Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E9: From research to reality: Breaking down comprehension barriers, with Phil Capin, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 9

Share episode

In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Phil Capin, Ph.D., assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They explore why recommended reading comprehension practices aren't widely implemented in schools, and what educators can do to change that. Together, they also discuss how knowledge building is foundational to reading comprehension, how writing is a powerful tool in supporting reading comprehension, and why we should structure reading instruction based on what happens before, during, and after reading.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"We've underestimated the value of writing in supporting reading comprehension." —Phil Capin, Ph.D.

"Reading and writing rely on a lot of the same language processes, and writing supports the consolidation of knowledge." —Phil Capin, Ph.D.

"Students should engage with meaningful problems, and they should have a reason for learning." —Phil Capin, Ph.D.

Timestamps*:
00:00 Introduction
04:00 Phil Capin's career path
08:00 Reading comprehension is the byproduct of a constellation of competencies
11:00 The complexity of comprehension
16:00 Dolores Durkin's findings on comprehension testing vs. teaching
22:00 Students should engage with meaningful problems
24:00 Comprehension instruction is organized by before, during, and after reading.
27:00 The value of writing for comprehension
31:00 Where comprehension strategies could be helpful
39:00 How much time should teachers dedicate to strategy instruction?
41:00 The strongest predictor of whether you're going to understand the text is the knowledge you bring.
46:00 Every teacher is a reading teacher
48:00 Closing thoughts
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute




 



[00:00:00] Phil Capin: If the teacher is doing most of the retrieving of knowledge; if the teacher is the one that's, you know, actively engaged in reading, then I think they're the ones that are going to get better at reading.

[00:00:14] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today in our Comprehension season, we've got a big one. We're sharing practices that educators can use to enhance students' reading comprehension. Dr. Phil Capin is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

He recently led a fascinating meta-analysis exploring the gaps between research-backed practices and what's really happening in schools. Today, he'll share his findings and offer some ideas for how educators can more effectively support students' comprehension. Here's Dr. Phil Capin.

Well, I am so excited, Dr. Phil Capin, to have you join us today on the episode. Excited to talk with you a little bit more about comprehension. So, welcome!

[00:01:04] Phil Capin: Thank you for having me, Susan. It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:06] Susan Lambert: Before we get started, I would love it if you could tell our listeners just a little bit about you and actually how you became interested in literacy.

[00:01:16] Phil Capin: Yes. So, I don't know that I chose literacy as, as much as it chose me.

[00:01:22] Susan Lambert: I love that!

[00:01:22] Phil Capin: I was, uh, one of those students for whom reading and, and schooling more generally, didn't always come easily. I think because of that, I didn't love school the way you might assume that a future professor must have. It was really until a few months before my college graduation that I realized I had a passion for education.

I was tutoring a young, a boy named Ramon, who struggled to read well and, um, it was part of an after-school program and, mm, I'm like embarrassed to admit how little I knew at that time, um, but fortunately the program leader provided us enough direction to be useful. And Ramon lacked confidence, um, in his academic ability, and he was sometimes hard to keep on track.

And those were qualities that I, I could appreciate. So, as he made progress, and somehow he did, you know, it was really a joy to see. And I think, I can still remember our last session. We were outside of this building, and he was reading a text aloud in English and his mom was listening, and Ramon read with relative ease, you know?

[00:02:29] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:29] Phil Capin: Uh, more ease than he had read previously and with obvious confidence. I mean, there's a pride about him. And, um, Ramon's mom, I don't think she spoke English, but her excitement was unmistakable.

[00:02:40] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:40] Phil Capin: I mean, it felt like, you know, an aha moment for him and for me. And so, I graduated college. I started to work in education. And again, I was drawn to students like me, who experienced some academic challenges, and ended up being a special ed teacher, serving students that had reading and behavioral difficulties, and then as a literacy coach, and really trying to help teachers implement evidence-based practices.

And so, you know, I think it's always hard to know exactly how you end up where you do in life. But I think for me, I think it was my experiences in school combined with that, you know, early experience in supporting other children like me that sort of put me on this path that I'm on today, which is, you know, trying to understand how we can better support, uh, students to reach their full potential in reading.

[00:03:28] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So you really came up the ranks of teaching and really as a practitioner. What made you decide to pivot to pursue a doctoral degree or decide that you want to be a professor?

[00:03:42] Phil Capin: Yeah. I was living on the border of California and Mexico, and I was teaching. And I felt like I was, you know, making some impact, like students were making progress, particularly on the foundational literacy skills.

[00:03:55] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:55] Phil Capin: You know, I was helping students to better read texts and to some extent understand what they were reading. But I had lots of questions, lots of unanswered questions, and, you know, I thought that pursuing a doctoral program could help me to better address those questions to maybe increase my impact. And I also, I think selfishly, like kind of wanted to challenge myself to see if I could do it.

[00:04:18] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:04:18] Phil Capin: And so I ended up, you know, with a really fortunate, uh, situation where I could work with Sharon Vaughn, reading researcher, who's had a lot of impact, particularly for students with reading difficulties.

[00:04:30] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that's real, that's really interesting because, you know, we often talk on this podcast of how people end up in the places that they end up in. And I'm assuming you didn't wake up one day and say, Hey, I want to be a professor of literacy. So, it was a little bit of a journey for you.

[00:04:46] Phil Capin: No, certainly. Yeah, I think it, it was about impact. It was about trying to, you know, not only impact the students in my classroom or in my district, but, you know, how can we help more people understand the science behind reading and to implement it at scale.

[00:05:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That's awesome. And it, it really, um, sort of lends itself to the conversation we're going to have, I think, about comprehension.

