Producer:  Welcome back to Full PreFrontal, where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. As always, I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, my good friend. Always good to be with you, looking very much forward to this conversation. Why don’t you kick things off for us?

Sucheta:  Good to be here with you, Todd. I apologize to our listeners, my voice is not the best today but maybe it’s sexy, as you said earlier.

Producer:  And the show must go on.

Sucheta:  Show must go on. We have a very special topic. We’re going to talk about reading comprehension. So I will talk a little bit about failure in reading comprehension. This was a story that I came across several years ago about fall of German Wall. The story behind the fall is less than glamorous apparently. So Washington Post did a story in 2009 that described that one of the most momentous events of that century was in fact an accident. A semi comical and bureaucratic mistake that owes as much to the Western media as to the tides of history.

So, story goes something like this, that on November 9, 1989, Günter Schabowski, he was a member of the East German politic bureau, who was supposed to hold a press conference to disclose minor changes to the travel ban between East and West Germany. Schabowski unfortunately was not really informed about the memo that he was handed but he was the spokesperson so he took the written memo which was written by somebody else and did not read it. And not reading can really be a problem and not understand what you’re reading can be a problem. And then if you are asked questions about what you have just read and you can’t answer it, it can be a problem.

So, the story goes like this, that he gave the speech and it was very bureaucratic and totally unengaging. It went on and on for one hour and Tom Brokaw who himself was there during the speech described it as boring. But what happened is he mentioned something in the memo that kind of perked up people’s interest. It mentioned that maybe the ban will be loosened allowing the travel. There was a Italian reporter who heard that and he raised his hand and said, “When?” Suddenly, Schabowski who had not read anything beforehand or not understood it, he frantically went through his paperwork and tried to find the space or spot where this was written and somehow put a couple of clauses together and in the longwinded clause that he picked up, the snippet said, “Exit via border crossings and possible for every citizen.” So he picked up these two phrases and the conclusion was the ban was going to be lifted and that hit social media. That hit all over the world. And before he came home for lunch, everybody thought that the wall was down.

So, the bottom line I’m trying to say here is reading comprehension is very, very critical not just for young learners or anybody who’s trying to affect the world and problem with reading can really cause devastating problems. In this case, it just turned out to be for the best for all of us. So that brings me to our very special guest who is an expert in this and who is going to shed a light as to how people can avoid such mistakes and really get good at understand what they’re reading and then summarize what they’re reading so that they don’t put their foot in their mouth.

So, with great honor, I’m inviting Kelly B. Cartwright, who is a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and teacher preparation at Christopher New Port University, where she directs the reading, executive function, and development lab which is called READ. Her research explores the development of skilled reading comprehension and the neurocognitive and affective factors that underline comprehension processes and difficulties from preschool through adulthood. She has written many books and a few just to list here is, Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators, Word Colors, Small Group, and One on One Intervention for Children Who Read but Don’t Comprehend, and the last one is Literacy Processes: Cognitive Flexibility in Learning and teaching, which was nominated for Ed Fry Book Award in 2008. Her research has been supported by grants from the Virginia State Reading Association and United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. Kelly regularly works with teachers in public and private schools throughout the United States to better understand and improve reading comprehension for struggling readers. These experiences inform her research.

So, it’s a great delight for me to invite you, Kelly. Welcome to the podcast.

Kelly:  Hi, Sucheta. I am just so happy to be here today. Thank you.

Sucheta:  So, I asked this question of many of my guests or most of my guests, tell us about a little bit about your own executive function and how have your personal insights into self-awareness and self-management skills benefited you as you embarked upon your career in psychology and neuroscience?

Kelly:  What a fun question. I am planner by nature. I make lists. I love to organize details. I’m most comfortable when I’m able to impose some sort of order on things, whether it’s straightening my desk before I try to engage in a task. Perhaps that’s really procrastination at work. I don’t know. But as a young learner and as a reader, since we’re focusing on reading today, comprehension was fin for me. So, I think in that sense, I was a goal-directed learner. I was a goal-directed reader. And I think as I have developed as a learner and a reader and embarked on my career, I was interested in the differences that I saw in how I engaged reading and what I saw in other students and why some people have difficulty and some people don’t and why some people have an easy time structuring writing, for example, and other people have a more difficult time. That led me to a career in focusing on how children and adults think and learn and how that connects to executive function processes or brain-related processes that support that thinking and learning. And so I guess in terms of my own executive processes, my meta cognitive reflection on my own reading and thinking made me interested on how that worked for others and I’ve made a career out of it.

