Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ® | Science of Reading for Teachers

Live from SSSR: What Reading Science Research Says Right Now

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In this bonus episode, we're bringing you research right from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) conference, one of the biggest gatherings of reading researchers in the world. We break down the key takeaways, emerging trends, and standout research that caught our attention, and talk about what it all means for your classroom. If you want to know where the science of reading is headed next, this one's for you.

Resources Mentioned

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Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at literacypodcast@greatminds.org.

Why A Research Conference Matters

Melissa

Research conferences can change what happens in your classroom Monday morning. Lori recently attended the SSSR conference, where the world's top reading researcher spent days sharing their latest findings.

SPEAKER_02

This is a super special episode. I'm joined by researchers Blythe Anderson and Jake Downs. We are debriefing the conference highlights and the takeaways every reading teacher needs to hear. Hi, teacher friends. I'm Lori. And I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want 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.

SPEAKER_02

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.

SPEAKER_03

We are recording on the final afternoon of the annual conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading in Rotterdam, Netherlands. So we're going to do a roundtable chat about the conference and highlights that we picked from it and what it might mean for your classroom instruction. So the conference is an annual conference held at different locations worldwide. This is my second year attending. Blythe, you've been here before.

SPEAKER_02

Yes, also my second year.

SPEAKER_03

And then Lori, this is year one, right?

SPEAKER_02

This is my first year. I had the big badge that said first year attendee, and everybody was very welcoming.

SPEAKER_03

So a lot of our listeners might be familiar with other uh other conferences, something like Plain Talk or the Reading Leagues Conference. Uh Lori, can you just talk to us about how Triple SR's conference, S being the Society for Scientific Study of Reading, right? Triple SR's conference is different than other conferences teachers might be familiar with.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it was really fun to be part of a researcher conference because it really highlighted the evidence-based research that's happening right now. Um, and then it allowed me to really think about the practitioner lens and what that means for practitioners, but it was really fun to see all of the researchers just learning from each other and having those conversations with each other. Um, so to kind of frame it for everyone, the sessions were um about 20 minutes long and you got an incredible research overview of the study that was done, um, and then some uh hopefully some implications for classroom practice and some QA, which was really interesting to hear the thoughts between uh the research group. So it was an awesome experience to be part of. I'm sure you two have a different takeaway because I was thinking so much on the practitioner side, and I'm sure you were thinking maybe both practitioner and researcher. So love to hear what you all thought.

SPEAKER_00

I think um something that makes this conference a little different from some of those that you mentioned is there's a combination of sessions that are really focused on, you know, we've done this study and these are our findings. Um, but there's also study, or there's also sessions that are about methods and sharing um, you know, what are great practices for doing the research that can be, you know, applied to those other kinds of studies. So I think it's it's a great place for researchers to both share what they've learned from studying something specifically, um, but also sharing and getting ideas for how could this be studied or you know, what would your take be? We were trying to address this particular question. And there are, of course, many ways to go about those answers. So I think it's a great place for researchers to come together and and think about things together and share um what they've learned and have how to do that work.

SPEAKER_03

It's a great place to for me to be able to think not only about okay, how do I improve, how I support teachers with everyday instruction in the classroom, what are the implications of specific things, but uh, you know, I'm also a researcher by trait. And so study design ideas, way to, ways to tweak what I'm already doing, um, questions that need to be asked that would help support instructional practices. And at Triple SR, it's it there's a wide range of research, right? Like the we saw like some really like basic, basic research of like how does letter position affect its whether the word will be blended accurately or not. I just saw a poster on that. So like the first position versus the second versus the third, um, you know, really basic stuff like that, uh, you know, all the way to like like Blythe, you were sharing your summer school intervention results. Uh yeah, so there's a whole range of stuff, and and not every, not every, because it's researchers talking to researchers, every session might not have like direct, like this is what it means for instruction. But I think with, I mean, this at least the sessions I attend, the implications are there. You know, you kind of have to think through. So that's what we're gonna do with our round table today. We're going to talk about some of the sessions we saw that we feel have a lot of implication for what classroom, what teachers do in the classroom.

Read Alouds That Build Knowledge

SPEAKER_03

So the first one was Dr. Tanya Wright from Michigan presented on some ongoing research she's doing with read-alouds. So these are a sample of teachers where they sent to the research team videos of them uh conducting read alouds, and then uh Tanya Wright in a research team, uh Dr. Laurie Brunner was involved with that. They analyzed, they they had a rubric where they were grading, uh not like grading, but analyzing, looking at the quality, the instructional practices that were used during the read alouds.

SPEAKER_02

It was like um was it a zero, one, two? I might be wrong. Was it one two?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I think it was a one, a zero, one, two, three. There are four categories. Yeah. That's right. I remember. And looking at specifically like did the read alouds, was it promoting knowledge building and vocabulary development? Those were so do you all want to take away kind of what the results and what you think the takeaways are?

