FAQ: What Is the Science of Reading?
Literacy is the foundation for success in school and beyond. But reading isn’t an innate skill. We’re not born with it. If we want students to succeed in reading, writing, and life, we must give them the tools to do so.
Disciplines like the science of reading help us understand the cognitive processes necessary for all students to become proficient in reading. But before implementing this science- and data-backed instruction, we must first answer important questions like: “What is the science of reading?” to see how it works and how to best use it in your classrooms, schools, and districts:
Why does building skilled readers with the science of reading matter?
What should educators know about science of reading research?
How to support educators on science of reading best practices
What is the science of reading?
The science of reading (SoR) is a scientifically-based, research-backed field of study designed to understand how students learn to read and build knowledge. Its purpose is to discover how students become proficient readers and writers, why some have difficulty reaching those milestones, and how educators can effectively teach and improve student outcomes in reading and writing.
The science of reading provides the strongest evidence about how students learn to read—more than any other body of work on the topic. One of the main goals of the discipline’s research is to address reading difficulties in at-risk early learners and help those who are falling behind in older grades. SoR includes data and information from multiple fields and disciplines, including:
Cognitive, developmental, and school psychology
Communication and implementation science
Education
Linguistics
Neuroscience
As an ever-evolving discipline, there is new research and evidence added constantly. SoR is not “complete,” nor is it a playbook educators can follow step-by-step in schools and expect them to just learn how to read. In fact, the science of reading is not:
A curriculum your school or district can buy
A phonics program to drill students on skills
A tool teachers can implement in the classroom to improve assessment scores
Instead, the science of reading is a living, evolving framework. New studies are always happening to collect more data and refine what we know. The framework includes more than just basic research on how and why people can learn to read.
It’s focused on instructional practices backed by science to show which methods are most effective for teaching reading. New research pushes the boundaries of what we know about reading to help us serve the diverse groups of students in our classrooms.
What are the key areas of the science of reading?
Though science of reading research is always evolving, experts over the years and across disciplines have pinpointed five common key areas essential for helping readers learn word recognition and language comprehension. These five pillars of the science of reading include:
Phonemic awareness: The ability to identify and manipulate phonemes in spoken words
Phonics: Learning the alphabetic system—which is the relationship between letters and sounds and how they correspond to spelling patterns—and using that knowledge to decode words
Fluency: The ability to read text aloud accurately, quickly, and expressively
Vocabulary: Identifying word meanings individually and in the context of a text
Comprehension: The ability to understand what you hear and read
Why does building skilled readers with the science of reading matter?
Results of national exams show that two-thirds of U.S. students aren’t proficient in reading. Even more of them struggle with content knowledge in subjects like U.S. history and civics. This problem goes deeper than underperforming test scores. It can have consequences beyond primary and secondary school and even into adulthood.
Almost half of high school graduates report that they had gaps in their education, with many citing inadequate preparation related to literacy skills and content knowledge. In the workforce, employers consider written communication and critical thinking—which both rely on literacy skills and content knowledge—as two important career readiness competencies. Yet only 47 percent of employers feel that recent graduates are highly proficient in communication, and 55 percent feel they’re highly proficient in critical thinking.
This gap reveals the long-lasting effects of poor literacy instruction. By intervening early with evidence-based methods, like science-of-reading-backed approaches, we can attempt to close this gap and set all students up to become skilled readers.
Science of reading frameworks
Over the last five decades, researchers have collected instructional and scientific data from a variety of worldwide sources. They’ve analyzed thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages to build the science of reading body of research.
This collective inquiry debunked reading instruction methods used over the years that didn’t have scientific evidence to back them up. It also spawned instructional frameworks, like Scarborough’s reading rope, the active view of reading, and the simple view of reading.
While these frameworks differ in their approaches to reading instruction, they have three primary components in common: Word recognition, language comprehension, and reading comprehension:
Learning to read through word recognition
Before students can understand and make meaning from a text, they must be able to read the words on the page accurately and fluently. In school, teaching students how to read often begins in kindergarten by helping them “crack the alphabetic code.” To do this, educators must explicitly teach students how letters represent the sounds of speech.
After students can make the connection that written letters paired with sounds make words, recognizing them becomes the major focus. To be able to recognize words, students must develop:
Phonological awareness: Identifying and manipulating the sounds of spoken language
Decoding skills: Sounding out unfamiliar words
Sight recognition: Identifying common words that become familiar through repeated practice
Each one of these things is an acquired skill, meaning we’re not born knowing how to do it. Cognitive science shows that learning acquired skills—like reading or playing the violin—requires repetition and external motivation.
To make the skill stick, students must practice it often and receive explicit instruction, encouragement, and support from someone who’s already mastered it. Reading can be an extra tricky acquired skill to teach because educators also have to be conscious not to overload a student’s working memory during instruction.
Working memory is a part of the brain that processes new information. It has a limited capacity. If there’s too much new information in working memory, it becomes overloaded and shuts down. This makes it more difficult—if not impossible—for students to learn a new skill until the load on their working memory decreases. When students start learning to read, all the skills they need to learn are new, causing these overloads to happen.
As beginning readers work on building oral reading fluency—their ability to read a text quickly, smoothly, and with expression—they can offload some of the strain on their working memory. The more practice they have, the more second nature this process becomes. Oral reading fluency typically becomes automatic when students are able to read about 150 words per minute successfully.
Newsela + Science of Reading
Newsela ELA is based on learning science to foster the development of critical knowledge and comprehension skills. See how we help your teachers meet students’ unique learning needs.
Reading to learn through language comprehension
By third grade, text becomes a main source of information for learning in school and signals that students have entered the “reading to learn” phase.
