The Simple View of Reading and Its Extension As the Cognitive Foundations Framework: A Conversation With Dr. Wesley Hoover

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Dr. Wesley Hoover:

Teachers need to have an open mind about accepting new science, but they also need to understand that it’s not just individual studies, it’s the volume of science, it’s the repeatability, the replicability of studies that makes a difference. So, they’ve got to be mindful. When someone comes in and says: “Well, I have this study that shows this isn’t the case. This is the case.” If it hasn’t been repeated in other situations by other researchers, you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt. And so, I think teachers need to be using science, but they also need to be skeptical about the claims of science until they have been highly scrutinized by other scientists.

Narrator:

You just heard from Dr. Wesley Hoover, renowned researcher and literacy expert. Dr. Hoover is our guest 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 September literacy conversation. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are 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. Wesley Hoover is with us today and we couldn't be happier. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Hoover before we begin.

With a background in human experimental psychology, Wesley set out to make an impact in the area of early reading, bilingual reading, and language acquisition. And to make an impact as he did, he spent 35 years at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, otherwise known as SEDL, for 35 years, where he led research centered on the cognitive underpinnings of reading, focused on detailing the specifications and predictions of conceptual models and testing them in the context of early grade reading. In his last 18 years at SEDL, he served as its president and CEO. He is one of the original collaborators in seminal research on the Simple View of Reading and is co-author of the 2020 book, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition: A Framework With Applications Connecting Teaching and Learning. Who'd have thought connecting teaching and learning? Awesome. His research and writings are relied upon by thousands around the world. He now devotes his time to writing, speaking, and consulting on issues surrounding the cognitive foundations of reading.

Welcome, Wes. Let's get started today. You know what I'm going to begin by asking you to share a little bit about yourself. So, we've got like a two-parter here. First, I want you to share with our listeners what interested you in finding out how we as human beings learn to read. So, that's the first part and what led to a career in education into your time at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. I had to say it all again so people know we're talking about SEDL here.

WH: 

Well, terrific. Thank you for that warm introduction. I want to say that it was great to hear that you had connections with SEDL in your career. It's always nice to get in touch with people that have worked with our institution and it's good to hear that the people that we have help people actually do their work in the field, because that's what the critical part of SEDL is trying to bring research to practice.

But for me, I didn't get to SEDL, nor to the study of reading, by a direct path. It was more looking for what interested me, what excited me, and then be ready to take on opportunities. So, I actually started my career as an undergraduate at Trinity University in San Antonio. I was a mathematics major. I did that for a couple of years but it wasn't as exciting as I had hoped it'd be. So, in some of my undergraduate work I took a couple of classes in the philosophy of language and I read Chomsky. I read the aspects of the theory of syntax and syntactic structures and the ideas about language learning, about how people can just learn a language any language from being exposed to it in a real communicating situation, just was so thought-provoking to me. So, I really wanted to pursue that work. So, I changed my major to experimental psychology. My professor at Trinity said if you're interested in psycholinguistics, both psychology and language, the place to do that work is either at the University of Texas at Austin or the University of Pittsburgh.

Being a Southern person, I wasn't going to Pittsburgh. So, I decided that I would see if Austin would be a fit, if I could get in. So, I drove up to Austin, had a conversation with Phil Gough, who was the head of the department at that time. We talked for a while. He encouraged me to apply, so I did. I got accepted, went to UT and started working with Phil right away and we mostly worked on word recognition in the early days, trying to look at models of how people actually are able to recognize words. But I also came in contact with Bill Tunmer, and Bill was a graduate student at UT a year ahead of me. We became good friends and lifelong colleagues and he’s the one that actually went to work at SEDL.

He was working on a bilingual reading study. It was, I think, in the second or third year of an eight-year study and he got an offer to go to Australia and he packed up and went and the people at SEDL were very concerned that they were in the third year of this study. They had a lot of data they were about to collect and analyze and so they asked him if he knew anybody that could possibly help out. And so, I went and talked to the project director at SEDL and talked to the lead consultant, who was Bob Calfee out of Stanford University, and Bob was very concerned that there be somebody who was very meticulous about data, who could keep data organized, and because there was going to be a lot of data in this study. And so, they agreed to hire me on a temporary basis for a few months to see if I could do the work, and after those few months they decided I was OK and so I worked at SEDL.

