Dec. 4th ~ Codevelopment of Word and Nonword Reading in Children From First Through Fourth Grade; Comprehension Strategies and Skills in Grade 3–5 Textbooks
The Weekly Newsletter That Keeps You Informed of the Latest Reading Research!
Welcome to the Reading Research Recap, a weekly newsletter featuring the latest reading research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The goal of the Recap is to share recent scientific findings and foster an appreciation of science as a way to navigate the world. I try to make this one of the most informative emails you get each week. If you enjoy this issue, please share it. I am always interested in improving the newsletter and welcome feedback.
Welcome! This is Issue No. 30
“We [academics] are probably the most protected group in the world. Yet there is so much fear. Think of other sectors that do not enjoy such protection, yet they still stick their necks out. We are public servants when it comes down to it. The main reason we have tenure is to protect us from our colleagues. We need to take advantage of that and get out there.”
-Rashid Sumaila…from this book
(note: I am not in academia, but I found this quote interesting with regard to tenure)
No updates!
Research📚
Highlights (research presented in brief)
Meta-Analysis: “Our results show a decrease of genetic and shared environmental influences and an increase of non-shared environmental effects from preschool/kindergarten through elementary school to middle school, suggesting greater importance of family effects in preschool and in early school years. However, after the initiation of formal schooling, heritability estimates slightly decrease -although remaining substantial- and shared environmental effects decline, leaving the nonshared environment as the primary sources of variability in reading.”
“In England, instruction in systematic synthetic phonics is the first approach to teaching children to read words. There is little research exploring what makes successful training for phonics teaching despite evidence teachers’ subject knowledge is limited…Research-informed in-service training for phonics teaching can have beneficial impact, but must be closely partnered with local needs, and calibrated to teachers’ existing subject knowledge, to ensure professionals feel empowered to make sustainable changes and improvements to practice.”
“Hence, the aim of the current synthesis was to examine follow-up intervention effects of reading interventions involving adolescent struggling readers in Grades 6 to 12. Our literature search yielded only 10 studies that reported follow-up data for intervention participants, which highlights the dearth of intervention research that examines sustainability of intervention effects. …a comparison of treatment group students’ immediate posttest and follow-up scores showed that students mostly maintained gains made during intervention at follow-up time points.”
“Thus, while problems in face recognition can be present in developmental dyslexia, the dissociation strongly suggests that face recognition can also be preserved.”
“Avoidant coping style, emotional wellbeing and social functioning were related to education, and life‐satisfaction to unemployment irrespective of c‐RD. Thus, the non‐cognitive factors associated with education and employment are similar in individuals with and without c‐RD [childhood reading disability].”
“Results demonstrate that the intervention Build a Word-Easy Spelling with Phonics substantially improved the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of letter-sound correspondences for the five LEALs [Learners of English as an Additional Language].”
Deeper Dive
General background not directly from the paper:
Nonwords (sometimes referred to as pseudowords) are nonsense words (have no meaning) but still follow the orthographic ‘rules’ of English.
There is some debate about how to use them effectively in reading instruction. For example, some people believe they should only be used for assessment and never directly taught, others believe that they should be taught, because, after all, many multisyllabic words are composed of smaller nonsense/non-words. (I couldn’t find the link: there was video from a pattan lecture on Facebook the other day and I forgot to save it, sorry).
Background from the paper: The authors lay out a rationale for intentionally combining/merging two hypotheses/models of non-word reading (NWR) development. One is a behavioral model: the asymmetry model. The other is a computational model: the orthographic-phonological overfitting model or O-P overfitting (part of the Triangle Model). They combine these because both models suggest that children with dyslexia tend to have very poor non-word reading skills and that the children who have the worst non-word reading skills also have poor reading skills.
Rationale: “This is the first study to model, and display visually, the relations between WR [word reading] and NWR [nonword reading] growth trajectories in a large sample of developing readers; thus, allowing the “asymmetry”/ “O - P overfitting” hypotheses of dyslexia to be appraised.”
Sample: N = 588; 45.60% African American; 38.69% Caucasian; 51.5% female; 61.47% free and reduced lunch; and aged 7.1 years (SD = 0.20 years) at the start of the assessment
Measures: A battery of tests including the TOWRE and the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test
Methods: “…second-order curve of factors growth models…”; “While the curve of factors approach has been around for some time (Isiordia & Ferrer, 2018; McArdle, 1988) it has rarely been applied in the social sciences. The curve of factors approach specifically capitalizes on the advantages inherent in modeling a construct’s change over time with multiple measures.”
They also graphed vector plots available here and pretty cool!
Results
“…children with dyslexia overfit O-P associations across time, relying on more “global” processing strategies, resulting in lexical asymmetry in which word-specific representations are added to the lexicon without concomitant addition of sublexical O - P associations needed to read nonwords.”
“Additionally, results indicate that while WR and NWR growth factors are highly related (r = .71) in the sample, the relation between WR and NWR trajectories changes in a nonlinear fashion as a function of initial WR and NWR skill.”
If you started with poorer word-reading skills, then your trajectories (vectors) were more likely to be flat. A flat vector indicates that you grew in word-reading skills but you did not grow in non-word reading skills (hence the ‘asymmetry’ described above).
Implications for Practice
“Certainly, our results suggest that contrasting early WR and NWR skill growth across time in struggling readers could help to quickly identify those children with characteristic at WR–NWR trajectories that indicate elevated risk for poor word-level reading outcomes.”
“Instructional routines that focus students’ attention on connections at the sublexical level in a systematic way have an impact on the pattern of results observed regarding real-WR versus decoding.”
I thought this was interesting:
“Similarly, Blachman et al. (2014) employed an intervention focused on building sublexical O - P associations in a study evaluating the long term effects of an 8-month intervention on second and third graders (selected on the basis of poor word-level skills) reading with significant WR effects favoring the treatment surviving a decade later (d = .62).” (open access to underlined article!)
In-Depth
An Analysis of Comprehension Strategies and Skills Covered within Grade 3–5 Reading Textbooks in the United States (access the full paper!)