Why Kids Can't Remember Words: Brain Science Explained

In this S5E4 Schoolutions Teaching Strategies conversation, Dr. Molly Ness challenges what you know about learning to read, sharing insights from her most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Katie Pace Miles, "Making Words Stick." Discover how brain science and the alphabetic principle reveal better teaching reading strategies and build stronger reading skills for kids.

You'll discover why 99% of "impossible" sight words actually follow phonetic rules and how orthographic mapping - not memorization - creates fluent readers. This episode is for teachers, education coaches, caregivers, homeschoolers, and anyone supporting developing readers.

🔥 KEY REVELATIONS:
💡 Why flashcard memorization fails (and what works instead)
💡The 4-step process that makes words "stick" permanently
💡How adult brains store 30,000-70,000 words instantly
💡The rubber band analogy that explains reading vs. spelling
💡Why middle school comprehension struggles start in elementary

Molly breaks down complex brain science into actionable teaching tips that work for new teachers, mentor teachers, and seasoned educators alike.

📚 Make sure to get Making Words Stick: A Four-Step Instructional Routine to Power Up Orthographic Mapping by Dr. Molly Ness & Dr. Katie Pace Miles so that you can implement the 4-step routine tomorrow.

People Mentioned:

• Dr. Linnea Ehri 
• Dr. Jan Hasbrouck 
• Mr. Dolch/Dr. Fry 
• William Nagy
• Dr. Jan Wasowicz 

Resources from Molly:

• Making Words Stick (pdf one-pager)
• Building Language Comprehension for Readers in Grades K-2

Chapters: 
0:00 - The Flashcard Myth That's Hurting Kids 
1:00 - Meet Dr. Molly Ness & "Making Words Stick"
3:00 - The Research Behind Orthographic Mapping 
5:00 - Lanaya Ehri's Groundbreaking Discovery 
8:00 - Least to Most Reliable Ways to Learn Words 
11:00 - The Shocking Truth About Sight Words (99% Are Decodable!) 
13:00 - Why Orthographic Mapping Never Stops 
16:00 - High Frequency vs. Sight Words Explained 
19:00 - The 4-Step Process: See & Say It 
21:00 - Step 2: Segment & Spell It 
23:00 - Step 3: Study & Suss It Out
25:00 - Step 4: Search & Stick It 
27:00 - The Rubber Band Analogy: Reading vs. Spelling 
29:00 - Helping Struggling Middle School Readers 
33:00 - The Three-Legged Stool of Word Learning 
35:00 - Take Action: Your Next Steps

Join our community of educators committed to cultivating student success, inspired teaching, and creating inclusive classrooms with a pro-kid mindset focused on the whole child. 

📧 Connect: schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com 
🎵 Music: Benjamin Wahl

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Olivia: [00:00:00] What if I told you that those sight word flashcards on your refrigerator might actually be working against your child's reading development? Today Dr. Molly Ness is back on Schoolutions Podcast and she is about to flip everything you thought you knew about how children learned to read words. She's the co-author of Making Words Stick, and she's here to share a mind-blowing discovery.

99% of those impossible to decode sight words that we've been forcing kids to memorize, they actually follow phonetic rules. But here's what really got my attention. The average adult reader has 30,000 to 70,000 words stored in their brain for instant recognition, and not a single one of them got there through memorization.

They got there through something called orthographic mapping. If you've ever watched a student struggle [00:01:00] with reading fluency, spending so much mental energy, figuring out words that they can't focus on what the text actually means, this episode is going to be a game changer. Molly even breaks down exactly how the reading brain works and shares a simple four step process that transforms how we teach word recognition.

Whether you're a teacher, a caregiver, or anyone who works with developing readers, get ready to discover why orthographic mapping is the on-ramp to reading success we've been missing.

This is Schoolutions Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. A show that isn't just theory, but practical try it tomorrow. Approaches for educators and caregivers to ensure every student finds their spark and receives the support they need to thrive. [00:02:00] 

Olivia: I am Olivia Wahl, and I am so happy to welcome Dr. Molly Ness back to the podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about Molly. If you don't already know. Molly is not only the author of six books, but a former teacher, reading researcher, university professor and teacher educator. Our conversation today will focus on Molly's book, co-written with Dr. Katie Pace Miles, I have it right here. Molly, I've been carrying this book around with me everywhere because it's phenomenal Making Words Stick. A Four-Step Instructional Routine to Power up Orthographic Mapping. I said to you earlier, I wish I had this book when I was teaching kindergarten and first grade. I would've been a much, much better teacher. When you know better, you do better. 