As you know, this season is all about comprehension for us. We're going to talk in a little bit about the meta-analysis that ended up on your radar that you looked at again, but I, I would love it if you could provide your own definition of comprehension.

[00:05:26] Phil Capin: Hmm. That's a tall task. I don't know if I have my own definition.

I guess maybe I'll share, you know, what's really shaped my thinking about reading comprehension. And so, it actually goes back to the RAND Reading Study Group. So, this group was convened in 1999 by the research arm of the Department of Education, and they gathered, I think, about a dozen experts in literacy led by Catherine Snow to better understand and put forth an agenda for researching reading comprehension.

And in their report, they defined reading comprehension as, I'm going to try to get these words right uh, the simultaneous practice of extracting and constructing meaning through engagement with written language. And so, you might think, wow, that's really broad. How is this helpful? Like, you know.

[00:06:19] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:06:19] Phil Capin: It's got extracting and constructing meaning through some engagement with text, but it doesn't really specify the processes that are involved. It doesn't tell you how to teach it, of course, but I think that definition underscores a key point about reading comprehension. And that's that it, it's probably best defined broadly because it's not a narrow skill.

[00:06:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:06:42] Phil Capin: And it's not a single ability. Reading comprehension isn't, you know, not like a constrained skill, like, you know, I was teaching my 6-year-old to tie her shoes yesterday, or trying to.

[00:06:51] Susan Lambert: Yay.

[00:06:52] Phil Capin: Yeah. Or phonemic awareness, you know, the ability to auditorially perceive sounds within words. That's a pretty constrained skill.

You know, reading comprehension is not that way. You know, I don't know that you can influence reading comprehension, at least beyond a single text or a single purpose within, you know, for reading a single text, through a discrete set of steps. You know, to me, reading comprehension is the byproduct of, you know, a constellation of competencies that are interrelated: your ability to read words, your, your knowledge of words, your background knowledge on the topic of the text, your ability to integrate information in the text, what you know previously, your ability to suppress the less relevant information in the text. You know, all of these things are, I think, you know, really important.

And reading comprehension reflects the, you know, sort of byproduct of that. And so I think that broad definition is helpful. I guess maybe I'll say one more thing about the Rand Reading Study is that it put in the foreground that reading comprehension is influenced by various factors. And I know you know this, Susan, and I'm sure many of your listeners do, but maybe it's helpful for our conversation today to just sort of specify those factors. And so it helped us to put forth this idea that reading comprehension is influenced by the text that you're reading, by characteristics of the reader, by the purpose for reading, and all of this is situated within a sociocultural context right?

And I think, you know, in addition to thinking about reading comprehension, as a broad construct, I think it's helpful to realize that it's not a single thing, that it really varies. And your ability to comprehend text will vary based on, you know, the information you bring, the knowledge you bring to the task, your interest in it, uh, your purpose for reading. Like, I was working on a recipe last night. My comprehension there for the, the article was really low, because I was just trying to find out those ingredients, right?

[00:08:56] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:08:56] Phil Capin: And so, it really varies based on the purpose. And so I think, my thinking has really been influenced by that RAND Reading Study and thinking, you know, in a nuanced way about how reading comprehension really varies based on the context.

[00:09:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I love that. And you know what, you just did? You almost summarized our entire comprehension series in that, uh, comment that you had about what comprehension is.

We did talk with Dr. Julie Van Dyke not too long ago about comprehension. She said it beautifully. It's both a process and a product. I think some of that comes from Oakhill's work too, or we were talking with Dr. Hugh Catts, who talks about, well, what is comprehension? It depends on what your purpose is for reading. Like you or your example, right, like a recipe, like I'm going to read that recipe differently than what I'm going to read the meta-analysis that, uh, Dr. Phil Capin wrote. So, um, as a former third grade teacher who didn't understand as much about reading comprehension as I should have, it has really opened my eyes to think about just what you said. Comprehension is complex, right?

And there are things that are constraints, skills we can teach, and other things just aren't generalizable beyond maybe a particular text. So, the other thing that I want to say is, that RAND study is not as well-known as it should be. Why do you think that is?

[00:10:25] Phil Capin: I don't know. I mean, maybe I'll just respond by first saying that, you know, Hugh Catts among, you know, Sharon Vaughn and a couple other people have probably influenced my thinking on reading comprehension as much as anyone. I mean, I think his article in American Educator.

[00:10:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yep. That's right.

[00:10:40] Phil Capin: You know, is, is excellent. And he's helping us to think through that reading comprehension is not just a pillar, right?

[00:10:47] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:10:47] Phil Capin: It is sort of the sine qua non and that

[00:10:49] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:10:49] Phil Capin: You know, we can't teach it as directly as we can teach, you know, vocabulary words, for instance. Um.

[00:10:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:10:54] Phil Capin: In, in terms of that report, you know, there were several reports that came out around that same time, right? The National Reading Panel.

[00:11:01] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:11:02] Phil Capin: You had the RAND reading study, and then there was a really great report about adolescent literacy that came out in like around 2010 to 2013. And um, you know, it's hard to know why some things get picked up and other things don't.

But when you look at the reading researchers and you know, the scientists that are publishing in these, uh, high quality journals, you often see them describing reading, the process of reading, through the reading report by RAND.

[00:11:29] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:29] Phil Capin: And to, to, to take into consideration the nuance interplay. And, like you, I was a teacher and I didn't always think about this.

You know, I would often apply some approach, you know, that would work maybe well for an expository text, but doesn't work as well for a narrative text, because I kind of thought reading comprehension was one thing.

