Science of Reading: The Podcast

Summer Special '26: How research builds on research, with Sonia Cabell, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, host Susan Lambert, Ed.D., does something a little different, sharing her own research alongside that of her guest, Sonia Cabell, Ph.D. Together, they trace how Sonia's large-scale Institute of Education Sciences (IES) study directly inspired Susan's dissertation, and what that process reveals about how evidence in literacy education actually gets built. Susan and Sonia also discuss what Sonia's IES study on content-rich literacy instruction found; how Susan's own dissertation research built directly on those findings; what it really means for research to "accumulate" and why it matters for classroom practice.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"The Science of Reading is not like a product. It's not a thing. It's an ever-accumulating body of work." —Sonia Cabell

"You're doing better than you think. Keep being a learner." —Sonia Cabell

"It's the accumulation of research over time that leads us to an evidence base, not just any one study." —Sonia Cabell

Timestamps*:
0:00 Introduction: How research builds on research
3:00 Sonia's research focus: oral language as the foundation of reading
7:00 The origin of the IES study
10:00 Sonia's study design and what cut it short
16:00 Results of the IES study
23:00 What is an IES study?
25:00 Causation versus correlation
28:00 Susan's dissertation: building on Sonia's research
31:00 What Susan found
35:00 "It's not about just one landmark study"
41:00 Trusted organizations for educators
44:00 Reasons for optimism
48:00 Closing thoughts
*Timestamps are approximate

[00:00:00] Sonia Cabell: It's not about just one landmark study. It's what do we know from the evidence that's accumulating across multiple studies and converging evidence?

[00:00:13] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We just wrapped our miniseries on adolescent literacy, and in a couple weeks we're diving into a new Science of Reading Essentials episode, and then Season 11. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy something just a little bit different.

On today's episode, I welcome back Dr. Sonia Cabell for a bit of a meta conversation about literacy research, how it's conducted, how evidence actually gets built, and how research interconnects. Dr. Cabell is the Sigmon Endowed Professor of Reading Education in the School of Teacher Education and at the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University.

I specifically wanted Dr. Cabell for this conversation because it was her work and methodology that I leaned on heavily when I conducted my own doctoral research. So for the first time on the show, I'm also excited to share a bit about my own study, and I hope you'll come away from this conversation with some fresh thoughts on literacy research. Here's Dr. Sonia Cabell.

I am so excited to have Sonia Cabell back with us on the podcast. Sonia, welcome.

[00:01:28] Sonia Cabell: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

[00:01:31] Susan Lambert: You have been here two other times back in Season 2 and back in Season 3, and we're going to revisit some of the content from one of those episodes.

But it's just always a pleasure to talk with you. You always have so much fun thinking going on over there.

[00:01:44] Sonia Cabell: Thank you. I'm really excited about all the work that we're doing.

[00:01:50] Susan Lambert: For our listeners, I would love if you could reintroduce yourself, or maybe some of them don't know who you are, although I can't imagine that, and tell us what you're up to these days.

[00:01:59] Sonia Cabell: I'm Sonia Cabell. I'm a professor of reading education at Florida State University. I am an associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research, and I study the prevention of reading difficulties in young children.

In my doctoral training, I became really obsessed with the understanding of the importance of oral language for later reading. I really didn't understand that when I was a classroom teacher. And I didn't know how to build a foundation. I didn't even know I needed to build a foundation for language, for reading.

And so, as I've understood that and how language comprehension plays a role in later reading, I became really engaged in how do I improve the ways that children are learning oral language in the classroom, and how do I help classroom teachers to create a language-rich environment for children.

That's what I've been studying. All of my work really revolves around how do I improve language learning for children in ways that would lead to reading success later on.

[00:03:01] Susan Lambert: That's awesome. I'm sort of the same way too. I didn't realize the impact of oral language and how important it is as a foundation, but also all the way through. Right? It never stops having an impact or being important.

[00:03:14] Sonia Cabell: It never stops. I tell my colleagues that in another life I would've also wanted to be a speech language pathologist too.

[00:03:22] Susan Lambert: Me too.

[00:03:22] Sonia Cabell: I'm really jealous of those who have both literacy and speech language pathology training. My sister is a speech language pathologist, and the more I study, the more I think that language is underlying everything.

And my language pathologist friends will remind me it's important for so many areas of life, not just reading. But I'm interested in how language supports reading, and I think about how do teachers and children have better conversations that support academic language learning. And one way to do that is through content-rich conversations.

So I've been interested in looking at the ways that science and social studies instruction may impact the interactions that teachers and children have and lead to better language learning.

[00:04:06] Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's awesome. Didn't you recently write a book too about...

[00:04:10] Sonia Cabell: Yes.

[00:04:11] Susan Lambert: Yes. What's the title of it? I totally forgot.

[00:04:12] Sonia Cabell: It's right here behind me, Strive-for-Five Conversations.

[00:04:15] Susan Lambert: That's it. Yeah.

[00:04:16] Sonia Cabell: Tricia Zucker and I, we've been great friends for decades. I saw her as a kindergarten teacher while I was a reading coach back in the day during the Reading First time period.

[00:04:28] Susan Lambert: Oh, yes.

[00:04:28] Sonia Cabell: And she was the best kindergarten teacher I'd ever seen, and we both started our doctoral work together in 2005 at the University of Virginia. And based on our work together, along with the work of other people, we put together this book, Strive-for-Five Conversations, that helps teachers and children improve conversations in the classroom and gives teachers what are the moves I should be making.

