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The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way that contributes most to reading and comprehending text is reading words automatically from memory by sight. The evidence shows that words are read from memory when graphemes are connected to phonemes. This bonds spellings of individual words to their pronunciations along with their meanings in memory. Readers must know grapheme–phoneme relations and have decoding skill to form connections, and must read words in text to associate spellings with meanings. Readers move through four developmental phases as they acquire knowledge about the alphabetic writing system and apply it to read and write words and build their sight vocabularies. Grapheme–phoneme knowledge and phonemic segmentation are key foundational skills that launch development followed subsequently by knowledge of syllabic and morphemic spelling–sound units. Findings show that when spellings attach to pronunciations and meanings in memory, they enhance memory for vocabulary words. This research underscores the importance of systematic phonics instruction that teaches students the knowledge and skills that are essential in acquiring word-reading skill.

The simple view of reading describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension and the relative contribution of each to reading comprehension across development. We present a cross-sectional analysis of first, second, and third graders (N = 123-125 in each grade) to assess the adequacy of the basic model. Participants completed multiple measures to inform latent constructs of word reading accuracy, word reading fluency, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. In line with previous research, structural equation models confirmed that the influence of decoding skill decreased with increasing grade and that the influence of listening comprehension increased. However, several additional findings indicate that reading development is not that simple and support an elaboration of the basic model: A strong influence of listening comprehension on reading comprehension was apparent by grade 2, decoding skill was best measured by word and nonword reading accuracy in the early grades and word reading fluency in grade 3, and vocabulary skills indirectly affected reading comprehension through both decoding skill and listening comprehension. This new elaborated model, which provides a more comprehensive view of critical influences on reading in the early grades, has diagnostic and instructional ramifications for improving reading pedagogy.

Students are expected to comprehend and produce increasingly complex texts in upper elementary school, and academic language and literacy skills are considered critical to meeting these expectations. Notions of academic language are also controversial and require careful deliberation when applied to traditionally minoritized populations, including bilingual learners who negotiate more than one language in their daily lives and have varied linguistic repertoires. In the present study, the authors report on a quasi-experimental field trial of a theoretically grounded and language-based reading intervention framed around language components (semantics, syntax, and morphology), language functions, discussion, and reading comprehension. A sample of 239 Portuguese–English and Spanish–English bilingual students in grades 4 and 5 worked in small instructional groups to explore language, apply reading strategies, and discuss and write about big ideas in text. Half of the students were assigned to the intervention group (n = 119) and the other half (n = 120) to a business-as-usual control group. Classroom teachers (n = 12) and specialists (n = 10) implemented the intervention with small groups of four to six students. Results showed practically meaningful effects of the intervention on standardized measures of both academic language (Hedges’s g = 0.248) and reading comprehension (Hedges’s g = 0.166), with implications for theory, research, and classroom practice.

In this quasi-experimental study, the authors examined the effects of an intervention designed to teach upper secondary school students to take source information, such as author expertise, into consideration when selecting, processing, and using textual resources to complete particular multiple-document literacy tasks. The intervention centered on a contrasting cases approach framed by authentic curriculum-based classroom activities and was implemented over six weeks by teachers who had participated in professional development seminars. The findings demonstrated that students who had participated in the sourcing intervention placed more value on source information when selecting texts, invested more time and effort in processing the texts they selected, and more frequently attributed textual ideas to their respective sources compared with students who had participated in typical classroom activities instead. These effects were observed on far transfer tasks in which students worked with multiple documents on different topics in different situational contexts for different purposes, and were sustained over a period of 5.5 weeks. The discussion highlights the uniqueness of the current intervention work and centers on the aspects of the sourcing intervention that likely promoted these broad, sustainable, and transferable sourcing skills in students. Attention is also directed to several possible lines of future research in this area.

Using a sample of 116 Norwegian undergraduate readers in this experimental study, we investigated whether reading informational text on a tablet versus on paper would lead to differences with respect to strategic text processing and text comprehension. Strategic text processing was measured by means of verbal protocol analysis, and text comprehension was measured by means of postreading written products. Results were inconsistent with the shallowing hypothesis proposing that there are comprehension advantages for printed texts because digital texts are typically processed in a more shallow, superficial way. That is, we found no differences across the reading mediums with respect to strategic text processing or text comprehension. These results may suggest that there are boundaries to the shallowing hypothesis that are related to tasks, individual differences, and reading contexts. Such potential boundaries are discussed in light of the current findings, and suggestions for future research to clarify those boundaries are offered.

