Science of Reading: The Podcast

S2-07. Research, comprehension, and content-rich literacy instruction: Sonia Cabell

• Amplify Education • Season 2 • Episode 7

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Join Sonia Cabell, Assistant Professor of Education at Florida State University, as she shares findings from her research trials on content-rich literacy curricula and whether activating students’ background knowledge alongside explicit phonics instruction is more effective than traditional approaches. She also explains what constitutes “compelling evidence” in the science of reading and why students need to interact with both written and spoken language while learning to read.

Quotes:

“The knowledge that you have about a particular subject matters for your reading comprehension.”

“When I think about content-rich English language arts, I think about how we can integrate science and social studies into the language arts in ways that make sense.”

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Angela Duckworth: It is not just trying hard that makes you successful. You need to be set up in a situation that helps you, as opposed to fighting you like an enemy. And when we talk about schools today, there is an enemy, I think, that I didn’t have to contend with when I was a teacher.

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Susan Lambert: Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Lambert. As the reading science movement continues to grow, even during this unprecedented time, it's so important to stay focused on what it takes to develop confident and capable readers. As we've learned, change can happen fast. That makes it even more important to stay connected and learn from each other. The more we learn and listen, the more prepared we'll be to lead. Together, let's voice challenges and take action.

Susan Lambert: Sonia Cabell, assistant professor in the College of Education at Florida State University, joins us on today's episode as we talk about her work in the critical role of language and its role in comprehension. While she knows that foundational skills are important—essential, in fact—to students’ reading development, she talks about how language comprehension can get overlooked in practice, especially in the early grades. She believes that learning to read and reading to learn are a false dichotomy. What a great episode to build your knowledge on the importance of background knowledge! Enjoy! 

Susan Lambert: Sonia, welcome to today's episode. So excited to have you on today. 

Sonia Cabell: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Susan Lambert:  So, as you know, we always spend the first little bit here chatting about who you are and how you ended up in this reading science space. 

Sonia Cabell: Yeah…you know, it starts back from when I was a 12-year-old girl. I was always interested in being a teacher. My parents immigrated from Pakistan in the 70s to the United States and they really placed a great value on education.

Sonia Cabell: And I think my mom had a very strong orientation toward teaching us, and particularly teaching us how to read. I see myself in her with my 5-year-old now. She would do some of the behaviors naturally that we now have research about. Like…going to the library would be a really fun thing where we could pick out whatever books that I wanted, and when reading aloud, she would regularly point to the print.

Sonia Cabell: And I remember being able to read before I entered school, so that was always something that was really important to me.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. So, [you] always wanted to be a teacher.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah. I always, well, before—I have to confess that before I was 12, I wanted to be an astronaut. But then I learned that you couldn't be, you had to be like 35 and have perfect vision to be an astronaut.

Sonia Cabell: And I thought, you know, I can't do that. So, teaching was it for me. And, you know, I had a great undergraduate experience at Smith College in the 90s. They had a really terrific child development and education program. But, interestingly, I did my student teaching at a really highly regarded school there, but they used the whole language approach to teaching reading. So that was my initial training. Then…fast forward a few years. I taught second grade for a few years in Oklahoma and I received my master's degree in reading education. And then I was a reading coach during the Reading First era in the early 2000s in both Oklahoma and Virginia.

Sonia Cabell: And I always valued reading because it plays such a critical role in our lives and can positively or negatively affect our lives. So I always thought that that was the most important thing.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. And now you're a teacher of teachers…  

Sonia Cabell: That's right. 

 Susan Lambert: And broadly publishing research, which is really exciting.

Sonia Cabell: Right. And it was during my reading coaching days that I began to see that teacher knowledge was really variable about how reading develops and how to teach reading. And that was interesting to me. Like certain teachers knew a lot more about teaching reading than other teachers. And, I kind of stumbled upon the opportunity to get my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. My husband had just gotten out of the army and we were moving from Oklahoma to Virginia to start a new chapter in our lives, and we’d just identified Charlottesville as a town we wanted to live in. So when we were there…I was reading the newspaper and I saw Marcia Invernizzi’s name in the paper, and she is one of the authors of Words Their Way, which I had used in my second grade classroom, like every day.

Susan Lambert: Mmhmm.

Sonia Cabell: And I got excited.And I told my husband, and I said, “Real researchers are at UVA!” And you know, that was back when I really wanted everybody's autographs in my books, you know? 

Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

Sonia Cabell: I'm not sure if I ever got hers. But I met her, and the rest was history. And she became my program advisor.

Sonia Cabell: And when I started my doctoral program, it was in 2005, she said it would change the way I thought and it would change my life, and she was absolutely right. You know, I began to see how some of what I practiced in classrooms didn't actually have an evidence base. And even though certain programs or approaches had glossy materials or well-written professional books about them, there was limited evidence that they actually worked to improve children's reading.

Sonia Cabell: So, that was, that was troubling. And, now, as I teach doctoral students, I see that regularly, that their world is kind of blown in the first few months of school and they realize, “What do we really have evidence on?”

Susan Lambert: Hmmm.

Sonia Cabell: And then I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Laura Justice, who served as my dissertation advisor and her work—she's at the Ohio State University now—and her work is in early childhood literacy. And I fell in love with the preschool space. And the prevention of reading difficulties makes so much sense to me: that if we can shore up the skills that serve as precursors to reading during the preschool years, we can prevent later reading difficulties to some degree.

Sonia Cabell: And to quote Joe Torgeson, the founder of the Florida Center for Reading Research, where I work now, we want to “catch them before they fall.”

Susan Lambert: Mmhmm. Well that explains a lot about sort of the development of your work from early on as a whole language, learning to teach, to now actually part of the actual discourse about the Science of Reading.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah. And one of those critical skills, you know, is around language. And that was…I began to study language, and think about the role it plays in both decoding and comprehension. But it plays a particularly powerful role in comprehension. And in boosting children's language skills early in life, and particularly those academic language skills that led themselves to learning the academic language, the register of books at school, we might be able to prevent later reading comprehension difficulties. And at the time, I was working on language interventions and preschool—or language approaches in preschool—to help improve the language learning environment. And the work overall found that language skills were really hard to change.

Sonia Cabell: It was really hard to both see a change—a meaningful change—in how teachers were talking with children, and it was really hard to see language skills shift for children in ways that would affect their later reading comprehension. And I remember being in a symposium at a research conference, and there were several groups…including my work with Laura Justice being presented there, and we were just presenting findings for language instructional studies in preschool that didn't have great findings. I felt like it was just lackluster findings. There were some changes in teachers and children, but not the kind of the generalized changes in language that you want to see.

Sonia Cabell: And I remember Catherine Snow of Harvard University being our discussant, and she said something like, “What if we gave teachers and children something to talk about?” And that led me down a path of trying to understand instructional context that may facilitate richer and more complex language more naturally.

Susan Lambert: Wow. That's a powerful question, right? I wonder, does she know now that that had such an impact on the work that you're doing?

Sonia Cabell: I don't even think she knows who I am, to be honest. I would love for her to know who I was, but I hope to be able to tell her what a difference that that made. And a study that I did after that time, I looked at different contexts in which teachers were modeling language and actually found that the science context may be a unique facilitative context to support teachers in providing a richer language learning environment for preschoolers.

Sonia Cabell: And so this, again, this made me think about approaches that combine content knowledge and language in reading instruction in the early grades.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. Interesting. And for our listeners, I think because this is the Science of Reading podcast and we're trying to bring these things together, just a reminder that we're, you know, the framework we're talking around here is the Simple View of Reading, meaning that reading proficiency or reading comprehension is really a product of language comprehension and word recognition. And you sort of sit in this language comprehension space. Can you just give us a, you know, just a primer on what is language comprehension and what are we talking about generally when we use that term?

Sonia Cabell: Right. And you know, a lot of the attention is naturally paid to foundational skills and phonics instruction and reading in the early grades, in K[indergarten], [grade] 1, and [grade] 2. And rightfully so. People generally see the early years as a time to learn to read. And we have a lot of compelling evidence in the Science of Reading about the importance of systematic and explicit phonics instruction.

Susan Lambert: Right.

Sonia Cabell: And there's little serious disagreement among scientists about that. But I do think that the language comprehension side sometimes gets overlooked, at least in practice, in the early grades, because sometimes people think of learning to read… they'll first learn to read, and later they'll read to learn.