And the "five" means five conversation turns, like, I say something, you say something, I say something, you say something, I say something. That's five turns. Right?

[00:05:00] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:05:00] Sonia Cabell: Every time the speaker changes.

[00:05:02] Susan Lambert: And those turns are important to kids' oral language development. Right?

[00:05:05] Sonia Cabell: Right. The practicing of the language is how we're learning the language, the using, using the language, and then hearing what we say juxtaposed against a more advanced language model. That's how we learn language and learning how to speak.

And so when we get into school, it doesn't automatically change into something else. It's still... The conversations that we're having are still a key driver of that language learning, and now we have to learn the more formal language register.

[00:05:36] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:05:36] Sonia Cabell: So it's not just about the everyday conversation, but in order to be able to read and understand texts, we need to really understand formal language.

[00:05:47] Susan Lambert: Mm. Strive-for-Five ... is the name of the book. We'll put a link in the show notes.

[00:05:51] Sonia Cabell: Thank you.

[00:05:52] Susan Lambert: Yeah, so our listeners can grab that. Many of them probably are familiar with it, but again, it's just a really good one.

I want to take a step back to your Season 2, Episode 7, where we talked about your IES study. And listeners, hang with us because we really want to talk about what happens as research evolves and develops, and so we want to focus a little bit on this idea of research and connections.

We've talked a lot on this podcast about preponderance of evidence, what does that mean, and so let's start by this IES study. And we're going to get to what an IES study is.

[00:06:33] Sonia Cabell: Right.

[00:06:33] Susan Lambert: But let's first start with, why did you decide to conduct this study? So what was the thing that motivated you to do this?

[00:06:41] Sonia Cabell: Well, I was very interested in how science and social studies, how content instruction might impact language, as I was saying earlier.

And I had done a study, with Laura Justice, Dr. Laura Justice from Ohio State University. She was my advisor, and she was the lead of the project. And we had looked at training preschool teachers to be conversationally responsive partners with their students.

But what we found was that it was really difficult to train teachers across all these different classroom contexts and with strategies and just try to improve the language learning environment that way.

Teachers were able to do some of the things, like they got better at setting up conversations and to some degree keeping them going, but they weren't able to do the more advanced language modeling techniques as easily.

And so I started thinking, "How can we help teachers with this?" And I started thinking about, "Are there contexts in which teachers naturally have an easier time modeling language?"

And in a study I was doing that looked at the classroom assessment scoring system across different contexts of the preschool teachers' day, naturalistically, we found that they were modeling language better in content-rich science activities than other settings.

And so that led me to this idea, and in addition, at the same time, Catherine Snow was a discussant in a symposium, a research symposium at the Society for Research in Child Development. I think the year was about 2011 or '12.

[00:08:32] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:08:32] Sonia Cabell: And we were discussing our findings, kind of lackluster findings, of we're having trouble improving children's language through these oral language instructional programs in class, in techniques in preschools. And it wasn't just our group. It was other groups.

And she said, "What if we need to give teachers and children something to talk about?" And that's what really led me to think about this. And actually, Core Knowledge Foundation was in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I lived, so I was familiar with them, and I knew that they were doing something different in their English language arts program in terms of building children's language comprehension. They were putting knowledge into that systematically.

And so that's what really led me to be interested in studying the CKLA Knowledge Strand because for me, it was a case of, look, they are trying to teach... The driver was knowledge building...

[00:09:28] Susan Lambert: Yep ...

[00:09:29] Sonia Cabell: And language was such a big part of that. It's through the read-alouds. So I viewed this as an integrated knowledge and literacy approach.

[00:09:38] Susan Lambert: And what specific question were you trying to answer in this research study?

[00:09:42] Sonia Cabell: I was really asking a "what works" question.

[00:09:45] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:09:45] Sonia Cabell: Does CKLA, the implementation of CKLA, does it improve children's language and knowledge?

[00:09:52] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:09:53] Sonia Cabell: That was the primary study, driver of the study, and it was a randomized control trial. There were schools that were in the treatment group and schools that were in the control group. Overall, we had 47 schools across two districts.

[00:10:06] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:10:06] Sonia Cabell: And it was actually two studies in kindergarten, and one was a replication of the other, but when we combined those, it was 47 schools. Originally, we wanted to go through kindergarten through second grade. We wanted to see, because knowledge and language take time to build, so we wanted to see the growth of children's language and knowledge in their vocabulary, listening comprehension, and content knowledge over time.

[00:10:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:10:35] Sonia Cabell: That was the ultimate goal. We ran into some issues.

[00:10:38] Susan Lambert: Like a pandemic?

[00:10:39] Sonia Cabell: Like a pandemic. We had two major issues. We had multiple issues.

One was the textbook adoption. To run a longitudinal study, it was really hard to go for multiple years because the English language arts textbook adoption comes into play.

[00:10:54] Susan Lambert: Oh, okay.

[00:10:54] Sonia Cabell: So we ran into that in our first district where we did study one. And we did the study through kindergarten.

And then our second district, we were in kindergarten. Then we were in first grade. The kids had moved from kindergarten to first grade, and then there was a natural weather disaster that happened in the area, then followed immediately by a pandemic.

[00:11:13] Susan Lambert: Oh my gosh.

