Sept 18th ~ Leftovers from RRQ's special issue; reading motivation, poor comprehenders; a meta-analysis on orthographic transparency; an RCT for a reading intervention for children with Autism
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. 19
“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
✏️Updates
There’s a lot of science in this edition! Perhaps because I’m covering the leftover articles from RRQ’s special issue. Speaking of the RRQ special issue, I saw it posted on Facebook that they recently made the entire issue open access. I have not confirmed this, but they do have short summaries of all the articles here.
And, as if there was not already enough research jam-packed in this issue, I have a special open access article (for science nerds) about why Meta-Analyses differ from Multi-lab replications at the end!
📊Research Insights
Open Access Papers
RCTs & Meta-Analyses
none this week
Correlational/Quasi-experimental/Descriptive Papers
“Our study provides further support for the high prevalence of the developmental decline in intrinsic reading motivation during early adolescence, its generalizability across students’ demographic characteristics, and its implications for the development of reading proficiency.”
“In this study, 75 preschool students were assessed using a benchmark preschool assessment that focused on literacy and then predictive validity was explored through the middle of kindergarten. Children’s literacy assessment performance was correlated with their results on later kindergarten assessments to determine if the preschool assessment predicted later risk in literacy.” (Note: this is a dissertation and not yet peer-reviewed).
“The more a student talked, the greater were his/her reading comprehension (RC) gains.”
“Thematic analysis of open-ended prompts revealed three themes: concern about children’s academic decline despite their effort to learn and the parents’ effort to support them; concern about children’s mental health; and, concerns about children’s deteriorating attitudes toward reading.” (Note: this is a dissertation and not yet peer-reviewed).
“Phonological ability, rapid automatised naming, visual short-term memory and visual attention span were significant predictors of spelling accuracy for beginning spellers, while for more advanced spellers, only visual attention span was a significant predictor.” (note: unclear if this is preprint has been peer-reviewed)
Opinions
Here are the rest from the RRQ special issue:
We need more translational science and translational scientists to bridge the research-to-practice gap. I loved reading this article. Though I have some very minor suggestions for areas I wish they would have discussed further. I think their thinking is really innovative but I have to say that I thought it was a bit aspirational at times. For example, in a field plagued by ‘reading wars’ do we really expect researchers with opposing hypotheses to come together and figure out who was wrong? (as the authors suggest on the bottom of page 25). Some researchers have careers built on a body of research, so what incentive do they have to partner with someone who criticizes them, risking the chance they (and their body of work) could be publicly deemed wrong if the results do not end up corroborating their view. I think the article would have benefited from a deeper analysis of whether incentives are actually aligned to conduct such research.
And, speaking of incentives, I wish they would have talked more about why knowledge is not enough to change practice. I think they missed the incentive discussion on this as well. For example, they mention that researchers can get creative in how they disseminate information (tweets, briefs, apps, etc.) but what practitioner is incentivized to follow and read all the tweets/briefs/apps for all the reading researchers out there? Did they ask practitioners if this is how they want to get information? It might work for researchers, but does it work for teachers? I’ve been doing lots of customer discovery in this area to improve the Recap, and one of the top complaints was an overabundance of so-called ‘expert’ resources. Based on what I know, tweets/apps/brief reports, if not packaged and delivered through a trusted portal, could become overwhelming, seen as untrustworthy, or lost in the fray.
These are minor complaints, though, and overall I really enjoyed the article because it presented innovative ideas. The ideas may turn out to be misinformed or wrong, but at least they are trying- so, good on them! (“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with something original.”)
How the Science of Reading Informs 21st-Century Education (A preprint of this was published a few months back and shared widely on the Facebook groups)
It’s Time to Be Scientific About Dyslexia I believe this opinion is pretty controversial, but basically he states that Dyslexia is not distinguishable from generally poor readers: “Whereas it is often claimed that scientific understandings, derived from genetics, neuroscience, and cognitive science, enable clinicians to validly identify, from within a larger group of poor readers, those individuals with dyslexia, the author shows this to be not only misleading but also potentially deleterious to broader inclusive practice.”
Papers That Are Not Open Access
RCTs & Meta-Analyses
RCT: “Six weeks of RECALL [Reading to Engage Children with Autism in Language and Learning] significantly enhanced story comprehension, emotion knowledge, and reading engagement among preschoolers in the treatment group.”
