Expanding the Science of Reading: Connecting All of the Evidence Related to Literacy
Natalie Wexler is an education writer who has spoken before a wide range of audiences in the U.S. and elsewhere, focusing on literacy, cognitive science, and fairness. She is the author of Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning and The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It, and co-author of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. She is the host of “Reading Comprehension Revisited” and a co-host of “Literacy and the Science of Learning,” which are seasons one and three of the Knowledge Matters podcast. She also has a free Substack newsletter, Minding the Gap.
The science of reading is changing the way teachers approach foundational reading skills. But what about the science of learning or cognitive science?
That’s a well-established body of evidence that also relates to reading—and writing, as well as learning in the content areas. Connecting all three of those domains and applying teaching principles that have a lot of research behind them can make teaching easier for educators and learning easier for students.
Science-backed principles include things like retrieval practice—recalling information we know but have slightly forgotten, which makes it easier to retrieve the information in the future when we need it—and elaboration—asking and answering how and why questions, which deepens comprehension. There’s also a concept called deliberate practice, which can help students acquire any complex skill, including writing.
Cognitive scientists have mostly studied instruction in math and science, but the principles they’ve discovered apply to all learning. And if we apply them to the typical approach to literacy instruction, a few things become clear.
First, we’ve been making reading and writing harder than they need to be. Reading, and especially writing, impose a heavy cognitive load on students’ working memory—in other words, they’re really difficult. Asking students to read and write about topics they don’t know much about, which often happens in classrooms, only makes those things harder.
Second, instructional principles backed by cognitive science assume you’re either teaching a transferable skill, like decoding, or substantive content. But typical reading instruction focuses on skills like “making inferences,” which are not transferable.
Third, explicit instruction in writing that uses deliberate practice can provide students with all of the benefits of science-informed instruction—even if teachers aren’t experts in cognitive science. When students write, they engage in retrieval practice and elaboration, boosting their retention and comprehension. And when they learn to construct complex sentences, they’re better able to understand such sentences, improving their reading comprehension.
Join me for an EDVIEW360 podcast about Connecting the Science of Reading to the Science of Learning to find out how you can bring the science of learning to your classroom by combining a content-rich curriculum with manageable writing instruction.