Reading Is Rocket Science Final

READING IS ROCKET
SCIENCE
Cynthia R. Smith, M.A., CCC-SLP
Katherine D. Smith, B.A.

Reading Is Rocket Science

In medicine, if research found new ways to save lives, health care
professionals would adopt these methods as quickly as possible,
and would change practices, procedures, and systems. Educational
research has found new ways to save young minds by helping them
to become proﬁcient readers; it is up to us to promote these new
methods throughout the education system. Young lives depend on
it. (P.5)


Scientists now estimate that fully 95 percent of all children can be
taught to read...Yet, in spite of all our knowledge, statistics reveal
an alarming prevalence of struggling and poor readers...[the] risk of
reading diﬃculties could still be prevented and ameliorated by
literacy instruction that includes a range of research-based
components and practices. But, as the statistics testify, this type of
instruction clearly has not made its way into every classroom (P.7)


Perhaps the dubious quality of past educational research
has justiﬁed the prevalent cynicism among educators,
who are often told that research exists to support any
point of view. However, reading is actually one of the
most studied aspects of human behavior, and a large
body of work based on sound principles of objective
inquiry exists that could be informing the ﬁeld. (p.26)


The tragedy here is that most reading failure is unnecessary. We
now know that classroom teaching itself, when it includes a range
of research-based components and practices, can prevent and
ameliorate reading diﬃculty... while parents, tutors, and the
community can contribute to reading success, classroom
instruction must be viewed as the critical factor in preventing
reading problems and must be the primary focus for change. (p.
9-10)

Tragic because not only reading is adversely impacted


In the words of Keith Stanovich (Adams, 1990, pp. 59-60):
Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational
consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and
inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading
develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of
reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with
reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this
developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized
the deﬁcits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition
and behavior. Or to put it more simply -- and sadly -- in the words of a
tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in
reading progress, "Reading aﬀects everything you do"

Children who can crack the code, read more words, learn
more vocabulary, comprehend more, are motivated to read,
and enjoy reading

Children without adequate word recognition skills read less,
read slowly, have slower development of vocabulary, and are
less motivated to read


Research should guide the profession

Teachers must be educated to identify, read, respect, and apply
the findings of scientific research to their practice. (p.25)

If research guides their profession teachers will be in a better position
to countermand the proliferation of appealing but unsupported ideas
that have been harmful influences for more than a decade. (p.25)


Examples of popular misconceptions include:
Reading instruction is only needed until third grade
Competent teachers do not use published reading programs
Avoiding published reading programs empowers teachers and enhances
the professional status of teaching
Teaching phonics, word attack, and spelling skills directly to children is
harmful
Those who favor good code instruction are opposed to literature and
comprehension instruction
Reading a lot is the best way to overcome a reading problem
Children should be taught to guess words on the basis of meaning and
syntax
Skills must always be taught in the context of literature


Outcomes of Retention
The idea of giving a child another year to "catch-up" and develop needed
skills sounds like a positive alternative. However, research shows that
outcomes for kids who are retained generally are not positive. In its 2003
"Position Statement on Student Grade Retention," the National
Association of School Psychologists (NASP) reports:
Academic achievement of kids who are retained is poorer than that of
peers who are promoted.
Achievement gains associated with retention fade within two to three
years after the grade repeated.
Kids who are identiﬁed as most behind are the ones "most likely
harmed by retention."
Retention often is associated with increased behavior problems.

Outcomes of Retention (con.)

Grade retention has a negative impact on all areas of a child's
achievement (reading, math, and language) and socio-emotional
adjustment (peer relationships, self-esteem, problem behaviors and
attendance).
Students who are retained are more likely to drop out of school
compared to students who were never retained. In fact, grade retention
is one of the most powerful predictors of high school dropout.
Retained students are more likely to have poorer educational and
employment outcomes during late adolescence and early adulthood.
Retention is more likely to have benign or positive impact when
students are not simply held back, but receive speciﬁc remediation to
address skill and/or behavioral problems and promote achievement and
social skills.


