What you need to know about the science of reading

In an era of intense politicization of education, there was a rare bipartisan consensus on one issue: the need to overhaul the way children learn to read.

Over the past five years, more than forty states have passed laws aimed at revamping literacy education. And on Wednesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a proposal to require schools to use “scientifically proven” reading curricula by 2025 and invest $10 million to retrain teachers.

The effort sweeping the country is known as the science of the reading movement. Here’s what you need to know about it and where it is located.

What is the science of reading?

There is no single definition of the science of reading. But the key idea is that teaching strategies should align with a wide range of cognitive research on how young children learn to read. That researchcollected over decades, shows that in addition to a broad vocabulary, children also need to understand sounds, or the relationship between letters and the sounds of spoken language.

Although some children seem to pick up reading naturally, research shows that many need explicit, carefully tailored instruction in the letter combinations and spelling patterns that make up the English language. Without explicit instruction, some students—including children who are read to every day in homes full of books—will not become competent and confident readers.

Proponents of the science of reading, including leading brain researchers and parents of children with dyslexia, have worked hard to change education over the past decade.

How is it different from other teaching strategies?

The science of reading represents a major shift for the nation’s school system. For the past two decades, a school of thought known as balanced literacy has dominated how colleges prepared future teachers for the classroom and how those teachers taught.

The scientific roots of balanced literacy lie in the education and English departments of universities. In other departments, brain researchers studied reading with MRI machines. As is common in academia, the two groups rarely shared ideas or collaborated.

Balanced literacy emphasizes the importance of surrounding children with books and allowing them to spend time quietly reading literature that interests them. It contains a number of sounds, but the instruction is less structured. Letter-sound relationships can be introduced as they emerge in stories or through classroom games, rather than in a sequence designed to build foundational skills.

Balanced literacy curricula are often based on teaching strategies that have been discredited, as children learn to guess difficult words by using pictures and the first letter, rather than saying the entire word from start to finish. Educators and researchers have said the technology leaves children ill-prepared to deal with more difficult texts, without illustrations, as they get older.

Critics have also argued that balanced literacy shortchanges vocabulary and knowledge building by giving teachers and students too much freedom in selecting reading materials, rather than guiding them to challenging texts that build knowledge in diverse subjects, such as social studies, sciences and arts.

Three major American leaders of the balanced literacy movement – ​​Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell – have changes to their reading curricula under political and financial pressure from the science of the reading movement.

But they have also warned about what they see as the risks of too much phonics instruction and have pointed out that previous phonics-focused reform efforts, such as the Read first program under President George W. Bush produced limited results.

Does the science of motion reading work?

In some big ways, yes. States are passing laws requiring changes in education, and curricula are being revised to include more foundational phonics and richer reading material. Many schools are also retraining teachers.

Universities are also changing, moving away from balanced literacy theorists and pledging to change the way they prepare future teachers.

New York has been a focal point. Under New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is dyslexic, the nation’s largest school district has required schools to abandon balanced literacy and choose from one of many reading curricula better aligned with cognitive research.

But there are many challenges to the overhaul, some of which could impact whether the efforts achieve an important goal: raising students’ reading test scores.

Teachers not only need to be retrained – an investment of time and money – but also involved in the efforts so that they feel committed to the work. Another major cost is that classroom libraries in many primary schools will need to be replaced, as they contain few books designed to build children’s phonics skills. Outdated curricula need to be replaced.

Through the whole country, initial The research into these efforts has been hopeful, but limited in scope.