Sucheta:  Brilliant. So, one more question about that. When did you discover that you were becoming strategic about your learning?

Kelly:  That’s a really good question. I think I was probably an undergraduate student. Maybe even into graduate school. As an undergraduate student, I wasn’t as strategic. I was interested in learning how processes worked. I remember reading in my cognitive psychology class about top-down and bottom-up processes and reading and I was fascinated about why and how that worked and thinking about how that worked in my own reading but still not as strategic as I was in graduate school. For example, when I was very structured in a way that I approached a text, the way I approached tasks and studying. And so I think as I developed as a learner and became more specialized in the topics that I was studying, I became more strategic. And I think my own development and awareness of my own processes is aligned well with what we see in a research in terms of development of executive function. Our executive functions aren’t fully developed until we enter late adolescence, early adulthood. So, we see with many people, we’re developing throughput the lifespan.

Sucheta:  You know, I’d really ask that question primarily because I think I find that many talented individuals with great executive function go into fields like you have where it requires very tedious effortful intentional organization and planning to manage a complex research endeavor. But as you mentioned, that strategic thinking is not external to us and we are trying to build that for students who struggle to make it external. And it is very time-consuming and tedious process but I’m really, really excited the possibility of making that process externalized, explicit, and visible to all learners at a very young age. Because then, for those, you know, the awareness of awareness may not kick in until very late but they are at least that strategies can be developed intentionally. So, thank you for sharing that.

Let’s start with a very broad question in terms of, I know educational experts or education in general wants students to develop literacy skills. Do you mind telling us what is literacy and what is the relationship between literacy and reading. And we’re going to talk about executive function soon, so could you first set the stage for us about literacy?

Kelly:  Absolutely. Literacy involves more than people typically ascribe to it. Literacy involves at least three strands. Oral language. So being able to speak and express ideas with words. Being able to understand what is said or read to you so that oral language skill, it begins developing at birth and it is the foundation of other literacy skills. We also have this written language that maps onto our spoken language. And depending on where you grow up, that written language can be configured in different ways.

So, in English, the squiggles on the page mapped unto the sounds, the individual sounds in speech. We have letters in our alphabetic language that map unto the sounds in spoken language. Now, we need to learn to read those and figure out how that mapping occurs and that’s pretty tough in an alphabetic language. But other languages like Chinese, for example, they map characters unto meaningful ideas in the spoken language.

So, learning that mapping between the printed language and the oral language is different, depending on where you grow up and which languages you’re learning. But then not only do we have to learn to figure out what those squiggles on the page are in our reading process, we also have to figure out how to make squiggles on our own and write words and convey ideas in print so that when I need my mom to make cupcakes for the next day at school for example if I’m, say, a fourth grader and I forget to tell her and I write her a note, I have now conveyed oral language in writing so that I can manage that task. And that brings in the idea of executive skills. We can use those literacy skills as tools to manage thinking and everyday behaviors and interactions.

So, I guess, in a nutshell, we’re talking about in terms of literacy, we’ve got oral language, reading the printed language but also writing the printed language and those reading and writing skills are built on that foundation of good strong oral language.

Sucheta:  Great. So, what is executive function then? I have defined this for our audience but I think it’s really great to hear each expert who is working on a particular area of their expertise define it in that context, and how and why does it play a vital role in reading comprehension?

Kelly:  Well, executive skills just generally are a critical set of mental skills that we use to manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors for a goal, whatever that goal may be, whether it is engaging in a podcast or whether it is going to the grocery store. But for us in this particular conversation, talking about reading comprehension, those executive skills are mental tools that we use, things like working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibition or inhibitory control that help us to manage our thinking processes, help us manage our behaviors towards that end goal of understand the text that we’re reading.

So they’re helping us, they’re mental skills that help us to manage the very multifaceted act of comprehending text. Reading comprehension is not a unitary construct. It’s a really complex construct that involves many, many different processes. And so we recruit executive skills more often when we’re doing complicated things that require us to manage of different things and reading comprehension is one of those complex tasks.

Sucheta:  Tell us a little bit about this idea that people often mention that around from kindergarten to maybe second-third grade, children are learning to read and from thereon or maybe fourth grade onwards, the switch begins to happen where they take that skill or those skills and begin to understand what they read. So learning to read and reading to learn, what does that transition looks like or what set of skills go into making that successful transition?