Meta-Analysis: “Orthographic transparency proved to be a significant moderator of dyslexic deficits in word and pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, spelling and phonological awareness, with the expression of the deficits being weaker on transparent—as opposed to intermediate and opaque—orthographies.”
Correlational/Quasi-experimental/Descriptive Papers
“These findings suggest that PC [poor comprehenders] exhibit poor text comprehension and memory, particularly of central ideas, because they construct a low-quality, poorly-connected text representation during reading, and produce fewer, less-elaborated retrieval cues for subsequent text comprehension and memory.”
Opinions/Suggestions for Translating Research into Practice
Two other papers from RRQ special issue that were not open access when I covered them- but they might be open access now (there was a post of a Facebook Group saying they were making the entire issue open access but I have not confirmed this. When I checked, some were still behind a paywall):
Disrupting Racism and Whiteness in Researching a Science of Reading. I think there are some important points here- such as who is creating knowledge? What do we mean by knowledge? I do not want to get too political and potentially offend people, but academia definitely has a long way to go in making itself more inclusive (for example, this, this, and this.)
“In sum, the overriding tension between the SOR and adaptive teaching resides in SOR research and pedagogy. Advocates of the SOR argue that the field needs research that is rigorous and scientific (Dehaene, 2009; Scarborough, 2001). This type of research is typically identified as experimental or quasi-experimental. SOR pedagogy emphasizes the teaching of discrete skills. This approach lacks a deep embodiment in practice of students’ cultural, linguistic, and varied instructional needs. In contrast, adaptive teaching positions teachers as knowledgeable decision makers and requires a view of students who vastly differ and are full of resources. In moving the debate forward, our suggestion is for the research community to work in between and across epistemologies to explore how adaptive teaching can be used in discussing a view of reading as a critical, sociocultural practice.”
I really wish these were published open-access or at least had a pre-print somewhere:
Improving Instruction in Co-Taught Classrooms to Support Reading Comprehension.
Teaching World and Word Knowledge to Access Content-Area Texts in Co-Taught Classrooms.
Preparing to Implement Evidence-Based Literacy Practices in the Co-taught Classroom
Warning: this section for science nerds only!
One of my friends from Columbia University is an experimental psychologist and he occasionally sends e-mail updates about science cool articles. This one really caught my eye (open access preprint): The puzzling relationship between multi-lab replications and meta-analyses of the published literature. While it concerns psychology, many of the problems that plague psychology are shared by educational research. So, I found it applicable. The preprint shared above is actually a response to another paper. In the first paper, the authors argued that meta-analyses are problematic, but in this article, they suggest that the discrepancy between multi-lab replications and meta-analyses can yield important information, such as understanding bias in the field.
“Further, our analyses suggest that effect size heterogeneity and publication bias may contribute to—but are unlikely to account fully for—this discrepancy. Speculative possibilities for the remaining discrepancy include that MLRs obtain smaller effect sizes because of standardization of methods across labs (perhaps especially for context-sensitive phenomena) and because of the potential for differential effort to ensure intervention fidelity comparing MLRs and original literature. Understanding the source of the discrepancy between effect sizes estimated from meta-analyses and those from MLRs is an important, complex question for future meta-scientific research.”
I just found the article interesting because Meta-Analyses are up there with RCTs at the top of the scientific rigor pyramid, but it seems like there might be issues with Meta-Analyses as well- like bias in the published literature. Examining how Meta-analyses differ from multi-lab replications could yield important information.
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I have a broad background in reading science and practice: I majored in Biology (UVA), credentialed in special education (UCLA), post-bacc’ed in cognitive psychology (Columbia University), mastered in educational neuroscience (Columbia University), and recently (doctored? PhD’d?) in special education (Vanderbilt) with a focus on reading development. I’ve been a social worker, a sped para, and a sped teacher (trained in the Wilson method) and a doc student/researcher (my work has been published in The Journal of Learning Disabilities, Annals of Dyslexia, and Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal).
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I started The Reading Research Recap to help bridge the research-to-practice gap, and, because I wish I had it when I was a teacher, a doc student, and even as a parent. If you are a taxpayer, you have a right to see the results of taxpayer-funded research. T
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The Reading Research Recap covers recent peer-reviewed reading research. I tend to focus more on quantitative (vs. qualitative), applied (vs. basic), young (vs. adults), and native English speakers (vs. ELLs or ESL). That does not mean I do not include research on topics contained in the parentheses, it just means, over time, I tend to cover more research on the other topics. I welcome feedback and am always trying to improve the newsletter so feel free to reach out to me.
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