Children who are struggling to learn to read often need targeted intervention, but not every intervention is a good one, says reading researcher Matt Burns in an Education Week article.
At the Reading League conference, Burns shared tips from a set of guidelines he created with his colleague, Valentina Contesse, that outline five factors educators should take into consideration with reading interventions:
- Be appropriately challenging,
- Be correctly targeted,
- Give students opportunities to respond,
- Offer explicit instruction, and
- Provide immediate feedback.
Three other takeaways from Burns’s talk:
- Reading “levels” aren’t the right tool to pinpoint students’ individual needs
Elementary teachers have used reading “levels” for decades—a ranking system that categorizes children by a composite score of their reading ability across several metrics. In a 2020 EdWeek Research Center survey, 61% of K-2 teachers said they use leveled texts in small group work.
But research from Burns has shown that one of the most popular leveling systems only accurately predicts students’ reading ability a little more than half of the time.
A more precise way is to test students’ discrete skills—phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, as examples—and then target intervention accordingly, Burns said.
- Practice solidifies knowledge — but not all practice is created equal
Effective practice shares some key qualities, Burns said. Students generate their own response—segmenting the sounds in words themselves in a phonemic awareness drill, for example, rather than listening to a teacher break down the sounds in different ways and choosing which one is correct.
Teachers mix in information students have newly learned with skills what they’ve already mastered, a technique called “interleaved practice.” And students get lots of repetitions of new information.
“We see a direct, strong relationship between number of opportunities to respond and retention. Around 20 repetitions, that number starts to level off,” Burns said.
- Beware of ‘cognitive overload’
Kindergartners famously have short attention spans. And research shows that trying to cram too much information into elementary schoolers’ heads at once isn’t just a challenge for the teacher—it can also short-circuit learning.
Burns shared multiple studies showing that when students were introduced to more new words than they could process in one session, not only did they retain fewer of those new words, they forgot some words they had learned previously.
When working with a teacher or interventionist, if students start getting things wrong that they were previously getting right, it might be a sign that they’re reaching their limit for the moment, Burns said.
Education Week
