Three Key Lessons from the READS Lab Summer Institute

In July, the READS Lab convened districts from across the country to learn how the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), an elementary science and social studies program that builds schemas and improves academic achievement, can fit into and bolster their existing literacy ecosystems.Here are three of the most important takeaways:

Lesson #1: Schemas help students find a home for their knowledge.

What are schemas?

Schemas are invisible mental structures on which we hang new knowledge. They allow us to organize, store, retrieve, and apply knowledge efficiently.

They can be thought of in many ways—“the glue that holds the clues,” or like a tree on which the leaves of knowledge hang.

Schemas can also be thought of as a mental home for knowledge. When you teach a basket of facts to kids with no underlying schema behind it, they may learn what you taught that day, but if they are unable to find a home for it, it may not last to be retrieved farther in the future. 

Schemas, however, allow students to organize, retrieve, and use knowledge—and by doing so, they help knowledge travel far, so students can understand unfamiliar topics using their familiar schemas.

The MORE curriculum uses schemas to help students build on previous units; for example, learning how paleontologists study dinosaur fossils helps them understand distant topics later on, like how archaeologists study the ancient city of Pompeii or how genealogists study our ancestors. 

Lesson #2: Unwinding Scarborough’s Rope—students need strong ropes to climb complex literary structures.

When teaching students to become skilled readers, schools often focus on word recognition skills like phonological awareness and decoding, key components of Scarborough’s reading rope. Though they are an important part of reading, these skills are also fixed, finite, and fixable. In other words, they are constrained skills, with a ceiling for mastery. After all, there are only 44 phonemes in the English language.

By contrast, language comprehension skills, like vocabulary and background knowledge, have no ceiling. 

In reading assessments, students are asked to navigate and understand nonfiction texts with strong vocabulary and background knowledge demands—complex structures that require a strong rope to climb. 

As the READS Lab team knows, it is important to make sure that a hyperfocus on word recognition doesn’t crowd out the development of essential skills, like background knowledge & vocabulary. By building schemas—underlying structures of knowledge which dive deep and help students see connections between concepts—the MORE curriculum drives lasting improvements in students outcomes.

Lesson #3: Early literacy isn’t built in ELA classes alone. 

In many districts, core tested subjects—reading and math—take up extra class time at the expense of classes like science and social studies (Tyner and Kabourek, 2020). Based upon the misunderstanding that providing extra time and practice with ELA assists lower performing students across the nation, access to science and social studies time is not equitably provided to all students.  

These tested subjects also tend to have more formal research-backed curricula, whereas social studies and science classes often have more informal, local, and cobbled-together curricula (Dilberti, Woo, and Kaufman, 2023).

Yet, these classes are a key component of an overall literacy strategy and system. Reading and ELA classes alone cannot bear the sole responsibility for teaching students to read.

The MORE curriculum is not an ELA curriculum—it is a social studies and science curriculum.

But students who used the MORE curriculum as a complement to the regular ELA curriculum scored higher in both reading and math, and gained 2.5 months of additional literacy learning. This effect size is larger than a student being taught for two consecutive years by a teacher with 5+ years of experience instead of a novice teacher—and MORE is only 3-6 weeks long.  

Moreover, through the use of schemas, MORE’s learning travels far. Students scored better on both “near transfer” and “far transfer”—measures of how much topics differ from the original content learned—and the effects persist 26 months after program completion in both ELA and math on state standardized assessments.

References 

Diliberti, M. K., Woo, A., & Kaufman, J. H. (2023). The Missing Infrastructure for Elementary (K-5) Social Studies Instruction: Findings from the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey. Research Report. RR-A134-17. Rand Corporation.

Kim, J. S., Gilbert, J. B., Relyea, J. E., Rich, P., Scherer, E., Burkhauser, M. A., & Tvedt, J. N. (2024). Time to Transfer: Long-Term Effects of a Sustained and Spiraled Content Literacy Intervention in the Elementary Grades. Developmental Psychology.

Tyner, A., & Kabourek, S. (2020). Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Effect size translations come from Kane, T. J., Rockoff, J. E., & Staiger, D. O. (2008). What does certification tell us about teacher effectiveness? Evidence from New York City. Economics of Education Review, 27(6), 615-631.

_________________________________________________________________________

Curious about MORE? Want to join next summer’s learning institute and bring MORE to your district? Sign up to receive more information and follow along on LinkedIn (@READS Lab at Harvard University; @Center for Education Policy Research).