[00:11:14] Sonia Cabell: And everything shut down before we could collect data. It's a story many researchers can relate to. So that made it hard for... We couldn't really track the progress over time like we had initially planned to.

[00:11:27] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:28] Sonia Cabell: But we really were asking a "what works" question.

[00:11:31] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:11:31] Sonia Cabell: And then, did it work? For whom did it work? Did it work better for kids entering the year with lower language or higher language, for example?

[00:11:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah. So that question you were trying to answer is really important as you frame up this research.

So, bringing it back to listeners and understanding how this whole research process works, you also had to figure out a way to answer the question.

So, asking the right kind of question is a thing, to be able to study what you want to study, but how were you trying to answer that question, that "what works" question?

[00:12:05] Sonia Cabell: Hmm. What do you mean by how?

[00:12:06] Susan Lambert: So how did you measure? You don't just walk into a classroom and be like, "Oh, yeah, it seems to me that it's trying to work."

[00:12:14] Sonia Cabell: Yeah, so it was random assignment of schools, because we thought we were going to go from kindergarten, first grade to second grade.

So we wanted whole schools to be involved, and they were adopting those schools who were randomly assigned to the treatment, adopted it in that first year. The other, the control group, was a waitlist control, meaning they waited a year before they had access to the materials, but we gave everybody an option to have all the materials.

[00:12:39] Susan Lambert: Ah, that's great. Yeah.

[00:12:41] Sonia Cabell: And then we pre-tested children on standardized measures of language, including receptive and expressive vocabulary, syntactical knowledge, which was part of our listening comprehension, a more general listening comprehension test, and a knowledge, the Woodcock-Johnson knowledge.

So there was a bunch of standardized measures that we took at the beginning and the end of the kindergarten year. And again, we were going to take it at the end of first and the end of second grade.

[00:13:07] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:13:07] Sonia Cabell: We trained teachers. We had permission from Amplify to involve the Core Knowledge Foundation to train teachers. We needed a firewall between us and Amplify, for example, and we needed firewalls between us and the foundation so that we could do the study independently. That is one major misconception of these studies, is that it's funded by the publisher.

[00:13:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:13:28] Sonia Cabell: And Institute of Education Sciences is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and so it's independently studied.

When I met you through the process, through a different role that you were in, and you were really helpful in making sure we had that firewall in this study in place.

[00:13:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah. I didn't talk to you for a really long time.

[00:13:51] Sonia Cabell: Right. There wasn't any pressure from Amplify on any of the things, and there was also a firewall between even knowing which sites we were in, which specific areas we were in, schools and stuff.

So I think, to answer your question further, there's a lot that goes into a randomized trial, but the core parts are you're randomly assigning to treatment or control. You are going to administer some pre-test. Then you're going to administer some post-test and see if there are differences between the treatment and the control group.

We did have professional development that teachers engaged in and some light-touch coaching.

[00:14:26] Susan Lambert: And for listeners, again, this is what we often called the gold standard, right, of research, the randomized control trial.

[00:14:34] Sonia Cabell: Right.

[00:14:34] Susan Lambert: And they're very... especially with the amount of schools that you had involved, they're very difficult to execute.

And as you mentioned, things happen...

[00:14:44] Sonia Cabell: They do ...

[00:14:44] Susan Lambert: That get in the middle. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:46] Sonia Cabell: Yeah. And it's understandable, and the researchers' goals aren't always the district's goals, and they shouldn't be. The district's goals shouldn't be the researcher's goals, and vice versa. Right? They're different purposes.

I think we're all trying to help kids, but it is hard to sustain a multiple-year randomized control trial. I learned that the hard way. But this is why you have so few longitudinal randomized studies in education.

[00:15:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes sense. What did you find? So what did you learn from this study?

[00:15:17] Sonia Cabell: So we learned that, speaking of in kindergarten, we specifically found effects on both the vocabulary and the knowledge taught in the curriculum That the treatment group outperformed in both of those areas the control group.

And more than that, when you drill down into... We're drilling down into the words themselves at the item level, and we're finding that there's this interesting effect on those domain-specific words. So it's interesting because it appears that the treatment students were able to uptake domain-specific words more than the general-purpose Tier 2 type of words.

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

[00:16:02] Sonia Cabell: Even though the Tier 2 type of words had the word work done on them.

[00:16:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah, so more explicit instruction.

[00:16:08] Sonia Cabell: More explicit instruction. They both had defined it within the read-aloud. But then there was even more explicit instruction on the general purpose or the Tier 2 types of words.

However, there is this easier uptake, it appears, of the domain-specific words, and I'm thinking about the understanding behind that being that exposure to the conceptually coherent teaching and those coherent text sets in a coherent knowledge framework.

We also saw this in the Woodcock-Johnson picture vocabulary, which had a significant effect on it. So as a standardized test, that had a significant effect in kindergarten, but that effect was driven by the words that were taught.

But the words that were in there where the effect was driven by were all related conceptually to the same domain. I think it was like moccasin and loom. It was the Native American type of domain. So that was interesting that students tended to learn those words in a domain.

I think that there's some interesting findings, and people often poo-poo, "Oh, you just have effects on the words that were taught versus more general words." I think we have a measurement issue, I believe, in general in the field, where we somehow think things like the PPVT and stuff are the gold standards. But when you actually look and see how a test is constructed to measure vocabulary, it's not based on domains. We need some better measurements.