Sonia Cabell: But that presents a false dichotomy. I think it's actually…an erroneous or mistaken reading of Jean Schultz, of what she was saying. That, actually, they can be reading to learn all along the way or listening to learn all along the way. And so the language comprehension side includes the—when I think about contributors to language comprehension, we generally think about things like vocabulary and syntactical knowledge, all of the things that are precursors to listening comprehension and later reading comprehension in terms of the language. But one of the things that we don't give a lot of attention to is the idea that knowledge is also a contributor to language comprehension. In particular, the background knowledge that children bring to a text.

Susan Lambert: And when we're talking about that, and I know we'll dive in a little bit deeper to this idea of knowledge building, but people in classrooms all the time, I see teachers doing it all the time: They're trying to activate prior knowledge.

Susan Lambert: What's the difference, then, between this activation of prior knowledge and this background knowledge that you're talking about.

Sonia Cabell: Right. So in the early 2000s, after the National Reading Panel report, one of the findings from that, one of the things that people grabbed onto, was the idea that you should activate background knowledge or activate prior knowledge. And prior knowledge is the knowledge that someone brings with them, right? We're told to activate this. I saw…I'd like to attribute things to particular people when possible, when relevant. So I saw Susan Neuman talking about this, and she said something that stuck with me. And it was, “How can you activate knowledge if there isn't any knowledge to activate?” So if someone doesn't have the prior knowledge, you could be activating all you want and nothing is getting activated. So background knowledge is what you need to be able to understand the given text, and you may or may not have it already.

Sonia Cabell: And so in my work, I investigate whether actively building background knowledge alongside literacy instruction matters for children's literacy learning more than traditional approaches. And in traditional approaches, those things are usually separate.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's an important distinction as it relates to language comprehension.

Susan Lambert: So in the general sense, when we're talking about language comprehension, we're talking about things that kids do and encounter before they even come to school. It's the back-and-forth conversations, and ideas, and concepts, and vocabulary they're using in their day-to-day conversations. Is that right?

Sonia Cabell: Right. And that’s why I just, I love that preschool space so much. Because you can't disregard all of that language that grows up…during the preschool years for children. And being a conversationally responsive partner with children and helping them build those language skills—and where you see a lot of this research is really in the book reading literature. And in the book reading literature, both in the preschool space—the reason I reference the preschool space a lot right now is not only my work largely situates there, but also a lot of the book reading work and conversational responsiveness work, all of this was done in preschools, among preschoolers before the age of five.

Sonia Cabell: And so what we've learned from some of the book reading literature is that it's those conversations before, during, and after the book reading experience that matters to children's learning. Yes, the book matters. But also those conversations matter to children's language learning. And I think book reading serves as one of those facilitative contexts for teachers to engage children in more academic language and grow their academic language skills.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And, maybe, let's talk just really quickly and then we're going to get onto a specific article that you have. But let's talk a little bit about what's the difference between those kinds of conversations that are happening in the home or in the day to day and conversations that are based on academic content. Why is that important—that they have those academic interactions?

Sonia Cabell: Right. We naturally learn to speak with interactions that happen with adults every day, daily, incremental language. That's how we learn our spoken language. But we don't learn how to read naturally. So we need the interactions with both texts and the language of texts, the language of books.

Sonia Cabell: The language of books is actually quite different in some respects from everyday spoken language. So if someone were to analyze the conversation we're having today and think about the number of rare words or sophisticated vocabulary that we use, it's probably a lot less in our conversation than it would be in a book you would read-aloud to a child.

Sonia Cabell: That's because the written language and spoken language are quite different. And so I think of academic language as a bridge between the casual register—the academic language skills are the bridge between the casual register of language and the more formal language of schooling.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. That makes so much sense because I'm sure my sentence construction right now isn't the same as what it would be as if I was writing or rewriting or revising.

Sonia Cabell: Absolutely. So not only your vocabulary is impacted, your syntax is. 

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. And so it's really exciting to me that—we'll talk a little bit about ILA [International Literacy Association] right now. ILA put out a special issue of their Reading Research Quarterly called “The Science of Reading.” And so you actually have an article in that issue. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah. Actually, I have a couple of articles in the issue, one of which we'll talk more deeply about.

Sonia Cabell: But, the reason I bring up the other article is that it was led by Yaacov Petscher and it involved all of my colleagues at the Florida Center for Reading Research. And we define the Science of Reading in that article. And so…that's why I wanted to bring it up.

Susan Lambert: That's amazing. 

