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In 2019, a group of researchers, led by James Kim, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, randomly selected 15 of the district’s 30 elementary schools to teach first-graders special skills. Knowledge building lessons For three years until the third grade. Kim, a reading specialist, and other researchers developed two sets of multi-year lesson plans, one for science and one for social studies. Students were also given relevant books to read during the summer. (This research was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of several funders of the Hechinger Report.)
The district’s remaining 15 elementary schools continued to educate their students as usual, still offering some social studies and science education, but not these special lessons. The regular reading class was not affected in the experiment. All 30 schools were using the same reading curriculum, Exploratory learningWhich follows the science of reading principles and teaches phonics.
COVID-19 hit in the middle of the trial. When schools closed in the spring of 2020, researchers canceled social studies units planned for second-grade students. In 2021, students were still not attending school in person. The researchers reviewed their science curriculum and decided to offer an abbreviated online version to all 30 schools instead of just half of them. In the end, children in the original 15 schools received one year of social studies classes and three years of science classes, compared to only one year of science in the comparison group.
However, the nearly 1,000 students who took private science and social studies lessons in first and second grades outperformed the 1,000 students who only took brief online science in third grade. Their reading and math scores on North Carolina state tests were higher not only in third grade, but also in fourth grade, more than a year after the knowledge-building experiment ended.
This wasn’t a huge boost to reading achievement, but it was significant and long-lasting. It costs about $400 per student in educational materials and teacher training.
Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in this research or the development of these science lessons, praised the study. “The study makes it very clear (as other studies have done recently) that it is possible to combine reading, social studies, and science curricula in effective ways that can improve literacy and content knowledge,” he said via email.
Linking background knowledge to reading comprehension is not a new idea. a The famous 1987 experiment She documented that children who were weaker readers but familiar with baseball understood a reading passage about baseball better than children who were stronger readers but did not know much about the sport.
It is clearly not realistic for schools to try to introduce students to every topic they might encounter in a book. There is disagreement among researchers about how general knowledge of the world translates into higher reading performance.
Kim believes that the knowledge building curriculum does not need to teach many topics. Random facts don’t matter, he says. It calls for depth rather than breadth. He says it’s important to build a thoughtful series of lessons over the years, allowing students to see how the same patterns appear in different ways. He calls these patterns “charts.” In this experiment, for example, students learned about animal survival in first grade and the extinction of dinosaurs in second grade. In third grade, this developed into a more general understanding of how living systems work. By the end of third grade, many students were able to see how the idea of functioning systems could apply to inanimate objects, such as skyscrapers.
Kim explained that these are patterns that can be likened to new conditions. Once a student becomes familiar with the template, it can be easier to understand new text about an unfamiliar topic.
Kim and his team also linked the science lessons to sets of vocabulary that would likely appear again in the future — almost like pairing wine with a meal.
The full benefits of this type of knowledge building are not realized until after several years of coordinated teaching. In the early years, students could only transfer their ability to understand text on one topic to another if the topics were very similar. This study suggests that the deeper their content knowledge, the greater their ability to generalize as well.
There’s a lot going on here: a progressive curriculum that revisits topics and builds on them year after year; Clear teaching of basic patterns; New vocabulary, progressing from simple to complex.
There are many versions of the knowledge-rich curriculum, and this is not about exposing students to classical laws. It is still unclear whether all knowledge-building approaches work as well. Other programs sometimes replace the main reading class with knowledge-building lessons. This did not tamper with regular reading classes.
The biggest challenge with the approach used in North Carolina’s experiment is that it requires schools to coordinate lessons across grades. this is difficult. Some teachers may want to keep their favorite units, for example, Growing Beans, and may feel irritated at the thought of throwing away their old lesson plans.
It’s also worth noting that students’ math scores improved as much as their reading scores in the North Carolina trial. It may seem surprising that a literacy intervention would also enhance mathematics. But mathematics also requires a lot of reading; State math tests were full of word problems. The researchers explained that any successful effort to enhance reading skills is likely to have positive effects on mathematics.
School leaders are under great pressure to boost test scores. To do this, they often doubled the time they spent reading and cut science and social studies lessons. Studies like this one suggest that these reductions may have been costly, undermining rather than improving reading achievement. As researchers discover more about the science of reading, it may turn out that more time on the science itself is what kids need to become good readers.
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