PA: 

And extended it to 35 years. 

WH:

I became the co-director of that study and finished it after five more years, and actually the data that were collected in that study became the first empirical test of the Simple View of Reading. We mined those data, did a secondary analysis, and Phil Gough and I produced that article that came out in 1990 that was just entitled The Simple View of Reading. So, after that work wrapped up, I was still interested in trying to connect research to practice, because that was what the focus of SEDL was, and so I had this idea about trying to lay out the cognitive foundations which were the underpinnings of the Simple View of Reading what are the things you need to master in order to master word recognition and language comprehension? And so, I wrote a proposal for federal funding, got that thing funded and we began to develop the Cognitive Foundations.

But shortly after that, years worked as the CEO, mostly trying to keep the institution well-staffed with quality programs and working on the links between knowledge and practice. So, my work in reading once I became the CEO was diminished. I didn't focus as much on reading as I did on other aspects of the institution. But in 2015, I led the effort to merge SEDL with the American Institutes for Research, and when that merger happened I stayed on for a few years and got to go back to work more on reading, which was how I produced with Bill the Cognitive Foundation's book and then several articles that have come out since then. So, just had that gap in my resume where focus on research wasn't as strong as it was earlier or later.

PA:

Yes, yes. Oh, very interesting journey. It was an indirect journey, but some of the words you use, Wes, your interest, your excitement, opportunity, and then an openness, I think, to dive into learning so much more. And the underpinnings of it all is language. That's what really directed you there.

WH:

Yeah, that was what was so exciting, this idea that just through exposure in a real environment you could learn any language in the world. And it just was something I had never even thought about. But in reading Chomsky it was so engaging.

PA:

Yes, and inspiring, obviously, when we take a look at your career. So, that we are all on the same page, I'd like for you to please take a minute and explain the Simple View of Reading and its significance in the study of reading comprehension.

WH:

Certainly. So, I like to describe the Simple View of Reading (SVR) as a theory that's been extensively studied of the big picture of reading comprehension. That details the central cognitive capacities that underlie it and their relationships. And let me unpack that a little bit. So the key words in there are, first and foremost, that the SVR is a theory, that is, it makes predictions and those predictions can be tested and falsified. Secondly, that it's been extensively studied. It's been around for 40 years. That first empirical study was done back in the mid-80s, published in 1990.

And since then there have been many studies of the Simple View of Reading, covering kids of different ages, education levels, reading abilities, and then reading in other languages and other types of language, formal language, informal language. So, it's been extensively studied. It's about the big picture. There's a lot of details under word recognition and language comprehension, the two main components of the Simple View. But the Simple View doesn't get into those details. It just looks at reading from the standpoint of those two proximal cognitive capacities and then it deals with the relationships; how word recognition and language comprehension related to each other in constituting reading comprehension. So, in short, the Simple View of Reading holds that the ability to read a language with comprehension is the product of the ability to understand that. Language with comprehension is the product of the ability to understand that language and to recognize its words quickly and accurately in print. That's formally captured in the equation reading comprehension equals language comprehension times word recognition. But to more fully understand it, it's nice to be able to put some contrasts about what the Simple View is and what it isn't. So, I've already described that it's a theory, that is, it's more than a description, a heuristic or a metaphor. There are other models of reading that are those things that don’t make predictions about what reading is. But the Simple View is a theory and it makes those predictions. It’s a theory that involves a static account of reading, that is, it’s not a developmental account, it’s just a static account of what constitutes reading comprehension at any particular point in time. So, if you measure word recognition, language comprehension, and reading comprehension concurrently, that is, at the same point in time, then the Simple View predicts that you can predict the reading comprehension ability of a person, given the two components of word recognition and language comprehension.

