Summary
In this episode, the hosts discuss the RAND Model, a heuristic for thinking about reading comprehension. The model was developed in the late 1990s by the RAND Corporation in response to a need for more research on comprehension. The model considers three main components: the reader, the text, and the purpose or activity of reading. It emphasizes the active role of the reader in constructing meaning from the text and highlights the importance of text complexity, coherence, genre, and the context in which reading takes place. The hosts also explore the challenges of measuring reading comprehension and suggest a curriculum-based assessment approach.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
Summary
In this episode, the hosts discuss the RAND Model, a heuristic for thinking about reading comprehension. The model was developed in the late 1990s by the RAND Corporation in response to a need for more research on comprehension. The model considers three main components: the reader, the text, and the purpose or activity of reading. It emphasizes the active role of the reader in constructing meaning from the text and highlights the importance of text complexity, coherence, genre, and the context in which reading takes place. The hosts also explore the challenges of measuring reading comprehension and suggest a curriculum-based assessment approach.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to Melissa and Lori. Lev Literacy. Have you ever heard of a reading model called a heuristic for thinking about reading comprehension from the Rand Corporation? Neither had we, but we were familiar with the components of the model the focus on the interactions of the reader, text and activity or task. Hugh Catts, researcher and professor at Florida State University, is back to tell us about this lesser known reading model and why he thinks it's an important one for us to learn more about. Hi teacher friends, I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who won the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi teacher friends, welcome back. This is our third episode in a series where Hugh Catts joins us to break down some popular reading models. In our first episode, 177, we talked about the five pillars from the national reading panel. In our second episode, 178, we discussed the simple view of reading and Sarber's reading rope. Melissa, what are we talking about today?
Melissa:Well, in this episode we're going to focus on a lesser known reading model, I would say and it's actually called a heuristic for thinking about reading comprehension that comes from the RAND Corporation, so it's also known as the RAND model, which is a lot easier to say and although Lori and I were not quite familiar with it when Hugh brought it up to us once, we looked at it and we're like oh yes, we know this. So we were familiar with this idea of looking at the text, the reader and the task when we're thinking about reading comprehension.
Lori:Yeah, and so we'll make sure we link everything in the show notes for you so that you can also see the graphic. But, hugh, I know you're going to talk a little bit about the history of the model and just tell us a bit about it, since it might be unfamiliar to our listeners. So welcome back, hugh, and I'm going to turn it over to you to share everything that you know about the RAND model.
Hugh Catts:Thank you guys. It's great to be back. The RAND model actually dates back to the late 1990s. It was a time at which there had been a great deal of focus on word reading and on word reading instruction, particularly with no Child Left Behind and Reading First. There was attention at that level, but people were beginning to be more concerned about comprehension and what might be involved in comprehension, and the research was fairly limited in terms of comprehension. And so the department education, or branch department education, asked the RAND corporation, which was a think tank, to get together as reading experts to talk about or provide an agenda for what researchers might study over the next 15, 20 years related to reading comprehension, to improve our knowledge about reading comprehension. And Catherine Snow led that group Catherine's from Harvard and the first thing they did was to define comprehension, reading comprehension, and she didn't use it at this point. But one of my favorite quotes is that there's nothing harder to do than have a committee write a sentence, and having been part of committees before and I agree, having been part of committees that have defined different things like dyslexia I'll recognize that it's really difficult the consensus you have to get on every word in the definition, and so what they, what?
Hugh Catts:The way they defined it was that reading comprehension was extracting and constructing meaning through interaction or involvement with written language, and so they saw it as a very active process where the reader played an important role in constructing an understanding of the passage, whatever it was, using their past knowledge and the knowledge in the text to build this understanding. And in doing so, they looked beyond what people had talked about related to other models. Not only did they look at individual differences within the reader, but they also looked at the contributions that the text might have to individual differences and differences that the purpose of reading might contribute to differences in reading. If you will and they had this heuristic which was a circle that had four slices, if you will, four big pieces of pizza. Imagine you get that really large pizza piece, and there were three of those in there. They referred to the reader, the text and the purpose or the activity and that you may see in some cases, and then around the edge is the context, and so you're going to put this on your website so that people could see it. And, just briefly, the reader portion of it referred to all those things within the individual that might contribute to individual differences like word reading ability, language ability, background knowledge, motivation, attention, so forth, and we talked about those in other models and so forth. So that's the portion of the slice of reading comprehension that's related to the reader.
