kim, a reading expert, and other researchers created his two multiyear lesson plans, one for science and one for social studies. Students were also given related books to read over the summer.

The remaining 15 elementary schools in the district continued to teach students as usual, offering some social studies and science instruction but not offering these special classes. Regular reading classes were not included in the experiment. All 30 schools used the same reading curriculum, Expeditionary Learning, which followed scientific reading principles and taught phonics.

[Related: Overhaul reading instruction. KIPP got there first]

A new coronavirus outbreak occurred during the experiment. When schools closed in spring 2020, researchers eliminated social studies units planned for second graders. In 2021, students were still not attending school in person. The researchers decided to revise the science curriculum and offer an online condensed version to all 30 schools instead of just half. Ultimately, the children in her original 15 schools received her one year of social studies classes and her three years of science classes, while in the comparison group she only received one year of science classes. .

Still, the roughly 1,000 students who took extra science and social studies classes in first and second grades outperformed the 1,000 students who took only shortened online science classes in third grade. Reading and math scores on the North Carolina State Test were higher not only in third graders but also in her fourth graders, more than a year after the knowledge-building experiment ended.

Although reading performance did not improve significantly, the effects were significant and long-lasting. Materials and teacher training costs approximately $400 per student.

Combining reading comprehension and curriculum content is powerful

Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study or the development of the science lessons, praised the study. “This study makes it very clear that: [as have a few others recently] “Reading can be combined with social studies and science curricula in powerful ways to improve both literacy and content knowledge,” he said in an email.

Linking background knowledge to reading comprehension is not a new idea. A famous 1987 experiment found that children who were poor readers but knowledgeable about baseball understood passages from books about baseball better than children who were good readers but had little knowledge about baseball. I am.

Obviously, it is unrealistic for schools to try to familiarize students with every topic they may encounter in a book. And researchers are divided about how general knowledge of the world leads to higher reading comprehension.

What is knowledge construction?

Kim believes that there is no need to teach many topics in a knowledge-building curriculum. He says that random facts are not important. He insists on depth, not breadth. He says it’s important to build a series of thoughtful lessons over the years to help students understand how the same patterns can manifest in different ways. He calls these patterns “schemas.” For example, in this experiment, students learned about animal survival in his first grade and the extinction of dinosaurs in his second grade. In third grade, it developed into a more general understanding of how living systems work. By the end of third grade, many students were able to understand how the idea of ​​a functioning system could be applied to an inanimate object, such as a skyscraper.

Allison Shelley/The-Verbatim Agency for EDUimages

First graders are investigating part of a beehive in their bee class.

Kim explained that it’s a pattern that can be analogized to new situations. Once students become familiar with the template, it becomes easier to understand new texts on unfamiliar topics.

Kim and his team also combined science lessons with vocabulary groups that are likely to come back in the future. It’s like pairing food and wine.

It took several years of coordinated instruction for the full benefits of this type of knowledge building to be realized. In the first years, students could transfer their ability to understand sentences from one topic to another only if the topics were very similar. This study shows that as content knowledge deepened, so did the ability to generalize.

[Related: Including young learners in the push for reading reform]

There’s a lot going on here. A spiral curriculum that revisits and builds on themes each year. Teach the underlying patterns explicitly. New vocabulary and progression from simple to complex.

There are various versions of the knowledge-rich curriculum, but it is not intended to expose students to the classical canon. It is still unclear whether all knowledge-building curricula work similarly. Other programs may replace core reading classes with knowledge-building lessons. This had nothing to do with regular reading classes.

The biggest challenge with the approach used in the North Carolina experiment is that it requires schools to adjust instruction across grade levels. That’s difficult. Some teachers may want to continue with their favorite units, such as growing beans, and may resent the idea of ​​throwing out old lesson plans.

Students’ performance in mathematics has also improved.

It’s also worth noting that in this North Carolina experiment, students’ math scores improved just as much as their reading scores. It may seem surprising that literacy interventions can also lead to improvements in mathematics. But math also requires a lot of reading. The state math test had a lot of word problems. Successful efforts to improve reading comprehension are likely to have a positive impact on mathematics, the researchers explained.

[Related: Reading supports abound in schools, but effective math help much harder to find]

School leaders are under tremendous pressure to raise test scores. To do this, they often double the amount of time they spend reading and cut back on science and social studies classes. Studies like this one suggest that these reductions may have been costly and may have further reduced reading comprehension rather than improved it. As researchers discover more about the science of reading, it may turn out that in order for children to become good readers, they need to spend more time on the science itself.

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Jill Barshay writes the Hechinger Report’s weekly “Proof Points” column on education research and data, covering a wide range of topics from early childhood to higher education. Mr. Barshay previously served as the New York bureau chief for public radio’s national business program Marketplace. Her work has been published in Congressional Quarterly, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, and CNN and ABC News.

James Kim’s 2019 Harvard Graduate School of Education study was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of the Hechinger Report’s many funders.

This background article was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.