There’s No Time To Waste To Recover Reading Loss
A recent New York Times article asks whether we are losing a generation of children to remote learning. The article raises two important questions. First, what’s the impact on the least advantaged children who are at greatest risk of falling behind in their learning because they are not able to attend school in person? Second, what’s the impact of students engaged in so-called “asynchronous learning” who are expected to do assignments at home with little supervision? The article in particular singles out concern about the impact of remote learning on the development of students’ early literacy skills.
Regarding the first question, I’ve previously written about the likelihood of a “K-shaped” recovery for literacy. Unless we take bold and decisive action, we are condemning a generation of children to permanent damage. Lowered school performance. More high school dropouts. More juvenile offenders. Lower matriculation into post-secondary education. Reduced workforce preparation. Increased chances of generational poverty. The stakes could not be higher. Our actions must meet the moment.
Regarding the second question, the New York Times article poses this challenge:
Of all the tragedies emerging from the pandemic, a generation of children left to teach themselves on sofas and bunk beds may be the most insidious. How these children — crucially the young ones developing literacy skills — will fare academically is the great uncertainty.
The data starting to come in suggests that harm is in fact taking place for early literacy in communities across the country during the pandemic. The Washington Post reports that K-2 students returned to D.C. Public Schools this school year with lower levels of reading achievement. Compared to Fall 2019, White K-2 students meeting literacy benchmarks fell by 6 percentage points, Black students by 14 percentage points, and Hispanic students by 12 percentage points. Robust research finds that different children need different amounts of different types of reading instruction. Children who are struggling with reading, in particular, need even more adult-led instruction in foundational literacy skills.
Getting The Minutes Right
Education researcher Carol Connor discovered there is an underlying mechanism that determines whether children are successfully taught to read or not. Over five years and 2,000 hours of observing PreK-3rd grade classrooms, Dr. Connor and her colleagues identified two key dimensions of reading instruction that shape students’ reading achievement:
Code-focused or meaning-focused instruction. Reading instruction either focuses on teaching children to recognize, or “decode,” words by matching letters to sounds (code-focused) or to derive meaning from, or “comprehend,” written texts (meaning-focused). Code-focused skills include letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and spelling. Meaning-focused skills include vocabulary, comprehension and writing. All children need both types of instruction.
Teacher-managed or child-managed. The learner’s attention during reading instruction is either directed by teachers (or another adult) or by the child through independent or group work. Again, all children need both modes of instructional delivery.
Put together, Dr. Connor and her colleagues determined there are four possible types of reading instruction in classrooms.
In the course of their research, Dr. Connor and her colleagues discovered a third critical dimension of reading instruction: time. Vocabulary, word reading and comprehension skills together are the building blocks of reading success. Based upon the combination of these three literacy skills, children need different amounts of time on these four types of reading instruction from PreK through 3rd grade to get to grade-level reading at the end of each school year. As an example, the graph below shows the different amounts of the four types of reading instruction that a beginning first grader needs based upon their reading level at the start of the school year.
Dr. Connor found that a beginning first grader who starts a full year behind in reading needs 31% more daily literacy instructional minutes than her classmate who starts the year reading on grade-level. Moreover, this struggling reader needs three times as many daily minutes of teacher-managed, code-focused instruction (30 minutes) than their classmates who start the year reading on-level (10 minutes). Overall, they need two-thirds more daily time on teacher- and child-managed code-focused instruction (50 minutes total) than their on-level peer (30 minutes total). That’s more than 6 and half hours extra code-focused instruction each month. One other key finding from this research: although the four types of reading instruction can be delivered in small groups or the entire class, teacher-managed instruction (both code- and meaning-focused) is about four times more effective when it’s delivered in small groups.
As the graph illustrates, students at different reading levels each need varying amounts of the four types of reading instruction. The precise mix and amount of daily instruction each child needs depends upon the combination of their vocabulary, word reading and comprehension skills. For example, two beginning first graders with low decoding skills both need plenty of teacher-managed, code-focused instruction to grow their word reading abilities. However, if one has strong vocabulary skills and the other has lower vocabulary skills, they need different amounts of time on child-managed, meaning-focused instruction. The child with stronger vocabulary skills will benefit more from additional time in these activities. The child with lower initial vocabulary skills needs less of this activity initially in the fall, with increasing amounts during the school year.
A student’s needed daily instructional minutes will change over time based upon their growth in these reading skills. These research findings further refine the “Simple View of Reading”, which focuses on the role of decoding and language in how children learn to read, to provide greater clarity on how we effectively teach children to read. The Simple View of Reading posits that skilled reading relies both on word recognition and word knowledge. Dr. Connor’s work clarifies how these aspects of early literacy development should be taught.
Through seven randomized controlled trials (RCTs), Dr. Connor and her colleagues demonstrated that getting the right amounts of the four types of reading instruction to the right students works. In a three-year experimental study, 94% of students whose teachers were guided by this approach to reading instruction from first through third grade read proficiently at the end of third grade. The average reading level was fifth grade. Real-world results in recent years across multiple districts provide further evidence that focusing on the type and amount of instruction students receive improves reading outcomes.
The Minutes That Matter Most
Tim Shanahan, one of the leading education researchers in the country, says that “the biggest decisions teachers make have to do with how much time to spend on literacy and language and how to divide this time up among the components of literacy.” In a 2013 blog post, Dr. Shanahan called for finding the right balance of time that teachers spend on both foundational (code-focused) skills and comprehension (meaning-focused) skills. Dr. Connor’s research and the real-world results of schools demonstrate that getting the right minutes to the right child at the right time matters. Their findings about the greater power of small group instruction also validates education researcher Robert Slavin’s intuition about the importance of getting classroom instructional groupings right. It’s about grouping children based upon the types of instruction and number of instructional minutes they need. Of course, high quality instructional materials and effective professional development matter. But Dr. Connor and her colleagues found that the greatest predictor of reading achievement in their research was meeting the instructional minutes needed by each child for each type of instruction.
Janelle, a third-year teacher in the Cajon Valley Union School District in Orange County, California, has been guided by Dr. Connor’s research her entire career as a classroom teacher. In the 2019–2020 school year, Janelle’s school was mostly comprised of Hispanic (44%) and White (44%) students. Twenty-six percent of students were English language learners; 67% were eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch. Janelle’s elementary school uses a professional support system for teachers Dr. Connor created called A2i (“Assessment to Instruction”) that helps teachers better use student data, curriculum and professional development to individualize reading instruction for each child in their classroom.
As a first-year teacher in fall 2018, Janelle’s classroom included nine first-grade students who started the year reading at a transitional kindergarten level. By the end of the academic year, all nine students were reading at a second grade level. In fall 2019, Janelle had a new class of 26 second-grade students. Eighteen of these students were reading below grade-level; the remaining eight students were reading on level. In mid-January, all eight students who started the year reading on grade level were reading at a 3rd or 4th grade reading level. The other 18 students who started the year behind in reading had caught up, a testament to the effectiveness of getting the right amounts and types of instruction to the right students at the right time.
Children who are behind in reading need even more teacher-directed instruction than their peers, yet this is precisely what they are missing when they are only exposed to “asynchronous” instruction during the pandemic. Even real-time “synchronous” instruction delivered virtually is less likely to be effective if it doesn’t include appropriate small group instruction. (Educators may also want to consider Dylan Wiliam’s proposed three principles and five strategies for delivering virtual instruction.) As a country, before the pandemic, we were not systematically allocating literacy instructional time in classrooms based upon student need. In order both to arrest the damage occurring right now and reverse the learning loss after the pandemic, we have to get instructional types and minutes right.