[00:11:45] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah. We're going to dig into that a little bit too, because we'll talk a little bit about your meta-analysis, but also talk about, you know, comprehension, what are comprehension strategies. So, you know, stay tuned, listeners. Don't give up on us yet. Um, we're going to dig into some of the details.

So, um, let's go to this meta-analysis. So you, you all did a response to Durkin's seminal study, right? Part of your title?

[00:12:10] Phil Capin: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:10] Susan Lambert: What put this on your radar? Why did you decide that you wanted to go back and look at what was happening in terms of reading comprehension instruction?

[00:12:19] Phil Capin: Yeah, I think at the broadest level, you know, I, I see myself as a researcher who's trying to address challenges that teachers face in practice, and so I was interested in understanding, or better understanding, you know, what reading comprehension instruction looks like in schools. What is typical practice? What is going well? What are gaps between what we know and what we're doing?

So I think at a broad level, that influenced our thinking. The other study that sort of led to this was I did a study in, around 2020, I guess it would've been. It was probably published in 2020 or 2021, but the study was conducted, the data was collected just prior to COVID. And we looked at typical social studies instruction in grade four.

[00:13:04] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:13:05] Phil Capin: And this, in the, in the broader systematic review, it's all focused on naturally occurring instruction.

So maybe it's helpful for your readers to know we're not looking at instruction that is influenced by a particular curriculum or a researcher developed professional learning. We're looking at like sort of in the wild, what does reading instruction look like, particularly as it relates to supporting reading comprehension.

And so, we did this study and we saw there were many improvements relative to Dolores Durkin's seminal study. Teachers were teaching vocabulary before they were reading, which I think is really valuable.

You know, many students... um, you know, as you're reading a text, the [writer] is assuming that you have some information, right? They're not going to define everything. And so a key to helping students to understand a text is to recognize what is the writer, assuming this reader already knows, and how can I make sure that they have that background knowledge so that they can engage meaningfully with the text?

And so we saw vocabulary instruction. We saw background knowledge building before instruction. But we also saw in our observations of teachers that they would do that before reading, but then, during reading, there was this common pattern that would occur where you'd have a teacher who is leading a whole class discussion and the person who's, you know, maybe, probably has developed literacy skills, the teacher, is doing most of the talking.

[00:14:32] Susan Lambert: Oh yeah.

[00:14:32] Phil Capin: You know, he is standing at the front of the room, he reads the text aloud, and then he summarizes or paraphrases, you know, the text. And then he'll ask a couple questions perhaps. Like, you know, usually they're sort of surface level literal questions, you know, about like what happened or when.

And then the students will provide like a one word answer and then the teacher will talk some more. And that reminded us of that Dolores Durkin's study.

[00:14:59] Susan Lambert: Oh, gotcha.

[00:15:01] Phil Capin: And I can tell you a little bit about that study if it's helpful.

[00:15:03] Susan Lambert: I was just going to say that. Can you tell us a little bit about that Durkin's study and what it reminded you of?

[00:15:08] Phil Capin: Yeah, so Dolores Durkin did this study where she looked and, uh, let's hope I get the details right, but I think she looked at instruction in grades two through five during like what we think of as a language arts block.

[00:15:19] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:20] Phil Capin: And then during social studies instruction. And what she found was that she assumed going into it, that teachers would support reading comprehension by maybe teaching students words or by helping them to learn strategies.

You know, like, uh, as you read, ask and answer questions, or summarize as you go. And her assumption was not supported. What she largely saw, in sort of her interpretation of it, was that a teacher would read a text aloud and then either ask students to answer questions on a worksheet or to answer questions in a whole class discussion, just as I described.

[00:16:00] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:16:01] Phil Capin: Right.

[00:16:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:01] Phil Capin: And she considered that comprehension testing, not comprehension instruction, because she argued that you're just assessing what they understood from that text. You're not teaching them how to navigate texts.

[00:16:15] Susan Lambert: Ah.

[00:16:16] Phil Capin: Now, you know, I think we could quibble with some of these words. Yeah, and I think we try to balance that in our article.

But I think the broader point is important that the conversation patterns that she described in her paper were later described as following a conversation pattern of, it starts with an initiation, so the teacher initiates a question.

[00:16:34] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:34] Phil Capin: A student responds, so it's initiate, respond, and then evaluate.

And that conversation pattern encompasses a lot of teacher talk. It also, I think, doesn't help students, as much as it could, to resolve ambiguities that are in text, to overcome challenges as you're reading, you know, some of these things that are difficult in reading comprehension, to make inferences between what you know and what's in the text.

And so, I think that conversation pattern, if that's all the instruction that's occurring to support students' understanding of text, then we have some room for improvement.

[00:17:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it, again, I always throw myself back to the classroom and think about what I did. And I remember reading that in the article: this idea that, wait a minute, is asking questions of students after they read a text, maybe that really is more like an assessment than it is like instruction.

But you could use that as an indicator to get back in the text and then help students sort of deconstruct that, right? And try to figure out where, where they were. But as a classroom teacher, I didn't do much of that. Right?

I'm like, oh, they're not comprehending. What do I do about it? I'm not sure I actually knew what to do about it, um, or how to support them. That is where this comprehension instruction should come in, right?

[00:17:58] Phil Capin: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think, like you, I'm motivated to, to better understand the ways in which I didn't totally succeed as a teacher.

And so you could imagine, you know, you're reading a text, and it's about plants. And you, you know, ask the students, so what is the process by which plants make food? And then, students respond, photosynthesis. Like, I think that's important. Right?

I do that when I'm reading with my daughter at home, when I'm in classrooms providing instruction. I do check for literal understanding. I mean, I think students need to have that right? And I actually think that practice of retrieving that knowledge is important, right? That's based in learning science.