Teaching reading is a job for an expert...[because] learning to read
is a complex linguistic achievement. For many children, it
requires eﬀort and incremental skill development...For best
results, the teacher must instruct most students directly,
systematically, and explicitly to decipher words in print (p.11)


Some children learn language concepts and their application very
easily in spite of incidental teaching, but others never learn unless
they are taught in an organized, systematic, eﬃcient way by a
knowledgeable teacher using a well-designed instructional approach.
Children of average ability might learn enough about reading to get
by, but may not develop the appreciation for language structure that
supports learning words from context, organization of the mental
dictionary, comparing words, or precise use of language (p.12)


...to understand printed language well enough to teach it
explicitly requires disciplined study of its systems and forms,
both spoken and written. (p.12)


Expert teaching of reading requires knowledge of language structure
at all levels. Without such knowledge, teachers are not able to
respond insightfully to student errors, choose examples for concepts,
explain and contrast words and their parts, or judge what focus is
needed in a lesson. (p.20)

Reading vs. Literacy
Reading = “getting meaning from print”

VS.
Literacy = “a variety of outcomes--
dispositions toward learning, interests
in reading and writing, and knowledge
of subject-matter domains--that go
beyond reading”

Rayner, et al, “How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading”

Literacy

...dimensions of literacy entail the achievement of a broad
range of skills embedded in cultural and technological contexts.
An extended functional deﬁnition is useful in helping to make
clear the wide range of literacy tasks a society must present to
its members (e.g., computer literacy, historical literacy,
scientiﬁc literacy, etc.).



The starting point for literacy is
reading skill.



Learning to read builds on cognitive,
linguistic, and social skills that have
developed from the earliest age. The most
important among these is the child’s
competence in language, which provides
the basic foundation for reading.



Children are routinely subjected to teaching
practices that have not been tested or proven
effective...Experts agree that children who
initially are at risk for failure are saved, in
most cases, by instruction that teaches
directly the specific language skills on which
proficient reading depends. (p.21)


Eﬀective teachers of reading raise awareness
and proﬁciency with every level of language
organization including sounds, syllables,
meaningful parts (morphemes), phrases,
sentences, paragraphs, and various genres of
text. (p.21)


Only recently has basic research allowed the community of
reading scientists and educators to agree on what needs to be
done (p.12)

5 Big Ideas of Reading

What did the National Reading Panel do?
Speciﬁcally, congress asked the panel to:
• Review all the research available (more than
100,000 reading studies) on how children learn to
read.
• Determine the most eﬀective evidence-based
methods for teaching children to read
• Describe which methods of reading instruction
are ready for use in the classroom and recommend
ways of getting this information into schools.
• Suggest a plan for additional research in reading
development and instruction.


Big Ideas in Beginning Reading (BIBR) focuses on
the ﬁve BIG IDEAS of early literacy:
Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and
manipulate sounds in words.
Alphabetic Principle: The ability to associate sounds
with letters and use these sounds to form words.
Fluency with Text: The eﬀortless, automatic ability to
read words in connected text.
Vocabulary: The ability to understand (receptive) and
use (expressive) words to acquire and convey
meaning.
Comprehension: The complex cognitive process
involving the intentional interaction between reader
and text to convey meaning.

What makes a Big Idea a Big Idea?


What is Phonemic Awareness?

An understanding that a single-syllable word such as
"cat" can be subdivided into beginning, middle, and
ending sounds (segmentation)
An understanding that individual segments of sound at
the phonemic level can be combined to form words
(blending or synthesis)
Knowledge or awareness of the distinctive features of
individual phonemes

University of Indiana

Phonological Awareness Continuum

Deletion
Addition
Phonemic Awareness Substitution
Blending
Segmentation
Isolation
Identity
Categorization
Phonemes

Onset-Rime & Rhyming

Syllable

I’ve Dibel’d…Page 132


Examples of Phonemic Awareness Skills:

Blending: What word am I trying to say? Mmmm...ooooo...p.
Segmentation (ﬁrst sound isolation): What is the ﬁrst sound in mop?
Segmentation (last sound isolation): What is the last sound in mop?
Segmentation (complete): What are all the sounds you hear in mop?

Critical Features of Phonemic Awareness Instruction


Research indicates that, without direct instructional support,
phonemic awareness eludes roughly 25% of middle-class ﬁrst graders
and substantially more of those who come from less literacy-rich
backgrounds (p.1)

Measures of schoolchildren’s ability to attend to and manipulate
phonemes strongly correlate with their reading success through the
twelfth grade (p.2)

Lack of PA means poor spelling and comprehension

Adams, et al, Phonemic Awareness in Young Children


What is Alphabetic Principle?

The alphabetic principle is composed
of two parts:

Part 1: Alphabetic Understanding: Words are
composed of letters that represent sounds

Part 2: Phonological Recoding (blending): Letter sounds can
be blended together and knowledge of letter-sound
associations can be used to read/decode words.

Dynamic Measurement Group


Why Alphabetic Principle?

Letter-sound knowledge is prerequisite to word
identiﬁcation
A primary diﬀerence between good and poor readers is
the ability to use word-sound correspondences to
decode words
Letter-sound knowledge can be taught
Teaching the alphabetic principle leads to gains in
reading acquisition/achievement


Alphabetic Principle skills
Examples of alphabetic principle skills:
Letter-sound associations: What is the sound of this
letter?
Soundblending: Blend the sounds of these letters to
make a word “m-a-n”
Segmenting: What sounds do you hear in this word?
Manipulating letter-sound correspondences in
words: What word would you have if you changed the /n/
in /nap/ to /l/?
Reading pseudowords: What is this word, mip?
Word identiﬁcation: What is this word, map?