Third, it's a theory that details what must be known for success, not what instruction must be provided. So, it isn't about instruction. It's about the cognitive structures that must be in place in order for one to read. What has to be taught and how it should be taught is a separate question. And then, finally, I want to list some things about what it addresses and what it doesn't.

So, the Simple View is about cognitive factors, not all factors. There are other factors that influence reading comprehension, but the Simple View just addresses the cognitive ones. It’s about capacities and not processes, so it doesn't address how reading is done. It doesn’t say that this comes first and then this comes second, what the information flow is. Rather, it describes the capacity of what reading comprehension consists of, what knowledge structures must be in place. It’s about the proximal capacities, not the distal ones. It’s about those capacities that directly impact reading comprehension, not those other capacities that influence reading comprehension. But their influence comes through the proximal capacities of word recognition and language comprehension. And, finally, it’s about the sole necessary proximal cognitive capacities, which are just word recognition and language comprehension, no others required.

So, that's what the Simple View of Reading is, but let me say a few words about its significance In science, its significance comes from its clear predictions, and it makes four of them, and I'm not going to detail them here. But, as I said, there have been substantial studies, a number of studies that have looked at the predictions of the Simple View and found that they have been supported in various contexts. Its significance in practice is its ability to help practitioners understand what the big picture of reading is, rather than get overwhelmed with all of the detail. It helps practitioners and parents keep in mind that what needs to happen in learning to read is you have to become a master of word recognition and language comprehension if you're going to read that language with comprehension.

PA:
Right, and when you say language comprehension, we're talking about the oral, which is what inspired you to begin with. Right, Wes?

WH:

Right, it's not just the oral, because, you know, I like to say we have that little voice in our head that we hear. That is based on language that's not really spoken, but you can hear it in your head. There is a voice that's talking and that's not really oral language, but it is language comprehension that starts off through phonology, and that's how I like to think about language comprehension.

PA:

And I love when you use the term of the big picture, right? What does it take? Is what came to mind when you use that particular descriptor the big picture taking a look at, not the processes. So, I think we've got a firm understanding on what the Simple View of Reading is. Now we know that there's been some affirmations, some other studies that have confirmed what we know about the Simple View of Reading. But you know what? There have been some critics out there that have been arguing that the Simple View of Reading is outdated. You know, what does the evidence show that supports the continued validity of the Simple View of Reading, of this theory, for four decades?

WH:

So, as I said, there are just mounds of evidence that have been done on the Simple View in other languages with kids that range from just beginning to learn to read to adults that were skilled readers, and the vast majority of that work supports the idea that reading comprehension can be decomposed into two capacities the capacity to understand the language and the capacity to recognize its words quickly and accurately in print.

But there are a couple of ways to think about what it means to be outdated, and one of those is that there are other theories that better explain what the proximal cognitive capacities of reading are. So, that's one way to think about outdated … that the Simple View has been replaced by other theories that do a better job of accounting for the proximal capacities underlying reading comprehension. But in fact there are no other theories that do a better job than what the Simple View does. So, it’s not outdated in that sense. But there’s another sense in which someone could say it’s outdated because current research, contemporary research, fails to uphold the predictions of earlier research. That is, that earlier research that was first the foundation of supporting the Simple View is invalid because we have different measures, we have different ways of thinking about reading comprehension. But in fact that isn’t the case either. The research that had been done over the last 20 years upholds the research that was done in the first 20 years of the Simple View.

PA:

Very, very interesting. I’m sure lots of people were very excited to hear that information and those layers definitely helped to make a difference. Wes, we know that we've identified this overview of reading. You told us what it is. We've got our language comprehension. We have our word recognition. So, thinking about these essential proximal capacities, how do these interact with each other in practice? You know, in actual reading of text in order to comprehend.

