S1-07. The missing link in reading comprehension: Anne Lucas

Hey listeners, it's not too late to submit nominations for the 5th annual Science of Reading Star Awards. Are you or someone you know building background knowledge, implementing interventions or focusing on comprehension? We want to celebrate you and the impact you're making every day. Learn more and nominate a literacy leader from your life today at Amplify.com/SOR Star Awards. What if a change in classroom practice could lead to change in reading outcomes? What should reading instruction include to ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed? What does cognitive science tell us about learning to read and why aren't those learnings applied in our classrooms? Welcome to Science of Reading the Podcast. I'm your host Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. Join us every two weeks as we talk with science of reading experts to explore what it takes to transform our classrooms and develop confident and capable readers. And Lucas is our guest today as we tackle the topic of comprehension. Specifically we dig into what Anne refers to as the missing link. An area of comprehension that often gets a little attention or instruction. Our discussion takes a deep dive into comprehension both during and after interactions with text. Keep your ears open. I think you'll learn something new. Hello, Anne. Thank you so much for joining us today. Of course. Thank you for having me, Susan. You know, we always like to start these these episodes by just asking people about their backgrounds and what was your journey that actually led you to the place that you're at and we're actually going to be talking about comprehension today which was super exciting. But how did you get here? Yeah, one of my favorite topics. I started my career working in schools as a teacher. I was an academic dean for grades K through two and a curriculum director for grades K through four. And in each of those roles without fail the thing that was always hardest for me and for the teachers that I was working with was reading comprehension. And in particular like what I always found to be really challenging about it was it was so hard to figure out why students were confused or like what was the one thing that I could alter in my instruction to help them. And like the scenario that so familiar to me is sitting down to read with a student listening to them read beautifully perfect coding, perfect fluency. And then I asked them something after they read like what's the problem in the story or what's the main idea of what you just read. And they say something just like completely walkie and you know you're just kind of left sitting there like wait did we just read the same book like what just happened. And so it just made me realize how comprehension is so multifaceted and there are so many pieces to the puzzle. And it was just always something I wanted to learn more about so I could get better at teaching it and help others get better at teaching it as well. Yeah that's great. And so what you're doing right now actually is you're working for Amplify and you're working on a specific, specific product just tell us a little bit about that product that you're working on and how this idea of comprehension you know relates to that. Yeah absolutely. So our the name of the product is Amplify Reading and it is a K through eight digital supplemental program that covers all aspects of reading from phonics all the way up to close reading and comprehension. And I think as part of building this one of the big questions that we were asking ourselves was how can we create a program that is going to help teachers teach or not teach comprehension but how can it help teachers with comprehension. And what are some of these skills that we can include that will that will kind of move the needle for students as they're reading. And we started to kind of go down a research path that sort of led us to you know there are a variety of these different what we call comprehension micro skills that are at play as students are reading. And you know I think that we we started to just create more and more activities in our program around that that we saw you know would really help students with comprehension. That's that's really cool because we haven't spent a lot of time on our science of reading podcasts talking about like specific aspects if you will of the simple view of reading we've talked about them sort of in big ideas and big buckets but really today that this idea of comprehension we're going to sort of dig down into the weeds of what that looks like. And so it's really cool that in in the you know the process of creating a product like that you had to do this deep dive into comprehension which is a really complex task. And there's a lots of like the orchestration of a lot of different things need to happen. So maybe we should just start by having you define for us in general terms what comprehension is. I think sometimes we take it for granted that everybody knows what we're talking about. Yeah so this is a tough question because I think there's a lot of different definitions of what comprehension so I'll is and so I'll share what what it is to me and what it means to me. And to me comprehension is making sense and meaning while you read so you have the ability to discuss, analyze and form an opinion about something after you read it. And I will say that my definition has changed a little bit since I've kind of been looking more into this comprehension research. I would often a lot of times think about it as something that just kind of happened after students read. Like I think of the really common image that when you think of comprehension is student reads a book and then the teacher and the student, the teacher starts to ask the student questions after they finish reading. So comprehension being what happens after it's like the papers they write, the questions they ask or the answer. But the more I really started to look into it, the more I saw there's actually a lot more going on while students are reading. That's important to their comprehension overall as well. Interesting. I think I've heard you talk about what you call that missing Lincoln comprehension? Is that sort of what you're getting at? Yeah, exactly. Great. How about you explain more about that? Sure. So, you know, I think this idea of why comprehension is so hard to teach and is there something missing has always kind of been nagging me. And luckily, you know, as I said when I joined Amplify, there was a group of folks here and a group of researchers who were also feeling nagged by