In this study, the authors examined the impact of a vocabulary intervention designed to support vocabulary depth, or the building of semantic networks, in preschool children (n = 30). The authors further investigated the effect of specific instructional strategies on growth in vocabulary depth. The intervention employed shared book reading and guided play methods to teach words in conceptually linked categories, such as taxonomic and thematic groups. Using a within-subjects design, analyses indicated that the intervention had significant positive effects on children’s depth of vocabulary knowledge. Children showed significantly greater growth in vocabulary depth for words taught in taxonomies as compared with words taught in themes. Three types of semantic information were learned more deeply for taxonomy words as compared with theme words: information about category membership, perceptual features, and object function. Results suggest that fostering deep vocabulary knowledge involves not only teaching single word entities but also introducing systems of conceptually related words to build semantic networks.

This study examined the efficacy of a supplemental, multicomponent adolescent reading intervention for middle school students who scored below proficient on a state literacy assessment. Using a within-school experimental design, the authors randomly assigned 483 students in grades 6-8 to a business-as-usual control condition or to the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI), a supplemental reading program involving instruction to support word-reading skills, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, and peer talk to promote reading engagement and comprehension. The authors assessed behavioral engagement by measuring how much of the STARI curricular activities students completed during an academic school year, and collected intervention teachers' ratings of their students' reading engagement. STARI students outperformed control students on measures of word recognition (Cohen's d = 0.20), efficiency of basic reading comprehension (Cohen's d = 0.21), and morphological awareness (Cohen's d = 0.18). Reading engagement in its behavioral form, as measured by students' participation and involvement in the STARI curriculum, mediated the treatment effects on each of these three posttest outcomes. Intervention teachers' ratings of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement explained unique variance on reading posttests. Findings from this study support the hypothesis that (a) behavioral engagement fosters struggling adolescents' reading growth, and (b) teachers' perceptions of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement further contribute to reading competence.

We investigated the roles of classroom supports for multiple motivations and engagement in students' informational text comprehension, motivation, and engagement. A composite of classroom contextual variables consisting of instructional support for choice, importance, collaboration, and competence, accompanied by cognitive scaffolding for informational text comprehension, was provided in four-week instructional units for 615 grade 7 students. These classroom motivational-engagement supports were implemented within integrated literacy/history instruction in the Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) framework. CORI increased informational text comprehension compared with traditional instruction (TI) in a switching replications experimental design. Students' perceptions of the motivational-engagement supports were associated with increases in students' intrinsic motivation, value, perceived competence, and increased positive engagement (dedication) more markedly in CORI than in TI, according to multiple regression analyses. Results extended the evidence for the effectiveness of CORI to literacy/history subject matter and informational text comprehension among middle school students. The experimental effects in classroom contexts confirmed effects from task-specific, situated experimental studies in the literature.

The authors conducted a small-scale randomized control trial (n = 31 teachers) of Online Content-Focused Coaching, an intervention consisting of an online workshop followed by multiple cycles of remote video-based coaching, to support dialogic text discussions. Findings demonstrate the efficacy of Online Content-Focused Coaching in three different ways. First, the authors’ analyses, after accounting for differential attrition among groups, demonstrate an existence proof for effects of the intervention on both classroom text discussion quality and student achievement. Second, the authors examined and demonstrated an association between the magnitude of changes in discussion quality and the magnitude of achievement gains. Finally, the authors propose and examine evidence to support a theory for how teachers develop adaptive expertise for facilitating dialogic text discussions. Results show that teachers’ use of transitional and some aspirational discussion moves grew from baseline to the end of the workshop, with limited growth in the quality of students’ contributions. Over the coaching phase of the intervention, teachers’ facilitation moves grew substantively, and so did students’ strong contributions. The authors interpret the results to suggest that the workshop was critical for developing teachers’ knowledge of the features of dialogism and that coach-guided reflection was essential for developing teachers’ expertise at using facilitation moves to elicit student thinking. Findings contribute to a validity argument for the efficacy of Online Content-Focused Coaching. More importantly, investigating and describing the process of teaching change is the study’s main theoretical contribution.

We situate education, and the science of reading (SOR) specifically, in the midst of a broad, evidence-based revolution involving an array of disciplines focused on improving the health and well-being of individuals and populations. Low and stagnant levels of reading proficiency, massive reading disparities, and a robust SOR knowledge base suggest that the withholding of evidence-based practices in schools differentially harms students of Color, students from poor families, English learners, and students with disabilities. We acknowledge that simply expecting greater use of evidence-based reading practices in schools will not suffice. We present a framework where practitioners and policymakers would continue to gain better and easier access to the SOR knowledge base and evidence-based reading practices and where much greater emphasis would be placed on fueling the demand for evidence-based practices in schools. How schools are organized to provide reading instruction for students is also a key consideration in efforts to expand the use of evidence-based practices. We make the case that schools engaged in comprehensive use of multi-tiered systems of support approaches in reading are well positioned to increase their use of evidencebased reading practices. Because much is not known about how to scale the use of effective practices, scaling efforts themselves represent opportunities to generate new SOR knowledge on both the supply and demand sides. This work would be consistent with the SOR knowledge base as a dynamic and constantly emerging phenomenon, rather than a static repository waiting to be accessed and used.