Children struggling to learn to read often need targeted instruction beyond what they receive in class to help grow their skills, but not every intervention is a good one, says reading researcher Matt Burns in an Education Week article
Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Florida, recalls one observation he made of a special education teacher conducting a lesson with a student.
The boy was reciting letters while jumping up and down on a miniature trampoline—an activity that was supposed to serve as multisensory instruction. But the jumping wasn’t serving any instructional purpose, Burns says.
“I don’t even need to look that up to know it’s not aligned to the science of reading,” Burns says.
The “science of reading” movement — aligning reading instruction in schools with practices supported by research studies — has grown in the past decade. Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation mandating schools to train teachers, select appropriate materials, and use evidence-based practices in classrooms. Many also say educators must identify struggling readers and provide them with interventions.
But researchers question the efficacy and accuracy of some of the most widely used intervention approaches. They contend some approaches don’t pinpoint students’ specific needs and can’t target instruction in a way that will move kids forward.
It can be hard for schools and teachers to know what types of intervention to use—or the criteria to consider when selecting an intervention program.
Burns created a set of guidelines he created with his colleague, Valentina Contesse, that outline five factors that educators should consider. Interventions should:
- Be appropriately challenging,
- Be correctly targeted,
- Give students opportunities to respond,
- Offer explicit instruction, and
- Provide immediate feedback.
Here are three additional takeaways from Burns:
1) Reading “levels” aren’t the right tool to pinpoint students’ individual needs.
Elementary teachers for decades have used reading “levels”—a ranking system that categorizes students 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 previous 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 says.
“People ask me all the time, ‘What’s the best intervention?’” he says. “My response is, ‘What’s the kid’s need?’”
2) Practice solidifies students’ knowledge, but not all practice is created equally.
Effective practice shares some key qualities, Burns says. 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.”
How many repetitions of the practice are enough? “We see a direct, strong relationship between number of opportunities to respond and retention. Around 20 repetitions, that number starts to level off,” Burns says.
3) Beware of “cognitive overload.”
Research shows that trying to give too much information to elementary schoolers can subvert the learning process.
Multiple studies show that when students are introduced to more new words than they can process in one session, they retain fewer of those new words and they forget some words they had learned previously, according to Burns.
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 says.
“When you see kids getting squirmy and start making mistakes, they’re done,” he says. “They’re telling you they’re done.”
Education Week