Critical Features of Alphabetic Principle Instruction


What is Fluency ?

A child who performs a task ﬂuently, that is, both accurately and
quickly, has learned the skill to mastery, is automatic in performing
the underlying skills and is much more able to remember, maintain,
and apply the skill than a child who has not achieved mastery. (p.2)

Truth About Dibels


Teaching Strategies and Examples of Fluency:

Letter-Sound Fluency
Example: Given a set of letters, the student can produce the
associated sound within one second

Irregular Word Fluency
Example: Given a set of irregular words in a set or a passage, can
identify words in one second or less

Oral Reading Fluency
Example: By the end of Grade 2, students should read 90-100
words per minute ﬂuently


Critical Features of Fluency Instruction:


What is Vocabulary?


What is Oral Language?

Knowledge and use of words in spoken
language
Sounds in words (phonology)
Meaning (semantics)
Order of words and relationship of
words in sentences (syntax)
Knowledge of word parts (morphology)
Purpose/function (pragmatics)



Why Vocabulary and Oral Language?


Why should Vocabulary and Oral
Language be taught?

Vocabulary is not a developmental skill
or one that can ever be fully mastered.
The expansion and elaboration of
vocabulary extends across a lifetime
(Kamil & Herbert, 2005)



Three Goals for Vocabulary Instruction

1) Provide students with skills/opportunities to
learn words independently
2) Teach students the meaning of speciﬁc words
3) Nurture a love and appreciation of words and
their use


Critical Features of Vocabulary Instruction

What is Comprehension?

Comprehension is about getting meaning


Why Comprehension?


Comprehension Skills



Seven Evidence-Based Strategies for Improving Comprehension

Comprehension monitoring
Cooperative learning
Multiple strategies
Mental imagery/mnemonics
Graphic organizers
Summarization
Semantic organizers including:
story maps
question answering
question generation

Critical Features of Comprehension Instruction

Comprehension strategies for proﬁcient readers

Teaching Strategies and Examples for Comprehension

Before Reading
1) Set comprehension objectives
2) Pre-teach diﬃcult to read words
3) Preview text and prime background
knowledge
4) Chunk text into manageable segments

During Reading
1) Identify text structure elements After Reading
2) Answer literal, inferential, and 1) Strategic integration
evaluative questions 2) Judicious review
3) Retell stories or main ideas of 3) Formal and informal assessment
informational text

Each DIBLES indicator represents a broader sequence of skills and
concepts to be taught (truth about dibels 1)

What is the purpose of DIBELS?

Outcome--Assessments that provide a bottom-line evaluation of the eﬀectiveness of the
reading program
Screening--Assessments that identify which children are at risk for reading diﬃculty and
need additional intervention
Progress Monitoring--Assessments that determine if students are making adequate
progress or need more intervention to achieve grade level reading outcomes
(I’ve DIBEL Now What?, pp.32-33)
’d,
NOT
Diagnosis--Assessments that help teachers plan instruction by providing in-depth
information about students’ skills and instructional needs. Some instruments may also
help determine the presence of a developmental disorder that requires specialized
treatments and interventions

DIBELS are criterion-referenced because each measure has an
empirically established goal (or benchmark) that changes across
time to ensure students' skills are developing in a manner
predictive of continued progress. The goals/benchmarks were
developed following a large group of students in a longitudinal
manner to see where students who were "readers" in later grades
were performing on these critical early literacy skills when they
were in Kindergarten and First grade so that we can make
predictions about which students are progressing adequately
and which students may need additional instructional support.
This approach is in contrast with normative measures which
simply demonstrate where a student is performing in relation to
the normative sample, regardless of whether that performance is
predictive of future success. (uoregon FAQ)

"Benchmark is where we want our lowest
performing readers to be. It's the minimum of
where we want our kids to be." (module 1)

The DIBELS benchmark goals are the minimal level students need to
achieve to be conﬁdent they are on track for literacy outcomes. The
ultimate goal is for 100% of children within a school to achieve each
benchmark (myths and facts 10)

"Benchmark is the bottom of 'okay'." (module 1)

Dibels related to the Big Ideas:

The fact that teachers need better training to carry out
deliberate instruction in reading, spelling, and writing should
prompt action rather than criticism. It should highlight the
existing gap between what teachers need and what they have
been give. (p.8)

Reading Is Rocket Science Final

Reading Is Rocket Science Final

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