EDVIEW360
Hosted by Pam Austin, these discussions will feature dialogues with experienced educators, inspiring thought leaders, social media influencers, and leading education innovators.
EDVIEW360
How We Remember Written Words and Why Some Kids Struggle
Join us for this fascinating discussion with David Kilpatrick, Ph.D., who has spent most of his career studying how we learn to read and the most effective ways to teach literacy. Dr. Kilpatrick explains how, with the right knowledge and tools, teachers can change lives because most word-level reading problems are correctable, and if we start early, preventable.
The discussion will focus on how children learn to read and remember words and why some children struggle. Understanding the nature of word-level reading development and word-level reading problems will guide assessment, instruction, and intervention. Dr. Kilpatrick will emphasize how helping educators establish a knowledge base allows them to implement more effective instructional and intervention practices.
Listeners will learn:
- How students turn unfamiliar words into familiar and instantly accessible written words
- Why some students struggle in remembering written words
- How to help students who struggle in word-level reading
And more!
Narrator:
Welcome to EDVIEW360.
Dr. David Kilpatrick:
My attitude is supporting reading and language comprehension should start the first day kids walk into kindergarten and it ends when those kids are leaving the last day of school in 12th grade and heading off to their bus. So, what's happening all throughout the day is kids learn more vocabulary formally, but also, incidentally. Kids get background knowledge. Kids learn inferencing, but also, incidentally, kids get background knowledge. So all those kinds of skills are being taught all the time. Yes, we do need a formal instruction and reading comprehension, I'm not downplaying that but that is much more thorough and comprehensive throughout the kids' K–12 years. But we also need to systematically get them to the point where they are now self-teaching. That's David Share's whole idea is that our teachers only taught us a limited number of the words we know. The rest we taught ourselves because we could sound them out and we learned those words in context as we read.
Narrator:
You just heard from respected author and researcher Dr. David Kilpatrick, our guest this month on the EDVIEW360 podcast.
Pam Austin:
Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We are so excited to have you with us today for our August literacy conversation. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we're excited to welcome a respected researcher, author, and trailblazing literacy expert who has dedicated his life and career to helping kids learn to read. Dr. David Kilpatrick is with us today and we couldn't be happier. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Kilpatrick before we begin.
Dr. Kilpatrick is professor emeritus of psychology for the State University of New York City at Cortland. He is a New York state-certified school psychologist with 28 years of experience and he has been teaching courses in learning disabilities and educational psychology since 1994. Dr. Kilpatrick is author of the acclaimed book, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties and Equipped for Reading Success. He is also co-editor of a third book, Reading Development and Difficulties Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice. He is well respected for his expertise on phonological awareness, phonics, and orthographic mapping, emphasizing the importance of understanding how these skills support skilled reading. His research and writings are relied upon by thousands around the world. Welcome, Dr. Kilpatrick. Let's get started. Let's start with learning a bit more about you and your dedication to helping kids learn to read. What drew you to the career that you've had so far? Why was literacy calling you as they say?
DK:
Well, my field is actually psychology and I got an undergraduate in psychology and my doctorate in psychology in a school psychology program and when I went out to work in the schools I didn't really get any educational training of any sort. When I started working in the schools I was noticing, well, at the time it was ‘88, OK. 1988 was when I started and the school district I was in had a whole-word approach, not to be confused with whole language, and then they shifted to a whole language approach in the ‘90s and children didn't really get much instruction in the core at all. Very limited. And the only time they would is if they got designated as having a reading disability and went off to the resource room and an IEP. And what we found is our resource teacher. She was phenomenal and she used some really good phonics programs and a lot of the kids … it really took off as a result. However, there was a substantial portion of children who, even with good phonics instruction and then their nonsense word reading scores improved dramatically, they still weren't good readers and they were not good at remembering words. So, what puzzled me in the 1990s was gee, how do we actually remember words? I didn't know and I was asking other teachers, figuring: “Well, I know, right? I mean, my area is psychology, not education.” Come to find out, nobody seemed to know. I had two different administrators, both of whom were important decision-makers. They giggled and they said: “Oh, it's kind of magic.” It's like you know what, that's not good enough. So, by dumb luck, I came across in 1997, 1998, learning about Linnea Ehri’s orthographic mapping theory. Now, it wasn't called that yet. She didn't start using that term until 2014.