Sonia Cabell: And I want to think about what constitutes evidence in the Science of Reading. So we talk about the Science of Reading as a phrase representing the accumulated knowledge about reading, reading development, and best practices for reading instruction obtained by the use of the scientific method. And my research takes a “what works” approach to teaching and learning.

Sonia Cabell: I conduct randomized control trials, which are well-designed experiments that test the efficacy of a particular curriculum or approach.That is one type of rigorous research design that would go into the Science of Reading or the accumulated knowledge about reading. And when we think about randomized control trials, we want efficacy trials to be done for vaccinations, for example.

Sonia Cabell: That's a very relevant topic, currently, very relevant. So shouldn't we also want them to be done to understand whether certain approaches or curricula work to improve children's reading skills? And so, in that paper we talk about levels of evidence, what we know about what's compelling evidence; what we know about what lacks compelling evidence; what has promising evidence? And the other paper that I wrote in this issue—I was the first author and Dr. HyeJin Hwang at Florida State University was my co-author—we talk about an area of research that is promising but not yet compelling. So the research in this area has not yet accumulated to the point of being conclusively compelling, and that is, integrating knowledge building into English language arts, or content-rich English language arts approaches.

Susan Lambert: Great. Can I stop you just there? I just want to talk a little bit because we've heard that the Science of Reading, there's decades of research, this idea of accumulated knowledge. But when we're talking about it—different areas for this development, even based on the Simple View of Reading—what you're saying, then, is that there are some areas where the evidence has been accumulating much more, and maybe we've even gone beyond promising evidence, but there's other areas that are just developing.

Susan Lambert: I wonder how we think about that or help teachers to think about that.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That, definitely, when you think about the decoding part of the equation, we know a lot more there and we have a lot more compelling evidence on not only on how it develops, but how we should be teaching it.

Sonia Cabell: Does that mean we know everything? No. I have colleagues who are, you know, working on the cutting edge of that space. We know a lot less about language comprehension and how to improve language comprehension. So, while we do have some compelling evidence around strategy instruction—comprehension strategy instruction—there's a lot that we need to learn and there's a lot of promising evidence in this area.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. And so that's where your article called “Building Content Knowledge to Boost Comprehension in the Primary Grades” sits—within that promising evidence section.

Sonia Cabell: Right, exactly. And, you know, I think about it. And the reason it's promising and not yet compelling, like I said earlier, is because there are much fewer studies.

Sonia Cabell: It just has not—the research has not been as well developed. Now, there has been a lot of research around understanding how knowledge relates to reading. So when we think about, say, the Science of Reading, remember we're talking about not only how reading develops, but also how you instruct. So when we talk about how reading develops, we know that things like the knowledge that the reader brings to the text is a determinant of whether they'll understand that text.

Sonia Cabell: And nobody argues that your background knowledge or the knowledge that you have about a particular topic you're reading about matters for your reading comprehension. I think most, if not every theory of reading comprehension, implicates knowledge. But it's interesting that that hasn't necessarily been translated into all of our instructional approaches.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. And why do you think that is?

Sonia Cabell: Well, I think unfortunately the subject areas in school have largely been siloed. So, you know, I saw firsthand during the reading—this probably happened long before someone who knows the history of all of the reading education in the United States better than I do would probably have a more historical answer for you.

Sonia Cabell: I'll…give you a contemporary answer. In the early 2000s when the National Reading Panel report came out, there was an emphasis placed on reading. And there was—during Reading First and No Child Left Behind—there was a lengthening of the reading block. And the reading block in some cases became two-and-a-half hours. You know, long.

Sonia Cabell: And that tended to push out other areas. You know, you can't lengthen one area and not shorten another. But, unfortunately, reading instruction has been largely, I would say, I'm not sure the right word to use here, but maybe largely agnostic to the idea of building knowledge. Yes, there are texts within reading instruction, for example. There are texts that teachers read aloud to children and there might be themes, but they tend to hop around in popular curricula, English language arts curricula, rather than building knowledge—science and social studies knowledge. What I'm finding to be even more troubling is, in the last few years, in talking with large districts, what actual practice is on the ground, is that children get very little science and social studies instruction in their day.

Sonia Cabell: Sometimes they get 30 minutes every other day. Or in some places, half the year is devoted to science and half to social studies. And…in kindergarten—I'm talking about the early grades here—and in kindergarten you may not even have science and social studies going on very systematically.