Hugh Catts:But they added the importance of the text and the differences that are introduced by different types of text. And the most important one right away is the subject matter. Readers are going to understand different level, have different understandings depending upon what they're reading about, and that's related to the people's background knowledge. But there's also other aspects of the text the complexity of the text. So for eighth grade science text on the same subject as a fifth grade science text, we're going to see the former being much more complex in terms of the sentence structure, the vocabulary, so forth. And we all know that there's novels that we might read that are really complex and so they make for a difficult read because of their complexity, where others aren't nearly as complex.
Hugh Catts:They also talked about the coherence of the texts that you're reading.
Hugh Catts:Coherence refers to is how well does the texts fit together? How easy is it for you to build a coherent understanding of it? And you might think that we want our texts to be really coherent so that people can understand them. We're actually. We often don't want it to be all that coherent, because really coherent texts cannot sometimes not be all that interesting or may not make us think that much about them. So an example might be a movie that you watch or a book that you read and that five, 10, 20 pages into it, or a half an hour into the movie, you're completely lost. You don't know where this is going. Right, you do some series on Netflix or so forth and you watch the first three or four and you go like what is this about? It lacks coherence, and it does it to try to get you interested in it, because you have to think more about it. You give it more attention, and so forth. Same thing happens in literature as well. You read a book and authors will not tell you everything up front to maintain your attention.
Melissa:It reminds me of those stories where you hear, like different people's parts of the story, but then they all come together. Exactly, but at first you're like how are these connected?
Hugh Catts:And some books will have a chapter written by one person and in the next chapter written by another and you have to.
Lori:the reader has to figure that out.
Hugh Catts:And the reason that it works is because you're more active in it. You give it more involvement, sometimes even within a single text that it's writers will purposely make it a little less coherent. And good readers it causes them to think more about the text and they'll get more out of it Toward. Poor readers less coherent text than work as well. Another example is when I do presentations or even teach class, I don't put everything that I'm talking about on the slides, cause what happens is people will just read those slides and think they understand what I was trying to get across. What one wants the audience or the students to do is to be involved in creating their own understanding of what is on that particular slide, and that's what coherence refers to. Other things in there is genre, so some people are gonna be better at understanding narratives and they are understanding certain types of text structure. Some people have more trouble dealing with something like an opinion piece than they would with a simple description piece, if you will. More recently, electronic versus hard copy. That can introduce variance in there, and the research on the differences between those two are just beginning to emerge. We don't really understand what having electronic medium might mean for reading comprehension. One thing that I'm observing, and that some people observed in research, is that we're tending to read electronic media differently than we used to read print text, and what that involves is reading fewer words in a text. There's this reading more for gist than for a deep understanding, and I mean, I don't know exactly why that is, but I would guess it's because of the volume of information that comes to us electronically. We've developed this habit of not reading it as deep, because if we did, we never get through our day. You know, if you read a newspaper in the morning through electronic media at a deep level, you're just not gonna do it. Now, we probably did the same thing with a paper as well, but there's something about this text that's electronic and you can move quickly through it by scrolling through it. Google feeds a good example of it. You know you get a Google feed there and you've got a story on something. You go through it very quickly. Well, what I've started to observe is that I'm actually reading the novels that I read at night faster, and I'm starting to notice that I'm skipping more words on it and paragraphs on it, and I don't know whether that's the implications of developing a habit of reading electronically that's now finding its way over into hard copy reading. But it is that type of reading is problematic for learning.
Hugh Catts:Marianne Wolf I don't know if you guys had Marianne on before, but Marianne in her book it's called Reader Come Home was talked about was really concerned about the lack of deep reading that is occurring in the role electronic media might play in that. There's no reason why you'd have to read that way. I think it's more of a habit in which we've developed there and if we're gonna use electronic media for reading purposes, we have to move to the habit of using that to read at a deeper level. That might be appropriate for comprehension. And then the other slice. So we've got the reader, we got the text, and then the last is activity of a purpose.
