Dr. Timothy Shanahan on the Models Behind the Science of Reading
What They Are, What They Aren’t, and What They Mean for Instruction
The following was adapted from a recorded and transcribed interview on the Science of Reading between Timothy Shanahan and Brandon Harvey, Senior Curriculum Specialist at McGraw Hill.
Brandon: Most of us associate the Science of Reading with two models: Scarborough’s Rope and the Simple View of Reading. Do those models capture the Science of Reading? Are there other elements to consider?
Dr. Shanahan: This gets tricky — the relationship of a model to a body of research is more a work of art than it is a science. Models are an attempt by somebody to summarize the work on a particular field, and maybe to focus particular research questions. I remember when Phil Gough and his colleagues put forth the Simple View of Reading. His challenge to the field was to identify aspects of reading that must be learned — that don’t fit into either the decoding content or into the language path.
It was a powerful model, and I’d say research over a 30-year period has been fully aligned with the Simple View of Reading. But if you look at some of that research, you’d notice that the data doesn’t explain everything involved with reading — it explains maybe 70% of the variation in reading.
So, that means there’s more to the picture — factors like social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL isn’t captured in the simple view. But SEL isn’t a comparable variable — it is something internal to the student. It might have an impact on reading similar to external factors like technology, teacher knowledge, classroom virtualization; and those factors wouldn’t be part of the model, either.
That’s because these models aren’t about how to teach reading or even how kids learn to read. Instead, they’re about what kids learn when they learn to read.
The same can be said for Scarborough’s Rope — I think that initially, all that Hollis Scarborough intended to do was to expand a bit on the Simple View, so that people would understand that word reading and language are important, and that it’s worth breaking them down and talking about what goes into those components — like phonemic awareness and decoding. Dr. Scarborough originally published this model in 2002, I believe, and it does very good job of what it tries to do, but even she went back seven or eight years later to revise it.
Brandon: That’s science, isn’t it! I like the phrase “when you know better, you do better.” That’s what science really is — evolving. I imagine, as you said, some of this work is 20, 30, 40 years old — there have been bodies of research that have helped to improve what we know about how children learn to read, and it’s anything but simple.
Dr. Shanahan: The basic notion of the Simple View was more of a hypothesis — the hypothesis was that if you could recognize the words … if you could decode them… if you could somehow figure out the words from that and you could read it aloud, then listening comprehension would take over; that if you could already comprehend things through that language mode by listening, then reading is the ability to decode or translate print to oral language.
But it was never intended for practitioners. It wasn’t, “this is how you need to teach reading;” it was a cognitive view of “what does it take to read with comprehension?”
The notion was, maybe there’s nothing special about comprehension. Maybe comprehension is just our normal oral language ability applied to print. And that’s what makes it simple — the notion that you only have to worry about adding word reading to an existing language system. Of course, there was research at that time, including some of my own, showing that written language was somewhat different than oral language, and that written language places some special demands on a reader. Sentences will be more complex than they are in oral language because we know not to burden each other with language that’s too complicated, whereas authors feel perfectly free to do so because they know you can go back and reread. They know you can manipulate text in a way that a listener can’t do with oral language.
So [the Simple View] is simple — it’s meant to focus your attention on particular things. That’s why it’s simple and it’s really quite powerful, because, as I say, it explains a lot of the variation in reading ability; it just doesn’t explain all of it. That’s why newer models — and there have been several in the last few years — are trying to be consistent with current research. Some of them structure things a little differently, but what they’ve done is the same thing that Hollis Scarborough did in 2009 by adding some variables that maybe were being ignored. There’s nothing wrong with that, for the most part (thought I might disagree with some of the additions). None of these models, it must be remembered, are about how to teach — they’re all about what it is you need to know to be a reader.
Brandon: Teachers are hearing a lot, and I imagine it must be hard to cut through all the noise that’s coming out right now. I did want to ask you a question that was asked to me by a teacher: “How can I be sure that what I’m doing is supported by the Science of Reading?”
Dr. Shanahan: You know, I get asked the question quite a bit, and we’ve got some problems in the field. Certainly, one problem in our field — and it’s a long-standing problem that I’ve written about, and I’ve talked about over the years — is our teaching force and our principal force are not research trained. For the most part, it’s very rare that those folks would have even a single course in research; how to read it, how to understand it. And that, that’s problematic. It makes it very, very difficult for teachers to keep up with a burgeoning field where there are so many studies that get published. I think it’s really, really difficult for teachers to keep up. There are a handful of sources, things like the What Works Clearinghouse, which is the Department of Education’s attempt to put out research-based information, that I would certainly tell teachers to turn to. I work like crazy on my blog to try to make it clear when I’m giving an opinion and when I’m summarizing research and I always stress the importance of trusting the research over my opinion. I wish everybody were quite as scrupulous about that.
Teachers definitely can subscribe to journals and do things like that. There are a number of good research journals in the field. But I think what happens to most teachers isn’t that they are having trouble finding research. It’s that they are inundated by other people claiming the teachers need to do particular things because of research. “You have to buy this product, you have to teach like this because the research says….” In those cases, I think what teachers need to do is insist on knowing what is the research evidence that is supposedly the basis of what they are being told to do — they must be a little bit of a pain in the neck to those people who are telling them what to do on the supposed basis of research. Quite often such claims have no real evidentiary support, perhaps the approach hasn’t even been evaluated. Those gaps are best exposed by teachers asking hard questions about the supposed evidence supporting claims.
For example, teachers can ask, “You said, the research [basis behind the program or instruction] is the Science of Reading — could you point out the studies that support that idea?” And quite often, what you find out is they can’t. They’ll say, “Well, there aren’t really studies on that, but we just thought logically that made sense…” Well, you know, what you think logically makes sense isn’t the Science of Reading. The Science of Reading really requires data. It really requires analysis; it really requires that you go through a refereeing process so that other scientists are looking at this information.
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