But just as a little background, in the summer of 1997, I sat in on a seminar by a guy named Phil Mcinnis who eventually, no relation to Anne McGinnis, the researcher, different spelling, and everything. He was a school psychologist and former president of the New York Association of School Psychologists and every other office they had back in the ‘60s and ‘70s early on. He basically introduced me to the fact that there's this huge enterprise of reading research outside the school psych field. By that point, my thinking was the only people doing any kind of scientific research on reading had to be those in the school psych field because we were so much into a scientific approach. But this other huge enterprise I didn't even know about. Well, at the time I was part-time teaching at the university and had access to that research. So, I tore into it and one of the early things I learned about is Linnea Ehri’s explanation of how we remember words. When I first read it I didn't get it. It is abstract. I know a lot of people, including many researchers. It's not an easy concept to understand and they don't get it. Definitely not the first time through. But once I had my aha moment in the ‘97, ‘98 school year, so we're talking 27 years ago that became my framework for interpreting all kinds of research at a word-level reading.
Now, to further answer your question, the number one referral that I was getting and our team was getting was reading problems, and so obviously that's why I took an interest in it. Like we have to do something about these reading problems. Why is it that the kids have to get an IEP and go off to resource before they start getting good instruction? So, that's really been my motivation. I've sat across the table from over a thousand kids I evaluated when I worked in the school district.
I worked in a school district for 18 years, K–6, and full time, and then part time for 10 years in a middle school and then a high school. And, I've been teaching part time at the university level for about 11 years and then full time for 15 years. Right now, I go by emeritus, which the university conferred on me, which technically means retired, but I'm not really retired. I'm still teaching classes and still doing research, but I no longer have any other faculty responsibilities. So, that's my situation. Oh, one other thing I want to say with your introduction, I'm always a little embarrassed when people introduce me because they make it sound like I'm some sort of high-powered researcher, but I'm more like a cover band, OK. So, in other words, what I've tried to do over the last 27 years is synthesize and present the research, and folks, a lot of folks, have attributed to me a lot of that stuff like, no, I didn't come up with this stuff, and so that's had some interesting ramifications.
PA:
So but, Dave, you brought it forward, which is what's important, right? I'm just listening to you and thinking about noticing something was a problem and only the resource kids were getting the help. And then wondering why and seeking and wanting to know and you say stumbling upon, right? Linnea Ehri’s work with orthographic mapping just by going to a seminar, all of those little breadcrumbs that led you along the way, and your interest in wanting to know but also wanting to share with educators, right? Because we had to do something. We had to make it better for kids. Yeah, I am impressed.
DK:
Yeah, that's right. I mean I had the opportunity. Interestingly, I had never intended. The first book that was mentioned there is in a series for school psychologists and I never had an intention to write a book. I got invited to write after speaking with someone at a conference. I got invited to write a chapter in a book in that same series and the editors of that book were so impressed with this because they weren't familiar with a lot of this stuff and they said: “Hey, I'll be happy to recommend you to the series editor about doing a whole book-length version of it.” And I was like great, so that's really how that unfolded. I wasn't like clamming and clawing and looking for an agent and trying to get published and all that sort of stuff. It more or less fell in my lap.
PA:
Which is wonderful, but you did something with it which we appreciate as educators. In your work that you've done over the years, you've said that most word-level reading problems are preventable. That's wonderful to hear, but what are the key components of prevention if it is preventable, and how early should we begin this instruction? How early should we begin with teaching to make sure that as many kids as we possibly can we can prevent those early reading problems?
DK:
Well, once again you kind of put it back to me and I'm going to go back to my cover. Band concept is we've known in the research literature for an awful long time that there are certain things that if children have those skills that they will succeed in word-level reading. Comprehension is its own separate issue, its own separate area. But we know that knowing letter sounds and developing those fairly quickly within the normal developmental time, as well as being able to access phonemes, those really are the two key skills that kids need to be good at dealing with an alphabetic writing system. And so, when the Reading Panel, when they did their review back in well, they started in ‘97, but the review came out in 2000. They looked at all these experimental studies where they did phonological slash phonemic awareness, and compared it to classes or kids that didn't get that instruction and their finding was very clear that doing phonological awareness, phonological awareness more broadly, would include things like syllable awareness, rhyming, etc. But phoneme awareness, which is the most important aspect of that, is what interacts with greeting. But with younger kids sometimes it's a little more difficult. So, preschool and kindergarten they may do syllable awareness and rhyming etc. But also just a little quick side note: Back at the time when the research was being done that was reviewed by the Reading Panel throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, formal reading instruction did not start until the beginning of first grade. So, when you talk about things like syllable awareness and rhyming etc. in kindergarten, we don't really have that advantage. You know, maybe we need to start pushing that back to preschool, because what happened is our reading scores were so weak.