Molly: Yep. 

Olivia: And, um, I've asked your permission, I want to kick the conversation off with a quote. Dr. Jan Hasbrouck wrote the Forward for the book. This was, her words are so powerful. [00:03:00] “One of the many amazing aspects of skillful reading is the brain's ability to effortlessly recognize words in print, in Making Words Stick, Dr. Molly ness and Dr. Katie Pace Miles state that the average reader has cognitively stored approximately 30,000 to 70,000 words, available for instantaneous precognitive identification.”

I also want listeners to know right out of the gate what makes this book so stinking special. It's different, and this is why, “Molly and Katie masterfully describe how the brain works to develop reading proficiency in a clear and understandable way.”

I could not under, I could not agree more, and I felt like this is clearer to me than it ever has been before, after reading this. “They explain Dr. Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping and connect it to instruction that supports learning and [00:04:00] explain why memorization of words is not the way to go.”

Molly, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for coming back and being a guest. 

Molly: Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here and I'm glad that, uh, somebody's finding this book useful. You never know when you write something if it's gonna land well or, um, how it'll be received. So I appreciate your, your kind words. 

Olivia: Yeah. It, it not only hit with me, I am recommending it to everyone I can. And I also shared with you, I highly recommend this book for caregivers, and we'll talk about that in a bit. But let's kick off with research. Um, you offer so many nuggets of research throughout the book. The book has structure of terms you need to keep in mind. At the end of each chapter there are QR codes with you explaining what is in print. You can actually watch a video of you. I mean, this book is crazy good. So if you had to pick one researcher to give a nod to that you lean on most, what would you [00:05:00] say? 

Molly: Well, obviously it would be Linnea Ehri. Who is the, uh, I like to think of her as the, um the, the, the grandmother of literacy, I mean, she, it's hard to talk about, um, without gushing, about her impact. Um, and she is also just the most soft spoken, humble, kindest human being in the world. I've been able to, uh, in the New York City area, she's still very involved with literacy and so I've been able to interact with her many, many times. Um, and, uh, she's just, she's just a, a brilliant woman and researcher who wrote about orthographic mapping in the early nineties.

This is not a new concept. I read about it as a doctoral student in the early two thousands, and I will be honest, it felt - even the term itself orthographic mapping feels pretty heavy. It's not sort of one of these things that's easily accessible in the way that it was written about, um, was not accessible to classroom teachers.

[00:06:00] And Katie and I very much felt that once people understood the um, the what and the how of orthographic mapping as well as the reading brain, people would understand, um, some of the instructional practices that Katie and I both did in our early teaching careers and how they don't align with the science and how they don't align with the, what we know about the brain, um, and how they don't help make words stick for kids.

Olivia: Mm-hmm. And that's what I think resonated most with me about that. Again, when you know better, do better and you give so many concrete examples of know better. And here's what you can do now, like action forward. So what was the moment that you and Katie said, yeah, we've gotta write this book? Was it driven by a student or a moment for you as a learner?

Molly: I think it was mostly just us reflecting on our classroom instruction. Um, Katie was, uh, very blessed to study from Linnea [00:07:00] herself. Uh, Katie was Linnea's doctoral, uh, advisor. When we were seeing what was going on in, um, New York and the schools that we were working in, um, as well, some of the instructional materials and practices that were happening in were commonplace in classrooms, we just sort of under had this moment of like, people don't understand orthographic mapping. 

Olivia: No. 

Molly: Um, and uh, and it's not necessarily their fault for not understanding because it wasn't accessible. It was in these academic journals like, you know, the studies for the scientific reading that doesn't feel warm and fuzzy. Um. It was not, uh, accessible. So our work was really okay. We see ourselves as, um, the sort of bridge between research and practice. And so let's write the book that we wish we had when Katie was a first-grade teacher in, uh, Colorado. And I was a sixth-grade teacher in Oakland, California. So we sort of wrote it for ourselves and what we wish we had had as well.