According to the science of reading, once they cross this threshold, typically developing readers have achieved sufficient reading fluency and can focus more of their time and attention on advanced skills that support reading comprehension.
But this doesn’t mean they stop learning how to read. Students must continue developing their literacy skills alongside building content knowledge to understand more advanced texts as they progress through school. Students do this by learning and using language comprehension skills like:
Language structures: Learning how the order of words in sentences creates meaning.
Background knowledge: Connecting personal experiences, world events, and other texts or media to what you’re reading.
Vocabulary: Learning new words and their meanings and how to use them contextually when speaking and writing.
Literacy knowledge: Discovering how to recognize and use print concepts and literary conventions like genres and text features.
Verbal reasoning: Using the other language comprehension skills to analyze, predict, and draw inferences and conclusions about what you're reading.
Metacognition: Being able to monitor your own comprehension and go back to re-read when you don’t understand something at first
During this phase, students have a foundation of oral fluency and language and these skills have moved into their long-term memory. Unlike in working memory, knowledge in long-term memory organizes information into smaller, more manageable units called schemas. Using relevant schemas from long-term memory frees up working memory to intake, process, and think critically about new information, like learning language comprehension skills.
Reading comprehension
Students use their language foundations, word recognition skills, and language comprehension skills to understand what they read. We refer to students who have reached this stage as skilled readers. They’ve moved beyond simply viewing or reciting explicit words on a page and now understand a text’s deeper meaning.
As texts become more complex, readers must become strategic in implementing the literacy skills they learn to make meaning from what they read. Background and content knowledge stored in students' long-term memory becomes increasingly necessary as readers must rely on what they already know to identify important ideas and strive to make logical connections between them.
What should educators know about science of reading research?
Scholars have formally studied reading for over 125 years, with the seminal National Reading Panel report serving as a key resource for nearly 25 of those years. Education researchers make new discoveries all the time, but many of the core tenets of reading research stay the same, thanks to scientific evidence. When reading up on this research, it’s important to rely on trustworthy, qualified sources with a true basis in science. Here are some things to consider when evaluating resources and research:
Is the content peer-reviewed?: Peer-reviewed studies have been examined by a group of objective content experts. This is a minimum standard for trustworthiness for scientific research that appears in journals like “Scientific Studies of Reading” and the “Journal of Literacy Research.”
Has the study been replicated?: A single study, no matter how well planned or executed, isn’t enough to be considered evidence. Look for articles with “review” or “meta-analysis” in the title, which synthesize results from many research studies.
Does the information come from a trusted source?: Certain organizations, like What Works Clearinghouse and The Best Evidence Encyclopedia from Johns Hopkins University School of Education, evaluate educational research using a list of rigorous, federally mandated criteria. You can trust they’ll provide up-to-date and accurate information about the science of reading.
Another consideration is whether you’re looking at quantitative or qualitative studies. Quantitative studies use statistical analysis to observe, count, and compare data. Some use experimental methods to help determine causes and effects and rule out alternative explanations for an outcome. Others look for correlations between things like instructional practices and student outcomes to learn more about how these measures hang together. While correlational studies can’t pinpoint the cause of an outcome, they can provide promising evidence for educational practice.
Qualitative studies answer questions about how or why something happens. They rely primarily on methods like observations, interviews, and focus groups. Qualitative researchers look for themes and patterns in their rich datasets to understand an outcome. Qualitative research can help us better understand the results of a quantitative study.
Some studies use mixed methods, which are both qualitative and quantitative. These can provide more information than one type alone, but they’re also more complex to design and interpret.
Do educators need more training on science of reading best practices?
Even though the National Reading Panel cemented most science of reading fundamentals in 2000, many students still read below grade level. For years, teachers weren’t given the knowledge and tools they needed to provide evidence-based reading instruction. Minimal professional development on the topic has led to a gap between how educators understand the science of reading and how it actually works.
Lack of professional development (PD) isn’t the only barrier to implementing evidence-based practices in the classroom, but it’s a big one.
Teachers also need help from the curriculum, such as having phonics-based products or ones that support broader language comprehension skills. Adopting programs and curricula that aren’t research- or science-backed can lead to confusion during reading instruction. If reading instruction isn’t linked to cognitive science or proof of results, you can’t measure or track if it’s working. Especially not in the moment during a lesson when adjusting instruction is critical.
Administrator-level buy-in to research-backed core and supplemental resources and providing professional development on science-of-reading-related topics can have an even more successful impact on teachers and their in-class instruction. With the right knowledge, teachers can better understand how to use the tools available to them and provide the best instruction for students.
Though science of reading PD is helpful, it’s not mandatory for all teachers. Studies show that teachers who get literacy-focused professional development have students who demonstrate better reading outcomes. Additional training could be key to helping teachers implement science of reading best practices and improve student motivation, engagement, and outcomes when learning to read and reading to learn.
Discover how Newsela ELA supports the science of reading
Many districts focus primarily on word-level skills, like decoding and fluency, as they implement the science of reading into their strategic plans. Those skills are critical, but to become skilled readers, students must also be proficient in key language comprehension skills like background knowledge and vocabulary.
Newsela ELA is designed based on learning science to foster the development of these critical knowledge and comprehension skills. It supports language comprehension development through:
15,000+ high-interest texts for knowledge building
Tier II and Tier III vocabulary supports
Teacher lesson suggestions for building skills and strategies
Plus, Newsela ELA supports students’ word recognition skills through:
And it’s all backed by multiple ESSA Tier II efficacy studies! Newsela ELA helps teachers meet students' unique learning needs with science-backed instructional methods they can trust.