I think it dawned on people whether this was a good idea or not. I'm not convinced it was a good idea, but that's neither here or there. Well, boy, they're having such a hard time. Maybe if we start them earlier I would suggest that. No, maybe if we started them at the same time but did something more effective, we wouldn't have had that problem. But that's a side note that nobody could ever directly prove one way or the other. So, anyway, the point is the Reading Panel is working under a framework where kindergarten is a time where kids learn letters and sounds that they're not learning to read. So, we have to properly frame those discussions. Anyway, they found that to do phonological and phonemic awareness resulted in better reading and spelling and even reading comprehension, though to a lesser degree than not doing it, and that was their major finding. So, we've known that in the reading literature for a long time that those key elements will result in fewer reading problems. It's not going to eliminate all reading problems, but it's going to reduce the number of struggling readers dramatically.
PA:
Yes, so that we have fewer students who need that intervention. So, taking what we know from the research and really applying it within the instruction, that's the main goal. That's where the prevention comes in, right, Dave?
DK:
Yes. Yeah, that's correct. Here's an analogy that I use often. Is that a basketball? My daughter-in-law disclosed to me, not this past winter, but the winter before, when her, one of her sons, one of my grandsons, started playing basketball in sixth grade and she sat next to me on the bleachers and said I don't know anything about basketball. Well, even if I never said anything or nobody else said anything, she can watch a basketball game and figure out what skills are needed for basketball just by watching. You know: “Hey, look, they're dribbling, they're passing, they're shooting, they're playing defense.
We don't have that advantage for reading because the skills that are required for reading are going on between our ears and all we can see is little samples of that.
All right, and I like to make a distinction between tasks and skills. So, a skill we can't see it. It goes on between our ears. But a task is something we use either to estimate that skill that we can't see or to instruct that skill or have kids practice that skill, right? So, think of like vocabulary. On the language test that speech pathologists give, and even the vocabulary test from the IQ test, we just sample a few items and then estimate someone's language capability, because we can't directly see language capability, we observe certain things and then we make inferences about their level of functioning. So, we have to make that distinction between task and skill, and when we do we realize that the skills we can't see. So, we do different types of tasks. And those tasks, instructionally, are going to be to make sure children learn their letters and sounds and make sure they develop the awareness of the phonemes and spoken language.
PA:
So, the task would be the instruction, and if students have gained fluency in that task, then we're looking at them gaining the skill.
DK:
We're looking at that, we can now infer that they have gained the skill.
PA:
Yeah, exactly OK. So, what does the research tell us about the difference between those students who learn to read quickly and those who struggle with word retention? You know, obtaining that skill?
DK:
I'm going to sound a little bit like a broken record, which maybe to some in your audience don't know what that means, right, because they're younger and they don't remember vinyl records when they would skip and make the same little couple bars of music over and over again. But anyway, I'm going to sound a little like a broken record in that the children who struggle are the children who, first of all, they don't acquire letter, sound knowledge quickly like other kids do. You have children, we've known this for decades, children showing up at the beginning of kindergarten with a kindergarten entry screening and they know 26 uppercase letters, 24 lowercase, and 15 sounds and there's like well over 80% chance those kids are going to go on and do just fine in reading. But then you have kids who show up with nine uppercase, six lowercase, and one sound and it just so happens that one sound lines up with the first sign in their name. Those kids are likely to struggle. And then you do some basic phonological tasks with kids as well, and children who do poorly on that they struggle, they have a much higher likelihood of struggling in reading.
Now, some of that has to do with background.