Olivia: Mission accomplished, Molly. Mission [00:08:00] accomplished. And so I need as a learner to go from known to new, and I thought it would be helpful then for you to explain what are the least to the most reliable ways to actually learn words, and why does that hierarchy even matter? 

Molly: Yeah, sure. So this is a hierarchy, obviously, um, that aligns with Linnea's research. Um, the least reliable way to read words is prediction, basically, uh, using context clues or using initial clues, um, of a, uh, of the, the first letters of a word or maybe, you know, diverting your eyes to look at the picture, which we've had so many conversations in, uh, the literacy landscape about the flaws of the cueing system. Not reliable and furthermore, really detrimental, um, to the brain development of, um, of beginning readers. 

Uh, next up is analogy, which is if you can read one word, you can read another. So if I can read the word [00:09:00] table, then I can read the word gable. It's more reliable, but it is still problematic because, um, there are some parts of words that have lots of different sounds like the OUGH can be pronounced so many different ways. So if you look at dough, like bread dough, does that help you read cough? No, because they are, uh, you know, the analogy falls short there. 

Uh, the third most reliable way is decoding, where you're really starting to look at the graphene-phoneme correspondence and do the work of pushing individual letter sounds, um, together to blend them to come up with the, uh, the word. And, uh, you know, as we try to make, uh, a a, a big point of this book, most of the words, um, in our language actually are decodable. And there's this misconception that, um, the English language is so irregular and so funky, and you just have to memorize it's, it's not, uh, decodable when, um, in [00:10:00] fact the majority are.

And then really the most reliable is memory or site, which is the process of orthographic mapping or how, um, you started with the, the, the, uh, the, the data that the average adult reader has about 50,000 words that are in their sort of mental Rolodex of words. If I were to ask you… 

Olivia: It's crazy… 

Molly: …on this, you know, Monday morning, what have you read? You've read newspaper headlines and emails and maybe social media, you've likely decoded nothing. Almost every word that you encounter as an adult reader is automatically retrieved for you. How did they get there? They did not get there through memorization. There's no way that, that we can memorize 50,000 words. They got there through this process of orthographic mapping.

Olivia: Oh, that it's so brilliantly articulated and you're pushing me then I'm jumping to 33 now, page 33. It, it spoke to me because you write, [00:11:00] “there's a misconception, and this is what you just alluded to, that high frequency words are so irregular that they simply need to be memorized as whole unit.”

And then that page goes on to say, “Katie and her colleagues analyzed the Dolch list of 220 high frequency words they applied 75 phonetics rules letter sound correspondence, 31 spelling rules to the words and found that 99% of them followed those rules.”

That's crazy. So in other words, 99% of the Dolch lists are regularly spelled or decodable. That blew my mind. 

Molly: I know. It's kind. It's crazy. It's crazy. We all grew up with flashcards and memorize them and I was actually, um. Earlier today, just in the Dollar Store in my town, and the Dollar Store was selling site words that are flashcards because that those are ubiquitous. And as a, you alluded a little bit earlier about, um, supporting caregivers, um, it is the message [00:12:00] that parents get as well that these are just, uh, words you have to memorize.

My sister got, uh, my older sister got very crotchety with me because I was visiting her house and this was when my nephew was a kindergartner. And on her refrigerator, she had this message from a very well-intentioned kindergarten teacher that said, Dear parents and caregivers. here are some, your kindergartner's going to be learning these words, the sight words that are the same thing as high frequency words, which they're not. Um, and most of them, um, you just have to memorize. So to help your parent, your child at home, here's what you can do. And I of course couldn't be the aunt. I had to be the reading research geek where I was like, actually, that's wrong. Actually, that's wrong. Let me correct this. And she was like, can you stop? Um. But that is a message that's pretty ubiquitous that these, these are just, they just have to be memorized and, um, we argue they actually don't have to be memorized, they have to be mapped. 

Olivia: Uh, so let's pause there because I, it it, it was also a moment for me [00:13:00] reading to think this is not a process that ends with children in kindergarten, first or second grade. Because the example you give in the book is you actually as an adult were mapping a word. And so I, I want you to just pause for a moment and speak to why, who does orthographic mapping serve and why do we as educators, caregivers, and I would say administrators also need to understand the process? 