Sonia Cabell: And when it does, sometimes I've also seen it that the teachers don't necessarily use materials that are systematically building knowledge. And so, I'm not an expert on science instruction or social studies instruction. My interest in this is really from a reading perspective. And when I think about integrating content-rich English, when I think about content-rich English language arts, I think about how can we integrate science and social studies into the language arts in ways that make sense.

Sonia Cabell: But these were never supposed to replace science and social studies instruction. So the developers of curricula such as Core Knowledge Language Arts, right? The developers didn't mean for that to replace science and social studies instruction. So when I talk about content-rich ELA instruction, I'm not talking necessarily about instruction that would replace science and social studies, but ideally serve as a compliment to what's going on in science and social studies.

Susan Lambert: Great. Well, let's talk just a little bit about what the research says about that integration then… .Why is it important and what does it look like in the classroom?

Sonia Cabell: Right. My colleague HyeJin Hwang, as well as our colleague Rachel Joyner at Florida State University, and this was…HyeJin led the way on this.

Sonia Cabell: We conducted some meta-analyses to see what is the research in integrating content area instruction and literacy instruction on both vocabulary and comprehension. And one of the things we were really surprised by is just how few studies have done this and measured vocabulary or comprehension as outcomes.

Sonia Cabell: And we just looked at K–5 settings, so in the elementary settings. Out of thousands of studies that we initially hit upon with our initial search, we narrowed down to 31 studies that fit the criteria that were either experiments or quasi-experiments. So both of these can show a causal inference. You can make a causal inference or see what works in these approaches. And I would say that most of these are approaches, and not necessarily curricula that are commercially available. 

Susan Lambert: Got it. Okay. 

Sonia Cabell: And when we meta-analyzed the corpus, we found that combining knowledge building and literacy approaches, either in English language arts or more generally, this was more general than that. So it could have been an intervention that combined it in the social studies or science instruction involved literacy. We did find that it had a positive impact on both vocabulary and comprehension outcomes for elementary age students. And the reason why this is important—I just want to point out why this is finding matters—the counterfactual in these studies, meaning the group that the treatment was compared to, were doing traditional instruction. So what was business as usual. So it wasn't that they were without instruction, it was just business as usual: traditional instruction that was generally separate.

Sonia Cabell: So we found this positive impact when these things were integrated, and it was significant for both vocabulary and comprehension. Now, when we zoom into just the studies that are on content-rich ELA approaches, that are done in the English language art space, we only had nine studies that met the criteria, which is really disheartening.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. This is why it's promising and it's continued to accumulate. Right? There's only nine.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah. Right. But of those, there were some that changed, that impacted, children's standardized, and what I mean by standardized, I mean on a standardized test, for comprehension. So that is very interesting.

Sonia Cabell: And in terms of language—again, the reason why this is significant is because when you look at the instructional approaches where we've only tried to improve language by itself, they don't seem as robust as this literature. Now this is a growing—like a small but growing—literature, so I don't want to say that too emphatically.

Susan Lambert: Sure.

Sonia Cabell: But there is definitely promise here in integrating English language arts instruction and content-rich instruction. And it makes a lot of theoretical sense.

Susan Lambert: Yeah.

Sonia Cabell: Because when children—some of these approaches included things like using coherent text sets—so children would be learning about building knowledge, and they would hear words repeated over and over again in different contexts. So they would begin to, you know, you could see that they would, their understanding of vocabulary would deepen. And you could see, and vocabulary, really, some people talk about vocabulary as being just the tip of the iceberg of someone's knowledge more generally.

Sonia Cabell: So if vocabulary, if the tip of the iceberg idiom is used, like the tip is what we can see, what we can measure, and we tend to measure vocabulary. But really, you know, if we could see the whole picture of knowledge, some people will argue that you are indexing their knowledge. So that's an important consideration to keep in mind.

Susan Lambert: Very interesting. So all of this sort of led you to conducting a study of your own, to look at this idea of content-rich ELA programs and what happens.

Sonia Cabell: Right. So, I conducted a randomized control trial of Core Knowledge, Language Arts, the Knowledge Strand. And in CKLA, I'm going to call it CKLA for short, CKLA has both a Knowledge and a Skills Strand that in K–2 are decoupleable. So, knowledge can be taught, and then you can use a different phonics approach or different foundational skills approach or curriculum.

