Feeling confused about what to do in the early literacy classroom? Wondering about strategies and practices that are better for your students? Worried if you’re doing it “right”?
There’s a lot of talk about the science of reading on the internet lately, and while much is scientifically accurate and useful, some is less supported by science and more supported by fads. In a teaching world where information (good and bad) is just a click away, it’s especially important to consider how scientific a practice or routine really is before you jump in with both feet.
There’s probably a scientific answer to your questions!
We know quite a lot about teaching young children how to read and write. The landmark work of the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000), for example, solidified the importance of explicitly teaching the five pillars of reading – Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Oral Reading Fluency, and Comprehension.
But we can go even deeper!
There is so much scientific research about teaching, to include specifically teaching reading – so much so that sifting through all of it can be overwhelming for a busy practitioner. Helpfully, a researcher named John Hattie has done a lot of the work for you! In a project that has become known as Visible Learning, Hattie has statistically analyzed hundreds upon hundreds of studies to generalize the educational practices that have the highest impact on student learning (and the ones that don’t).
Meet your new friend – Effect Sizes
Hattie works with meta-analyses – a type of statistical analysis that essentially summarizes the effects of multiple scientific studies of a particular practice. For example, Bus and van IJzendoorn (1999) conducted a meta-analysis of studies testing phonological awareness training for children, where they computed the overall effectiveness of teaching PA across many different studies and found it to be highly effective for improving later reading.
Hattie takes this analysis work to the next level by analyzing meta-analyses to compute effect sizes for a given practice, and has compiled a list of 150 highly researched influences on learning to determine average effects of teaching in general (which he calculated to be 0.4, or just under a half-year of learning) and to highlight practices relative to this average. In other words, we can assume that average teaching will have typical effects of about a half-year of learning, but certain exceptional practices can accelerate this learning – sometimes dramatically.
What does this mean for literacy specifically?
Several of the highly effective strategies in Hattie’s meta-analysis are specific literacy practices, such as Phonics Instruction (effect size of 0.7), Spelling Programs (effect size of 0.58), Vocabulary Programs (effect size of 0.68), Repeated Reading (effect size of 0.75), and Reciprocal Teaching (effect size of 0.74). Many others are not literacy specific, but can still be used in the literacy classroom to promote literacy strand learning, such as Concept Mapping (effect size of 0.64) and Interventions for Learning Needs (effect size of 0.77).
Furthermore, Hattie has partnered with Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, two highly influential literacy researchers, to write Visible Learning for Literacy, expanding on Hattie’s meta-analysis work for literacy practices specifically. If you’re looking for practices that have the strongest scientific evidence, their book is definitely for you!
What’s the most influential learning factor of all?
It’s you.
No, really.
According to Hattie’s most recent research, Collective Teacher Efficacy has an effect size of 1.57 – which is huge in the meta-analysis world. When teachers in a school collectively believe that their instructional moves can highly influence children’s learning, and therefore make moves to maximize their instructional quality, children learn and grow.
Your work matters, and your professional growth changes children’s lives.
Which I think is pretty cool.
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