But it can't just end there, right? Then you, you'd want to affirm their response. Say, yes, that is photosynthesis.

Okay. Now, let's look at figure three. Describe to your partner the steps involved in photosynthesis. And then you got, you know, students engaged in conversation, you know, going back to the text, you know, supporting a deeper understanding. And so I think, you know, sometimes people think, oh, are you saying Phil, that you know, we shouldn't have any initiate, respond, evaluate.

No, I'm, I'm not saying we shouldn't ask these basic comprehension questions. I'm just saying that can't be where it ends. We should be helping students to think deeply about questions that are more challenging and to engage students in more discussion and writing about text.

[00:19:16] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that's great. And I'm going to ask you a, a question in a minute about what comprehension instruction should include. But before we get there, I really want to talk about this overemphasis of teachers on teacher talk, versus engaging students and bringing them into the conversation. Why is that so important?

[00:19:37] Phil Capin: Yeah, I think that, you know, I did this. I still do this. You know, it's like I want to help students. And so, you know, I think your natural inclination is to provide more support and to better describe it.

And I think that, you know, we know from learning science and from reading research, that students need opportunities to engage and receive feedback and to build on their prior knowledge. And if the teacher is doing most of the retrieving of knowledge, is doing most of the connections between the text and their self, if the teacher is the one that's, you know, actively engaged in reading, then I think they're the ones that are going to get better at reading. Right?

And so we need students to be, you know, more actively engaged, and maybe strategies can play a role in that: I think, you know, generating interest in the text before you read and then taking a step back, and making sure that the students are the ones that are doing most of the heavy lifting.

[00:20:39] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. I love that. Um, no teacher should come out of the classroom and say, wow, I'm a much better reader, but my students aren't. Right?

[00:20:48] Phil Capin: Right.

[00:20:49] Susan Lambert: All right, so let's go back to comprehension instruction. What should that comprehension instruction include?

[00:20:56] Phil Capin: Yeah.

[00:20:57] Susan Lambert: What does a good comprehension exercise look like in the classroom?

[00:21:01] Phil Capin: So I think that there's, uh, lots of ways to support reading comprehension. I think I start from thinking about, you know, what do we know from learning science? And so there's this really important report called How People Learn. And in this report, another report we can put in the chat, I suppose, or in the notes, and I think what it showed us, and it sort of encompassed a body of research from learning sciences, is that students should engage with meaningful, you know, problems, and they should have a reason for learning. I think that's one of the key things.

Another thing is that instruction should recognize and build on the knowledge they have, and that learning environments should provide students opportunities to deepen that knowledge. And to deepen that knowledge, oftentimes, explicit instruction, instruction where you are helping students to systematically develop their knowledge, can be particularly helpful.

I mean, for novice learners, their working memory capacity is limited. And so providing them opportunities to learn the information, telling them directly, this is, you know, what we're learning about, here's some key information that you need to know, that will help them when they're faced with reading complex texts. And then, you know, I think of reading comprehension as sort of the application of these learning practices in the context of texts.

And so what that looks like? Of course, you know, you go back to the, the RAND reading report: it will vary based on the student you're serving, the purpose for reading.

[00:22:35] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:22:36] Phil Capin: The context, all of these factors. Right? I mean, I think any honest answer about what the best way to support anything is, it kind of depends. It's not a very satisfying answer.

[00:22:46] Susan Lambert: It's not.

[00:22:46] Phil Capin: But I think it's... the truth is that it really depends on the goals and the student that you're serving. And so for me, when I'm thinking about high quality reading comprehension instruction, it's helpful for me to organize it around a before, during, and after reading sequence.

So I can think about what am I going to do to support the reader before. And then while they're reading, what kind of sort of supports or checks am I going to have in place? And then after reading, how am I going to help them to consolidate this information? And so, if I'm thinking about those learning sciences before reading, you know, it's really helpful, I think, to develop a motivation for reading.

And so, you know, whether that's the students come up with a question that they want to answer in the text.

[00:23:30] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:30] Phil Capin: Or you present a question, a purpose for reading, and so, I think that's important: sort of establishing a reason for learning at the outset, and that can happen before reading. Oftentimes it's, you know, if we're reading about, let's say, the ancient pharaohs in Egypt, we can think about, you know, how is this important?

Or why is this important? We can try to connect it to their own lives, you know, like the, these pharaohs... were they, were they making good economic decisions or bad economics. That might feel other worldly. But if you connect it to the child's loan experiences, which is there's like, you know, limited resources. You know, how does your family decide how to allocate money to, or what does the school decide? That could be helpful.

And so I think the first thing is to generate an interest in the topic and then to make connections to what they've learned previously, because we're trying to accumulate knowledge right?

[00:24:19] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:24:20] Phil Capin: Through this process. And I think, to do that, supporting vocabulary can be very helpful. So teaching those words that have a lot of, are critical to the conceptual understanding of the text can be really helpful before reading.

And so. You know, all good things can go awry, right? And so we don't want the before reading to be like 30 minutes. And sometimes, you know, well-intentioned teachers like myself, you know, would do that. And so I think it needs to be sort of succinct.

You know, you're posing a question. Here's why we're interested in this. Here's why it's relevant to your life. You know, think about connections to your life. Build some background knowledge. And I would say instead of asking, what do you know about a topic, I would start with building their knowledge because it's very difficult to ascertain what a whole classroom of students, their background knowledge on a topic efficiently.

So, you know, I would just try to build the knowledge and I would focus on that knowledge, which the writer assumes the reader already has. Right?

[00:25:18] Susan Lambert: Right, right. Yep.