Basically, the better measurement would be words that all children were exposed to and that the treatment group learned more. And the closest that we had to that in this study was that 100% of all classrooms said that they taught plants that year.

[00:17:50] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:17:50] Sonia Cabell: In general, it's part of the standards.

[00:17:53] Susan Lambert: Oh, so, both the treatment and control. Everybody taught plants. Okay.

[00:17:57] Sonia Cabell: But the treatment students did better. The CKLA students did better on the "Tell me everything you know about plants." And we're going to go look back and look at those data more closely and rescore them in another way to see if indeed that holds up, that they have more robust knowledge that they're developing.

And so I think that that is an interesting finding for us to follow up on.

[00:18:20] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And so you mentioned something too. One of the things that you did or you had people do is that for the students, you ask them this open-ended question about, "Tell me everything you know about plants."

[00:18:33] Sonia Cabell: Yes.

[00:18:33] Susan Lambert: That open-ended question, you're saying, elicited some of that response from them, that you could code that finding and find out that they actually did know those, or you were able to use those words from that plant unit?

[00:18:46] Sonia Cabell: Well, that's interesting. So we haven't... Your dissertation codes the words, which I find interesting. So we didn't go... That's a great idea. We didn't go back and code the words that they were using. We coded the idea units.

But I wonder, we could go back and code the words as well, and I want to make it a broader coding. Right now, we coded idea units that were included in what was taught, but I want to make it more broad than that.

[00:19:08] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:19:09] Sonia Cabell: It's hard to code for the universe of everything because you have to make sure the coding is reliable.

[00:19:15] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:19:15] Sonia Cabell: And that what they're saying is accurate scientific information and not inaccurate. Right?

But I have a hypothesis that the treatment group learned about plants better, but we need to actually dig into that some more to really understand whether that's true. But if that's true, that would be a good measure of that more mid-transfer type of measure that showed that, oh, they both had teaching in this area, but the CKLA kids did better.

But I like the idea that you have of looking at the vocabulary that they...

[00:19:50] Susan Lambert: We'll connect my dissertation in a minute, but I want to do a little bit of a summary. So actually what you found is that the kids that were in this knowledge-building curriculum actually did better than the kids that weren't in the knowledge-building curriculum.

And they had better, what would you say, they had better vocabulary? They knew more vocabulary? Or what would be the couple things that they did better?

[00:20:13] Sonia Cabell: Yeah. They had improved vocabulary, particularly domain-specific vocabulary.

[00:20:18] Susan Lambert: Yep. Okay.

[00:20:19] Sonia Cabell: And then their knowledge, their expressive, "Tell me everything you know about," the way they expressed their knowledge was better. So the knowledge of both plants and Native Americans, those were the two, so science and social studies.

And unfortunately, we weren't able to follow them longitudinally, but it takes time to build. We did get second grade and third grade district comprehension scores for the second district that we were in, where they had it in... went in first grade.

We did not see any differences in their more distal comprehension, but I don't think that the students had the curriculum for long enough. And so I think that in order to see longer-term outcomes on comprehension, I think you need more robust, coherent learning for children.

[00:21:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. But you found positive impact, and so...

[00:21:10] Sonia Cabell: Absolutely.

[00:21:11] Susan Lambert: That links back to your interest in oral language development, and if kids' expressive vocabulary developed, that's positive. That's positive.

[00:21:19] Sonia Cabell: Yes, and we did have evidence that children who started the year with higher language, higher PPVT scores, performed better on vocabulary and the knowledge measures.

And that is, that's different than what people hope. People hope that children with lower language coming in make greater gains to close the gaps.

[00:21:42] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:21:42] Sonia Cabell: Yeah, to close the gap. But what we often see in research is the opposite, and people term it as the Matthew effect.

[00:21:48] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:21:49] Sonia Cabell: And it makes a lot of sense that if I come in with a richer language or knowledge base, I'm going to be able to uptake knowledge and language even more. This skill beget skill idea is across all domains, so it's not a surprising finding.

[00:22:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Or the idea that you learn more about the things that you already know about.

Yep. So if they already had some knowledge about that, yeah.

[00:22:10] Sonia Cabell: Right.

[00:22:11] Susan Lambert: Before we connect this to my research study, which I'm super excited to do, can you just explain to listeners what an IES study is in a way? What does that mean in general?

[00:22:23] Sonia Cabell: IES was founded in the early 2000s to really be able to understand what works, what are interventions, and help develop interventions or programs that work for children in terms of their education. And education more broadly, not just reading, but across all other areas.

But what works for children, and then how do we implement that in ways that will work? And so really, IES was set up to answer the question of what works.

And so it drew from the medical model of randomized trials, and randomized control trials. Like you said, it's a gold standard method of being able to see whether something causes something.

So we can't just say because something happened and something changed, that this thing caused the other thing. Right?

[00:23:12] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:23:13] Sonia Cabell: Just because two things are related or correlated doesn't mean one causes the other. That great funny example from, I think the book Freakonomics, is that the Dow Jones average changed like a high, high, high correlation, almost a 1.0 correlation with women's skirt hems.

[00:23:33] Susan Lambert: Skirt hem length?

[00:23:34] Sonia Cabell: Yes, exactly. Going up and down.

So did the Dow Jones cause women's skirt lengths to go up and down? No. Did women's skirt lengths cause the Dow Jones average to go up? No. So some things can be correlated but one doesn't cause the other.