SPEAKER_00

All right. So um they were looking at both read alouds that were both in English language arts instruction as well as in other content areas. And across the observations, they saw that their teachers were doing a lot of mentioning around vocabulary, maybe like a quick explanation kind of a thing, but not a lot of the like deep meaning, building that understanding of the meaning of the word. And sometimes, like, not not super clear, like the words were planned ahead of time and like the words that would carry the meaning of the text to really support comprehension. Um, so one of the examples they gave was like I think a student actually had mentioned like the text was about arches, and the student mentioned, hey, that's a plural noun. And so that's where the discussion went was around the fact that it was a plural noun rather than like what an arch is, which is actually really important. I believe it was maybe a social studies lesson. And so um with like Arches National Park and understanding that is a big part of understanding that text, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I would think, you know, my big takeaway there was there were some opportunities to, you know, if you're a teacher listening or a coach listening, to really think about read alouds as um a comprehensive experience for our students. So it doesn't just start the moment you pick up a book. It's what book and why we're reading it over the course of several days or the week. Um, and this is not like a read aloud, like, oh, it's the holiday time and I'm reading a special book for the holidays. This is a read aloud that is a you know specific instructional purpose to build knowledge and vocabulary and to give students access to that oral language and vocabulary that they wouldn't have if we weren't doing this read-alo to give them access to that text and topic. So um, for example, with your Arches example, be like super clear about the purpose for reading. You know, we're reading to learn about um Arches National Park because it's an example of um a wind erosion over time. And we're then also explore those words. So think about your vocabulary in advance. And yes, students might have other words that come up, um, but be really explicit about what words we want to teach, um, why we're reading this text. And I would say just, you know, any time where there's an opportunity to pause and make meaning of the text. So not like, oh, here's a heading, let's search for all the headings. Um, but instead, here's a heading, but um, you know, big arches in the park. This heading is gonna tell us about delicate arch.

SPEAKER_03

I'd say delicate arch because delicate arch is the big iconic Utah one. There's my my Utah social study.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, good. There we go. So delicate, that's a really good vocabulary word too, delicate, right? But you know, then that's we're gonna read about this, and everything underneath of this heading is going to tell us about that. And then we're reading and we're making meaning of the content in the book, not just that headings tell us things or going on a heading search. Um, we're really making meaning of the text that we're reading. And I always think of that as like keeping text at the center of our instruction. And that's what's fun for kids is to learn about the arches and to learn about the erosion and to learn about, you know, how sand does this over and wind does this over time. It's so cool. Um, and that's what makes learning joyful. So those are my big takeaways. I love thinking about that. Read alouds in particular are so fun to think about. So I loved that she was uh speaking about that and really where we could bolster our instructional practice.

SPEAKER_03

It doesn't have to be sterile in the sense of it's like this really like neat and clean and tidy polished, like, oh, like, you know, arches, that's a plural suffix, right? I think was the what what Dr. Wright used. But uh this is kind of making me think of actually Dan Reynolds' presentation where he was talking about comprehension and and um listeners on my podcast, I interviewed Dan Reynolds and his research team about um their white paper. It's a couple episodes back, but uh and I've I've read the white paper and I've talked with Dan about the paper, and but I but hearing it again, it finally sunk in where uh they were they one of the things they were looking at in their comprehension study was um the sort of what teachers intended to do based on their like learning, uh, you know, learning criteria, their learning objective that they'd like write up on the board, for example, versus what they actually did. And and what they found was a lot of times that teachers would indicate like a really rigorous learning criteria, but then in practice, like that wasn't really happening. It was more superficial. And it's like the same thing like with the read-alouds, like these um teachers were well-intentioned, right, of like doing a high-quality read-aloud. But then it sounds like from Dr. Wright's presentation, it's a lot of, at least in their sample, of superficial work with it. So thinking like, okay, what are the words that really matter for understanding this text and being able to space out the interactions of those? Like, let's do some interaction with the word arch before the text, let's do some interaction with the word during the text, let's do some interaction with the word after some text, and then now let's kind of like do something arch adjacent, right? Like there's the arch in the center of Rome, right? Or something like that. Or there's like the golden McDonald's arch, or I don't know, but something where it can kind of like the vocabulary exposure, yeah, can like s transfer and broaden over time. But that was a really good, that was a really good presentation. It sounds like they've got a lot more coming out of that study in the next whatever amount of time. So we'll have to stay tuned to that.

SPEAKER_02

When they were sharing in their presentation, you know, and the student said, that's a plural noun. I always think as a teacher, that was kids just take you off course and they're they want to know, you know, with their curiosity and with their comments. So, like, yeah, it's easy to kind of dive into that sidebar. Um, but I think staying the course of like what is the actual purpose here is really important. And so coming back to that purpose for reading would kind of pull you all back, you know, chart your boat back on course, if you will.

SPEAKER_00

I I think something that's really important to remember is like we learn words through talk and through text, right? And a read aloud, and I heard you say interactive several times, Jake, right? Like an interactive read aloud is this perfect opportunity to be building vocabulary in service of understanding that text, right? And so I just think um without that robust purpose uh for reading, sometimes we um have missed opportunities. You know, if we're reading it because it's in the curriculum and I know I need to read it, versus I have these really robust understanding that, okay, I need to purpose make sure that I'm um selecting words that are gonna really support us and that we're having conversations, like you said before, during and after, about those in ways that are gonna help build knowledge and and meet all those kinds of goals.

SPEAKER_03

Fantastic thoughts. I I, you know, going back to like the purpose for reading, I think sometimes like, like I know I like as a teacher, like I had administration that was like saying, oh, you need to do learning objectives on the board. And and I'd kind of chafe against it because I felt like it was micromanagey. But um, what I've learned over time is like, oh, it's not just for the students, it's also to keep me on track as a teacher. Like for me, you know, like, oh, this is my big burning goal for the next X amount of minutes, I better make sure that I'm working really hard, you know, to move towards that. And sometimes we think what we're trying to do is our clearly articulated in our head, but in their in their study, like they said that there were read alouds that they watched, the whole read-aloud, and and as an adult researcher trained in vocabulary, you know, and and and early education, they're like, we're not sure what the read aloud was about. So if like, you know, if if the adults watching it can't pick up what the read aloud was about, how are the students going to?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think that's a really important point of just being really clear with students in child-friendly ways of you know, why are we reading this book and making sure everyone understands?