Molly: Sure. Well, I'll pick up on that experience that I had, um, last summer because we opened the book with it to help make the case that orthographic mapping is not just a K-2 thing. It is a process. It's an invisible cognitive process. And by that I mean, it is in the brain behind the scenes. So it's not something that we wanna see classroom teachers saying, all right, kids, let's orthographically map this word.

Or let's pull out our orthographic mapping workbooks, because that's what we do in um, in things we learn about something and then we sort of [00:14:00] silo it. Um, but last summer I was reading a beach book. It was sort of a mindless murder mystery. And I come to this word that is S-L-O-U-G-H, and I had enough meaning or, or context clues to derive the meaning of the word.

This was a setting in a, uh, in, in this book that was like a swamp with marsh water and tides. And so I sort of knew it was something about this, this, this swampy area, this marshland. But I didn't know how to say the word or pronounce the word, and I'm not getting any help from the word itself because that O-U-G-H is it like cough? Is it like, dough, is it like through like there's so many different ways. 

I think there's six or seven different ways that O-U-G-H, um, can, uh, be pronounced. So what I had to do was go to an online dictionary and click the little sound icon and that was enough to give me [00:15:00] the sound, the word - I'm a New Yorker, and if you are in New Yorker, Canada, you say the word slew and a slew is like a boggy, marshy, swamp area.

So at this point now I've got a trifecta of things with this word, I've got the meaning of the word. I've got its pronunciation and I've got how it looks. And when I got the pronunciation, I was able to do the, okay, there are six letters in this word that map to three phonemes. And that whole process, that trifecta is really orthographic mapping.

So we use this as an example to say, okay, it's not just a beginning reader thing. I, as a professional adult reader, this was a word I didn't instantly recognize, but to get that word into my instant retrieval, I had to have that trifecta established. And so it matters because now as a proficient reader, once I did that work.

Every time I come to that word in the book, I instantly and automatically recognize it. I don't need to spend any [00:16:00] cognitive energy on lifting that word off the page, which then gets me to comprehension. 

Olivia: So that example is amazing. And again, I wish I had more of the why as a caregiver for my two boys as well as as a teacher in general, because you even just said very quickly, high frequency words and sight words are not the same thing. And my entire life as a teacher, it was trying to clarify what is the difference between the two? Can you do that quickly for us and then, I would love for you to explain, um, and start to, I, I want to speak to your four, um, step process, but let's explain high frequency and sight first.

Molly: Sure. So, um, high frequency, it sounds really obvious to restate that they are the words that are most frequently occurring in text, um, and way [00:17:00] back when Mr. Dolch or Dr. Fry I don't actually remember their first names or anything. They went through painstakingly, um, how the, the most common text and sort of tallied up the words in, um, order of first hundred words, 200 words. 

And actually those have been, uh, somebody else went through recently and revised the updated list. And you can actually read the research that shows, you know, here's the, uh, because the Dolch has been around for decades and in 2025, is it the same words that it used to be in, you know, 19, whatever.

Um, I can't remember the nuances of the words that, um, have been moved off the list or bumped in order. Um, but so high frequency words are the ones that you most likely encounter. Versus sight words. Sight words are any word that has been orthographically mapped. They are words that we don't need to spend any cognitive energy. They are in our automatic word retrieval. Um, Jan Wasowicz, I love this quote that she [00:18:00] likes to say that, “every word wants to be a sight word when it grows up.”

And I just love that because it reminds us that to get to the point of us being adult proficient readers with 50,000 words, we have to have such a huge bank of sight words so that we can get, we can read with fluency and get to comprehension.

Olivia: It's the best explanation of high frequency and sight words that I have ever heard. Um, so then what I'd love for you to do is let's shift because you do offer a four-step routine. I had a routine and I thought it was great. It was not your routine, and I also didn't understand the why. This is what makes your book so special. You explain and correlate what each lobe of the brain is doing while someone is orthographically mapping a word, it is crazy and I cannot wait for listeners to learn this from you. [00:19:00] 

Molly: Yeah. So, um. Katie and I are very, we like to be very candid about the, um, mistakes that we made, well-intentioned teachers, um, because we feel like if we can do it and reflect of like, I meant, you know, this is what I was doing with the best of intentions, then it invites a space that sort of, um, is, uh, welcoming for other people to, to sort of say Wow.