So in order to really understand that, you need a causal design. And at the height of that continuum is a randomized control trial. You have other causal designs that also you can draw a causal inference from, not as much as the randomized trial, but you have quasi-experimental studies where you have two groups that are not randomly assigned, maybe two groups that already exist.

[00:24:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:24:12] Sonia Cabell: And you are equalizing them in some way, and you're giving one something and the other one gets something else, and you're comparing. So you're doing quasi-experiment.

And there's other designs, but there's also the single-case method, single-case design, which I think is quite elegant design, where you can see if what you've done causes an effect.

[00:24:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:24:34] Sonia Cabell: And so there are causal designs that span a continuum But it's really important that just because something happens or somebody saw something, it doesn't mean it caused it or that we know that that's what caused the effect.

[00:24:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. Causation versus correlation, a big term and an important concept. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for talking about IES because we've talked a lot about the IES guides on other episodes.

[00:25:02] Sonia Cabell: Those are excellent.

[00:25:03] Susan Lambert: How great they are as resources because these are things that have high impact, that if you implement, right, you can expect they're effective in terms of what happens.

[00:25:14] Sonia Cabell: Right. And those guides are... You think about trustworthy sources. The information that's come out of IES is very trustworthy. Those guides, they're just excellent, and I know that firsthand from being at the Florida Center for Reading Research.

There are the regional educational laboratories. We have the REL Southeast that's been at Florida State at FCRR, I think for about 15 or so years, that works to serve the states in the Southeast. And on our website, which I can...

[00:25:43] Susan Lambert: We'll link in the show notes. Yeah.

[00:25:44] Sonia Cabell: That'd be great.

[00:25:45] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure.

[00:25:45] Sonia Cabell: We have information from the REL Southeast and from all the, that links from all the RELs that can inform classroom practice as well as home, what parents can do with kids at home. There's a wealth of information in those, in the things that IES has commissioned and funded.

So IES is much broader than the research studies that it's funding, such as the multimillion-dollar research studies that are randomized trials.

They're also collecting all the statistics on education in the United States. They conduct longitudinal studies to understand where we're going in the United States. The National Assessment of Education Progress, they compile that. So there's a lot of important functions of the Institute of Education Sciences.

[00:26:34] Susan Lambert: And fun fact for our listeners, if you go back to... I can't remember what season it is, but we'll put it in the show notes too... we did a two-part interview with Reid Lyon, who talked all about how all of that came to be. And so, for listeners, there's another connection for you if you're interested in how that happened.

So one of the things I wanted to talk about is this idea of how one person's research motivates, I guess that's the right word, motivates another researcher to think about something similar in answering a different kind of question in a different kind of way. So our listeners, if you've been listening a long time, you know, last year at this time, I graduated with my doctorate. Officially done.

[00:27:17] Sonia Cabell: Congratulations, doctor.

[00:27:19] Susan Lambert: You think? Thanks. And it really was you that got me thinking about this study. And so what I did was I took some ideas from things that you did, and by the way, you were super helpful as I was thinking about better understanding how to make this thing happen, right, how to make this dissertation come alive.

But what I wanted to know is I wanted to know, similarly to you, how does this knowledge-building curriculum impact students' oral language development, but not after they got it, but during the process of instruction.

I think this during-the-process-of-instruction question is really important to say, "Yes, there's some things that can happen at the end. These are the things that they learned after they were all done with this particular unit."

I actually wanted to see what happened during instruction, so it was this idea of a single-case design, right, and I didn't do anything with it differently with instruction. The teachers had been teaching for, I think that they were in their second or third year, and kindergarten classroom.

And I was also interested in what happened with two consecutive units. So you used in your study the plants unit. Right? For kindergarten.

[00:28:34] Sonia Cabell: We did.

[00:28:35] Susan Lambert: I decided to use the plants and farms unit, because you were talking about this idea of connected vocabulary, or like the semantic web that students end up building as a result of this information. And so I wanted to do the back-to-back, and in the CKLA program, they do plants, and then they do farms. They're two consecutive units.

And what I did was identified students in three different classrooms, and essentially I looked at a language measure, and I looked at just DIBELS composite score because I wanted to have students that were at risk and some students that weren't at risk to see what happened.

I pulled them out of the classroom. Best time of my life. Pulled these kids out of the classroom and just asked them to tell me everything you know about plants and everything you know about farms. Those are the two questions I ask them each time, and I used your protocol. Right?

[00:29:33] Sonia Cabell: I have to give a shout-out to HyeJin Hwang, who, she's at the University of Minnesota. And she is the one who brought that to our lab from Gina Cervetti in Michigan. So I appreciate that protocol.

[00:29:47] Susan Lambert: Shout-out to both of them, because they've also both been guests on the podcast, which is super great. But this is another way that researchers share their... This is why you share your research. Right?

[00:29:58] Sonia Cabell: Yeah.

[00:29:58] Susan Lambert: So I grabbed that protocol, did something very similar to what you did, recorded the kids talking about it, transcribed those recordings, and actually looked at what their development looked like over time. And I coded a little bit differently than you did. I looked at, could they use more vocabulary words directly pulled from the instruction, and could they use more ideas pulled from the curriculum?

So I did a little bit with the ideas. And I also collected word count. How many more words or how many words did they actually speak? And this was all expressive, right, all expressive language. So my question was slightly different than yours because I was looking at what happened during instruction. And it was pretty cool.