SPEAKER_03

All right, should we switch gears?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, let's do

Morphology Is Meaningful And Messy

SPEAKER_02

it. So another topic that there were quite a few sessions on here was morphology. And I think Jake summarized it the best. He said, morphology is really meaningful and it's also very messy. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. Um, like, do you want to give us a recap of one specific session?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I went to it was actually an interactive poster session. Um, and so uh Jamie Smith at the University at Maryland um worked on a systematic review. So looking at lots of studies. They were looking at 21 different experimental and quasi-experiment experimental studies of morphology specifically for secondary um learners.

SPEAKER_02

Like, Blake, can I ask you one question really fast? Yeah. What's the difference between a systematic review and a meta-analysis if you're looking at a bunch of studies? That's a great question. Sorry to interrupt here.

SPEAKER_00

No, that's all right. So a systematic literature review is going to the systematic part, is that it like the search was done in a way that like others could replicate and is done in a real comprehensive way, is maybe the the quickest explanation of gathering like everything that we know that's been done on um a particular topic. Um the meta-analysis can probably help explain this, um, but that uh has more um of what methods are involved in looking at the findings of studies and being able to try to say, like, across these studies, what can we learn from from studies that looked at the same question in maybe slightly different ways.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So I look at like systematic reviews, like a broader umbrella category. And a meta-analysis is one type of systematic review that you know they're you've still reviewed the literature systematically, but then you take the extra step of analyzing it quantitatively. So that's when you weight the findings of the study to say overall across studies, what do we know? So that's why they're really powerful, is because you get 20 studies on X topic, and you know, you can sort of say what the across studies, what we know about it. But you know, systematic views can still be really, I think, incredibly useful even without the quantitative aspect of it.

SPEAKER_00

So this is still really useful. So really useful. Right, we're looking at 21 studies, and these are like experimental or quasi-experimental studies, which is you know, like the gold standard of uh in research. And um the conclusion, like the the big takeaway here was that um morphology instruction was good for all. So looking at all different subgroups, they were looking at students who are multilingual and or and and also like EFL students, so students learning English as a foreign language as well. And so morphology instruction was the my takeaway was for secondary students, good for all.

SPEAKER_02

That's good to know. We want it to be good for all, right? It's helpful to have that confirmed.

SPEAKER_03

I saw the poster too, uh, which I think is great because I think morphology tends to emerge a lot more later elementary and then secondary, and then so to be able to say, what do we know about morphology in secondary grades was really is really important. I was in another session on morphology. The one of the things I just was remembered where I was re-realizing again was how messy morphology can get. So I was in a session where Danielle Kolenbrander, who you should go back and listen to my episode with with her, where we talked about her morphology meta-analysis, but she was talking about bases and how, you know, so with morphology, you have um, you know, a base which can be bound or free, and then there's prefixes, and then there's derivational suffixes, and there's inflectional suffixes. Um, but how bases can get really messy just because um bases can have three or four different versions of them that are all related. They're all from the same Latin root. And so tracking those words just gets really tricky because there's words that we we use that we don't realize are related because they have different spellings, but they're actually from the same Latin root. And I wish I could remember the word she used was such a good word because I was like, oh, I didn't know those three words were related, but it makes sense. But they had similar spelling, so um I think we give prefixes in practice. I think we give prefixes a lot of screen time, um, a lot of instruction with our students. And I think we do a lot with inflectional suffixes, so s plural, E S, I n G E R, E S T. I think we do less with derivational suffixes. I mean, I think we do stuff with like, oh, ER means person who, right? L Y, it's now an adverb. I think we do stuff with some of those, but like words where there's multiple derivational stuff. Like industrialization was a word we were using. Like as teachers, that starts to get really hard to parse.

SPEAKER_02

Anyway, I'll take a sidebar and say that like to that end, I love a morpheme matrix matrix to help kind of pull apart those words, right? I think that's incredibly helpful for kids to um play with that word with the central meaning of the morpheme. Um but to your point, when you have a word like industrialization, I kind of think how important is it that kids can pick out every single one of those endings and put them like in all different boxes? Like to me, just put them all to the side, realize that they're you know, they are helpful to know at the end, and then play with play around with that morpheme in the middle, you know, and think about know what it means and then play around with it so that you're still understanding like the whole big meaning of it and you still have access to each one of those. I've seen the matrix done where it's like, here's one section, here's another section, you know, to the right-hand side, and it's just like it gets very confusing for kids, I think. Just kind of put them up there and let them work with the word and play with it so that they're building it themselves. But to your point, it it gets really tricky, not only for students, but for teachers too. I think it's hard to track what actually is the route that we're working with when there could be several potential options and uh Google isn't always helpful because there's a lot of options out there. So do we have any resources to share?

SPEAKER_03

I actually that's a great lead-in, Lori. Thank you. Uh it's like you interview people.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, it's like I've done this before. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Uh yeah, I watched a presentation from Dr. Clarence Green. He's at the University of Hong Kong, and he's been working to build a database called the British and American Word Families Morphological Database, the BAWF. And I'll I'll put the link in the show notes so folks can access it. But it's a it's a website where you could go in, take a word, you enter in the word, and then it gives you different derivations of the word. So when we the example, I think I did I already use the example in industry on when we were live. Anyway, industry industry. So like industry, industrial, industrialize, right? It'll give you different versions of that. But then you could take remix it, take, take the root and find different words with that root, or take a prefix and find different words with with that prefix or suffix. I've been playing around with it. Uh it's pretty accurate, and it it might not give you what I'm finding is if it's a word with multiple derivational suffixes, so like if you type in industry, it might not pull up industrialization or industrializational, right? It'll give you enough to like get started. Enough to like, yeah, enough to like get rolling and go from there. So I think this would be a great tool for, okay, hey, here's a vocabulary word I was using in the text. It's in a it's a way-bearing vocabulary word, it's really driving text meaning. We've gone through with the text, we've had good interactions with it. Now let's let's remix that word, right? And that might be like a great place for like a morphing matrix too. How do we expand our knowledge of this word into new context or different derivational forms? Um, you know, things like that.