Sonia Cabell: So we were just testing the Knowledge Strand. And so I want to say the reason that's important is because all of what we were interested in is thinking about the language—changes in language that children would have. So, changes in vocabulary and listening comprehension and changes in knowledge that children would have as a result of the curriculum.

Sonia Cabell: And we looked in kindergarten and first grade settings. So what…we are able to report on so far is there are preliminary findings in the kindergarten space. Now, a little bit more about this, before I delve into findings, I want to just share just a little bit more about our study.

Sonia Cabell: It was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. And as you know, we were independent from Amplify. 

Susan Lambert: I do know. Yeah. [Chuckles]

Sonia Cabell: In fact, we took very careful pains to only purchase materials from Amplify and not get PD from Amplify. So, Amplify allowed us to work with Core Knowledge Foundation directly on providing the PD for teachers for the study. And we also then had a firewall between the Core Knowledge Foundation and the evaluation portion of our study. And then we have another firewall between our Florida State University team and the team that was conducting the main analyses for the study.

Sonia Cabell: So I have to say that my collaborators in the study are James Kim from Harvard University as a co-investigator, and Tom White from University of Virginia. So we wanted to maintain a level of rigor that we could say not only am I not a developer of the curriculum, but I don't really have a horse in the race for whether this curriculum works. What I became interested in is—when I got introduced to CKLA, it was around 2012—it really was the only approach in the space, a commercial approach, that was combining content knowledge building with English language arts instruction.

Sonia Cabell: And what strikes me about CKLA as unique from other approaches is that it tries to build the background knowledge for children systematically over time. And so within a grade level, knowledge builds, and across grade levels that knowledge continues to build. So it's both coherent within a grade level and then across grade levels. And so they were doing something different than what I had been seeing. So I became interested in studying this.

Sonia Cabell: And, at the same time, what was happening in the country was that since the Common Core State Standards in 2010, there was this push toward building knowledge that was occurring. And this push happened in English language arts. And so English language arts became a space where curriculum developers were creating content-rich English language arts curricula. And there were districts that were uptaking these curricula and widely using these curricula. And also there were districts that were creating their own curricula that were like this. And so this became something worthy of study because it was so widely used.

Susan Lambert: Right. And it was even outlined in Appendix A, right, of the Common Core State Standards? Of how you can use read-aloud text in the early grades to actually bring that background knowledge to students and develop it coherently.

Sonia Cabell: Right. And that's what CKLA primarily uses as a primary vehicle, for building that background knowledge through interactive read-alouds. So again, the talking, the conversations that occur before, during, after the read-aloud experience, and some of that conversation before the read-aloud experience includes, you know, reminding children of where the knowledge that they've already learned and applying that new knowledge to the text that's about to be read. And it also involves coherent text sets that are text sets that are related within given units of study.

Sonia Cabell: So those pieces…and what I want to say, just one caveat here, or a couple of caveats. One is, this is just one way to think about integrating knowledge and language or knowledge and literacy, okay? And it is not the only way. And some would argue that, ideally, you want this integration to occur across your day, not just in English language arts programs.

Sonia Cabell: So I want to put that caveat out there. The second one—and that's in keeping with the developers’ design of these curricula as well—they're not intended to replace the science or social studies and meet the science and social studies standards as well. The second one, is that this doesn't, you know, by studying curricula like this, it doesn't imply that comprehension strategy instruction is not important.

Sonia Cabell: We do have research showing that comprehension and strategy instruction can matter. And so I view it as a “both and.” Knowledge is needed and strategy instruction can be powerful. And so we have some compelling evidence on that. So I just wanted to put those out there before sharing the results.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's great. We appreciate that, because we actually know that from the National Reading panel too, right? 

Sonia Cabell: That's right. 

Susan Lambert: Comprehension strategies definitely have their place, but so does knowledge building in terms of helping students build vocabulary and, like you said, background knowledge. So tell us a little bit about the study then.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah! So, in the study we were in two different urban districts, large urban districts. And we provided professional development to teachers in the kindergarten year. The implementation occurred really during the second half of the kindergarten year. And this was a randomized control trial, so schools were randomized to either receiving the treatment, which was Core Knowledge Language Arts Knowledge Strand, or engaging in their business as usual practices. And, so after implementation—and we monitored implementation, and we largely found that teachers implemented the curriculum as it was designed—our findings are very interesting to me because—and this is designed to have to be a longitudinal study with multiple years of intervention, but I'm just talking about the kindergarten year findings.

