The science of reading: The accumulated, interdisciplinary body of knowledge from psychological, educational and related research about the reading process and its components, reading development and difficulties, and best practices for reading instruction and assessment. Scholars from various backgrounds such as education, psychology, speech-language science and other fields make significant contributions to both the basic science of reading and the applied science of teaching reading.
Adapted from Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology
The New York Times recently asked top education researchers to rate the most effective ways to boost student achievement, which for 10 years has lagged in the United States.
The group ranked science of reading in its top two recommendations for the best ways to improve education outcomes, behind small-group tutoring. The caveat, the experts cautioned, is that reading science and aligned interventions can only be successful when they are well-implemented in classrooms.
“In the real world,” the article noted, “a lot can fall apart in the details.”
That idea is the thrust behind a new, multi-million-dollar strategy at The Ohio State University. The Reading and Writing Research and Practice initiative will employ new and existing faculty to research and implement the “science of teaching reading” — supporting emerging and practicing teachers in how to best implement teaching practices aligned with reading and writing science in their classrooms.
The university and the College of Education and Human Ecology will fund $2.2 million to launch the initiative. Grants and other resources are expected to follow. The effort demonstrates the university’s commitment to align with state expectations around science of reading, said Erik Porfeli, interim dean of the college.
“Also, the new investment from the university allows us the opportunity to identify new colleagues to bring to Ohio State to strengthen our expertise in science of teaching reading,” he said. Two new faculty members will be hired.
Distinguished Professor Shayne Piasta will direct the initiative. She has conducted more than 50 research studies, contributing to the body of science by evaluating reading programs, curricula and teacher knowledge.
“We have more and more evidence — not just about important components of how reading and writing develop — but about best practices grounded in research that can help teachers most efficiently and effectively support the learning needs of their students,” Piasta said. “We’re really zeroing in to identify evidence-based practices for teaching.”
“By investing in this initiative, we are not only infusing (the science) throughout our teacher pre-service and in-service programs, but we also will be the ones to actually conduct that research,” she said.
In step with a national movement
The science of reading establishes that fluent decoding — helping students match letters and letter patterns to sounds, piece them together to make words and, with practice, to do so quickly and automatically — plus language comprehension are critical components of reading.
Forty-two states, including Ohio since 2023, mandate that their schools use foundational decoding instruction to teach children to read. This is often referred to as phonics. Similar efforts are underway to boost classroom language learning.
Nationally, reading scores for 9-year-olds in 2025 increased by 4 points over 2022, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, but remained unchanged for 13-year-olds. State-level data won’t be available until 2027, but in 2024, Ohio scored slightly higher than the national average.
Not all states that have adopted science of reading practices have realized meaningful gains, and the national average is still below pre-pandemic scores. Capitalizing on this moment will mean translating the reading science into methods that can be easily and accurately implemented by teachers.
The science of reading is incomplete, wrote Young-Suk Kim of the University of California, Irvine, without the science of teaching reading. Kim has collaborated with Piasta studying the implementation and effectiveness of LETRS, a popular teacher professional learning program.
Research that teachers can use to impact
Ohio State will work in alignment with the state to implement its research findings and others’ through college instruction and professional development. Under the initiative, undergraduate teaching students will have an opportunity to participate in research to strengthen their knowledge.
The objectives: Cultivate an accurate and nuanced understanding of reading science in the state and across the nation; generate evidence-based practices to support reading and writing; and determine how to collaborate with educators to apply it in the real world. That body of knowledge will engage multiple disciplines — education, psychology, human development and speech pathology — as the fields match to oral language and vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonics knowledge, fluency, comprehension, writing, motivation and engagement.
More than just conducting studies, the college plans to capture data and feedback from the field to continually refine and enhance the research.
“It's not a unidirectional ‘take from the research and push that into practice,’” Piasta said. “Teachers are bringing their own expertise to every context. Teachers have students with varied learning needs. What a researcher thinks might be a great thing to do within classrooms may not be feasible at all.”
“We're really thinking about, how can we take (the science) and make it bidirectional? Make sure that we're using research to inform practice, but we're also using what we know about practice to feed back into the research.”
The initiative will enhance partnerships between preschool and K-12 schools — plus partnerships within the university and among other Ohio universities — to drive statewide impact on reading and writing.
When the science of reading research and the practice align, districts and educators can truly move the needle on students’ reading and writing skills, Piasta said.
“We're really thinking about, how can we take (the science) and make it bidirectional? Make sure that we're using research to inform practice, but we're also using what we know about practice to feed back into the research.”
- Shayne Piasta
A focus on writing, also
Even before the push in the early 2020s to align school instruction with the science of reading, some experts were making a case of their own: to include writing science under the umbrella of science of reading.
While different, reading and writing draw on the same cognitive mechanisms and the same processes, science shows.
“The more we know about writing and reciprocal relations between reading and writing,” Piasta said, “the more I'm convinced that it is absolutely critical that we think about not just reading, but also what we know from research about how writing develops — science of writing — and also what we know about best ways to support students as they are learning to write.”
The Reading and Writing Research and Practice initiative will incorporate writing into its research and into teacher training.
In keeping with the university’s AI Fluency Initiative, the reading initiative will also embed AI and digital literacy into the undergraduate curriculum.
“For school districts to be more effective, we need to accelerate our understanding of the impact of technology and how to best incorporate it,” Porfeli said. “The faster we do that, the quicker we get to the place where we're maximizing the benefit of AI and minimizing the harm. To the extent this initiative accelerates innovation between higher ed and K-12 education, the better for all of us.”
Managed properly, AI can help advance reading proficiency and deepen students’ learning while also reinforcing limits, Piasta said.
“Some of the tools that have been put out there allow teachers to use AI to create books that map to the skills and interests of specific kids in their classrooms,” she said. “So that's an area where we want to do research and understand how that might be helping.”
A time for dreaming big
Over a child’s lifetime, literacy will impact their employment prospects, college success, health outcomes and even chance of incarceration. The end goal of the Reading and Writing Research and Practice Initiative is to help young people to read and write more effectively, Porfeli said.
The college has partnered for months with President Ravi Bellamkonda, Interim Provost Trevor Brown and the Office of Government Affairs to launch the initiative.
“I'm very fortunate to be a part of a leadership team that understands the importance of literacy in Ohio,” Porfeli said, “and is willing to devote appreciable resources, time, talent, treasure to not only adapt to state law changes, but also to position us as a leader moving forward.”
Now is the time to dream big.
“I believe that Ohio State has a rare opportunity to align with this major statewide change and to be the partner of the whole state,” he said. “I don't just mean state government. I mean the K-12 school districts across the state; I mean teachers and school administrators; and of course I mean students.”
“We have a great opportunity to truly be a leader, with our other state university partners leading along with us.”