[00:25:19] Phil Capin: Because you don't want to take away the, the reason for reading, right? Yeah. If you tell them everything that's going to be in the text, like, why are we reading this?

[00:25:24] Susan Lambert: Why read it? Right. Yeah.

[00:25:25] Phil Capin: Yeah. And so, I think before reading, those are some of the things that I think are important. And then during reading, you know, I really like engaging students in cooperative learning opportunities, so that they're reading with peers, whether it's a, a partner or a small group, and that we want them to engage in discourse.

And so posing questions to them throughout the text that will generate not just literal understanding of the text, but also starting to make connections between texts or between the text and their, their life, I think is important. And then after reading, I think we want, you know, further discussion. I think discussion can be a vehicle for sense making and meaning making and getting feedback, right?

[00:26:11] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:11] Phil Capin: I think, you know, discussion prompts, active engagement, right? I'm more likely to engage deeply with the text to read and to reread when I'm, you know, going to have to talk to, uh, Susan about it afterwards.

[00:26:22] Susan Lambert: Right. Right.

[00:26:23] Phil Capin: And then the last thing, I think we've underestimated the value of writing in supporting reading comprehension.

And so, in the sort of work that I'm doing, I'm trying to integrate more opportunities for structured writing because we know that reading and writing rely on a lot of the same language processes, and writing supports the consolidation of knowledge. Like, I don't really fully understand something until I write about it.

[00:26:49] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:26:49] Phil Capin: And it sort of forces me to think more deeply about things. And so that's kind, you know, when I think of high quality reading comprehension instruction, I think of before, during, and after. I think, I think of students doing most of the work. They're engaged in discussion and writing. So, you can see a, a big focus on language.

[00:27:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And I love that construct that you used about instruction, because I think teachers are familiar with the before, during, after reading sort of process. And I just wonder if they're linking that structure before, during, and after to actually one, what do students need differently in each one of those processes? And this actually is supporting that depth of comprehension that we want to get them to.

And that sort of leads me to the next question, which is, I think, this is a hypothesis, If I went out and asked teachers what comprehension instruction should include, I believe they would say, well, of course we need to teach comprehension strategies.

Right? Which, that's not the first place you went. But they would say something like, you know, like, we need to find the main idea and details in this particular passage, or we need to learn to summarize the thing that I just read. How do you think about comprehension strategies? Not even which ones they are. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. But, how do you think about those strategies and how they should fit into, then, this process of comprehension instruction?

[00:28:25] Phil Capin: Yeah, I think this is, um, a hot topic right now. It's like, where does comp...

[00:28:31] Susan Lambert: it is!

[00:28:31] Phil Capin: Comprehension strategy instruction fit, and you know, you have some folks that are suggesting that it may not need to play a large role. And then you have others who take a sort of balanced approach where, you know, building knowledge is critical and strategies can help with that.

And I think for me... maybe we should just define a couple of the terms just to make sure the audience and, and we're all on the same page. So when I think of comprehension strategy instruction, I think of teaching students conscious plans that they can apply to a text to better understand it.

I think there's research to support that comprehension strategy instruction promotes active engagement with text. So, it encourages students to engage more deeply, you know, with the text or at least to engage with it, I think. And there's research to support, particularly for struggling readers, that it can improve their reading comprehension outcomes.

And so, maybe it would also be helpful to say a, a, an example of a reading comprehension strategy you mentioned is, you know, finding the main idea. Another one is like asking and answering questions, right?

[00:29:35] Susan Lambert: Yep, yep.

[00:29:36] Phil Capin: And so for me, I think there's solid empirical evidence to support the use of reading comprehension strategies, particularly for students with difficulties.

At the same time, the research shows that these strategies can be learned relatively quickly, um, maybe over a couple weeks rather than an entire year. So there's empirical support. There's also theoretical support: like they help students to have this metacognition.

[00:30:01] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:01] Phil Capin: To monitor how well they understand the text and to resolve issues that come up.

Now, maybe the last thing I'll say is, about, about reading comprehension strategies, is that I think they're particularly helpful for students that have low standards of coherence. And so a low standard of coherence, um. What that means.

[00:30:22] Susan Lambert: What does that mean?

[00:30:24] Phil Capin: Yeah, what that means to me, um, and I think the way it's defined in research, hopefully, is, it's the level of expectation that you sort of set for your understanding of a text, right? So I told you my recipe example, right? Like...

[00:30:37] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:30:37] Phil Capin: For my standard of coherence was very low, because I just wanted to find the ingredients, and then, like, I just looked very quickly at, you know, how they suggested it be cooked. But I wasn't going to follow it in a step-by-step procedure. Now, conversely, if I, um, read like a, a new reading study and I'm asked to review it, I read that really deeply, right? So I have a different standard of coherence. And what we see is that, for some students, at least for some text, they don't have a very strong internal criteria for their understanding, right?

[00:31:12] Susan Lambert: Oh, interesting.

[00:31:13] Phil Capin: They don't have a strong standard of coherence.

[00:31:15] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:15] Phil Capin: They're the kind of students that sometimes will read, and maybe they'll misread a word aloud and they'll keep going. Or they won't know the meaning of a word and they'll keep going. And then they'll get to the end of the paragraph and you'll ask them, okay, you know, you just read about hurricanes, uh, and this described the structure of a hurricane. What is the middle of a hurricane called? And, you know, it's like, there's a blank stare.

[00:31:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:38] Phil Capin: And they're not sure. Right? And it's because, as they were reading, you know, they didn't think about the eye of the hurricane. You know, it isn't talking about the eyes on our face and...