So, if a child … we know that reading difficulties, particularly word-level reading difficulties, there's a very strong genetic basis for that. So, in principle, if someone came in and they didn't have a lot of letter sound knowledge because the parents didn't read too much and didn't do, you know, letter sound work at home and letters on the refrigerator or whatever, but they do not have what has been sometimes called, starting in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as the phonological core deficit, meaning a weakness in phonological skills, they're likely to catch up pretty quickly. They have the architecture, so to speak, to develop those skills. They just weren't given much opportunity. But some kids can be the flip side. So, some children the parents could do all the right things and the parents might be great readers themselves, but you find out later, you know, had dyslexia and that child might have some phonological issues. And even though the kindergarten screening shows that they look like they're doing pretty good, you may not necessarily see the problem until first or second grade. So, our screenings are pretty good but they're far from perfect.
PA:
Right. So, definitely being attentive to individual students' needs, but going in at the get-go and providing what the research says all students need. Some kids, just maybe a little bit more. Am I right in saying that, Dave?
DK:
Well, I'd say very roughly, because this all falls on a continuum. So, I'm going to say it in a non-continuous way, but you'll get the gist. Some kids don't need much of it at all and some kids do need a little bit more, but some kids need a lot more and we need to make that kind of distinction. And I'm a big fan of universal screeners, even though I'd love to tidy up some of the details but I'm a big fan of those, especially when they're given at least three times a year in kindergarten and first grade, because then you're going to catch that student who came in and looked like they were going to be a star reader and by the end of kindergarten, hey, now they're kind of middle of the pack, and then you screen them by mid first grade and go: “I think we’ve got a problem here, right?” But you wouldn't know that if you didn't have such screening tools.
PA:
All right, now let's take a moment. I'd like to take a step back. You mentioned what happens between a student's ears, where we can't see right. So, I want to think about the big picture. How do the major brain regions, we talk about the brain and what's happening with the brain, and we have those MRI scans that you mentioned before, what's happening in the frontal lobe and the temporal lobe and how they're working together to support that learning and memory. Is memory a key as well?
DK:
Sure, I'd be happy to kind of give you a brief summary. What you might find interesting is my dissertation was actually in the neuropsychology of learning disabilities and all the kids in my study were actually kids with reading disabilities. But that has not played a huge role in how I've approached things since then. And here's why. One of the things we have to be aware of and this is something many neuroscientists talk about, many reading researchers talk about, but somehow doesn't necessarily trickle down to educators quite so well. But we have to think about different levels of explanation. So, for example, somebody could say why is that water boiling? Well, on one level, you could talk about how the molecules are moving really quickly and as a result of friction, it's heated up. On another level, you could say it's boiling because it's on the stove. And a third level, you could say it's boiling because I want some heat. All three of those are 100 percent accurate descriptions or representations of why, answering the question of why, the philosophy of science. I don't want you to think I'm being clever about that. Just two days ago, I watched, I didn't finish the whole thing, but I watched a video where, as of about five years ago, some physicists have figured out the physics behind a spiral of a football an American football and on that little video that they had, they invited Tom Brady. And what was interesting is that this was all news to Tom Brady. And yet Tom Brady if you don't know who he is, he's probably the greatest, if not one of the greatest, football quarterbacks of all time, and he was not aware of the physics behind the spirals that he threw, and yet he was still very effective. So, you can be pretty good at getting yourself tea by just knowing you want tea and by putting it on the stove without knowing anything about how molecules move. Are you with me on that? So, we have to understand that the neuroscience is at a level that is a step removed from any kind of educational application. There was a very fascinating study in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2015.
And just to back up and partly answer more directly, answer your question, when we see words that we're familiar with, we see activation way down in the lower part of the left side of our brain, kind of between the occipital region, which is in the very back of the brain, in the temporal region which is just sort of in front of that kind of back behind our ear, and that area is the left fusiform gyrus, if you want to be fancy. Now, what they did, unfortunately, is early on it got called the visual word-form area. When it turns out, reading is not about visual forms anyway, but we're kind of stuck with an inadequate term. Well, when we see a nonsense word, right? A pronounceable noun word like blat or prep, we see activation much higher up in the temporal lobes. Well, what these scientists did is they trained some college students. They showed them a whole bunch of nonsense words where they saw that activation much higher up in the temporal area, and after they saw one half of the words they trained the students on, they exposed them many times and they became familiar, so that the ones that they were taught now were being activated in the left fusiform gyrus as if they were familiar words, even though that wasn't a meaning attached, and the ones that were in the half that hadn't been trained, that they were seeing, or the fresh new batch of nonsense words like before, they're activating much higher up in the temporal area.