[00:30:48] Sonia Cabell: So what did you find?

[00:30:49] Susan Lambert: Oh, I was waiting for you to ask.

I found something really interesting, which was, one, over time students were able to use more words. Right? So they were able to talk more about the topic as time went on, which you would expect, I guess. But it's a good finding to know. Right? It's worth it to be able to engage students in those conversations.

And I found that they didn't necessarily use that many more vocabulary words or that many more idea units, but the kids that did were actually the ones that were at risk. So I found that the kids at risk were able to use more vocabulary than the kids that weren't, so that was interesting.

[00:31:34] Sonia Cabell: That's a really interesting finding.

I like that you repeated that probe again and again in your single case design study and asked that again and again, because you were able to see from session to session. I forgot, how long apart were your probes?

[00:31:49] Susan Lambert: So I did it twice a week, every week for 12 weeks.

[00:31:54] Sonia Cabell: So you were able to see it in real time...

[00:31:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:57] Sonia Cabell: ... what was going on while they were getting the instruction.

[00:31:59] Susan Lambert: That's right.

[00:32:00] Sonia Cabell: Something interesting that's complementary about our study that I failed to mention earlier was that by the time we tested the words, they had learned them in, toward the middle of the year, and we were testing them at the end of the year. So they had sustained learning of the words.

[00:32:15] Susan Lambert: That's great.

[00:32:16] Sonia Cabell: So it wasn't just that the domain-word learning was stronger, it was that it was also sustained. And I believe that you also found that they had maintained some of their learning.

[00:32:24] Susan Lambert: Yeah, because I actually asked them that after the... for several weeks after they were done with the instruction, and I found they maintained that as well, which is really interesting.

[00:32:37] Sonia Cabell: Very important, because one of the things we want, we want to be able to teach, we want them to ... to sustain the learning. And how do you really sustain learning about vocabulary? It has to connect to something for you.

[00:32:51] Susan Lambert: That's right.

[00:32:51] Sonia Cabell: And so when you teach it in a conceptually coherent text set, you're creating semantic networks for them to learn and uptake, and the words are not only repeated, the ideas and the concepts are repeated and used differently, and then students are using those in the discussions.

What I would love to see as a next step could potentially be, okay, what are the classroom conversations when they're discussing these texts, and how do those change over time? What are teachers doing in terms of the sophistication of those conversations, and to what extent do children get to participate in those?

I know that there's "turn and talk"s written in, so they're talking to their peers.

[00:33:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah.

[00:33:32] Sonia Cabell: But teachers probably vary in how they do that component.

[00:33:36] Susan Lambert: They do. I did classroom observations, too, at the same time, and I'll tell you what I found was super interesting because I had three classrooms: classroom A, classroom B, classroom C.

I'll talk about causation. Not exactly sure what happened here, but definitely classroom A was the one that had more growth than the other two classrooms. And that classroom teacher did all kind of things, like she had this great little song that she used to sing at the beginning of the day about how does a plant grow. And the kids would sing it, and they'd get low to the ground when they were a seed, and their stems would grow, and the leaves would grow.

And so she had all these little extra things. When they were lining up for lunch, they were talking about... It was like a constant reminder or extension, and she did a lot of extensions. And so I sort of had that same thought, too. It's like, "What other things need to happen in the classroom to make this learning sticky?"

[00:34:33] Sonia Cabell: Right. And so what your project did was take a zoomed-in look at better understanding. Yours was still a ... you could make a causal inference from the single-case design. This caused this. You know?

[00:34:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:34:47] Sonia Cabell: Does the instruction cause the growth? So you're adding evidence to that, and it's the accumulation of research over time that leads us to an evidence base.

Not just any one study. It's not about just one landmark study. It's what do we know from the evidence that's accumulating across multiple studies and converging evidence, not just one.

And so I think it's important because when each of these studies can give you different pieces to a puzzle that we're all trying to solve to really help students learn.

[00:35:22] Susan Lambert: Yep. Two important concepts there you just said, and we talked about this preponderance or evidence or the growth of the building that knowledge base.

And then we've talked a lot about this on the podcast, too, the convergence of evidence. That I found something similar to what you found.

[00:35:37] Sonia Cabell: Yep. Absolutely you did. And interesting, not just similar, but interesting specificity around some of the findings in terms of, okay, like I said, the probe given more than once a week over a period of time so that you can see the vocabulary the students are using naturally.

So I love that approach where you're looking at... I really, what I really wanted to do is I wanted to follow around students all day and say, and count how many times...

[00:36:06] Susan Lambert: See what they were talking about ...

[00:36:07] Sonia Cabell: Count how many times they're using the words, because I think that's such a big... Students using the language themselves makes a big difference, and I think in the research studies that I've seen that have larger effects or effects that seem more robust seem to be ones that direct students to use the words in other contexts as well.

[00:36:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah, how important that is.

[00:36:31] Sonia Cabell: And what you're describing that teacher was doing was.

And when I think about that particular program, I think about how the Core Knowledge Foundation, the vision as I understood it was really for the sequence of instruction to guide all areas, so having coherence with the science and social studies I'm learning as well as the English language arts so that I'm learning coherently across my day and then across time.

[00:37:00] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. And gives the schools an opportunity to integrate that into other content areas like music and the arts and physical education.

[00:37:09] Sonia Cabell: Yeah, and I also think that what we're talking about doesn't just apply to core knowledge. I think it applies to knowledge-building curricula in general.