SPEAKER_00

I like that. Remix this word. Yeah. One thing I think about with morphology instruction is and in thinking about uh the session you mentioned earlier with Dean Reynolds, right? Robust versus surface level kind of that was comprehension instruction in particular. But I think with morphology, we don't want it to become in vocabulary. We know we don't want to do look up the list vocabulary instruction, right? Where it's just here's a list of random words. And I think like we don't want to do that with morphology either. We're like, here's a list of random parts and like let's make connections, right? And so I think a plug for for something like read stop write, um, which is an intervention that has things, you know, thinking about morphology with in terms of that can be helpful on the decoding side of things, of being able to take apart multisyllabic words in these, you know, meaningful units that can help us to pronounce the word and then also come back at it from, and now that we figured out how to say this word, how can we use those word parts to figure out what the word means? Um, but those are like rooted in actual grade level text. And so the point is not just to Learn the morphemes, but the point is to understand the text. And we're using these strategies to help us both the code and uh and understand the meanings of the words, which ultimately helps us understand that text.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

But let me add on to that in Dr. Green's work in building the morphological database he's been working on. He adds the opportunity to analyze, right, the the words. And this is a really large corpus of word data. And he reported that the 100 most productive affixes cover 92% of morphologically complex words. Wow. Like I think we think of Yeah, like we'll do, hey, high frequency words. Let's do 100 high frequency words for 50% of English. Like that's a trade-off we're willing to take. Um I think we could do a better job of like, let's embrace these 100 most frequent affixes and we get to 92% and morphologically complex, meaning more than one morpheme in the word.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and let's not teach them like a list. Right. Yeah, throw a list. We want to teach the then we want to be aware of them, right? To pull them from the text that students are reading.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I think like as a teacher, you can, you know, we can easily know the hundred um high frequency words. We can you can easily learn those affixes and have those in mind so that in the moment you can pause and hey, we we've just learned this in this other um text, right? And make those like quick connections. Um, but within that meaningful context. Is there a list of these? Like is it available?

SPEAKER_03

I'm sure he has the list. Um I'm not it's it's not on the website though, but I mean, there's um like Holly Lane had an article a couple years ago from Academic Words that I've used with teachers. There's an older one from the early 90s, but they're all they're all similar. I've looked at this the Morphe Lex uh database and my list is similar to the other ones.

SPEAKER_02

So there's so they're the ones that are in curriculum and that you see so it might be more helpful for teachers to think like, not like where's the list, but um can I can I find a list of the of affixes that are commonly used and then be aware of these in my instruction? Like it doesn't have to be like you know, the one and only list.

SPEAKER_00

In the same way that there are multiple high frequency word lists, then like, right? Like you kind of pick one and um you're gonna like whether you're adulter a fry person, it's all good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I mean if if we're going from maybe not focusing on morphology much now to like getting a hundred of yeah.

SPEAKER_03

But I think the like the for like me, a big takeaway with morphology is that um statistically, right, if we're focusing on high-leverage morphemes, we're going to encounter those high-leverage morphemes in text. Uh and relatedly, right, like if we're looking for vocabulary words that are carrying the meaning of the text, right? What are the words that we can harvest and get a lot of mileage out of for text understanding? Well, lo and behold, those are probably also going to have some pretty good morphology in them of some sort, right? Maybe not the prefix and the base and the root, right? But um, you know, some of the stuff I've preliminarily have been doing with teachers, we can p it's we can pick weight-bearing words that also have high frequency morphology. So we can just sort of align things so everything's not quite so silent. We can still be explicit with things, but more integrated and less silent, especially in those upper elementary grades.

SPEAKER_00

And I think it's helpful by using explicit or using authentic texts. It's helpful for kids to be able to grapple with like I I I think of like like the perfect word to teach kids is like autobiographical, right? We've got a lot of parts there. That's wonderful, but that's not actually when they're encountering it's much messier, as you said, when you're encountering words out there, you know, in the wild. In the wild, in real text, that um being able to like, oh, I know this is an affix, I can break that apart here and I can get some meaning from that, um, even if it's not a perfect, you know, section it off.

SPEAKER_03

This was something that Dr. Green brought up in his presentation was that he's like, linguists argue, like they make like a career out of arguing over the boundaries of which which what part of the when does the derivational this derivational suffix and then this derivational suffix begin in this specific word, right? Linguists argue about these things. He he showed different ratings of words and they only agree with each other about 80% of the time, you know. So I think as a teacher, like uh sometimes I think prefixes are pretty straightforward for us, but then the boundaries between roots and derivational suffixes starts to get really, really slushy. But as a teacher, like you don't have to be a linguist, like the way that you are peeling apart the word to leverage meaning and or word reading accuracy and or spelling accuracy out of it, that's the entry point for you to leverage that for your students. Um, you don't have to be a trained linguist to do morphology because there's a lot of hairs to split when it comes to morphological boundaries, especially when you're doing multiple derivational suffixes on the end of a word.