Susan Lambert: Okay.

Sonia Cabell: The findings are interesting because, you know, in most studies that are vocabulary studies, for example, it's no great surprise or shocker that children learn the words you teach them, right? 

Susan Lambert: Yeah, I hope so! 

Sonia Cabell: And so in that way, we found that. That children learned the words that we taught them. We also found that children learn the knowledge we taught them. 

Susan Lambert: That's great, too.

Sonia Cabell: Right! Those are important findings. I'm not trying to minimize the importance of those findings because, without those being the case, something would be really wrong. But, where you want to also get purchase, is in moving generalized knowledge of language… .In our study, we did vocabulary, listening comprehension, and knowledge. And most vocabulary interventions do not move the needle on a standardized measure like the PPVT [Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test] for example. 

Susan Lambert: So let me say that again. Most vocabulary interventions don't move the needle on more generalized vocabulary development. 

Sonia Cabell: Right. 

Susan Lambert: Okay.

Sonia Cabell: There's a few that have. And some of the integrated approaches have done that. But what we found was that there was a difference, a significant difference, in expressive vocabulary on the Woodcock-Johnson picture vocabulary test. And we also found a significant difference in science knowledge on the Woodcock Johnson science test.

Susan Lambert: So why should people be excited about that finding?

Sonia Cabell: Well, it is rare! So I actually am a bit surprised by the finding myself as a researcher in this space. I thought we wouldn't find standardized findings on generalized assessments like that until at least after the first grade year.

Sonia Cabell: But the fact that we see that in kindergarten after one semester of instruction is quite remarkable. There were, you know, to be fair, we didn't find it across all of our generalized measures and the effect sizes were very small. But, if you know education research, you know that small-effect sizes are part of what happens, right?

Sonia Cabell: We don't see huge-effect sizes and things that are distal measures like this. So it’s very…there's some promise here. And to put it into context, when you think about large-scale randomized control trials in kindergarten across all outcomes, they have an average effect size, non-significant effect size, of 0.01, and on language outcomes specifically, 0.01 across grades.

Sonia Cabell: And so our small-effect sizes of .06 and 0.12, approximately, are quite remarkable. So it makes me excited about the potential for this approach, a content-rich English language arts approach, in building children's language and knowledge.

Susan Lambert: That's exciting. And what does that mean for sort of next steps, for the study itself?

Sonia Cabell: Right. Well, our study ran right into COVID. So…last year, children were in first grade. Our testing window opened up at the same time, COVID hit and school ended. 

Susan Lambert: Oh, that's so disappointing.

Sonia Cabell: Yeah. So we don't have first grade. Although children received the intervention in one of the districts in kindergarten and first grade, we don't have child-level data, meaning we don't know, we don't have the vocabulary listening comprehension and knowledge data that we were hoping to obtain.

Sonia Cabell: Now we are working with school districts to see if we can get related data as children grow and develop. And what would be really interesting is if we saw an effect of kindergarten, first-grade instruction on, you know, second- or third-grade reading.

Susan Lambert: Yeah.

Sonia Cabell: So we're hoping to be able to gauge that, although with COVID, you don't know… . What I'm getting ready to dive into is research on teachers and how teachers—like I said earlier, teachers generally showed fidelity to the program or they adhered to the program—but there were differences, and we want to explore those differences.

Sonia Cabell: In first grade, they also received additional supports and we want to explore those. We also have survey data on teachers. We have video of their instruction. We…know the books that they were reading; they reported on the books that they were reading in general. So we'd have a lot of rich information about implementation that we want to really dive into.

Susan Lambert: Yeah.

Sonia Cabell: And so that's where we're headed; we're finalizing our results in the kindergarten space. Like I said, what we reported are preliminary results and we're working on finalizing those results and getting those published in a peer reviewed journal. And then we will be turning our attention to teachers. And one of the interesting questions to me is whether teachers, after having used the curriculum for a semester in kindergarten, did any of the things that the curriculum was kind of teaching them to do on a daily basis, did that transfer to a novel reading of a book that wasn't CKLA?