[00:37:17] Susan Lambert: A hundred percent. Yeah.

[00:37:18] Sonia Cabell: And so I'm studying several different knowledge-building curricula in terms of the implementation of them and how teachers are uptaking them.

We're also trying to understand the differences, my doctoral students and I right now are trying to understand the differences among these English language arts programs in terms of their knowledge build, what makes them different. And does that variation relate to children's language or the language experiences that teachers provide in class?

So those are the kinds of questions that we're looking at, but I do think of this program, CKLA, as one of several programs that are trying to build children's knowledge in the English language arts space.

[00:37:58] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's fun that you and your doctoral students are doing a little bit more with that.

[00:38:02] Sonia Cabell: Yes. We...

[00:38:03] Susan Lambert: More to come.

[00:38:03] Sonia Cabell: More to come. Yeah, we are really, again, we love this area and the understanding how the knowledge-building piece relates to the language learning environment. That's really what I'm interested in.

[00:38:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you a little bit about misconceptions or misunderstandings that actually surround scientific research.

[00:38:28] Sonia Cabell: That's a big question.

[00:38:30] Susan Lambert: Not to put you on the spot or anything.

[00:38:32] Sonia Cabell: Where do we start with that one?

[00:38:33] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah, yeah. But I'm sure there's got to be some common misconceptions that really get in the way.

I think you already mentioned one about publishers funding research...

[00:38:44] Sonia Cabell: Yeah, that's a...

They can't... Well, publishers can and do fund research. A lot of research that's conducted is not funded by publishers, and that's important because especially the "what works" kinds of things, if it's asking the question does it work and it's really high stakes for the publisher, I think some people often assume the publisher is funding it and then disregard it.

You really need to ask, "Who's funding this?" And it's not necessarily the case... It's actually usually not the case that the researcher is trying to improve things for the publisher.

In fact, even when the researcher obtains money from the publisher, we're doing some implementation science work right now that's funded by a publisher asking questions about what are the barriers and facilitators to implementing the program, and we made sure that one of our deal-breakers was we need to be able to publish our findings no matter what they say. Otherwise we can't accept this money.

[00:39:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:39:36] Sonia Cabell: And they agreed to that. And so it's important to understand who's doing the work. So I think that that's one misconception.

I think another misconception or something that happens is that people tend, in my experience, I think it's gotten better over the years, especially in the Science of Reading age, but in my experience, it used to be that the things with the glossy covers or the things that were being marketed to someone were the things that people valued and thought were the right thing.

When I was a teacher, for example, in the early 2000s, I did not question whether the glossy program that was handed to me was researched. I didn't even think about it because I didn't know to even think about it. I was assuming that if it was being adopted by our school, it was good.

And I was assuming that it would help kids. I didn't understand things about evidence-based. An evidence-based program is one that has evidence on that program itself, or at least it's research-based, meaning that it's based on a body of research.

[00:40:43] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:40:43] Sonia Cabell: But everybody will say that they are, so that becomes problematic, I think, knowing who your trusted sources are. And that's why I think things like the Institute of Education Sciences, which is nonpartisan, the FCRR, the resources that we have in general...

I try to stay very neutral in my work and not endorse particular programs and things like that, or if I am or if I have a conflict of interest, I will disclose that.

[00:41:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:41:12] Sonia Cabell: Like, for example, the, the Strive-for-Five book. If I do work, researching Strive-for-Five, I'll disclose that we received royalties from Scholastic on the book.

So I think it's knowing who you can trust, who's going to be transparent with you about what the research says.

[00:41:28] Susan Lambert: Mm, yeah. That's a really good point. Do you have any advice for educators about... I think you've already mentioned IES, you've mentioned FCCR, but I worry sometimes that because of social media, because this evidence-based instruction, the Science of Reading has taken off, it's really great... But I feel like sometimes sound bites on Twitter or on Facebook or on Instagram about this one little thing.

How does a teacher know what to trust or what should they do with a sound bite? Where do they go to be sure that that information is right?

[00:42:09] Sonia Cabell: Yeah. And I think that there are... One great place is to think about what organizations can I trust to help me build my knowledge base.

The Reading League is a good example of an organization where they can learn about what reading is, expert... International Dyslexia Association. There are many different organizations that could potentially be avenues, and there's chapters in every, in most or every state. So being part of an organization where you might be going to a conference and learning more...

[00:42:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Or have a network of people in that...

[00:42:47] Sonia Cabell: Yes, exactly.

[00:42:47] Susan Lambert: Like The Reading League. Right? Yeah.

[00:42:49] Sonia Cabell: Right. You have a network of people that you also can then ask, "I'm having this particular issue," and then you have a network of colleagues that's not just limited to your district, but might be in your state or even around the world. Around the world, yes, around the world. But in...

[00:43:03] Susan Lambert: Yes, in every... Yeah.

[00:43:04] Sonia Cabell: ... even in the nation that could really help you answer. Then the great thing about social media and things, there's a lot more accessibility today than there was 20 years ago. Right?

[00:43:14] Susan Lambert: True. Oh my gosh, yes, yes.

[00:43:15] Sonia Cabell: Even though there's a lot more information, there's also a lot more accessibility. I have people email me all the time with questions about my work and things like that, and I think if you want to search it out, there are great avenues.