Evidence Based Tools Worth Using

SPEAKER_00

I was on the lookout throughout the conference of, you know, I think there's a lot of curricular materials out there that are available for educators to use. Really, as a field, we're really having this understanding of evidence-based, wanting to use evidence-based materials. And so one of the things that I was really listening for in sessions are what are the interventions or the you know, curricular materials that are created by researchers and have then been researched, um, right? There's studies that have been done with them. And so I think that's a big distinction with not everything that's out there has been created by researchers or even the subject of any study. I think this came up maybe in multiple sessions, but the word connections um intervention is by um Dr. Jessica Tost and her team, I believe is for multi-syllabic words or yeah, right. So some connections are with morphology.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I think it's mostly fourth-fifth grade. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Some other resources for for teachers, the Words as Tool project, Dr. Amy Crossen presented on behalf of her team, which includes uh Dr. Diana Townsend as well. Um, this is an intervention for secondary uh students, specifically multilingual learners. I know they are just about to begin a year with a randomized controlled trial. So we're talking about like experimental evidence. So they have just um been in the design phase where they've really created and tried out this intervention in classrooms, and they've taken um educator feedback and gone back and made changes. So it's this iterative process, and they're about to kick off their um RCT, their randomized control trial, um, which is really exciting. So stay tuned on that. But I think um preliminary um data is really promising for the for that resource. A couple other resources. So Dr. Katie Pace Miles and her team working with the interventions um reading ready and reading go. Um, you know, they presented, I saw a poster today on a tutoring program across the city of New York City, where they have university students who are trained as tutors and work one-on-one with K2 students and really seeing some really positive gains there. I believe first grade was where they saw the biggest gains, but also in the other kindergarten and second grade as well. And then shameless plug for a couple of projects that I've worked on. So I mentioned Read Stop Wright earlier. That's work with Dr. John Strong and Dr. Laura Tortarelli and Dr. Ensu Cho as well. Dr. Strong presented that work as well. So readstopprite.com is a place you can go. Um, for this is a an intervention for grades four through nine. Um, and it is uh using informational text. I believe John's talked about this on your pod um before, the very initial version of the code.

SPEAKER_03

That wasn't the first one. That was like this, that was my second review in like episode 17. Uh, but that was before because you've all added in its multi-component now. So you've got it in vocabulary, multi-syllabic word reading, written summary stuff.

SPEAKER_00

That mine was just the the comprehension focus.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it's it's it's definitely expanded. Absolutely. So yeah, check definitely check it out because it's it's out there and it's free. Uh you just you can just use it, which is excellent.

SPEAKER_00

I was just on the site the other day. Wonderful. Um, and then finally the Access Reading Program Um is one that Dr. Strong and I have have worked on as well. So multiple iterations um we presented on a summer, our fourth iteration of a summer school project, um, where we use the differentiated reading instruction model from Dr. Sharon Walpole's work to provide differentiated instruction. And I think just as schools are thinking about, and I know we talked about this on your pod as well, but summer programming, but as schools are thinking about summer school is not that long, right? It's not very many days. And what do we want to do? And and typically schools are inviting students who are showing some kind of need with literacy. And so, really, to make the most of that time using um something like um Dr. Uh Katie B. Smiles' work or or something like differentiating instruction from Dr. Sharon Walkle is like a really good use of this like limited time when it's we've got evidence that it's really effective. We showed over this particular iteration was 24 days, they got 15 minutes of differentiated instruction per day. That's only six hours of instruction. That's not a much when you think about it on specifically on the differentiated like foundational because we had another component as well. But if you think just about that part, we saw really good effects for students in in just you know, six hours of that targeted assessment-based instruction. So I would just encourage schools to, as they're thinking about providing, you know, either after school programming, summer school programming during the school day, right? And thinking about your tier two interventions, using some of these resources that are created by uh researchers and have been studied to really get the most of your efforts.

SPEAKER_03

The Jake's take on summer school is if you can stop if you you don't have to increase, if you just stop the summer slide, that's a huge win for summer. And that's what your effects have been with the the the the really reasonable amount of instructional time you know you've devoted to this in the summers, which is really great stuff.

SPEAKER_02

I will say we will link everything in the show notes. All right, so let's switch gears a bit to one of my favorite sessions that I saw this entire conference.

Which Multisyllabic Words Trip Kids

SPEAKER_02

Do high-quality instructional materials, teach students to read grade level text and upper elementary multisyllabic investigation by our very own Jake Downs. Round of applause. It was such a great session. I know I learned so much, and I felt like everybody in the room was asking such incredible questions afterwards that I wanted an entire hour with you just to process it. But we get to have that time now.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, well, we can do the short version. This has been a good project, an ongoing project, but something I've thought a lot about and have spent a lot of of work on is thinking about uh what do what do kids need to read grade level text really well, and especially thinking about upper elementaries where they're just pelted with all sorts of multisyllabic words and a lot of words they've never seen before. Um the sentences are long, the texts are dense, um, it's about content that they are unfamiliar with. And so one of the aspects of this is the multisyllabic word reading. And something I've wondered for a long time is like, well, how do we like looking at like national norms? The vast majority of students are reading text with 96, 97, 98, 99% accuracy, which is fairly high. But you have to have 98 or 99 or 100% accuracy to really get a lot of meaning out of the text. So in in this specific study, I just wanted to know like what types of multisyllabic words are out there, because we tend to kind of treat them all the same. Like on the phonic side of things, we get like super, super granular, right? Like here's a constant blend and a digraph versus a trigraph, right? And all the different vowel categories we have of vowel teams and diphthongs and art controlled vowels. And then we just kind of say, oh, and now multisyllabic, you've graduated to multisyllabic, and it's just it's the wild west. But you know, we've we've used industrialization in this in this podcast already. Like the word cookie is a very different multisyllabic word than the word industrialization.

SPEAKER_02

For many, many reasons.

SPEAKER_03

For many reasons, yes.

SPEAKER_02

Um not just length.