Kelly:  That’s a great question and I think that idea, learning to read and reading to learn and that there is a shift if development that comes from [00:13:59] back in the 1960s. She proposed this idea. It’s a very pervasive idea in the field and it characterizes to some degree what we see in development where early in schooling, children do have to learn how that print, whatever language they’re learning and for us today, we’ll talk about learning English, learning how those alphabet letters map unto the spoken words, the sounds and the spoken words that they’re saying. So, in that sense, they are learning to read that print but they’re not just doing that. They’re also understanding what they read at the same time. So I want to be careful with that learning to read versus reading to learn dichotomy because it often can suggest to people that in that kindergarten to second grade range in development, that children are not actually worried about understanding what they read or that we as educators don’t have to worry about helping them understand what they read. Because in those grades, we should focus on learning how to decode the print but that’s problematic because reading comprehension requires that you coordinate those decoding processes, learning how to map letters and sounds unto to speech sounds with meaning. Words have meaning and words have letters and sounds and so good instruction and good development helps children to be able to manage both of those things and understand that the purpose of reading is to get meaning from text. But children who cannot decode text, who do not learn to decode those squiggles on the page are going to have significant difficulties with reading.

So, I would say then, I would characterize those early years as years where we have to make sure that children do learn the systematic correspondence between letters in print and sounds in speech so that they can use that systematic mapping to decode whatever words they come across. Because even as adult readers, when we come across an odd word that we’d never seen before, we use those same skills. We always engage those processes. They just may be automatic for us as adults but we certainly do need to focus on those skills but we should not focus on teaching that systematic phonics knowledge and that systematic decoding process. We should not focus on that to the exclusion of understanding what words mean because that creates comprehension problem. I mean, if we teach children that reading is only about decoding the print.

And if we do a good job in helping them as they go through development and they learn how to decode that text in that learning to read phase, say, kindergarten to second grade, we assume by second grade, children are able to fairly automatically map those letters and sounds unto speech. And they do it fairly automatically and they’re able to weave together a meaning of that text and that they can like we as adults readers make sense of what they read without having to spend a lot of effortful energy or a lot of cognitive resources, a lot of working memory space, if you will, on decoding. We would like that decoding process to become automatic. We just don’t want the focus to be at the expense of meaning early on.

Sucheta:  Thank you for clarifying that. I purposefully bring that question because when I go to different conferences and either hear questions being asked or presenters talk about sometimes I hear this concrete dichotomy as you mentioned or reconcretized version of looking at it that way. As you mentioned earlier, the literacy, in general, there is that communication having four parts. The oral communications, understanding, spoken language and speaking. And then written language having understanding written language and writing. And all four skills together make this infrastructure of your academic learning, so to speak, or learning or becoming learned.

So, yes, if somebody suspends comprehension in kindergarten to second grade thinking that let’s build only this relationship between these texts or the codes of written language and the sounds of spoken language, then they’re missing the boat. So, I appreciate you really emphasizing that and clarifying that.

So, the idea that the research show that struggling readers often exhibit low proficiency and executive function which then affects their comprehension which again eventually affects their academic success. So, what I notice that reading comprehension is salient yet silent or invisible. So, what are good comprehenders doing that struggling readers are not doing?

Kelly:  That’s a great question. I want to go back to your comment that comprehension is silent. Teachers don’t see whether it’s happening. Parents don’t see whether it’s happening in the child. What they do see and what they do hear whether you’re a teacher or a parent or just a bystander, you hear a child reading aloud and perhaps they do have that decoding process, that word-reading process down pat. So they sound fluent. They’re reading sounds like talking. That’s often how we frame it for students. We want you to read in a way that sounds like talking. So maybe they can do that. So for a teacher, that seems like the child has it all together. They know what’s going on.

But what we don’t see because comprehension or the lack of comprehension is silent, we don’t see that they might not be able to manage building that mental model of a text’s meaning in mind while working their way through decoding that text. So at the very least, a good comprehender is able to do that. They’re able to build a model in mind of a meaning of a text, processing not just individual words’ meaning but weaving them together in ways that makes sense, building that mental picture, if you will, of what’s going on in a text and then updating that picture as they continue to decode more words and make their way further into the text that they’re reading. And that coordination requires that they’re flexibly shifting between the letter sound information in the printed words and the meaning of words, the syntax in the sentences and whether the words are going together in an order that makes sense. They are having to inhibit attention to things that don’t support comprehension so ignoring irrelevant meaning. If you come across a word like the word “jam” for example, and traffic jam versus strawberry jam. You have to inhibit the meaning that doesn’t fit the context in the text that you’re reading about. You have to inhibit attention to your wiggly classmate sitting next to you.