WH:

So, that’s a very important question. It’s one that the Simple View doesn't address because, again, the Simple View is about capacity and not process. It doesn’t say how word recognition and language comprehension combine when actually carrying out reading. It just says that to be a reader you have to have these two capacities, you have to be able to understand the language and you have to be able to recognize the words of that language quickly and accurately. So, it's about capacity and not about process. But when you think about the difficulties in recognizing a word, you can see, for instance, in set for variability, where a student who’s learning to read a language that they already know and trying to understand the grapheme-phoneme correspondences, comes to a word and their skill with grapheme-phoneme correspondences doesn't allow them to correctly identify that word. In that case, they might use language to help them guess, or make an educated guess, about alternative pronunciations for that word. So, for instance, if I'm reading a sentence, the football hit him in the and I come to stomach and I say stomack, because I’ve never seen that word in print before and I realize, well, that's not a word I’m familiar with. What are some other words that might be similar to that that actually are in my vocabulary and so I come to say stomach and I say, oh, it must be stomach. Well, that helps me actually learn what the proper grapheme-phoneme correspondences are for that word. And in that way there's an interaction between language comprehension and word recognition in actually learning to read. But the skill that comes out of that is the skill to actually know the grapheme-phoneme correspondences and to know the language. Those things are dissociable. You can separate them. Kids can know a language without being able to recognize any of its printed words, and vice versa. I can read Spanish. I don't know Spanish, but I can read it. I can read the words. So, those two competencies are separable and that's one of the things that's really important. But there's another way to think about the interaction of word recognition and language comprehension. That comes from the Simple View. That’s very important and the way I get at this is people that are familiar with the Simple View have seen that its scales sometimes are put on a scale of zero to one. No skill to perfection. That is so for word recognition. If I have no skill, I can't recognize any of the words. If I'm perfect at word recognition, it means all of the words I encounter I can recognize quickly and accurately. Same thing for language comprehension zero to one, no skill to perfection. Reading comprehension zero to one, no skill to perfection.

And most people, when they come to the Simple View, they get the idea pretty readily that if I have no skill in one of the components, that is, if I can't read any of the words, recognize any of the words, it doesn't matter how much skill I have in language comprehension. I'm not going to be able to read the language. And they recognize the other situation as well. If I can read all the words but I have no skill in the language, then I can't read any of that language. So, it’s easy to see that skill in one there’s no compensation between language comprehension and reading comprehension. If you don’t have skill in one, it won’t help you with reading comprehension, regardless of the skill level in the other. So, in that way they don't compensate.

But it’s important for people to realize that the general principle is that the level of skill in one component, its influence on reading comprehension, how much it advances reading comprehension, depends upon the level of skill in the other component. So, let me give you an example. If, for instance, going back to this scale of zero to one, if I can recognize half the words that are contained in a text and I can understand all of the language that’s in that text, if it’s read to me, then I can read half of the text when I read it rather than when it’s read to me. Because I can read half the words, I understand all of the language. But now, if I take that same level of word recognition, being able to recognize half the words, but now I can only understand half the language, I can only read, with comprehension, a quarter of the text, not half.

So, what that means is that the skill in one component is determining how much the skill in the other component can advance reading comprehension. And where this gets important for teachers is when they come upon kids that are struggling. Say, we have two kids that are at the same place in word recognition and a teacher goes out and advances their word recognition both to the same level, but then, when giving them a reading comprehension test, realizes that one of them is a far superior reader to the other one, even though their word recognition skills are the same. So, what's going on? Well, their language comprehension is limiting how much their word recognition skills can influence reading comprehension. So, that's what's important for teachers to understand that there is this connection between word recognition and language comprehension.

PA:

And you always have to be leery about what the skills are in both when you're talking about reading comprehension. So, one skill can affect and support the other, but not with sufficiency to help to create that skilled reader, because they need both. It’s just absolutely necessary. It’s essential for students to have both competencies. I love the examples that you gave, Wes. Teachers would appreciate having those as clarifying points, because I was going to ask you to clarify with some examples, but you jumped right into that.

So that was wonderful. I do want to shift a little bit because we are talking about capacities and the cognitive function. I want you to elaborate a little bit on the Cognitive Foundations Framework, the CFF, and how it extends the simple view of reading.