Susan Lambert: Ah, got it. Yes.

Sonia Cabell:  A book of their choice. It's like, what book did they even choose? What did, what was the talk like? The extra textual talk like before, during, and after reading? What vocabulary words did they teach? How did they teach them? Those kinds of things. So that's the kind of the direction we're looking at next.

Susan Lambert: That sounds exciting.

Sonia Cabell: We're excited about it.

Susan Lambert: So I think one thing that would be super helpful for our listeners, and relevant, is, what kind of application might even this study that you've done, even though you're calling it promising and it's preliminary findings, what kind of application can be made in the classroom based on what you've learned?

Sonia Cabell: Right. And it's not just based on this study. It's also based on some of those other really well-done studies in the K–2 space that we found in those nine studies that had content-rich ELA approaches. There were a few other ones that… met the What Works Clearinghouse Standards of reporting.

Sonia Cabell: And, you know, from those studies, some of them were done by Carol Connor and colleagues, Jimmy Kim and colleagues, Susan Neuman and colleagues, and [James F.] Baumann [and Nancy] Romance. But those studies really had some similarities that we actually pull out in our article and talk about.

Sonia Cabell: And some of those were things like how they sequenced content knowledge and systematically taught students increasingly complex ideas, learning from previous sessions. And they also all involved some form of writing, I believe. That all, a lot of them involved writing about the knowledge that you're learning, and that certainly is a part of CKLA as well.

Sonia Cabell: That idea, that vocabulary was selected, systematically and thinking with not only in keeping with words [those] kind of Tier 2 words that children might need to know and have high mileage, the more general content, general words, but also content-specific words to help them learn the content.

Sonia Cabell: And in all cases, students were involved in reading, writing, discussion, and hands-on activities for learning the content in a cumulative way. So there are similarities among studies that are doing this that I think need to be looked at. And, this idea, I think that the idea that using the interactive read-aloud as a vehicle is built on a very solid, much bigger pot of literature in this area.

Sonia Cabell: And so, even though the research in content-rich ELA instruction is promising and growing, it's based on research that has been accumulating over time around interactive read alouds.

Susan Lambert: That's helpful and I know you, like you said, you've outlined a lot of this research in your article itself and we'll be sure to point listeners in our show notes to where they can find that article so they can dig in a little bit for themselves.

Susan Lambert: So we appreciate you reviewing it. So, in closing, as we sort of bring things full circle here, I'm wondering if you can share with our listeners one or two things you'd like them to take away, maybe read more about, think more about. Anything, any advice?

Sonia Cabell: I think some of the things that bubble to the surface for me is the idea of being very intentional throughout our day in building children's knowledge. So when we are choosing a book to read aloud, why are we doing that? And make sure that understandings about children's background knowledge factor into it. Not only do they have the background knowledge to understand something, but rather, can what I'm reading aloud to them build the background knowledge?

Sonia Cabell: I also think that something that I think sometimes gets confused is in kindergarten settings, for example, sometimes I see read alouds that are really very simple and are not syntactically complex. And so, I think that sometimes there is a confusion between reading books that children are able to read versus what might be more syntactically complex for them and beyond their reading level. So…another thing that I think about is making sure to read aloud books that are a couple of grade levels above where they're reading right now, so that they will be able to engage with the rich academic language. Because if you don't read it aloud to them, where are they going to get it from?

Susan Lambert: Right. Right. Well, I do know one thing in just seeing children interact with content, particularly our youngest learners—it's motivating to them. They love being scientists and historians.

Sonia Cabell: Right. And I think that building on that motivation, and that excitement from children is what we need to do and just acknowledge and realize that it's not the fault of the teacher that instruction has been siloed in the way that it has.

Susan Lambert: Yeah.

Sonia Cabell: And I think just raising the awareness that it doesn't take away anything from your reading instruction to also make it content rich.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's beautiful. Well, we appreciate you being on this episode and appreciate the work that you're doing. So stay in contact. And we will be sure to link our listeners in show notes to resources that will help them also explore. 

Sonia Cabell: Thank you for having me, Susan. 

Susan Lambert: Thanks for listening and keep your feedback coming. Want to learn more? Be sure to stay connected by subscribing on your favorite podcast app and join our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. And visit amplify.com to check out all our free literacy events and webinars.

Susan Lambert: Until next time, keep the hope; take action; and stay in touch.