Working memory certainly comes into play here for good comprehenders because working memory involve storage of information but it also involves continued processing a part of that information while you hold information in mind. You’re able to do things while holding information in mind or transform that information that you’re holding in some way. As I read through a text as a good comprehender, I’m making that mental model of text that I continue to update and transform and that requires my strong working memory skills.

But a poor comprehender or what teachers would commonly call a word caller, someone who can read words from the page well calls words from a page well and then doesn’t understand what they read, those students often have weak working memory skills. They’re not able to hold that text meaning in mind while continuing to decode words or they don’t inhibit well their attention to irrelevant pieces or they’re not able to flexibly shift between all the many elements or processes necessary to understand a text. These are silent skills. We don’t know that they’re there or not there until we realize that comprehension breaks down.

Sucheta:  So only way to really judge breakdown in comprehension is when the comprehension is tested, right?

Kelly:  Yes, yes.

Sucheta:  And so there are two ways to do it informally. Maybe asking a child to summarize what they just read or asking a pointed question which they can answer. But I find that it’s a hindsight 20-20 issue with reading comprehension because until and unless you read substantial amount of material, then this constant working memory update for the contextual meaning model if you keep building and updating, building and updating, then you formulate the big picture. So until enough comprehension is done, you cannot really judge whether there was a breakdown or not, right?

Kelly:  Right.

Sucheta:  Because otherwise, the process will be so labor-intense. So what are some of the things that parents or teachers can – I know we’re going to talk a little bit about how to support it but right here, I thought it was so critical to help people understand that a I have a lot of friends whose children are in fourth grade to middle school or beginning of high school but they are so satisfied that my son who’s a fourth grader is reading Harry Potter. I always asked, have you asked any – how do you know they’re reading well? And so the answers parent often give us, “I see him read.” Tell me, why is it so important to intercept reading comprehension process?

Kelly:  What a great example. I often give that very same example when I give talks. Parents will say, “Well, my child can read Harry Potter.” Well, what does that actually mean to you? “Well, I had him read it aloud to me at bedtime.” Well, great. That tells me that your child can decode words. So you can read the word “Dumbledore.” That’s great. You can decode those sounds but do you know what it means? We don’t know if the child knows what it means unless we ask those questions.

And so often, as an example from my own family, I have an 8-year-old son who is in third grade as well. When he reads a text, I will ask him, “Well, tell me. What is it about — do you like that book? What do you like about it? What is it that’s happening? Who are the characters? What are they doing? What’s the problem they’re solving in the story?” So, I try to engage him in conversation about the text to see if he has made any meaning from that text. I know that he can decode the words. If he struggles with the word and he’s reading aloud to me, I’ll say, “Hey, go back and check that and read all the way through the word,” making sure that he’s attending to all the bits. Because sometimes, even at the third and fourth grade level if they’re fed a multisyllabic word, we’ve got to take them back to that decoding process if they’re not getting there. Help them with strategies. Let’s chunk it and look at parts that we know. Organizing our thinking the way that we would as good folks who handle our executive function processes well.

But in terms of knowing whether they’re reading for meaning, we need to ask them questions about the meaning not in a sense that would make it feel like they’re being tested. We don’t want reading to not be a fun thing to do but engage them in conversation about what they like about that text. Who are the characters? Or if you’re reading together with your child and you are reading a book with them, you’re doing the reading, stop and talk. Ask questions. What do you think is going to happen next? Why do you think the character chose to do this? Those kinds of things to get them focused on that meaning. That way, that gives you an idea of whether they do know what’s going on in that story?

By the time they get to third and fourth grade, they want to go off and read by themselves, ask them questions about what they’re reading.

Sucheta:  My children are grownup now. They are both in college and when they were younger, we started reading very young The Series of Unfortunate Events.

Kelly:  Oh, they’re fun. My daughter knows.