SPEAKER_03

Yes. As we'll get into, right? Not just length. So what I did is I took two of the popular core reading programs in Utah, and every third week we took every multisyllabic word from the text. And then we took all the multisyllabic words from the decoding portion of the lesson, the program as well. And I did what's called a latent profile analysis. So what it does is it it looks, it looks at the words, and I had seven variables we were looking at, and it kind of just put them into categories of saying this group of words is similar, and this group of words is similar, and this group of words is similar. So we found three profiles. The first profile we're calling like concrete vocabulary. So it's words like basket, camera, suitcase, telephone, hooky. So multisyllabic words that are younger kids would know. Uh they're fairly shorter. You know, most of them are two syllables, but they are like things that you can really clearly picture in your mind. A bottle, right? Something like that. The other type of multisyllabic word we found were more like function words, right? These are words that kids are also tend to be familiar with, um, but they are shorter, mostly two syllables, but they tend to be abstract. So words like before or without or almost or a go or between. I can't picture before in my head the same way I can picture the word lemon or cookie, right? You it's hard to show a picture of before. So those are words that were shorter in length, you know, only two morphemes maybe, or um, and then words that kids learned at a younger age, and they tended to be highly abstract.

SPEAKER_02

They also see them a lot too, right?

SPEAKER_03

But yes, these are words that appear in text a lot. I mean, before is going to come up, that's going to be in first and second grade level text. Sure. Okay. Then the the last profile, uh, and there was some debate in the session of what to call it. So I'm just going to call it the everything else category. At first I had academic vocabulary, but but it's it's everything else. These would be words that are longer in length, that they are more morphologically complex. So we're talking, you know, potentially three or four, not all of them are three or four syllables, but uh three or four syllables, three or four morphemes. Um these are words that students learn when they're older, and they're but they're also words that there was the most unique number of words, but overall, like there was the total number of words was the most, but the amount that each individual word appeared was overall less, if that makes sense. So like the word unfortunately, you're going to see unfortunately in text a lot less than you might see the word like almost, you know, for example. So so the types of words that were in this last profile were educational, industrial, fascinating, understanding, dramatic were those types of words. With the thinking of those three profiles, the the long story of it is looking at the we we found that the academic words, those words I just mentioned, that those are harder for students to read than the function words or the concrete words. And so thinking about if there's a whole lot of those words, they're quite a bit harder to read, but they also, you know, a word like industry, if I'm reading a text about England in the 1600s, industry is probably going to be an important word for me to help understand the text. So they also tend to convey a lot of weight within the specific text that they're in. And so thinking about, well, what does that mean for decoding instruction? And what we kind of found when we looked at the three programs was it really varied quite a bit. But my my feeling was that the academic words or those longer, more abstract words with higher age of acquisition were being under-indexed. Like those were only 20 to percent of the words in grades four and five, whereas like the concrete words like cookie and basket, um, you know, were over half of the time to almost two-thirds. And so thinking about if I'm trying to really promote multisyllabic word reading, I need to give kids the types of words that they're missing in text. So we talked about in the wild earlier, like taking my decoding instruction in tier one whole group out of captivity and into the wild to say what words do my not trying to necessarily teach them something new, but like there has to be a part where we are applying our decoding skills with new words that are long that we haven't seen before with with, you know, a long word blending strategy. That that part was outside of the study. That's other things I'm working on. But for me, that's a really important takeaway here is applying blending skills with words that are going to be hard for kids to read accurately, but also matter for understanding the text.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think it's like when I I appreciate this so much and I really like thinking about words in this way. Like I I like this, I like the way that you've categorized them, like even if it is just everything else, because those words are words that you know, students the frequency is very low for those words, right? Industry, I don't come across it on the daily or even close. But when I do come across it, it does hold that heavy weight and meaning and all the variations of it I need to also be able to understand. Um but what I'm guessing is students also have that same experience with a word like that, right? That's the whole point. And it's not necessarily, I think, about um, like we need to give them skills to to do something with that word in the text, but also like we need to increase the reps with these types of words so that when they come to these words, they feel like they know what to do and how to attack them. But they also need to have a prior experience with re like longer words and more complex words because these are the words that they're going to be seeing once they hit middle, high school, college. I mean, you I they should be seeing them probably more in fourth and fifth than um I think you might have found. Yeah, I just I think the the way that you've categorized them kind of helped me reframe the way I think about multi-s multisyllabic words. And personally, I think that's incredibly helpful for teachers too. Just like, you know, lemon, like all multisyllabic words are not equal. Lemon is not the same as industrialization. They're very different, even though yes, they're multisyllabic, you know?

SPEAKER_00

And I think in terms of like takeaways for educators, like text selection really matters here, right? If we're gonna have opportunities to encounter these words, um, it really matters the text that we're selecting and making sure that, you know, not just one text, but like you're saying, and if we're gonna encounter this multiple times, then maybe we need to think about putting together a text set and building knowledge in these particular ways where the words are gonna come up in similar contexts, but different than that, you know, one particular context that it was first encountered, but gives those opportunities and just like how important it is to have opportunities for kids to be reading challenging grade bubble texts with supports. I think about that, you know, more time is is often needed than what kids are are necessarily getting regularly.

SPEAKER_03

I mean, uh the my contention is is at the end of the day, students in upper elementary students in a text, uh if they're reading, which the vast majority of students are reading uh above 95%, but almost everybody, I mean it's only the the below the 10th percentile that's reading below 90% accuracy, uh which word are they missing in the text? Are they gonna get the word industrialization inaccurate, or is it going to be a word like telephone or sandwich that's inaccurate, right? It's it's industrialization. And so I think the types of materials we give students in upper elementary grades for multisyllabic word accuracy support, I think the words tend to be too short. I think they tend to be words that students are already familiar with. And I don't think those are the types of words that to move a student from 97% accuracy to 98% is a lot harder than moving them from 87 to 88 just because of the the demand of the words that are the very hardest in the text makes a really, a really big difference. So stay tuned because I've I want to do more stuff in this area over the next, you know, however long.

