The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading

By Nell K. Duke, Kelly B. Cartwright. Reading Research Quarterly, 2021

454 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The simple view of reading is commonly presented to educators in professional development about the science of reading. The simple view is a useful tool for conveying the undeniable importance— in fact, the necessity— of both decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading. Research in the 35 years since the theory was proposed has revealed additional understandings about reading. In this article, we synthesize research documenting three of these advances: (1) Reading difficulties have a number of causes, not all of which fall under decoding and/or listening comprehension as posited in the simple view; (2) rather than influencing reading solely independently, as conceived in the simple view, decoding and listening comprehension (or in terms more commonly used in reference to the simple view today, word recognition and language comprehension) overlap in important ways; and (3) there are many contributors to reading not named in the simple view, such as active, selfregulatory processes, that play a substantial role in reading. We point to research showing that instruction aligned with these advances can improve students’ reading. We present a theory, which we call the active view of reading, that is an expansion of the simple view and can be used to convey these important advances to current and future educators. We discuss the need to lift up updated theories and models to guide practitioners’ work in supporting students’ reading development in classrooms and interventions. The simple view of reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) is widely used to explain the science of reading to classroom teachers and others involved in reading education and to guide instructional practice (e.g., Moats, Bennett, & Cohen, 2018; Rose, 2006, 2017). In fact, a Google search finds that the terms science of reading and simple view appear together in websites over 71,000 times, and although 35 years old, the theory is cited more often now than ever. Yet, science progresses. Our purpose in this article is to describe three key advances that have emerged in the scientific evidence since the formulation of the SVR. We identify research studies that have shown that instruction aligned with each of these advances improves students’ reading. We also present a model of reading that can be used to convey these important advances to current and future educators so as to better align instructional practice with the evolving science of reading. Although a number of more complex models of reading have been proposed and shown to hold up well in research (e.g., Cromley & Azevedo, 2007; Joshi & Aaron, 2000; Kim, 2017), the SVR has remained the model most commonly presented to practitioners. This is likely partly because of lack of awareness of some modelbuilding and Nell K. Duke University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77e28bd214db9574d488da8cd573cb4f12c74135