Sucheta:  They are so good, aren’t they? They are just so fabulous. But one of the monumental task I had to do is I had to read the whole series before they got into it. I could not keep up with Harry Potter after two books. They went a lot further than I did. But being in this field long enough has informed me how to intercept their comprehension through engagement, not interrogation like you’re being arrested by a reading police.

Kelly:  Right, right, right.

Sucheta:  But what I found that I like to call it spot checking comprehension. You pick a random paragraph and read together and ask the child to explain the context that came before what was just read about and then predict something that’s going to happen next based on this paragraph. I have found that technique very useful, not disruptive to the reading interest and the joy of reading but also kind of sometimes if you don’t have time or ability to read everything the child is reading, kind of stay with it so that you are not letting the child – you know, I use this analogy, I said, “Would you take your child to a water park and not supervise?” And they will say, “Of course I would never do that.” So I said, “Your child when he’s reading a fat book, he is at a water park and you’re not supervising. He’s likely to drown in some parts of the water slides.”

Kelly:  Right. Exactly.

Sucheta:  Is that a good way to guide the children? Because how can we nurture their interest in reading  and not be the police but really, really provide that support scaffold, that psychosocial emotional support so that reading is building thinking skills?

Kelly:  Are you talking about a reader who is learning to read and things are going along well or are you asking me about reader who’s struggling with comprehension? I want to be clear about what you’re looking for here.

Sucheta:  I would love if you have a distinction between those two groups, how the scaffolding would look like. But I find that the parents, one of the educators who assign reading and the pushback that parents give mainly is about by intercepting reading, we are destroying the joy that goes with reading.

Kelly:  Well, I think there is a lot to be said there. We could have a whole different conversation about motivation and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

Sucheta:  Yes.

Kelly:  Children start out motivated to read because they love doing it and then we make them read for particular purposes, whether it’s points or stars or what have you. And the more that we give them external rewards or punishments, carrots or sticks for doing so, the less they want to do it on their own. So, I think giving them choice, making it fun, going to the bookstore or the library and letting them choose the things that they are interested in regardless of whether we like the topic of think that it would be interesting ourselves, that that choice and variety helps them to stay engaged. We want them to be engaged with the text. We don’t want do disrupt their comprehension certainly but I think stopping after a paragraph or when they look up and asking them, “What is your book about? Tell me what your book is about. What has happened up to this point and what do you think is going to happen next?”

You suggest that I think what that does for you is it tells you has my child built a model of this text’s meaning? Do they talk about the character’s motivations and why the character’s might be doing? Are they making those inferences about why characters are doing or feeling the things that they are and predicting the next subsequent action? That tells you that they have a meaning model that they’re building. And then they are looking toward the next updates that they would need to make as they read through the text.

Now, my son and I have conversations like that he will ask me, he’ll come to me sometimes and say, “Mom, this doesn’t make sense to me. Can you look at this and tell me what it means?” So making them aware that reading is supposed to make sense is another piece, I think. I have heard of and seen research-wise of other households where reading becomes about decoding the words right. And I think that we need to make sure that that certainly is a focus. If they can’t decode the words, we’ve got to make sure they can do that but we need to also make sure that getting the meaning out of the text is important because otherwise, they won’t be able to read to learn.

Now, you asked me earlier about distinguishing between children who are reading along fine versus those who really are having those comprehension problems. And I think it’s the child who when you ask, “Well, what is your book about?” “Well, I don’t know.” Those are the children. When they don’t know what it is about, they don’t know who the characters are, “Well, why did your teacher have you read this book?” “Well, I don’t know. Just to read it.” Well, if the response don’t give you any indication that they have comprehension of the text, if they’re missing the comprehension questions, if it’s just about getting the words right – colleagues at a school for struggling learners in Pennsylvania take on intake, ask students what do good readers do? And the struggling readers that come in, the ones who are struggling either with decoding or comprehension, they come in and say, “Well, good readers get all the words right. They don’t make mistakes when they read. They read the fastest. They get done first.” And those perspectives suggest that the students don’t even know what reading is for.

They don’t understand that good readers make a plan to understand text for a particular purpose, that when a good reader sits down with the text, they’re reading with the end in mind, knowing that they either need to learn a particular kind of information or they are reading for enjoyment, they are reading to see what these interesting characters do next. If children are reading just to decode, that’s a very, very different situation than reading to understand. And if they don’t even understand that how to go about understanding a text or that that’s why they should be doing it, that’s where we can intervene and provide the strategies and the support for their executive functioning skills that may be necessary. Because often what happens when they’re not comprehending, even though they sound like good readers but they’re not putting together that meaning, what may be happening is they just don’t have the working memory resources. They don’t have the cognitive flexibility necessary to support the things that they need to do to comprehend that text. And that is where intervention can happen.