[00:31:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:48] Phil Capin: You know, didn't have this standard of coherence. And so, I think that that's where reading comprehension strategies could be helpful... is helping students to generate some engagement with text and to establish or start to establish a standard for coherence.

Now, I've talked about some of the benefits of strategy instruction, but I think that we've often misapplied strategies in a couple ways. One is we've made it the focus of instruction. You know, I don't think reading strategies should be the focus, right? We read to gain knowledge and for enjoyment, uh, not to practice applying strategies.

[00:32:24] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah. Yup.

[00:32:26] Phil Capin: And so I think they should be secondary, probably, to our goals for, you know, understanding. And I think the other way in which strategy instruction has maybe gone awry is that we've focused on helping students to know what strategies are and to apply them, but not... we haven't focused on the conditional knowledge that you need to apply strategies.

So, like, get the gist or main idea. That is a helpful strategy for students who are not actively engaged in text and they're reading an expository text. Right? Like, what's the main idea of this science text?

[00:33:01] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:02] Phil Capin: Well, science texts often have, you know, main ideas, so that could be helpful. But in the context of a narrative text, I don't think it's a very good strategy.

Like, you know, narratives involve characters and settings, and they have some goals. There's some event that sort of starts your story. The protagonist might have a goal, and then everything that follows are like driven by goal directed actions and, you know, what's the main idea of a story? I, I suppose you could think of that as the author's message or the moral, but that's not how you remember stories. Right? You don't remember there's like a main idea.

[00:33:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:33:34] Phil Capin: Right. You remember like the story, the process, the, the problem and the solution. And so, I think, you know, we need to, when we were talking about reading comprehension strategies and supporting our students to apply them, recognize when they can be helpful and maybe when they're not as helpful.

[00:33:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's a, a couple of really good examples. So this, this idea of, I think you said, can we go all the way back to your recipe?

[00:33:59] Phil Capin: Yes.

[00:34:00] Susan Lambert: So first of all, you must be a good cook, because if I am reading a recipe, like I'm the kind of person that has to read for lots of coherence, so that I know exactly how this thing is going to turn out, right?

So, that might be an example of a context in which my purpose for reading that recipe versus your purpose for reading that recipe could be very different...

[00:34:23] Phil Capin: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:23] Susan Lambert: Based on our expected outcome of the thing we're trying to cook or bake and/ or my background knowledge versus your background knowledge. Right?

[00:34:34] Phil Capin: Right.

[00:34:35] Susan Lambert: So, that's one thing that, you know, this idea of purpose. Um, related to coherence, you were also talking about, when you're reading through, some readers don't realize that their level of expected outcome or whatever is lower than it should be. And I remember this when I was reading novels. I can't recall when I realized that this was my issue, but my level of pronunciation of names in a novel... I, I actually didn't care, right?

[00:35:10] Phil Capin: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:11] Susan Lambert: Like, I would skip over the names because, you know, a lot of times names are how to pronounce. Like, in full transparency, I made sure I knew how to pronounce your last name so that I could give you the respect that you, that you're, that is due. But I found out at one point that because I wasn't attaching a pronunciation to a name in a novel, I would lose track of who did what to whom and how they fit in the story, because I was literally skipping over the names. Right?

[00:35:41] Phil Capin: Yeah.

[00:35:41] Susan Lambert: And so that impacted my overall comprehension of what I was reading. I think that's an example of what you were talking about in terms of expectations of a reader.

[00:35:52] Phil Capin: Yeah. No, that is, and I have never thought about that. I sometimes skip over proper nouns as well. It makes me think of like sort of triangle model of reading. You know, our understanding of a word is influenced by our orthographic mapping of the word.

[00:36:06] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:36:06] Phil Capin: Also our phonology and the semantics, right?

[00:36:09] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:36:10] Phil Capin: And so you were looking at the word and maybe thinking about the meaning, but you didn't have the phonological part connected to it all. And so your triangle, you know, was not quite as strong.

[00:36:20] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:36:20] Phil Capin: So I think that, that's sort of interesting. And I think it does really relate to what I was talking about, that if you don't have this internal criteria, you know, that you don't pause and check for understanding as you're reading, um, you don't ask yourself questions as you're reading, you don't reread when something doesn't make sense, that you're going to have difficulties understanding.

[00:36:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And, um, when, when I think back on me skipping over the names in a novel or in a story and not understanding how those things come together, your other point was, strategies can help you, but not all strategies work in all text types.

[00:36:57] Phil Capin: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:58] Susan Lambert: And so if I would've said, oh, hey, maybe I should go back and see if I can find the main idea, that strategy at that moment would not help me understand a novel because I skipped to the names of the people and couldn't figure out how they all went together.

[00:37:10] Phil Capin: Right.

[00:37:10] Susan Lambert: And so I think it's part of what I believe is, and you can, you're the expert here, so, so tell me if I'm wrong. My idea of comprehension strategies is a way to engage further in the text to then support the outcome or the product of my comprehension, as opposed to, so the text is always the main, the main player here, right?

[00:37:36] Phil Capin: Right.

[00:37:36] Susan Lambert: As opposed to the comprehension strategies, but they can be used to engage students into deepening their understanding of the text. Does that track with you?

[00:37:45] Phil Capin: Yeah, that, I wouldn't have said it any better. I think that's perfect. I think we share this expertise, um, that reading comprehension. We should think of text as the primary vehicle for building our knowledge and that reading comprehension strategies can be helpful for students that are having difficulties engaging actively with the text.