the same question. And so we worked with a really large group of researchers, like Jane O'Kill, Kate Kane, I'm not sure if you're familiar with them. And, you know, they also had this nagging feeling about, you know, why is comprehension so difficult and what can we do about it? And the interesting thing was we found that there was a lot of research that had already been done on the importance of comprehension during reading. And it showed that students who struggle with reading comprehension are often also weak in underlying language and literacy skills that are required of them to create like a coherent network of ideas about what they read while they're reading it. So in other words, as students read the picture or the model that they're creating in their mind of what's happening in the text, could be wrong or could be different from another student if they're lacking these certain skills that are collectively being called comprehension micro skills. Interesting. And so this is beyond, I mean, I think we all agree that decoding is an element of this, but these kinds of skills are something different than the idea of decoding. Can you provide some examples of that? Yeah, definitely. And I think they they are different skills. I think it's, you know, I've had the same thought of like, you know, decoding is the thing that happens while kids are reading, right? But I think the truth is that language is just so complex and particularly, you know, as we're asking students to read more and more complex texts, you know, it becomes even more true that the language and interpreting that language is really challenging. So a lot of these skills aren't anything new, but it's just looking at them in the context of reading comprehension is new. So I'll give you an example. If I have a sentence, you know, Peter lent his car to Olivia because she had missed the train. It's pretty easy for all of us to understand it. Who is she referring to? If I were to ask you that, Olivia, did I get that right? You got it right. Good job. So fairly straightforward. And so we can really build this picture easily in our minds, you know, Peter handing the car keys to Olivia because she's rushing out the door to to catch the train or something along those lines. But now if the sentence were to read Peter lent his car to David because he had missed the train. Now who is the he referring to? Hmm. Well, probably David. Right. But you have to kind of pause and think about it. I did. And so that requires what we call like a resolution. Or it's almost like a like a little mini inference to make sense of that where you hear this word he, but now all of a sudden there's Peter and David and you have to kind of make sense of well, who, which one of those two could that be referring to? Right. And think about why it wouldn't make sense if it were Peter. And so for a lot of our beginning readers and struggling readers, that type of resolution, you know, it's essentially like pronoun antecedent resolution. The researchers will often use the fancy term anaphora to describe this. That's a great word. It is. But you know, I think that type of work is really challenging for them. And if they're not kind of taking a pause while they're reading to make sense of that, you know, they might end up with a completely different picture of what that sentence is saying. Well, so that is, I mean, that's comprehension at like a sentence level. Like a reader that could decode would would be able to read that sentence. Maybe decoding all the words in very fluently, but if they didn't understand the connection of that that he the who the he is talking about, I could see where you're you're not going to, you know, gain meaning the appropriate meaning from that. Yeah, exactly. And I think it gets, you know, that I think is a simple example I gave it gets to be even more complex where, you know, if there are noun substitutions and if there or if the they talk a lot about the distance between where the pronoun and its antecedent is and the farther away and is the harder that is for struggling readers. So there's there's a lot of different degrees of difficulty with this as well. So I heard you say that even in your own definition of comprehension, that you used to think of comprehension is what happens after you're done with some portion of a text. So something you would answer something that you would produce after your reading. Right now we're talking about what you're doing while you're reading. So I think I think I've heard you say that there's sort of this distinction then between product or the end goal and process of what's happening during the reading process. Can you talk a little bit more about that distinction? Yeah, definitely. So I think with when you think about the process of or let me take a step back, I think you summarized it perfectly, which is that we often think about comprehension as a product or something that happens after kids read. But I think with the growing body of research around these comprehension microscopy skills, it's showing that the ability for a student to build a model or a network of ideas or a picture in their mind happens while they're reading. It becomes an automatic process eventually. So it's something that's really hard for us as fluent readers to unpack. But it's the idea that as students are reading, this model or this picture or this this network of ideas that they're building is constantly changing as they're learning new information. And so they have to be able to, you know, use that these smaller micro skills to understand what's happening at the sentence level and then apply that to their broader model of what's happening in the story overall, so that they can then have those conversations about, you know, analyzing or discussing what happened in the story. So are there other kinds of skills in this process world that kids, you know, that kids that kids are using or that I maybe not kids are using, maybe I should say it a different way. Are there other examples of this process part that skilled compry hunters use besides the example that you've given us already? Yeah, and what's really interesting about this is there's like, it's a growing body of research that's happening now. So I think I, you know, I mentioned that there's sort of, there's a lot that's already been done. And I think we're still kind of uncovering how all these things work together. And so they're, you know, I think that within the research that we've looked at, there are many skills, maybe as many as like 17 that are playing well. But we've sort of narrowed it down to try to find the ones that are going to have