What Constitutes a Science of Reading Instruction?

By T. Shanahan. Reading Research Quarterly, 2020

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, the term science of reading has been used in public debate to promote policies and instructional practices based on research on the basic cognitive mechanisms of reading, the neural processes involved in reading, computational models of learning to read, and the like. According to those views, such data provide convincing evidence that explicit decoding instruction (e.g., phonological awareness, phonics) should be beneficial to reading success. Nevertheless, there has been pushback against such policies, the use of the term science of reading by “phonics-centric people”, and their lack of instructional knowledge and experience. In this article, although the author supports pedagogical decision making on the basis of a confluence of evidence from a variety of sources, he cautions against instructional overgeneralizations based on various kinds of basic research without an adequate consideration of instructional experiments. The author provides several examples of the premature translation of basic research findings into wide-scale pedagogical application. Science of reading is a term that has been used for more than 200 years. Throughout this history, it has been used most frequently to refer to the pronunciation and decoding of words on the basis of basic research. In this article, I situate the term historically and recommend caution in formulating agendas of instructional practice or policy primarily or solely on the basis of basic research. As such, I make claims about the nature of the empirical evidence that should comprise any science of reading instruction. The purpose of research in any field of study, including reading education, is to increase our knowledge comprehensively about reading and its development. Yet, because reading is widely accepted as a public good, reading research also has a more specific responsibility. It should help determine how best to increase the literacy franchise, to raise levels of literacy performance, to ensure equal access, and to make the delivery of reading instruction more certain and more efficient. That first goal, the comprehensive expansion of knowledge, is not my focus here, but the second one, figuring out how best to teach reading and to use these results to inform instructional practice and public policy, is what I will explore. In current use of the term science of reading, authors often try to make pedagogical and policy claims mainly on the basis of basic research done in the cognitive sciences and neurosciences, particularly with regard to beginning reading (e.g., Seidenberg, 2017). As such, the term is a bit of a misnomer because those using it today tend to reason directly Timothy Shanahan University of Illinois at Chicago, USA What Constitutes a Science of Reading Instruction?

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology

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