So we start with thinking about how we taught identification of words, lifting them off the word, the page, or decoding as well as spelling. Um, and we talk about, uh, this process being useful for decoding and encoding because they both draw on the same linguistic well, or, uh, knowledge of, um, linguistic features.

So, um, we've got this four-step protocol that we, um came up with based on the research. So we, uh, looked at the IES guides, we, you know, poured over the research. We looked at what has to happen in [00:20:00] the brain for the neural pathways to establish the, the reading brain. Um, so I'll walk through it sort of quickly, but then, um, explain each step in a little bit more detail.

So we see and say it, we segment and spell it, we study and suss it out, and then we search and stick. And you'll notice that, of course, all of the different, um, steps start with the letter s. It's just an easier mnemonic for you to remember. So let's walk through, um, each particular, uh, step in a little bit more detail and as well as the why. 

So we start with see it and say it. So here kids see the word and they say the word. It sounds super obvious, but you have to make a phonological representation of the word to orthographically map it. And I am in classrooms all the time where, um, I see well-intentioned teachers teaching vocabulary or teaching words and kids [00:21:00] not saying them. And in fact, this was my spelling instruction when I was a sixth-grade teacher. I was so proud of myself because it was quiet in my classroom. And quiet means studious and industrious. Well, what were my kids not getting? A phonological representation of the word? In other words, you need to go through the part of the brain that links, um you need to do the work of the what that happens in the occipital lobe, which, um, I'm sort of gesturing right above the nape of my neck. The occipital lobe is where this area called the letter box or the visual word form area is this is responsible for instant recognition of letters and words. So you're basically seeing the letter saying, oh, that's a letter I know it's not a number, it's not a Greek character. And then you are forming a pathway to the parietal lobe, which is kind of over towards the right part of your brain. It's responsible for the linking of the phonemes and the graphemes. So the letters and the sounds. 

So [00:22:00] you see it and you say it. So you show kids the word. Um, as simple as writing it on the whiteboard or putting on a Google slide. We have all these activities that help get to these, um, these different, this different protocol. Um, but they're saying it so they're hearing the teacher say it. They're saying it themselves, they're looking at pocket mirrors. Um, if that's something that's a part of your classroom instruction, but there has to be that phonological component.

And, um, again, I'm always surprised even in like, I'll go into a science middle school classroom and a teacher will be teaching the word mitosis and she won't have kids say the word mitosis. So anytime we're working with words, kids have to say the words. Um, so the see and say it. 

Next up is segment and spell, and this is where we do the work of mapping the graphemes and phonemes by connecting the letters and the sounds. So this is where we draw kids direct [00:23:00] attention to, um, how the word appears on the page in conjunction with the sounds that are representing it. So if we take that word slough which I started with, we would say to kids. I am seeing that there are six letters. The SL blend, the O-U-G-H makes one sound. So we're doing some of that work of like Elkonin boxes.

Lots of teachers know the, uh, heart word protocol where we're saying this part of the word is regular. Let's call your attention to the part that just is irregular, that you have to memorize right. So that's the phoning graphene correspondence. 

The next part is study and suss out. 

Olivia: I love this. 

Molly: And suss is a British term that means to figure something out. And, um, the story about that, I'm, I'm a little bit of a Broadway geek and I was watching the, uh, the rock opera, uh, Tommy by The Who, and they use the word suss. And, um, I first saw it when with, uh, my older brother when I was a kid, and I then decided I was [00:24:00] gonna use the word nonstop just to annoy his and I was going to use it with a British accent.

So, study and suss is suss out, is really looking at the meaning of the word, the application of the word, the usage of the word. And this is where we are doing the work in the frontal and temporal lobes, which are all about the, uh, language comprehension around the words, the semantics, the syntax. So it is connecting the word’s meaning usage and application. So there's a fair amount of research that shows that knowing a definition of the word does not help you use the word. Um, this is, I'm, I'm pulling on the research of, of will, uh, Bill Naggy who reminds us of that. 

So it's more than just defining the word. It's um, it's semantic relations of the word. So if the word is, um, bat. Is that the baseball bat? Is that the Halloween bat? If it's the Halloween bat, oh, that's that mammal that has pointy teeth and fangs and um, [00:25:00] flaps and you know, those sorts of things. So you're doing the work here to talk about the word meaning, usage, application. 