like the biggest bang for your buck essentially. What are the ones that kids really struggle with? But also that have where the research is showing that with repeated practice, students are able to improve their comprehension overall. So we found the one that I mentioned already, which is that the pronoun antecedent relationships are an aphora. Another example is what we call connected words or marker words. And an example of that would be a word like and or but or so or because these words that are, you know, really common to us and often only part of instruction as maybe like a grammar exercise or a writing exercise or something like that. But the idea with those words is that, you know, the purpose of that word in a sentence is really joining two ideas together. So the word and is signifying that the two ideas that that word is connecting are related in some way as opposed to a word like but which is saying that those are different or the word because which is saying that, you know, one of these ideas has a cause and effect relationship with another one of the ideas. And so what the research was showing is that the, you know, struggling readers and particularly with this one English language learners as well, if they don't understand what the meaning of those really seemingly small and inconsequential words is, they're going to struggle with the relationship between the two ideas. So, you know, an example of that could be something like a sentence. The girl scraped her knee because she fell off the bike. So we know that that word because is signifying there's a cause and effect relationship. So if we were to say, you know, why did the girl scraper knee? We could easily say because she fell off the bike. But if you don't really know that that word because it's supposed to signify some type of cause and effect relationship, as you're reading the sentence and building this model in your mind, you might just fill in that gap yourself and say, oh, maybe she scraped her knee on a tree. And then she fell off her bike and have a totally different model in your mind of that sentence. Something that's so seemingly simple to a fluent reader. But then all of a sudden can be easily misinterpreted just by one little word. Wow, that's really interesting. And so then is it, are you saying the the best way for us then to get kids to understand this is an explicit teaching of what those words mean and how they're used and practice with them? Yeah, exactly. And so that's at least for me when I was looking at this research, I think, what made me the most excited is it's it's really easy to target a lot of these skills in your classroom. And, and we particularly focused on a lot of these comprehension micro skills as we were building out amplify reading because the research was showing that repeated practice with them yielded greater results in comprehension overall. So it's something that you can do, you know, you don't have to completely change your curriculum, you don't have to completely change the way you're teaching. It's something where, you know, you can do like a quick little direct instruction on, you know, the word he and what that means and who that's referring to. And then you can start to just point it out in your classroom. You know, if you're doing a read aloud and there's a particularly complex sentence, you know, you can quickly just write it up on a sentence strip and start to have conversations with students about, you know, who, what is this word it referring to, you know, which noun is it referring to and things like that, just to get kids thinking about it. And I think that, you know, what's interesting about these and particularly with the teachers that I've spoken to about this is, you know, a lot of English language learner specialists or speech language pathologists that I've talked to, you know, they're like, oh yeah, of course, you know, we do this all the time. This is like common practice for them. But they've just never thought about it in the context of reading comprehension and how that can really play an important role, not just into students' language abilities, but in their ability to comprehend the text as well. That's that's fascinating because, you know, even me being a teacher and I'm sort of reflecting now back on how I could have done a better job with comprehension. Oh, it's a, it's a curse, isn't it? Yeah. The curse of knowledge, right? But we, like, and I fall into this even now that we interchangeably use the comprehension skills and comprehension strategies. And we think that they mean the same thing, but they actually don't mean the same thing. Can you talk to us about how they're different? Yeah, oh, that's such a good point. A big topic of discussion, I know. And I guess to me, I see skills as being isolated, something that you can practice over and over again and get better at it. Whereas a strategy to me is much more about like thinking and decision-making, how are you going to approach something? How can you change that approach? It doesn't work. It requires a little bit more flexibility. And as it relates to reading, I see skills as being things like I think you brought it up, like phonics instruction. You know, the letters in the book are going to be the same. That's never going to change. And once you kind of cracked that code, you know, that you can apply that to any, any English at least book that you read. But, you know, I think applying a strategy or like, you know, I think one common comprehension strategy that's talked about is like, you know, summarizing or wondering or things like that. You can't apply that in the same way to every book. You might try and it might not work and you need to try something else. And so I think that, you know, a lot of times that can be really challenging. And I think that's partially what makes teaching comprehension so difficult is because it is really different to apply those to every, you know, to different books that you read. And so I think what I'm hoping to advocate for here and talking with you is that there are these comprehension micro skills that can actually follow within that skills category. And it's something related to comprehension that can be practiced over and over again and is going to help improve overall comprehension since those strategies are not something that you can kind of do with like repeated at that practice. Got it. So the idea of understanding these words like "and" and "but" and because, sort of once you master the skill of that, you can generalize that and put that in any kind of context. Exactly. Exactly. And what's really exciting about the research