So, what these authors showed is what we already knew. We knew about those activation errors, but we never had a study that connected them as a result of learning. So, it was really a really cool move forward. But here's the problem: These authors did not respect this issue of levels of explanation and so in their conclusion, without citing any research, they made the recommendation that well, some kids that have phonological issues maybe we can just teach them the words visually, remember them as visual holes. Well, unbeknownst to those authors and obviously the reviewers of that article and the editors of that journal that let that slip through, we have tons of studies to show that doesn't work right. So, they were trying to jump from brain scan to educational application and it failed miserably. I don't want to take away from their study because it was brilliant and it was a great finding in terms of understanding the neuroscience behind reading, but you can't jump from that to an educational application.
PA:
So, understanding the research and its implications for instruction. Let me ask you this, would you say that a, and I'm just kind of paraphrasing what you say and pulling that together just to give you an answer just for some affirmation more than anything else, would you say that a deep understanding of neural brain science is not essential for providing effective instruction?
DK:
Well, this is not a great analogy, but it's an analogy. Every analogy breaks down, right? But Tom Brady did not need to know the physics of spirals to do all the things he did for all those years, right? So, let me tell you the value. It has many values. OK, you have to realize that the neuroscience research isn't just about reading. They're dipping into the reading area, of course. They're covering things like autism, alcoholism, schizophrenia, addictions, all sorts of things are being investigated and it's just an amazing enterprise that's going on. So, I don't want to downplay its value, but let me tell you something that's semi-practical, probably maybe more than semi-practical, at least for reading researchers is that type of research can help support, or not support, a cognitive explanation.
Now, when I say cognitive, I'm talking about our perception, our memory, our retrieval, that type of thing. And isn't that what reading is about, right? We see, we perceive, and we remember. We retrieve words as we see them. So, here's a value. One of the things that this brain research, if you want to call it that, neuroscience research has shown is we see activation in the very back of the frontal lobes, in the speech centers, even when skilled readers are reading silently. Hmm, interestingly, so we have some phonology going on, even with highly, highly trained readers that have been reading for a long time, and we see other areas of phonology activating throughout the learning process as well. So, what the neuroscience has been able to show is that, hey, phonology is really important when it comes to reading. What we don't see are the activation of our visual memory.
What people don't realize is that probably the biggest findings of the reading research came in the 1970s and ‘80s. Frank Vellutino in his 1979 book on dyslexia said he started the decade assuming that we remember words based on visual memory. He ended the decade saying no, visual memory does not play much of a role at all, and that was one of the biggest steps forward. Then, the next one that kind of followed into the ‘70s, into the ‘80s, was the finding that kids with dyslexia, kids with poor reading, had phonological issues. They didn't have visual memory issues. They threw every kind of visual task at these kids, and visual memory tasks they did fine. They're no different than the general population.
So, anyway, one of the values of the neuroscience has been to verify that when we see a lot of visual activation, the visual centers, like in the right parietal area, etc. is in kids with dyslexia who are trying to compensate. So, the areas of the brain that are more efficiently processing reading are not working like they should be, so they're trying to look somewhere else, somewhere else in the brain, to figure out how to read. So, the whole-language approach and the whole-word approach kind of got a thumbs down from the neuroscience, but the phonics approach and orthographic mapping more or less got a thumbs up, and so one of the values is that kind of research can help support or not support an explanation at the cognitive level.
PA:
Awesome, thank you. Some things I'm pulling from what you're saying, Dave. It's that understanding of those various levels and there's a multilayered approach here, and really we're thinking about application. How do teachers apply what they've learned from the research so they don't have to be neuroscientists themselves, they don't have to dive into learning all aspects of the research, just interpreting what students need and bringing that into their classrooms? That instruction, that changes, is going to be most impactful, would you say? That's what we're looking at.
DK:
Yeah, again, I don't want to beat my analogy to death here, but would you rather learn from a physicist about how a spiral works, or would you rather learn from Tom Brady about the actual mechanics of throwing a football, right? So, the latter would be more like the cognitive theory, like we have. Cognitive theories such as the Simple View of Reading is a cognitive theory. It's talking about things we can't see the skills behind word level reading, the skills behind language. Well, if you take the word-reading side, orthographic mapping explains the skills we need and then results in us understanding the skills needed for teaching kids. So, I think that's what teachers need to do most.