Sucheta:  Absolutely. That’s very, very clear. So that bring me to another ways, a problem with reading often comes up or is described is breakdown in attention while reading. Often, children are seen or teachers or parents report that or the child himself might when prodded might report that he’s reading something over and over again. Can you talk a little about that? When does that really happen and what is going on in terms of inside and how does this relate to efficiency in reading?

Kelly:  I had a teacher tell me just this past week. I travel to give a talk to some teachers in another state and I had a teacher tell me she had an “aha” moment after we talked about executive functions and reading. She said, “Wait. All this times when my students, they read through a text and I think that they are not understand because they read too fast and they don’t pay attention and I tell them to slow down.” That’s not actually helping them to understand the text better. It’s just making them not understand more slowly. I think that’s what we see with these students who struggle with comprehension.

It’s more than just attention. If we tell them to sit down with a book and pay attention to it, that doesn’t tell them how to pay attention to it, what things should they be doing to understand that text better. Why are they reading this text? What things should they be doing? For example, we can tell them explicitly, we can give them explicit supports for working memory. Some of the things that authors do that students can be made aware of are that they leave bits of information out and we have to make inferences. And so we can teach them how to do that.

But if students are unaware that good readers are good thinkers, they’re good planners. They start with the goal of reading in mind. They have good memories. They can read through the text and then maybe all they’re doing, just decoding those words while also making a picture of the meaning of that texting mind. And if they are not able to do both of those things at once, if they’re not able to be flexible thinkers, then we can teach them, we can strengthen their cognitive flexibility as well. Good readers are flexible thinkers. Good readers can inhibit attention to particular distracting information in favor of attending to the meaning of the text.

But if students don’t know specific actions that they can take to understand the text, then telling them to pay attention isn’t going to fix it. I think that’s often what happens. We see a child read through the text or they do so too quickly and we say, “Oh, slow down then you’ll understand it. Pay attention.” But they don’t know how to pay attention because it’s more than just paying attention. They need to look for the clues that the author leaves in order to make inferences. They need to be able to make a picture of what’s going on in that text in mind while continuing to decode that text. They may have difficulty inhibiting inappropriate word meanings, for example, and so we need to teach them multiple word meaning and then help strengthen their ability to shift between those meanings as they’re making their way through a text.

It’s more than just a general attention issue. There are specific things that we can help them do and without giving them specific strategies, those children who have trouble with executive functioning, they’re not able to just pay attention and understand.

Sucheta:  You know, this reminds me of what you’re saying, if I can summarize, is that purposeful reading in my work, in my practice when I do the executive function training, I talk a lot about executive attention which is paying attention within intention and regulating the paying attention over passage of time. So, am I paying attention to the right stuff and do I know what that right stuff is which is that purposeful reading, right?

So, one of the exercises I do is taking a book cover, particularly for younger readers for example. This is much more easily illustrable, so to speak. But a couch for my mother and there is a big fat couch on the cover then you ask the child what is the story going to be about and predict why the mother needs a couch or whether she already has a couch. And so kind of creating some type of mental hypothesis so when you go into reading, you are able to find the answers to those hypotheses. Isn’t that what you are talking about?

Kelly:  Absolutely. I mean, good readers begin reading with a plan to understand the text for a particular purpose. When I’m working with students who struggle, I tell them this, we begin with my plan to understand that child should have a plan to understand that text for a reason because good readers are good planners. And so here, we might work with a student to set a goal for reading and understand why they’re reading a text and then have them look through that text, preview that text and see whether they should pay attention to particular parts and focus on those parts as opposed to others because they will help them reach that reading goal that they’ve set for themselves and connect information and that text back to knowledge that they have.

So that’s going back to our knowledge organization and connecting that new information to the knowledge that we already have and our long-term memory enables us to retain the information and the text. And then construct questions and make those hypotheses that you talked about and make predictions. What do I guess will be in this book? What will I know when I’m done? And so that goal-directed reading can help to support them. But I think there’s another piece here because planning goes hand-in-hand with organization and often children who struggle with executive functioning and adults as well, we struggle with organization and texts are organized. Authors are organized. Language is organized.