And so, I think that one question that teachers often ask is like, how much time should I dedicate to, to strategy instruction? And I think it, you know, it of course will depend on your students. But I think that if you are doing, uh, a great job of fostering an interest in the text, and so you're, you know, students are motivated to read it because they see the connections between it and prior topics... maybe there's some connection to their own lived experiences that could be helpful... and then you're teaching the words that students need to know in order to understand the text, or at least some of those words, and building their adequate background knowledge, I think for many students, they won't need, you know, a step-by-step application of strategy.

So if I, if I'm teaching, you know, students in fifth grade, I would say that maybe early in the year I would teach some reading comprehension strategies. Like, hey, when you get to a word you don't know, what should you do?

[00:39:09] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:10] Phil Capin: Well, here's what I do. I look within the word. There's parts of words that can help us to figure out the meaning. I look around the word. I use the context to try to help us. And this is in the context of, you know, this is not when I'm teaching word reading. I think in the context of word reading, of course, you know, we don't, we're not looking around the word to try to decode a word.

[00:39:26] Susan Lambert: That's right.

[00:39:26] Phil Capin: Right. But in the context of, you know, reading a grade level text where you, you don't know what the word means, I think that can be helpful. And so, I would teach them a couple of these fix up strategies.

[00:39:36] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:37] Phil Capin: Um, but I would not necessarily spend every lesson focusing on applying those strategies. I would use them as a part of their toolbox, a flexible strategy they could apply, particularly for those students that are not showing that active engagement.

[00:39:52] Susan Lambert: Yeah. I love that. What a great conversation, because, you're right, it's a hot topic. Comprehension strategies are a hot topic now, and I feel like we're, we're talking past each other sometimes when we're saying, oh, it's more important to build background knowledge and vocabulary, or is it more important to teach reading comprehension strategies or help students use them?

Well, actually it's both things, and both things in the appropriate context and for the appropriate reason.

[00:40:21] Phil Capin: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, Natalie Wexler, for instance, has done a really good job of bringing to the forefront that knowledge is, um, so critical to understanding what we read.

[00:40:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:40:33] Phil Capin: That the background knowledge you bring to the task is really highly correlated. As you get older, that's the strongest predictor of whether you're going to understand the text, the knowledge you bring to bear to that text. It's stronger than, you know, your strategy knowledge or your ability to implement strategies. And so I think, you know, she is right to focus on knowledge building, and many researchers are also focused on it.

[00:40:56] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:57] Phil Capin: But I also see when she's talking about it recently, that she recognizes that, for some students, there will be an opportunity to, you know, provide strategic supports and that, you know, those tools are not, uh, an end [in] themselves. Right? That they're just a means to that end.

[00:41:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, that's a nice way to say it.

So, I know you don't just think about reading comprehension strategies or reading comprehension. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's top of mind for you?

[00:41:24] Phil Capin: Yeah, so we have a couple projects that are going on right now. We just finished a study, uh, from the Center for Success of English Learners, and David Francis and Sharon Vaughn and Letty Martinez and myself, uh, conducted a series of studies focused on helping middle school social studies teachers to engage and support students, particularly classrooms that have a, a large number of students who are learning English as a second language, in understanding social studies texts. And the resources actually are freely available. They're on the SERP, which is the Strategic Educational Research Partnership, uh, website. And so we developed originally, uh, SERP. Suzanne Donovan and Catherine Snow and others developed a set of lessons focused on helping social studies knowledge and disciplinary literacy.

[00:42:19] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:20] Phil Capin: So, when I say disciplinary literacy in this context, it's, you know, we want students to understand social studies knowledge and understand history, but we also want to help them to develop the skills for comprehension in social studies, which involves being able to identify different perspectives.

[00:42:35] Susan Lambert: Oh, okay.

[00:42:36] Phil Capin: And to evaluate these different perspectives and to generate arguments and counter arguments. And so, these lessons are freely available, um, online. And we, we did these studies and what we found is that when you engage students, including English learners, in rigorous... like, these are difficult grade level tasks.

You know, we're asking them to read difficult text and to debate, you know, to take a position and to write persuasive essays. When you provide the language and literacy types of supports, you know, the kinds we've been talking about in this episode, they can really bolster students' comprehension of text.

It can also improve their knowledge of social studies. And so, I think that's really important because one of the challenges we've had in reading comprehension is that I think we have encouraged, you know, progressive state standards, like the Common Core. They indicate that teachers across content areas in middle and high school are expected to be literacy teachers.

[00:43:38] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:43:38] Phil Capin: But I think that we haven't always provided teachers the training or the support to enact these literacy practices. And oftentimes, we've been focused in content area literacy. There's a quote that I really like, I think it's by Elizabeth Moji. She said, you know, content area literacy is often focused more on literacy and less on content area.

And I thought that was really powerful.

[00:44:02] Susan Lambert: That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:44:04] Phil Capin: And so, in this program, the team who originally developed the lessons did a wonderful job of sort of basing it around social studies. So it wasn't just, you know, applying, you know, general reading practices. It was focused on social studies, disciplinary practices, like identifying different perspectives, generating arguments and counterarguments.

Those are literacy activities that we engage in, in social studies. And so, that project's been really interesting because we've taken this approach and we found that it improves students' understanding, but it also just improves their knowledge. Like when you engage in language and literacy, it actually improves their social studies knowledge.

So whether you're a social studies teacher and you care about, you know, knowledge or literacy or both, this kind of language and literacy supports can be really helpful. And so, that's one thing we've been working on.

[00:44:50] Susan Lambert: That's really cool, um, this idea of disciplinary literacy. And I, you know, I remember back in my day, it was a push for all content teachers are reading teachers. And I remember content area teachers saying, no, we are not teaching kids how to read. But what you are doing in those content areas, particularly things like social studies, is you're teaching kids how to interact with texts and gain new knowledge. And that is a literary activity, and you literally have to have kids learning how to read...