I am not against people looking at the neuroscience. I think it's absolutely fascinating. I just think there's a danger in assuming number one that you need to know that and teachers shouldn't get all angsty if they realize: “Oh, I don't know that much about the brain.” Well, Tom Brady didn't even know about spirals until he retired. So, the point is, that's great stuff and it's part of a much broader picture of neuroscientific research into the brain, but it isn't essential. But a good cognitive theory is essential for us to know what are the skills the cognitive theory tells us about the dribbling, the passing, the shooting, and the playing, the defense, and we need that for reading.
PA:
All right, excellent. You know teachers are going to breathe a sigh of relief, understanding that they don't have to go that deeply into it. What's most important, probably, is having an effective master teacher who applies that cognitive theory to help dive into improving that skill. It's a craft right, isn't it?
DK:
I've always felt that way. Yeah absolutely.
PA:
All right. So, right now, educators are feeling overwhelmed, Dave, right? By the shifting evidence-aligned practices. What's the best place for them to start? You kind of alluded to that, but can you elaborate just a little bit more?
DK:
Well, once again, we have to ask the question I was asking in the ‘90s: How do we remember words? And, as it turns out, we have an explanation that is so well supported in the research literature, both in terms of direct studies and indirect studies, and that is Linnea Ehri’s explanation of how we remember words. Now, she's used different names over the years. It's only been since 2014. She used orthographic mapping. Her earlier study I just read a couple of weeks ago. I read it years ago, but I read it again a couple of weeks ago, a study that she did in 1979, Journal of Educational Psychology. I felt like I couldn't believe what I'm reading. It's like this is so current, right? So, she's portrayed that in the same, but she didn't call it orthographic mapping, she called it, she used a chemistry term amalgamation. She called it the amalgamation theory, where you're amalgamating the individual phonemes that make up the pronunciation of the spoken word with that series of letters and you're amalgamating that to the word's meaning. So, all three are bundled together and treated like as a single unit. So, when we understand that, we realize we need to work on all three of those, and that's an important starting point.
Now, the way I look at it. What's happening and I'm not trying to be critical or whatever, but it seems to me so much focuses on phonics. Now, there's a good aspect to that, because show me a child from third grade on who has never taught phonics, that can't read nonsense words. If they're a skilled reader from third grade on, and you were never taught phonics, you can read nonsense words. Oh, you put blatant prep in front of those kids. They don't look at you and go: “There's no context. I can't guess at it. I've never seen it before. I can't call it from memory.” They say blatant prep, what does that mean? That means that they learn phonics. You need to be able to use phonics skills in any alphabetic writing system, all right. So, I'm not downplaying phonics. It's essential.
My big question is if every kid needs it, why don't we teach it? Now, not every kid needs as much drumming. Kids with phonics skills in first and second grade who already have them. That's just not very productive, right? But we have a lot of kids that don't figure out all that stuff on their own, those third-graders who were never taught phonics. They figured out the phonics on their own, but kids with phonological issues do not, and so they need that attention.
My angle on phonics is the most useful and effective way to identify a word you haven't seen before, so that you can map it into permanent memory and you don't need to sound it out thereafter, after just a very few exposures. So, rather than an end in itself I know nobody teaching phonics thinks it's an end in itself, but instructionally it kind of becomes an end in itself. So, somehow people are trying to jump from good phonics skills to fluency and in between that, Joseph Torgesen, who was a very well-known NICHD researcher who retired back in the late ‘90s, 2000, I think around 2006 or 2007. Anyway, he proposed the idea after the Reading Panel that fluency is basically I mean, it has a lot of factors connected to it OK, but the biggest factor is how many words do you already know in that passage ahead of time that are going to jump out at you instantly and effortlessly?
So, if you have a large site vocabulary or researchers call it an orthographic lexicon, I refer to it as both and sometimes I just say our databank of familiar words. So, if you have a large database of familiar words, you move through text quickly and accurately. If you have a more limited databank of familiar words, you move through text much more slowly, excuse me, and laboriously.