SPEAKER_02

Can I make a suggestion? Please. So to your point about going from a lower number to a higher number of accuracy, right? I kind of think about that if if if I'm a teacher listening and I'm thinking, okay, so how will I know what my students don't know? That's hard to anticipate. First, yes, definitely read the text, try to anticipate that. But a really cool exercise, I did this recently with a student, is to take a text, like a a small, like an article, you know, not a set a shorter text or a section of the text. So a small section. And just say, okay, I'd like you to read this to yourself. Circle the words that you don't know and don't know how to say. You don't have to color code them. There's no stars, there's not an annotation, it's just circle every word that you either don't know or don't know how to say. And that is like a great litmus test for you to see what your students are thinking, right? I mean, maybe ask a couple students to do it, and then what you guessed at and tried to anticipate and put those together. And I think it really does provide that like lens into the invisible brain of the students as they're reading and really help um as a teacher build my knowledge of what they might need.

SPEAKER_03

Laurie, I think you should do that as a study.

SPEAKER_02

Jake, I'm not certified for that kind of thing. I've got I've got one suggestion.

SPEAKER_03

Suggest, because that was just my little thing. It's such a great idea.

SPEAKER_00

But oh I I find for from the vocabulary standpoint, when we ask kids like what words don't you do you not know? Kids are sometimes hesitant to say, I don't know this, right? But if we say, which words could you not explain to somebody, like, you know, or right? Like that changes it a little bit because you have to have a level of comfort with it to be able to explain it, right? And so and we know like the intercept gradients of like, I've heard it before, right? So like what does no mean? But like, oh, I've heard that versus like, oh yeah, I can explain that.

SPEAKER_02

So that's actually a really good one because I feel like they all will be like, Yeah, I know it. And then, okay, explain it to me.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I've been in classrooms with upper elementary students who knew who quote unquote knew every single word, but when you'd ask them about it, like, oh, actually, I'm I so don't know how to say or can't explain. Yeah, which things might be challenging to pronounce and yeah, I couldn't leave.

SPEAKER_03

From my perspective, like our job isn't to just teach stuff to kids or to review a lot of things they already know. Like it's to find what is the edge of what they can do and stretch them so what the edge of what they can do is they can do it now. And then there's a new edge of what they can do.

SPEAKER_02

And we can only do that by really hearing from the students.

SPEAKER_03

Probe to get information back and then respond to that information. So I love it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

Maybe you can help me. We can work together.

Rapid Fire Takeaways From Posters

SPEAKER_03

So for the next chunk, uh, I think let's just talk about a couple like we'll just each kind of share one or two rapid fire takeaways rather than going deep into a whole session. Um Blyth, what was a rapid takeaway of yours?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So I there was uh another poster session that stood out to me, and I did not get the name, I believe came out of Florida Center for e-research, but I don't remember the exact person. There's been a lot of talk in the last number of years about um when we're introducing letter names and letter sounds, like how important it is to like focus on like mouth positioning. And during the pandemic, there was talk about that with like, you know, when we're trying to introduce this with masks on and that kind of thing. And so I know that's a practice that uh a lot of teachers have started really focusing on mouth positions and possibly using like mirrors so kids can see themselves making those positions. You know, there's lots of different variations, but um, I I don't believe there's been a ton of research behind it. And so this poster stood out to me. I believe it was a systematic review, and so I believe it was maybe just four studies. Yeah, it wasn't very many. Um, but it was like some preliminary from those studies is beneficial for students, and it looked different across those four studies, whether kids were making the movement and like with the mirror kind of example, or just looking at the instructor. But regardless, as long as the kids were drawn attention to, you know, sometimes it was a picture, sometimes it was the instructor's mouth themselves. Um, but having that as a source of information along with the letter name and letter sound uh looks to be promising and benefitful for students.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I saw that poster too. And for me, the important takeaways A, there's really not a ton of research. B, especially I don't like I don't think any of the studies were whole group tier one. They're more small group intervention. But but the fact that yes, it can be mirrors, but also the teacher modeling the mouth position and picture cards with the mouth position were also shown effective. So I don't think we need to be pigeonholed into one of those being better than another because I don't I don't think the research bears that out. We know that articulation and and supporting students with the correct mouth position is is going to be important. But I mean, with four studies, it's very hard to say, you know, which one in in the cage match would win.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I think with only four studies, like we still have plenty of room for for getting more specific on like dosage, right? We're not necessarily saying like every single time you talk about, right? Like so thinking about like, you know, what is that optimal dosage for drawing attention versus um, you know, maybe extinguishing that at some point as a scaffold, right?

SPEAKER_02

Or even like explicitness, right? Like, was it how explicit do we need to be versus just doing it while we're teaching it in our regular part of our instruction?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I think just, you know, this is a constrained skill. Learning letter names and letter sounds is constrained. There are only 26 names, right? There are 44 sounds or so, right, in English. And just keeping that in mind as well, is like kids will master this. And so once once you have evidence that they've mastered it, it's not the case that we would like need to continue that, I would believe. Right. So so uh you know, don't take it and run into it too far, but it seems promising.

SPEAKER_02

Second grade, students might not need to be making the sound in the mirror. Right. They probably shouldn't. They probably for sure should.