But I think joining an organization, knowing trusted resources, understanding who the experts in your midst are. Just because somebody has a title doesn't mean they know the most about something.

[00:43:42] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:43:42] Sonia Cabell: But it could be that somebody who doesn't have any title knows the most. And so figuring out who are those people who are really knowledgeable in your midst.

[00:43:51] Susan Lambert: How are you feeling about the momentum of evidence-based instruction and the Science of Reading?

[00:43:57] Sonia Cabell: Well, I'm a glass-half-full person, so I will always be, I'm always positive. I can't say I speak for everybody else around me. But I really feel hopeful when it comes to what's happening with teachers.

I do spend a lot of time traveling and meeting different teachers in different states, and I see the hunger for learning. It appears to me that the average teacher knows a lot more about reading than they did when I was a teacher. And that's really encouraging to me.

[00:44:31] Susan Lambert: That's really great news.

[00:44:32] Sonia Cabell: Well, it's thanks to podcasts like yours and others that really put out information that help people learn about reading.

[00:44:42] Susan Lambert: Well, and books, like the books that you've put out.

I thought about that the other day. When I was a teacher and searching for information about evidence-based practices, that I knew the research was there, but I didn't have access to it, nor at that point could I translate it. Right? I couldn't do that. But the books that were being put out, that were being published weren't the ones that were evidence-based practice.

[00:45:09] Sonia Cabell: And how are you to know that?

[00:45:11] Susan Lambert: Exactly. How do you know that? And so I'm just so excited that there's more access.

[00:45:17] Sonia Cabell: And there's more attention on it in general, such that different organizations are creating their own sets of rubrics around what is good and what is not. And we can have arguments over which is the best or whatever, but the reality is that the attention is being paid, and heightened attention is happening. We have films that have come out about reading.

[00:45:39] Susan Lambert: Right. That's right, yeah.

[00:45:40] Sonia Cabell: We have whole movements that have been created by parents and those concerned about their children learning to read and read effectively. You know, the reporting that Emily Hanford has done has been outstanding in helping raise awareness.

And so I'm encouraged by all of those things. I do think, though, I guess when we cut back to misconceptions or one of the cautionary notes, is that sometimes people are very... They're either this or this. We used to be like, "It's either phonics or it's completely whole languagy."

[00:46:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:46:19] Sonia Cabell: There wasn't a middle part. And the Science of Reading is not like a product. It's not a thing. It is an ever-accumulating body of work.

[00:46:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Ever-changing. Ever-changing and growing. Yeah.

[00:46:33] Sonia Cabell: We learn new things. We want to know what the science says, and we want to be open to our own assumptions being dashed. I used to incorporate techniques in my classroom when I was a classroom teacher that I learned later on weren't helpful. For example, drilling kids on sight words.

[00:46:52] Susan Lambert: Yep, flash cards.

[00:46:53] Sonia Cabell: I thought that would be helpful. That seems like it would be helpful, and it wasn't to the students I was doing it to, but later on I understood why.

And while it broke my heart that I didn't know how to help some of my students in the past, you take what you learn and you move forward with that.

Just like doctors. We expect our doctors to be up to date. We should also expect all of us as educators and our teachers to be up to date, and also our supports for our teachers to be helpful in supporting teachers to be up to date.

So being part of those organizations that will help you be up to date on what to know, because you have to know about so many things. You can't be the expert because you weren't trained to be a researcher. I didn't know as a teacher how to even consume research.

[00:47:39] Susan Lambert: Right. Me either.

[00:47:40] Sonia Cabell: I didn't know. Yeah.

[00:47:41] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's always a great conversation with you, Sonia. I always...

[00:47:44] Sonia Cabell: Thank you.

[00:47:44] Susan Lambert: I always enjoy it.

[00:47:46] Sonia Cabell: Me too.

[00:47:46] Susan Lambert: Any other wise words you want to say before we wrap up?

[00:47:50] Sonia Cabell: Well, I think that what I would say to teachers is that you're doing better than you think. Keep being a learner. I had told my husband when I was a second grade teacher, I told my husband, "If I ever stop learning, can you please tell me to stop being a teacher?"

Because I should not stop learning. I should be a lifelong learner. And so I encourage you to keep learning. I know it feels like it's so vast, all the things you have to know, not just about reading, but about everything.

So keep going, 'cause it's worth it for the kids who you're serving. And thank you for what you're doing every day to help kids.

[00:48:32] Susan Lambert: Those are wise words.

[00:48:34] Sonia Cabell: Thank you.

[00:48:36] Susan Lambert: Thanks for joining us again. We always appreciate having you on.

[00:48:39] Sonia Cabell: My pleasure. Thank you so much. I appreciate being invited.

[00:48:45] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Sonia Cabell, Sigmon Endowed Professor of Reading Education in the School of Teacher Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University. Visit the show notes for links to Dr. Cabell's IES study and much more.

Next time, we'll be revisiting one of our all-time favorite episodes, a conversation with Dr. Brittney Bills about implementing multi-tiered systems of support.

[00:49:12] Brittney Bills: One of the other ideas around MTSS is efficiency, so we want to use data and leverage data to make decisions that are going to help us arrive at our outcomes or our goals in the most efficient and effective means possible, which is where, from what I've gathered, this idea of class-wide intervention comes.

[00:49:36] Susan Lambert: That's next time.

Meanwhile, remember to subscribe to my Substack, scienceofreading.substack.com.

Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.


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