And then finally the last step is search and stick. And this is where we're trying to move the word out of isolation and connect it to context. So we are trying to build automaticity around the word, um, so that it's instant. We are calling kids attention to how that word is connected to decodable text, following the same linguistic features so that they're moving from just isolation to actual transfer to text.

And this protocol, we've designed it for K-5 and we walk through, um, different words of different complexity. Uh, for the different grade levels as well as the different phases of reading based on Ehri’s work. Um, and then we have about, gosh, almost up to 10 different activities for each of these different things that are based on what's appropriate, based on, um, [00:26:00] these different alphabet, these different phases of, uh, Ehri’s work.

Olivia: I mean, what you've packed into 150ish pages of goodness is bananas to me because you give all the why, you give the research, but you just said you give these activities that cover a myriad of different aspects that teachers need to know. And it also would help me, regardless of the grade I'm teaching, it would help me know where to begin with individual students based on their base knowledge as well. So then something else that struck me in the book was the rubber band analogy, because it was so fascinating to me to better understand how, um, that tension between reading and writing skills differs and changes as children develop. Could you explain that? 

Molly: Sure. Um, and this is all the, uh, brainchild of Katie. We had sort of gotten a little bit tired of hearing that reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. You've probably heard that [00:27:00] analogy. Which I think is, um, kind of a gross oversimplification of, um, how much more sophisticated spelling is. Um, or we talk about it in the book as encoding. So if spelling and encoding are sort of simultaneous, um, so, um, if I were to put the word chrysanthemum on the screen, you could instantly code it, right? But then if I asked you to spell it, you'd sort of be like, ooh, I can't, you know, that's a little trickier. 

Olivia: That's tricky. 

Molly: Yeah. Because spelling requires a phonological memory component. So I have to, in spelling, do the hard work of hearing the sound, knowing what the sound is, and then sort of going through my file cabinet of the best way to show that sound. So if I'm trying to spell along a word. Not only do I have to recognize it's a long a word, but then I have to figure out, oh, is it ey? Is it a y, is it ai? And so that's that memory component. 

And so we sort of were sort of butting up against [00:28:00] this whole reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, when really they draw upon the same linguistic well, but spelling is a bit more sophisticated, more complicated and, and cognitively challenging. 

So, um, Katie talks about it as these, there this tension between a rubber band. So you've got a rubber band that is, um, reading on one side and, and, uh, spelling on the other. And, um, how do the two coexist? Sometimes spelling lags behind for kids. So the reading, if you were to, you know, keep it in, in, uh, one part of the rubber band in place and pull the spelling would, um, be a little bit tauter.

Um, so we write about it as a way to how do we address kids who their reading is ahead of their spelling, and most of the time it's, um, over, it's, um, really emphasizing explicit spelling instruction, which sort of has gotten overlooked in classrooms today. So when we wrote this book, we are very much, it's not just decoding this routine works for spelling as [00:29:00] well.

Olivia: Yeah. 

Molly: Um, because again, it's that rubber band that we have to make sure the tension is equal on both sides so it doesn't get too slack or snap because one end is, um, pulling too far ahead of the other end. 

Olivia: I also kept thinking about, as I was thinking of that rubber band and the snapping. I support and serve a lot of middle school and high school students that are striving readers. And there was a point in, when I was reading the book for a second time, thinking what could we do? What strategies could we offer students that seem like they're stuck at either the partial or the full alphabetic stages of reading? Can you offer any strategies? 

Molly: Sure. So, well, lemme get on my middle school soapbox because that was the world that I came up into reading research as a middle school teacher. And I've been doing a lot of work in middle schools lately, and, um, a lot of, uh, middle school content areas, teachers will say to me they can't read the [00:30:00] science textbook, or they can't, you know, ancient Mesopotamia, they can't access the text. Gimme a comprehension strategy to help with that.

And I'm like, you don't actually wanna hear my answer because wouldn't it be great if it were just, here's a strategy. So instead I talk about, um, the research around the decoding threshold, which is a paper that came out, uh, ‘24, I think 2024 out of the RAND and AERDF, um, which talks about this notion that if kids don't have a threshold of words that they can decode, uh, by sort of fourth-ish grade comprehension will always suffer.

