In 2010, the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education funded a bold and innovative research initiative called Reading for Understanding (RFU).
This initiative established a research and development network comprising five core teams and one assessment team that would collectively engage in intensive, applied research designed to substantially advance the field of reading comprehension – both in terms of improving our fundamental understanding of reading comprehension as a cognitive process, and in terms of developing interventions that effectively improve reading comprehension among children and adolescents.
With more than $100 million provided to support the initiative, analogies were made between RFU and the effort to land a person on the moon set forth in 1961: “Surely the goal of teaching our children how to read for understanding is as important to each child and to the nation as a whole as being the first country to reach the moon… a tightly networked and coordinated group of social scientists can work together to accomplish the goal of rapidly increasing the nation’s ability to teach children how to read for understanding,” said the IES program description.
Improve language skills to improve reading comprehension
The Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC), one of the six RFU core teams, was based in EHE and involved Laura Justice, Shayne Piasta, Ann O’Connell, Richard Lomax, Jessica Logan, Jill Pentimonti and numerous professional research staff, graduate students, undergraduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
LARRC also involved co-investigators at Arizona State University, Florida State University, Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Kansas and Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
The work of this consortium was focused specifically on improving our understanding of the language bases of reading comprehension or, put simply, the way in which language skills facilitate the development of reading comprehension. Our work included a longitudinal study of children from four to nine years of age, as well as experimental work developing and testing language-focused interventions to examine effects on children’s reading comprehension.
The emerging results of the team’s effort have been published in Child Development; Reading Research Quarterly; Elementary School Journal; Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; and Educational Psychology Review.
Creating an intervention to improve reading comprehension
One outcome of LARRC’s effort is the development of a curricular supplement – Let’s Know! - designed to improve children’s reading comprehension by targeting growth in language skills.
Let’s Know! was developed through two years of design studies (2010-2012), followed by a quasi-experimental pilot study (2012-2013) and a multi-state randomized controlled trial (2013-2015). Let’s Know! provides a scope and sequence of instructional objectives designed to enhance children’s lower-level (grammar, vocabulary) and higher-level language skills (comprehension monitoring, inferencing, text structure knowledge). The scope of instruction appears in the “Let’s Know! Scope of Instruction.”
Separate but aligned versions are available for each of five grades, transcending pre-kindergarten to third grade. Each version includes 25 weeks of lessons organized into four units, as well as progress-monitoring assessments and professional development modules. The design studies conducted were important for creating a curricular supplement that teachers could use with relatively high levels of fidelity, so that children were exposed to all of the targeted objectives.
Measuring success
The results of the two-year randomized controlled trial testing Let’s Know! are currently being analyzed. However, some initial findings from the design studies and pilot work have been published, suggesting that the curricular supplement has promising effects when used within pre-K to grade three settings.
One paper examined the effects of Let’s Know! on the quality of language arts instruction (LARRC, Pratt, & Logan, 2015). This study involved 60 classrooms (12 per each of pre-K to grade 3) and quasirandom assignment of teachers to implement versions of Let’s Know! (experimental group, n = 40) or to maintain their usual approach to language arts instruction (control group, n = 20).
The goal of this study was to determine whether teachers’ use of Let’s Know! appeared to elevate the quality of their instruction. We used two measures to assess instructional quality: the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) and Snippets. CLASS is a commerically available observational tool that captures the global quality of the instructional environment. Snippets is a LARRC-developed observational tool that captures teachers’ use of 18 practices that exemplify high-quality comprehension instruction, such as making predictions and drawing inferences.
This study showed that language arts instruction provided by the teachers using Let’s Know! was substantially higher in quality as assessed with both measures.
Another study examined the effects of teachers’ use of Let’s Know! on student outcomes, focusing specifically on implementation within pre-kindergarten classrooms (LARRC, Johanson, & Arthur, in press). Participants were 22 teachers, 11 of whom implemented one of two variations of Let’s Know! for 21 weeks and 11 of whom maintained their typical language arts practices during the same time period.
A subset of children within each classroom was randomly selected to complete pre- and post-test assessments of their language skills in the fall and spring of the academic year. Results suggested that children exposed to Let’s Know! made greater gains than those in control classrooms over the academic year.
Currently, the LARRC team is developing a website through which the Let’s Know! materials can be made freely available to the public. At the same time, team members are exploring future research ideas for continuing to investigate the effects of Let’s Know!, such as its applicability to reading instruction for children with disabilities.
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2015 issue of In Review, the EHE Office of Research Newsletter.