So, if well, how do you get to have a large orthographic lexicon? Well, you need two things. Number one you need a wide exposure to a lot of words, because words don't go into our long-term memory unless we've seen them. And then you have to be good at orthographic mapping, so you have to be efficient at getting those words into long-term memory. So, phonics is what sets us up so that we can now map a word rather than an end in itself. I mean, it is an end in itself in a given situation. So, you're coming across the word in a paragraph, you're trying to understand. You read the word. Phonics lets you get it and that provides you with some success right then and there. But phonics is not what's providing the success long term, because now you need to map that word so you don't have to sound it out again.
PA:
All right. So, first step forward phonics leading up to orthographic mapping supports fluency and that fluency is going to help support the comprehension, right?
DK:
You're exactly right. I mean, that's a nice, neat, and tidy diagram, so to speak. There's more complications to that, obviously, but that's it in a rough sense.
PA:
Yeah, so we can say with the right tools and knowledge, teachers can change lives. Would you say that everything that you've listed so far, Dave? Would those be the instructional tools?
DK:
Yeah, I think all of that needs to be explicitly taught and modeled and practiced and learned all those key elements, along with the semantic, morphological, and things related to comprehension. My attitude is supporting reading and language. Comprehension should start the first day kids walk into kindergarten and it ends when those kids are leaving the last day of school in 12th grade and heading off to their bus. So, it's happening all throughout the day as kids learn more vocabulary formally, but also, incidentally, kids get background knowledge, kids learn inferencing, so all those kinds of skills are being taught all the time. Yes, we do need a formal instruction and reading comprehension I'm not downplaying that but that is much more thorough and comprehensive throughout the kid's K–12 years. But we also need to systematically get them to the point where they are now self-teaching. That's David Share's whole idea is that our teachers only taught us a limited number of the words we know. The rest we taught ourselves because we could sound them out and we learned those words in context as we read.
PA:
Yeah, all right, and you've gained a skill. You gained a skill and then you could apply the skill. And going back to application, application, application, right? When we think about schools and districts … How can districts support teachers in making that shift to more effective intervention strategies but more effective instruction in Tier one to begin with, in both areas?
DK:
Well, I think it's important for administrators not just teachers but administrators to become aware of the most important findings and research as well, and they can be the ones who are guiding and directing that. I had the fortunate opportunity, I mentioned Phil Mcinnis, who became my mentor. He had a program which it may sound like I'm promoting it here. It hasn't been around for over 20 years now, unfortunately. I hate to say it in such a crude way, but it kind of died with him. But he was pulling stuff from the research and putting it together to have this amazing program. But his related to reading, writing, and math and I remember traveling with him his last few years for summer workshops and the kind of results he was getting were just amazing.
I'd run into an administrator and they'd say: “Oh, you're helping him with the program. Hey, look at what our scores were before and look at what they are now.” And these administrators where he had the best results were in schools where the administrator said this isn't just some other workshop that you're doing and you may or may not apply. This is what we're doing, these are the skills we are going to be working on, and I know there are teachers that will push back when an administrator tells them how to do their job. I understand that and I appreciate that I work at a university. I know especially what's going on in the public domain right now. We like our academic freedom and so, and teachers similarly. But the idea is we can't have teachers teaching things that we know from research just are not going to help that bottom end of the distribution and they need to be doing the things that we know work.
PA:
So, the administrators who are savvy with the research and are instructional leaders are what we're looking for. They are impactful. From your experience, right, Dave?
DK:
Yes, and I have, and I'm very happy about the fact I've met numerous administrators who have really taken the lead themselves. I run into them already and they're like: “Wow, they know this stuff.”
PA:
I'm so excited to hear that. Finally, one more thing I want to know what gives you hope about the direction literacy is taking right now in education.
DK:
I think what gives me hope is the fact that so many teachers recognize there's some issues and really want to help. You know, unfortunately, there are a lot of teacher bashers out there. I've worked with and interacted with dozens and dozens of teachers very closely when I worked in the schools at three different levels, you know elementary, middle, and high school. I've worked with teachers as part of research studies, etc., etc., and I find very few teachers are open to the kind of criticisms that people often have and they bash all teachers that way. But most teachers I find really want to do the right stuff and they're willing to learn and I'd say that's probably what excites me the most.
PA:
Yeah, Awesome. Thank you so much. Can you tell us how our listeners can learn more about your work?