WH:

Certainly so. The Simple View of Reading is about the capacities that are required for reading, so it's about what constitutes reading comprehension. The cognitive foundations doesn't extend the Simple View by adding additional components to what’s required for reading. What it adds are what’s the basis for being able to acquire word recognition and language comprehension. So, the cognitive foundations are about learning to read, whereas the Simple View is about what constitutes reading. So, that’s the difference between the two models. And in the cognitive foundations it's a hierarchical presentation of the skills and their relationships to each other that are required in order to learn word recognition and language comprehension.

So, let me start. We don't have the graph, but let me start on the language comprehension side. So, language comprehension in order to master language comprehension, you have to be able to master linguistic knowledge. Comprehension you have to be able to master linguistic knowledge, and that's the knowledge of phonology. What’s the sound structure of the language? How do sounds relate to word formation? You have to master syntax. How do word structures in sentences come together to give different configurations of words, different meanings of phrases and sentences? And then semantics. What are the meanings of individual words? What are the meanings of sentences? What are the meanings of connected sentences? But that just gives you linguistic structure and that won't help you actually have language comprehension unless you pair it with knowledge of the world and inference making. So, you have to be able to understand the world and understand how the world translates into language in order to have language comprehension. So, let me give you an example of that.

So, for people that know baseball, I was just in Australia and I gave this example because they don't know baseball very well in Australia, they know cricket. And so I said, if I gave you the sentence, The baseball game ended with a ball, tell me what you think that means. And most of the people were nonplussed. Well, of course it ended with a ball. Baseball has a ball in it and they didn't understand the difference between a called ball from an umpire and the actual object that is a ball. Baseball has a ball in it and they didn't understand the difference between a called ball from an umpire and the actual object that is a ball.

But if you know that it was a called ball, you know a whole lot about what happened, why the game ended. Because the only way a baseball game could end on a called ball is if the bases were loaded. It was the bottom of the ninth inning or later the home team had walked the last batter. That person went to first base. The person on third base came home and scored. So, from only that sentence, the baseball game ended with a ball. You can make so many inferences about what happened if you know the game of baseball. If you don't know it, you can't make those inferences.

PA:

It has a lot to do with background knowledge and social interactions, understanding of concepts, your experiences.

WH: 

Absolutely. It's not just language, it's the relationship between language and knowledge of the world and being able to make inferences in language based upon your knowledge of the world. But on the word recognition side, let me go there. It has a lot of complexity in it and I'll start at the bottom.

With word recognition, you have to be able to have two things to begin to learn to recognize words. First, you have to be able to discriminate the units of the alphabet. You have to be able to recognize the words doesn't mean you have to be able to name them, but that’s how most people learned to discriminate between the different letters of the alphabet. You also have to be able to discriminate the units consciously of the phonological system. So, you have to have phonemic awareness.

And phonemic awareness isn’t something that you get in language comprehension, because you don’t need it to comprehend language, but you need it in order to acquire reading, because you have to be able to isolate the phonemes in the speech stream so that you can tie them to the letters in the alphabet. And to do that you have to have knowledge of the alphabetic principle. And if you don’t have knowledge of the alphabetic principle, then you won’t know what the game is in trying to learn to read. You won't know that the task you’re charged with is to associate the phonemes within a language with the letters that language uses from the alphabet. So, you have to have that cluster of things, letter recognition and phonemic awareness together to build knowledge of the alphabetic principle.

But once you have that, you have to couple it with print concepts. You have to know how the printed language works. The language in English runs left to right, top to bottom. Pages turn left to right, sentences are bounded by blank spaces, sentences end with periods or question marks. That stuff isn’t hard to know, hard to learn, but you have to know it before you can actually use the printed page, along with knowledge of the alphabetic principle to acquire alphabetic coding skills. And that’s the relationship between graphemes and phonemes that you have to master. And mastering that allows you to then connect word patterns orthographically, orthographic patterns directly with meaning. So, rather than going from orthography to phonology to meaning, once you’re good at doing that you can then connect directly the orthography to the meaning of a word. That's orthographic mapping, going the whole round from phonology to sorry, from orthography to phonology, to meaning, and once you do that, then you can recognize words quickly and accurately. And that's what gives you word recognition. Word recognition is very complicated to learn. Lots goes on in trying to master it.