Hugh Catts:Some people talk about the purpose of reading as comprehension.
Hugh Catts:Well, the purpose of reading is not comprehension.
Hugh Catts:Purpose of reading is why you're comprehending.
Hugh Catts:Right, what is it that you're involved in that would require you to comprehend?
Hugh Catts:Now, sometimes it's just finding a fact or getting the gist of that story that's in your New York Times or whatever it is you might be reading.
Hugh Catts:Or in other cases it's learning like in school, where you're trying to learn about a particular topic, or you might be reading so that you can write a paper, or reading to understand an opinion in a opinion column or whatever right, and that's gonna have an impact on how good you might be at forming an understanding, what you might do to form that understanding and so forth.
Hugh Catts:And so one other thing the context in that heuristic refers to whether this reading is taking place in school, whether it's taking place at home, but also the social, cultural aspects of reading and what reading means in a particular culture or a particular household and how that has an impact on reading that the individual might do. The reason that I like this model early on was because of the consideration of the different components, but it did show the differences in reading, that reading was a much more fluid idea than what we had in mind, that an individual can have multiple levels of reading ability depending upon the subject matter. You're gonna vary quite a bit from reading one particular subject matter to another. One individual might vary depending on the particular type of text they're reading or the particular type of purpose that they're reading, and I like that because that showed the complexity of reading assessment.
Melissa:Yeah, I was just gonna say as a teacher, I know my question right there for you would be well, what do we do with assessments? Because I mean especially at like a state assessment, where everyone gets the same text and they can be pretty high stakes.
Hugh Catts:So yeah, I mean. This model shows us the complexity of assessing reading right, and one of the things I like to say is that we cannot reduce reading comprehension to a single score, because it's not a single thing. It depends upon what we're reading and the purpose of that reading, to the level of our particular reading ability. Now we can attempt to do that, and we certainly do that, by using a reading test to measure that. But even within reading tests we see variability in individuals' performance.
Hugh Catts:One of my favorite examples comes from a study done by Jan Keenan, who was a researcher at University of Denver and she had available to her a thousand kids that had taken four different reading tests.
Hugh Catts:So she was interested in how well they did on one reading test compared to how well they did on the other reading tests. So she looked at what's called bivariate correlation, the correlation of one with each of the other, and if you got four tests it comes out to be six different correlations and she found that those tests were correlated. I think on the median correlation was.54, which is really pretty moderate given they're measuring the same thing. But the real take home was she identified the bottom hundred students on one measure and looked to see how many of the kids were in the bottom hundred students on the other tests and she found out on average it was only 43 percent, only 43 percent of the kids who, let's say, failed this test, if you will, bottom 10 percentile, or in the bottom 10 percentile on another test. These tests measure different things. Kids perform differently on them. So right away that leads the idea of using a single test as a pretty suspect for measuring reading ability.
Lori:I know our listeners are going to ask for the name of that. Do you have it off the top of your head, the name of that study.
Hugh Catts:Yeah, you know, I don't have it off of my.
Lori:It was by Jan.
Hugh Catts:Keenan. You can Google it. It's from Jan Keenan, it's 2014. And yeah, and you can get that. It's readily available. Yeah, put it in the show notes. It's a really good.
Hugh Catts:Other people have done it too. Actually, the first people who did it was a number of years earlier. Hollis Scarble and a colleague did that same type of study. So people ask I think Melissa's going to ask well then, how do you measure it? All right, I mean, if you can't measure it with a single test.
Hugh Catts:So some people say, well, maybe we could put, maybe we could put three tests together, if you will, and get an average of those, and that would do a better job. But I think what we're learning is that the putting those together creates a score that's really hard to change because it's a rather general measure of ability and it's not that easy to change with instruction. So we'd like to measure things in education that we actually could improve and see that improvement over time. And what we learned from some of the studies that I've been involved with teaching reading comprehension is these standardized tests don't move that easily.