DK:
There's a term that just came up recently that I had never heard before edu-celebrity. OK, and those are folks. They're on Twitter. They're on Facebook. They're on all those other things. They’ve got blogs. They’ve got websites. They’ve got everything. I'm not that right. So, the only place you might find me is I do, one of my sons set me up with a Facebook page, which is completely dormant. So, if anybody's ever sent me a friend request, I have not even looked at that. It was designed for me to keep track of my 38 first cousins and my school chums from elementary school or high school, right? And I haven't used it for that. So, I really have zero web presence. Anything. You see, for me it'd be something somebody else recorded and posted. OK, so I was at the Society for Scientific Study of Reading last week, and two researchers were like you know, I was talking about this very thing that we're talking about. They go: “Oh, we would think you're an edu-celebrity.” No, so there's a whole lot of people out there that are doing stuff, and fine.
I do have one concern I would like to mention, though, is, unfortunately, there are folks that are, instead of getting their information out of the research, they are actually passing along misinformation that they have gotten off of social media. I'll give you a perfect example. I said back at the beginning that the Reading Panel did experimental work. That compared doing phonemic awareness versus not doing phonemic awareness, and that was their main finding when it came to phonemic awareness is that it improves reading. Now, they went on and looked at eight other things that were not experimental, they were just correlational. And you know they said it was tentative, it was correlational. It may not really be a correct explanation. They put this big caveat which never gets translated by the way into or never gets conveyed in social media, and so, even though I'm not on social media, you can imagine people send me stuff. What's going on out there.
So, one of the eight things they said was teaching phonemic awareness works better with letters than without letters. The unfortunate problem is they didn't define what they meant, and so now I had read every single one of the studies they cited. I've read each of those studies twice over the years. I'm working on a third time going through for another project. It's very clear from those studies and how they group them. The without-letters studies did phonemic awareness activities with kids and never tied it in with the ELA, never tied it in with letters, not with words, nothing.
The studies in which they said teaching phonemic awareness with letters what that meant was they taught phonemic awareness using oral activities, but they incorporated letters at some point or another. Eighty percent of the with letters studies that they referred to taught phonemic awareness using oral activities, and one of the studies they didn't even include letters toward the very end of this eight-week intervention and it was only like three or four letters. So, now what's happened is I think it started with a blogger who wasn't a researcher and wasn't even a teacher. It started with a blogger and it's gone viral. It’s the idea that the Reading Panel said that oral activities are not very useful, which is not true, and that you should have letters in front of kids when you do phonemic awareness activities. That's not true and that once you develop letter sound skills, you don't need any more phonemic awareness. None of that reflects the literature, but you know what it reflects the social media misinformation. And what's scary is you have folks still quoting that as if that's what the Reading Panel said.
PA:
So, if you hear it, you need to verify it.
DK:
Right. Correct.
PA:
Dave, would you recommend that?
DK:
Yes, and I don't mean to be negative or nasty, but to me there seems to be and this is true when I read stuff across. I mean, if I'm reading something from an MD or I'm reading something from a physicist or whatever, if you have an academic position, you're in a very special angle when you say something online because people assume that what you said you have actually done your due diligence to look into it yourself. But there are some folks in academic positions of this edu-celebrity class. I'm not trying to say edu-celebrities are bad. OK, we need that. OK, we do. But some of them are actually saying things they have not looked into and they're repeating common things that are out on social media, and that's unfortunate, and this is probably the biggest example of that.
PA:
All right, thank you so much for sharing that, Dave. That clarification, I think, is very important.
We're learning so much in education these days and that application of what the research has shown us. We want to take those cognitive theories and make sure we're incorporating it in our daily instruction, because the end result is teachers teaching well and students gaining skills. All right, Dave. Thank you so much. This has been such a wonderfully informative and insightful conversation. You know we thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience with our audience today. That's it for another great EDVIEW360 podcast. Please join us again next month and visit voyagersopris.com/edview360 to learn about our webinars, blogs, and other podcasts. This has been Pam Austin and we hope to see you all again soon.
Narrator:
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Voyager Sopris Learning:
Voyager Sopris Learning® is the reading, writing, and math intervention specialist. With four decades of results, we provide evidence-based interventions and assessments that help educators ensure academic success for all students. Learn more at voyagersopris.com.