PA:

Well, it seems very complex when we think about the phonology involved, the phonemic awareness, understanding the alphabetic principle. All of those are so foundational. And you mentioned something like you know they have to know the game, right? What about these kids who don't know the game, who don't understand the code or have difficulty being able to understand the game? What can educators do for these students? How can we help them?

WH: 

What it can help educators do is know where to focus attention when kids are struggling. So, from the Simple View, you know if a kid’s struggling, find out whether it's in word recognition, language comprehension or both. If it’s in word recognition, is it in their ability to do alphabetic coding? Can they map letters of the alphabet onto the phonemic stream and then get to a word meaning? If they can't do that, is it just because they haven’t had enough practice or is it because they don't understand the game, that is, they don't know that?

What I'm trying to do when I read a word, when I read a passage, is I’m trying to actually identify the word based upon the letters I'm seeing, rather than say guessing what the word is, based upon the context or the pictures on the page. You have to know what the game is and you have to devote your attention to trying to figure out what that relationship is. And if you can't do that, you're not going to be successful. And so there are programs that like LETRS that people can use to go learn about how to connect, how to help kids make that connection. But it's not part of what comes with the Simple View of Reading or the cognitive foundations.

PA:

So, we can get identification, so that then they can find those processes that they need to apply to get students to be able to either focus and build that language comprehension or that word recognition based on student need. That's what we're going back to, right Wes?

WH:

Right. It ought to be all need-based. And just from the complexity that I talked about under word recognition and language comprehension, you can see that a classroom of 30 kids can have a great diversity of individual challenges that kids are facing and it at times can be an overwhelming task for a teacher to think about all of the possibilities that might be there. But a teacher, if they're going to be maximally helpful to a kid, has to figure out where their specific weaknesses are and then has to map the instructional tools that they have onto the support that they can provide the kids for those particular needs.

PA:

Right, awesome. Definitely a resource that can be used. What other areas of research that you think that would need to be explored just a little bit more? To help educators go in and really help to figure things out, looking at that direct, explicit instruction for processing, to help guide those students so that they could get in the middle of the game and truly understand to become that sufficient reader we’re pushing them for.

WH:

Yeah. So, for me, on the cognitive foundation side of things, one of the things the cognitive foundation stipulates is that these abilities that have to be mastered, these capacities that have to be mastered to master, say, word recognition, are hierarchical in nature, that is, there has to be some level of development at a lower level before any development at a higher level can take place.

But once that level is reached at the lower level, then development of both the lower and higher level are reciprocal generally, and so one of the big research questions is just how much capacity has to be mastered at a lower level before I can start working successfully with kids on the higher level, and once they’ve reached that lower level that allows them to go on to the higher level, how much instruction needs to be explicit and how much learning should come from implicit learning.

That is, the clearest example of this takes place in teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences, because once kids understand what the game is and have a fair number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences under their belt, then implicit learning can take over, and the best resource for teaching them to read is reading itself, letting them read and figure out themselves what those relationships are, rather than going through relationships either that they already know or that they will better acquire through implicit learning. So for me, the main research challenges are figuring out what those levels are that kids need to master before they can move on to higher levels, and then what's the balance between implicit and explicit instruction in helping those kids the most.

PA:

So, just thinking about that just-right level of instruction to provide for students, because we do want them to work at it a little bit themselves. As you said, that could be the best teacher. When students struggle a little bit with something, once they gain a skill, when do I move to the next level? When do I give them more leeway to try and do on their own? You know, we've got a saying that says we go as quickly as we can, but as slowly as we must.

WH:

Exactly, bad thought, definitely. And it's hard to realize just what that pace ought to be and when.