Hugh Catts:If you look at the national reading tests or state reading tests like the NAAP, it's been pretty flat in terms of ability over the history of that particular test, because it's a pretty general measure of reading ability that relies heavily on knowledge across a number of different areas, and some people have referred to it as a reading test. It's actually a knowledge test disguised as a reading test, because it measures a wide range of knowledge and it's also a bit problematic because it conflates word reading ability and comprehension. So we don't know whether the problem that kids are having is that their poor word read they don't, uh aren't able to translate, for translate the words and the meaning or into language, or whether they have trouble understanding uh the language. And uh recently you'll see that uh that problem occurring when, with all the focus on improving uh the teaching of word reading right Through the, through the recent uh uh writings that have have now begun to to improve the way that reading it, uh word reading, is instructed.
Hugh Catts:Well, the immediate uh thought was that that was going to have an impact on performance on state exams or on the NAIP, and it didn't.
Hugh Catts:Uh, there's some evidence that it that it's had a small incremental effect on those particular uh type type measures, but it's. But it's that notion that we've conflated that assessment. We've conflated word reading and comprehension within that particular assessment. So the the way that I would suggest that we measure comprehension is within a particular discipline that we're teaching. So we measure kids ability to understand and write about a particular topic social studies at the beginning of the semester and over the semester we teach them more about social studies or science or whatever, and periodic periodically through the semester we measure how well they read and write within that particular subject matter, as opposed to uh testing comprehension on these rather global measures of comprehension, which is heavily affected by the knowledge that you have on those on the subject matters. It's very unfair to ask somebody to understand something that they haven't had any experience with, and a curriculum based assessment like that gives kids the opportunity to uh learn material and then being tested on that particular learning.
Melissa:Yeah, just makes sense.
Lori:Yeah, I feel like too. That goes along with all of the statistics that we know about reading right and what you shared earlier, that that certain percentage, that low, of the students who are struggling right On that specific assessment, the 43 percent you scored on other assessments. In the same way, that goes with that like 5 percent. Right that we keep hearing that five, that right, so that we can then intervene it to your two with that level, so that the tier two is like that 5 percent. Is that right?
Hugh Catts:Yeah, no, I would think about it more this way, lori, that those 43 percent have particular problems with whatever that reading test measure. So some reading tests are very, are much more dependent upon your word reading ability. If you can read the words, you're going to do better on that. On that test or other tests are heavily dependent upon the knowledge you have. There's some reading tests that that kid, that individuals can actually do quite well on it without even reading the text. But because the questions actually are dependent upon what you already know about the particular topic. And so 43 percent here because these kids have a particular ability on that test. Some of those kids in the next test actually do better because it focuses on what they're kind of good at Right. So that highlights the complexity of of word reading comprehension and why it's so hard to measure reading comprehension with these single measures.
Hugh Catts:And that's why more curriculum based measure like what I'm suggesting, would work better, because it gives educators the idea of what you need to work on. So if the kids are doing poor on that mid year tests within social studies, you got two things to work on social studies or better reading instruction, right. So helping kids extract and build knowledge from the social studies text At the same time, you're teaching them and reviewing more social studies knowledge. It's a much fairer way. It's a way of focusing on the purpose of reading and and, in doing so, helping kids acquire the knowledge. And I think what we're beginning to see is a shift from the science of reading to the science of learning and focusing on what it is that we're trying to accomplish in school and what role reading plays in that acquisition of knowledge or appreciation of literature or whatever else we might be doing within school.
Lori:I like that. I do too. That's such a great way to think about it, and I think that might be a great way to sign off, thinking about the science of learning. Do you want to add anything to that?
Hugh Catts:No, no, I think I'll just leave you with that. We can do another one another time Sounds good.
Lori:All right, we accomplished our goals for our series, so thank you so much.
Hugh Catts:Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk again.
Lori:Yeah, so this series was awesome If you haven't listened to the other two episodes. This is a three-part series. This is the third one about reading models, visual representations for reading, and I know that we've just learned so much, and thank you so much for being here. It's so complex and you made it so easy to understand.
Hugh Catts:Thank you guys, appreciate it.
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Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees, we appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.