SPEAKER_03

In tier one, they probably mastered that, which I think is a really important. Like, if I was to make a Jake's take recommendation, like I would say in tier one, it's extremely minimal, and then you mop it up in tier two. Because I think most kids' introduction, clear visualization of the mouth, I model it, you mimic it, here's the card, we move on. And let's get to actually using the sound in words with print. Is that's going to give you a lot of payoff as well. A lot of research there to show that connecting there. We know like mapping letters and sounds and the words they make, is actually a pretty big deal. Lori, rapid fire takeaway.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so one poster that I saw that was uh especially memorable. It's called What Text Do Early Elementary Teachers Use in Small Groups? This was Lisa Cortez Hendrix, uh Dr. Tonya Ripp, they were from Michigan State University and University of Michigan. Um, and what was really interesting to me, like my big uh remembrance takeaway, was that the text that teachers start using when they start teaching is what they continue to use. So for example, um, if I'm a teacher who starts using leveled texts when I'm teaching, then I continue to use it on and on and on and on and on. Um for the most part, right? Um and so I mean teachers, it said um for example, teachers who were in their sixth to ten tenth year teachers, tenth years of teaching, a hundred percent of them on this it's a pretty high number. That's true. Yeah, I'm trying to see if it's a quantitative observational study. They 100% used small uh level text, right? Um, but in the other years, the that number was much lower. So there were other types of texts, right? Nonfiction texts, other types of uh trade books. What also was compelling is that and this was like totally surprising to me, is that teachers with master's degrees use nonfiction text statistically more often than teachers with bachelor's degrees. It's really interesting that that additional um education and programming helped to make different decisions and incorporate nonfiction. And I'm also wondering what is happening in undergrad that we're maybe not promoting nonfiction or using that and not I don't know. Just having lots of wonderings. But um, you know, my uh instructional takeaway would be let's use really good texts to teach small group and perhaps even the text that we're using for whole group to read it more, study it more. I mean, there's just maybe uh step away from the level, use it as a topic, and I think this to me speaks uh for the importance of ongoing learning, right?

SPEAKER_00

Whether that's professional development, professional learning that's offered through your district or elsewhere, of um or or a master's degree, right? Something like that. But just the importance of educators constantly, you know, being learners themselves. Like listening to the podcast. Yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_03

My quick takeaway, Dan Reynolds had a really great quote in the session we were in. So he was talking about the curriculum analysis they did of him, his colleagues, the SRA of HQIM in some large urban school districts. And you can go back and listen to my episode with him about it. But he was asked the question after the session was, well, like, what were the differences across curriculum and looking at surface level comprehension versus deep level comprehension? And he's like, that's the question I get all the time. And he he says, We do need to go back and like look through the data and and really answer that question better. But he basically said, My my take on it from what I've seen of the data and working with it was was something to the effect of all of the curriculum offered opportunities for deep comprehension instruction, but they weren't necessarily consistently designed in a way to deliver on that. And so he was talking specifically about comprehension, right? There's opportunities there, but the execution within the curriculum might not quite be allowing it. Well, I think the the tasks within the curriculum intended to be used by an instructor, would be my my take of what he's saying there. So looking at like my study and and more broadly, I I think that's fairly applicable. Like there's lots of opportunities to do great things with curriculum, but I think curriculum sometimes just isn't quite delivering there. And so we need to be thinking about how do we, you know, how like a teacher's job is like how do we take curriculum and make it uh better? Like curriculum instruction, like instruction is curriculum enacted. So how do we take curriculum and enact it in such a way that it is a match for my students? And so a lot of times that involves bending and shaping and molding the curriculum so that that we're in charge of it and it's not in charge of us. So I've I really liked Dan's quote there. He said in a really great way that I didn't say in quite as great way.

SPEAKER_02

So when we're thinking about like deep versus surface comprehension and making those adjustments, we wouldn't I think a really important part of that is knowing our students, right? And making sure that we're knowing the multisyllabic words, maybe not knowing, but making really good guesses and using them to inform us and having that feedback loop between our students. You know, what really is tricky for you here in this text? What don't you understand? What background knowledge do you have that I, you know, didn't realize that you might have? I feel like kids always surprise us in that way. Um, what do you either of you like to add to that?

SPEAKER_00

I was just thinking, you know, he talked a lot about having a robust purpose. And I think, right, that's something that educators can look at a lesson. And, you know, there are often whatever materials you're using, right? Right, there are objectives there and really looking and having that moment of do I see robust purpose here? Um, if I carry out the lesson as it's designed. And if the answer is no, if it's really more surface level kinds of things, like what can you do as an educator to um really make sure that you're going beyond surface level? Um, because you know, it's opportunity costs, um, right? Our time in school is limited. And if we're taking time to do, you know, surface level, we're giving up time to do something that's deeper and more meaningful and impactful. So just really using that time wisely.

SPEAKER_03

I think just to like land the plane here, like that's been a thread throughout our whole discussion, right? Going back to the read-alab, like arches as a plural noun versus wow, an arch is an amazing geologic feature that's that is created over thousands of years that you can go see and and you know, that's a real thing. Like building a schema around arches rather than just like grammatical understanding, or like like Lori, what you mentioned, of like, is there a way that I can figure out, hey, what words do my kids not know in this text? And then maybe those become, I look for some patterns, right? Maybe those are the ones that I, you know, I scaffold for them uh, you know, ahead of time or with with with comprehension, you know, being able to say, is this, am I doing this task just to like check a box to say, oh, I did a task, or am I using this task in such a way that it's driving text, meaning, and understanding? Can I get two birds with one stone? I think that's a very big, I think that's what we're all just trying to do is how do we take, how do we make our instruction more rich and more beneficial? And I had a great time at the conference talking about it with you all.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, same. One of the things you said in your session, Jake, though, was not just how do we make instruction more beneficial, but how do we make it more cohesive? You talked about that connectedness of words and um texts and instruction. And I just think that's something really important to leave everyone with too.

SPEAKER_03

Let's bend it so like things can align. Uh explicit doesn't have to mean siloed.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02

Meaningful. Meaningful, bend it like Beckham, it's roll tunnel. Yeah.

Cohesive Instruction And Closing

SPEAKER_03

Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the podcast. Yeah, you don't get a Jake's take because the whole thing was Jake and Blythe and Lori's take. So until next time, let's go and teach reading and writing just a little bit better.

Melissa

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SPEAKER_02

If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend, or leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

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.

SPEAKER_02

We appreciate you so much, and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.