PA:

And I can imagine for individual students or certain groups of students, that might be changeable, right? So OK, that's that next bit of research that we want to learn more about so that we can pinpoint, and again, that just-right level. You talked about some everyday use of the Simple View of Reading, which is that big picture view, and also speaking about the Cognitive Foundations Framework as well, when we think about that everyday reading instruction. You gave us lots of examples. Can you give me one more example of a way to support students, and I think in my brain I’m thinking of those students who truly struggle? I’ve tried this with my students over and over and over and over again and this is not working. What can I do? What’s the next step in order to guide these students who are truly struggling and to get them to the point where they become those skilled readers that we are trying to develop?

WH:

So, one way is to worry about your assessments. You have assessments that can help you drill down into those skills that underlie the Cognitive Foundations Framework and tell you do they know the letters? Are they good at phonemic awareness? Do they have the alphabetic principle? Are they able to acquire grapheme-phoneme correspondences? Do they know what they’re trying to accomplish when they’re reading a text? Do they know that the letters are what they need to master and their relationship to the sounds, to the phonemes, in identifying words rather than just guessing based on other information?

So, getting assessment data is a critical piece and if you just have broad scale assessments of reading comprehension, they’re not going to tell you, they’re not going to pinpoint for you where those difficulties are. So, I think teachers need to get with their district leaders who have assessment information, and find out what are the assessments I can use to try and help pinpoint where these kids are having particular problems. On the language side, that's a very technical area. And so, if kids are having trouble, for instance, recognizing sounds in language, if they have glue ear or something like that where they just can’t pick up the sounds in the language, that requires a professional intervention and those kids you ought to find out if that's the case through assessments, but then those kids need to be referred to some other resource for help.

PA:

Right. So, additional resources maybe with students who have trouble just repeating a multisyllabic word right. Hold on to that in memory. That would be an example. All right. Lastly, what is one key takeaway that you would like listeners to remember about the role of cognitive factors in reading comprehension?

WH:

So, a couple. Actually one. Cognitive factors are really critical and they are the thing that must be mastered in order to master reading comprehension. So, you have to worry about them and you have to worry about how they develop and how you can support their development. But the other thing I always worry about, being from a research background, is that teachers can become jaded about scientific research, especially when new scientific research comes in and counters other scientific research that they have been relying on.

And I hope that teachers can understand that science doesn’t prove things. What science does is disprove things. It tells whether a theory is or isn't going to be sufficient for the phenomenon it’s designed to account for. So, I can disprove it, I can show that it’s not sufficient, but I can’t show that it actually is how things work. And so, other science may come in downstream that actually counters what we know today. Teachers need to have an open mind about accepting new science, but they also need to understand that it’s not just individual studies, it’s the volume of science, it’s the repeatability, the replicability of studies that makes a difference. So, they’ve got to be mindful. When someone comes in and says: “Well, I have this study that shows this isn’t the case. This is the case.” If it hasn’t been repeated in other situations by other researchers, you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt. And so, I think teachers need to be using science, but they also need to be skeptical about the claims of science until they have been highly scrutinized by other scientists.

PA:

Great. So, we're looking at a body of research that can prove a certain concept, again and again, affirming that this is true in various areas, maybe various populations of students, as you mentioned before, and we can say the Simple View of Reading has shown that, has proven that to be so. Am I correct in saying that, Wes?

WH: 

Not so much affirming that it's the case, but failing to show that it isn’t the case. So, it stands up to rigorous tests, but that doesn’t prove that it’s true. It only shows that we’ve failed to show it’s false. So, the more and more evidence we have that we can't show that it’s false leaves us to have confidence that it’s true, but it doesn't prove that it’s true.

PA:

I love the use of the word confidence, because I want to have confidence that what I understand about reading instruction and what my students need, I want to be able to have confidence that it works, because I'm going to spend that time with the students and that moment in time is most important for students. Oh, thank you so much, Dr. Hoover. This has been such a wonderful, informative and insightful conversation. 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/edview to learn about our webinars, blogs, and other podcasts. This has been Pam Austin and we hope to see you all again soon. Thank you.

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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.