[00:45:22] Phil Capin: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:23] Susan Lambert: And write to be able to acquire that content. So what, what a fun study.

[00:45:27] Phil Capin: Yeah, I think that's right. And I, I've been one of those people that said, you know, every teacher's a, a reading teacher, right, as the phrase goes.

[00:45:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:34] Phil Capin: And, um, I think that, you know, it's true that we need people engaged in literacy, but we might better position teachers who have expertise in social studies and science and math, if we supported them in implementing literacy practices that are grounded in their discipline.

[00:45:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love how you said that. And Tim Shanahan would agree with that, because I remember him writing about this years ago.

[00:45:57] Phil Capin: Oh yeah.

[00:45:58] Susan Lambert: Uh, him and his wife doing research in this area.

Anything else that's top of mind for you these days?

[00:46:04] Phil Capin: The, the other project we're working on, and it relates to the RAND model we talked about earlier, is, I think that sometimes we've treated text as sort of monolithic and not been sensitive to the differences between the types of text.

And so, that's one reason why we've been focusing on thinking about what are the best ways to support students early in elementary school in understanding narrative texts. And so, I talked to you a little bit about narrative structure earlier.

[00:46:32] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:46:32] Phil Capin: Right? And so we did, we did an observation study. It was led by Kolby Hall at the University of Virginia.

And what we found is that oftentimes teachers, when we ask them to teach narratives, they don't teach the sort of structure of narratives as well as they could. Oftentimes, they'll focus on character and setting, but not on these like, you know, causal relationships between the problems that come up in stories and the solutions.

[00:46:59] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:46:59] Phil Capin: And so, we are developing and testing, and I'd love to come back on and share the results of it one day, a program in which we provide better supports to students, particularly those students with difficulties in the elementary grades, in understanding and writing narrative texts.

[00:47:16] Susan Lambert: Very interesting, very interesting.

And you can count on it. When you've, when you learn more and you're ready to share more, uh, let's talk about it, because we, we actually don't do a lot of talking about narrative constructs or, you know, narratives, uh, on this podcast. So, we would love to have you back on.

So many fascinating ideas. So much great stuff that we talked about today. Um, I wonder if you have any closing thoughts or any advice for our listeners as we wrap up?

[00:47:44] Phil Capin: I think, maybe one thing is, you know, I'm really interested in supporting students that have risk for difficulties.

[00:47:52] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:53] Phil Capin: And I think in this conversation about comprehension, uh, which is an important conversation, like we need to be talking more about reading comprehension. I really appreciate this. This series is about that. But I also think we can connect it to some of the other efforts that are going on in our country around early literacy.

I think that there's, you know, a scientific consensus that phonics plays an important role. And I think, uh, we know that when we help students to map letters on sounds and to link those associations when they come to words to read them more accurately, that students learn to read better. And we also know that when we screen students for reading difficulties and monitor their progress early in development, that students, you know, are more likely to develop foundational literacy skills.

And so, I do think that, you know, we've talked a lot about reading comprehension, but perhaps one of the biggest things that any teacher can do to support reading comprehension is to help students launch into reading with those strong foundational skills.

And so, you know, I think sometimes in our field, you know, we, we talk about comprehension or we talk about word reading. And I think it's a both/ and situation, that we really need to be taking these efforts seriously. You know, there's a lot of legislation that's passing around early literacy, and I think much of it is, is grounded in science.

But you know, laws alone are not going to change this, right? We're going to need coherent and aligned systems to support foundational literacy development. And so, another thing I would add to this discussion is that it's really important that we help students to develop those foundational literacy skills, because it is just a fact that if you can't read the words, you're not going to understand the text.

[00:49:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah. What a great way to close, and, and I appreciate you bringing us back to that. Table stakes, right? It's table stakes for reading comprehension, to be able to get those words off the page.

So, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us, Phil, and we look forward to having you back again. Really appreciate your time.

[00:49:53] Phil Capin: Thanks, Susan. Thanks for all the work you're doing.

[00:49:57] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Phil Capin, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Please check out his meta-analysis via the link in the show notes. You'll find information on a couple of the key reports we discussed, as well as a link to learn more about the BRIDGES Lab.

Next up in this Comprehension season, we're taking a closer look at oral language development and its critical importance for comprehension. I'll be joined by Dr. Charles Hulme and Mary Kate DeSantis.

[00:50:27] Charles Hulme: These basic skills of speaking and listening are fundamental, really, I think, to everything about the development of reading, but more broadly, they're fundamental to pretty well everything that happens in education.

[00:50:42] MaryKate DeSantis: The research is just so clear that, you know, language is not optional for literacy. When we treat it as foundational, that's when we will give more students access to success.

[00:50:53] Susan Lambert: Make sure you've subscribed to Science of Reading: The Podcast to get that episode in two weeks.

And check out the latest edition of the Beyond My Years podcast, which features one of our all-time favorite Season Six guests, Dr. Mitchell Brookins. Dr. Brookins breaks down four concrete steps for a difficult task, building students' critical thinking skills.

[00:51:17] Mitchell Brookins: I also love when I see the teacher that says, Hold up. You know what? This is a lot of information. Let's stop and reread it over and over again. Let's do some fluency with it.

[00:51:26] Susan Lambert: Mitchell's point about rereading is also the perfect preview for an episode we'll have next month with Dr. Tim Shanahan. Get ready for Dr. Shanahan's return by listening now to Dr. Mitchell Brookins on Beyond My Years, wherever you get your podcasts. We'll also have a link in the show notes. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.