And what's happening with so many of our middle school kids is we're seeing the output. We're seeing that comprehension is suffering. What we do is we want the Band-Aid, gimme the Band-Aid so that I can dress comprehension when really the underlying gaping wound is word identification, is decoding, is that they don't have enough words orthographically mapped.

Olivia: Yeah. 

Molly: And so [00:31:00] then what happens, it's a domino effect of, um, negative influences. So if you are spending so much time as a sixth grader or an eighth grader or whatever decoding words, your fluency then becomes slow and laborious, and your cognitive effort is so focused on the decoding and the fluency that what suffers the, the, the price or what, what pays the, the toll it's comprehension.

Um, I really believe we're at a point sort of in the literacy landscape where foundational skills, K-2, K-3 are pretty robust. We've got some really great programs out there, seeing lots of schools using a UFLI or a Fundations or what have you, and we're really starting to, to move the needle there.

But I'm really worried about our kids in grades four and five, who there are not as many instructional materials for morphology. Word study fluency. Uh, word identification at upper elementary, and then we see them get to middle school where they're working in these really [00:32:00] sophisticated content area texts and we see a, a decline. And we think like, okay, let's just address comprehension when really it's a underlying issue of orthographic mapping. So I wish I could say like, what's a strategy? The strategy is build up more word identification and encoding, particularly at the multi-syllabic level for grades three, four, and five.

Olivia: I think that that will be extraordinarily helpful, um, especially for those of us serving middle and high school populations of students. And I have heard from third through fifth grade teachers that there is a gap. And hopefully that gap will close as the K-2 continues to be so robust and let's even loop PreK in with that, um. Let's end the conversation, you know, if there was one thing you wanted caregivers and educators to take from the book into their homes, into their classrooms, what would it be? 

Molly: It would [00:33:00] be, uh, the notion that in order to make words stick, you have to have this trifecta. I almost think of it as a stool, a three-legged stool, um, where you have to see the word. You have to connect the word, so it's, it's, uh, orthography. You have to have the phonology of the word it sound structure, so how it sounds and how the phonemes and graphemes connect. And then you have to have the meaning of the word, and that's the, the language comprehension, components of semantics, application of the word usage, uh, syntax.

So when we think about that three-legged stool, that's what's gonna get our kids to be, uh, stable and have words stick so that they can access them when they're reading, but then they can also access them when they're writing and spelling and getting to, um, getting to comprehension. It's really, uh, I think of orthographic mapping almost as the on-ramp to fluency.

And, uh, you know, we want our kids operating on the reading [00:34:00] highway, uh, towards comprehension. Um, but without the, uh, orthographic mapping, um really being in place, then they're gonna be traveling a, a road under construction for too long, and comprehension will be a goal that they never really can get to.

Olivia: Yeah, well said. Um, Molly, it is a gift always to be in conversation with you. You make me so much smarter and I'm grateful for you putting into words what I needed uh, 20, over 25 years ago. And I think that it, it's just so accessible and that's why I'm grateful for you and Katie. Thanks for taking the time to talk today.

Molly: Oh, I'm so appreciative of your, of your time and advocacy as well. Thank you. 

Olivia: Take Care. Schoolutions Teaching Strategies is created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Thank you to my older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen to Schoolutions wherever you get your podcasts or [00:35:00] subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube.

Thank you to my guest, Dr. Molly Ness, for ensuring all of our students will be thriving readers. And if this conversation has you rethinking how you approach making words stick for your children, don't let this knowledge sit on the shelf. Here's what I'd love for you to do right now. First, grab a copy of Making Words Stick by Dr. Molly Nest and Dr. Katie Pace Miles. This book needs to be in every educator and caregiver's hands. Second, look at one high frequency word you're currently teaching or your child is learning and try Molly's four step process. See and say it, segment and spell it, study and suss it out, and search and stick it.

Notice how different this feels from flashcard memorization. And finally, share this episode with one teacher or caregiver or administrator who needs [00:36:00] to understand there's a better way than memorization. Because when we know better about how the reading brain actually works, our students deserve for us to do better. The reading highway is waiting. Let's help every child find their on-ramp. 

Make sure to email me at schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Let me know what resonated and your next steps after listening to this episode. Tune in every Monday for the best research-backed coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. And stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday where I'll reflect and share connections to what I learned from the guest that week. See you [00:37:00] then.