And so one of the things that we can do to help support them is to help students understand how language is organized. Perhaps they have difficulty with syntactic organization and so we can help them unscramble sentences. We can take sentences, break them apart and help them put them back together in ways that makes sense. Or we can help them understand another way that organization impacts reading comprehension is in text organization. Narrative texts are mostly organized in a similar way. When you read stories, you have events that are causally related but children who struggle with reading comprehension don’t see that those events are causally related and that characters react in a cause and effect fashion to events that happen in the story. And so helping students become aware of the structure of stories helps them to learn to us that information to understand texts.

And then another way to use this is with informational texts, the expository texts, texts that teach us things, nonfiction. Those have very different organizational structures, different from narratives. So those texts may provide just concept or they may be comparing and contrasting things or they may illustrate a temporal sequence, some sort of time sequence. But teaching students what those structures are, how to use those structures to help them remember what’s in a text, that enables them to take an organized approach to understanding text.

Ways to support this for students, I think, who struggle is to illustrate, take those illustrations, take story sequence images, sort of like cartoon sequences, scramble those up and have them, put them in an appropriate order and explain, retell how that story should go together. That gives them practice in seeing those connections so that they can then use that same organizational structure later on as they become more aware of it and their comprehension of new texts.

Sucheta:  Amazing. And thank you for listing specific processes there. I think, there’s so much behind the scenes that happens and needs to happen and it is facilitated. But if it’s not facilitated, the cost is devastating. To me, not being able to regulate reading comprehension is the 21st century crisis. What I see is that there is a gap in the educator’s understanding of the relationship between reading comprehension, critical thinking, and executive function.

My final question to you is, what does self-regulated reader and learner look like when it’s done well? What’s happening in that class?

Kelly:  A self-regulated reader and learner is on who is able to make sense of that text, who is able to mentally shift back and forth between meaning and decoding processes, who is able to reflect on knowledge that they gained from that text. They’re managing so many different processes but they’re able to glue those processes together, so to speak.

So the vocabulary knowledge that they have, their oral language comprehension, and their ability to decode that text and recognize the words in that text, they’re able to manage those things and weave them together, construct a meaning from a text that they can connect to their own knowledge, that they can use and they can use and they can talk about and they can write about after reading that text. Students who understand what they read and adults who understand what we read, we respond to text. So if you’ve ever found yourself reacting to a text or you read an article and you say, “Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking.” Or you react and say, “No! This makes no sense.” That your reaction is evidence of you comprehending and making meaning from that.

Sucheta:  That’s so beautiful. Such a beautiful example of that because this is exactly what happens in real life, right? We don’t get grades. We don’t get tests on what we read. There is a visceral emotional reaction and yeah, thumbs up, thumbs down, and internal reciprocity to that text. I love it, love it. Thank you so for clarifying that.

Any final words in terms of where do you see most optimism in your work and what’s happening in the field of reading comprehension and preparing next generation of readers?

Kelly:  The most optimism that I see is that we’re learning that reading specific executive function interventions are the things that are supporting readers. So, when we, for example, one of the tests that we’ve used successfully to improve reading comprehension is a cognitive flexibility task that enables readers to shift between meaning and letter sound information flexibly by sorting words according to those dimensions. So as we improve their ability that to shift between those dimensions, the letter sound information and meaning, we improve their ability to construct meaning while they read. Those kinds of reading-specific interventions, the interventions that map reading processes unto executive function demands, those seem to be the kinds of interventions that do improve academic performance for students and reading performance for students.

I should contrast that with interventions that train generic executive function processes. So general working memory tasks that aren’t necessarily reading-related. We have limited success in improving reading with those. But when we adapt executive function tasks for specific demands of reading, then we see the improvement. I think that’s where the field is going and I think that we’ll be able to support more readers that way.

Sucheta:  Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kelly, for your time today and your expertise. Simply when you speak, there’s so much joy for what you do and the love you have for children and providing them that optimistic view that they can actually master the skills makes me so happy. So once again, thank you so much for taking the time and coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. You have already written so many amazing things that I think people who enjoy your talk will enjoy reading your work as well, so thanks again.

Kelly:  Thank you.

Producer:  Alright. That’s all the time we have for today. If you know of someone who might benefit from today’s conversation, we would appreciate it if you would kindly forward it directly to them. So on behalf of our host Sucheta Kamath, today’s guest, Professor Kelly Cartwright, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.