we looked at is it spans, you know, like I said, language, reading, and even writing. I think that once students, particularly with those connective words, I think once students had a really solid grasp of those, you know, the research was showing a really great creativity in how they were combining sentences and putting ideas together. And it's just it's really exciting, I know, for me anyway, because I think anytime you can get a quick win like that in the classroom is huge. Yeah. Yeah, that, you know, it's just another place where we talk about the reciprocity of both reading and writing and being able to apply those skills in both places helps you actually become more competent. Absolutely. Yeah. This seems like a really important distinction, right, about this idea of these comprehension micro skills that we, you know, could really help students in their comprehension process, which will impact then the comprehension product, if you will, at the end. Why do you think it hasn't, you know, these sort of micro skills? Why do you think it hasn't gotten more attention? That's a great question. And the interesting thing is it's, it's not a new concept. There's actually a ton of research on this, and but it largely, as I said, is just as it relates to language skills. And I think that these types of things have either been thought as like a, you know, a language processing exercise or grammar exercises, maybe a little bit in writing. I think it's just that we haven't thought a lot yet about how these apply to reading and to reading comprehension overall. Even though the research is, you know, pretty promising that it can help, you know, with, with all of these aspects of things. So, I'm hoping that it will, it will start to become, you know, more of a topic. And I think already there's been, you know, an increasing amount of research into the role that these micro skills play. Yeah. And I know, for example, you have presented at many conferences and talked to hundreds of educators about this. What's the sort of response you get from them when you introduce this idea of comprehension could be at this sentence level or at this really discrete level? Yeah, it's, there's honestly, there's two responses that I get depending on who's in the room. I think if there are teachers in the room who are English language learner specialists or who work particularly with students who have language processing difficulties, I think for them it's sort of a, you know, yes, of course, we do this all the time. This is a regular part of our instruction. But, and, you know, maybe they hadn't thought about it in terms of reading comprehension, but they quickly see the connection and are kind of like, yes, you know, we will continue to do this. But with, you know, typically, like, general education classroom teachers, they sort of have this like light bulb or eureka moment of like, oh my gosh, you know, I didn't realize that my students might be struggling with this. And I think there was one teacher in particular, who kind of crystallized it perfectly when she said, you know, I always ask my students when they read to make a picture in their mind as they're reading. And I never thought that that picture might, might be different from what I was reading or from what others might be reading, or that they're really having a hard time building that picture. And I thought that was just a really powerful, uh-huh moment of just how important these things are. Yeah, and not only maybe they have a different picture in their head than what I have, maybe kids sitting next to each other have even different pictures in their head. Exactly. Exactly. So we've had a couple episodes where we have been talking about and exploring the importance of background knowledge for reading comprehension. How do you think this serves as an additional element to sort of the background knowledge idea? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I think it's a great compliment to it because I think we, you know, we know background knowledge is incredibly important and it's something that, you know, we need to integrate into instruction and into curriculum. And I think, you know, this, this just sort of complements the idea that the more tools we give kids to grapple with texts and concepts, the better they'll be able to do it. So, you know, I think practicing these, these skills in that way, you know, can only just continue to increase their comprehension overall. Great. And then I would say if we wanted, you mentioned, you mentioned Jane O'Kill and I know she's written a book called Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension. So we will link our listeners to that in the show notes. If folks are looking for like more information to learn more about these sort of comprehension, micro skills, where would you point them? Yeah, so I think Jane O'Kill's book is a great place to start. I also Susan have. So we have a white paper on this topic that I'd be happy to send to you if we can link that in the show notes as well. Absolutely. And I can even put in, I have a couple just like example activity handouts that I have. I'd be happy to link to those as well. Teachers want to grab those in the show notes and hopefully be able to use those right in the classroom. And yeah, I think those would be two good places to start. That's awesome. That's super helpful. This has been just really eye-opening and in me thinking about and in preparing to talk to you today. Again, I, you know, made some new connections myself. And again, I'll say it again, if thinking back to my own classroom, I taught third grade for most of my teaching careers, but how much this actually resonates with what I could have done better in terms of, you know, simple shifts in the instruction to help my students be better comprehenders. But with that, I'd like to just sort of wrap this whole thing up and just I always like to close by saying, you know, what's the one thing you really want our listeners to take away or think about or to consider more about as it relates to this idea of the missing link in comprehension. Oh yeah, one thing. So or two. I mean, I could give it two if you want to. You're very generous. I think the one thing would be just to be mindful that the process of reading comprehension is very multifaceted and encompasses a lot of different skills beyond what we think of typically, which is, you know, usually decoding and fluency, I think is what we think of during reading. And so yeah, I guess I'd say just be mindful that I think there's more at play there and particularly, you know, with our most struggling readers and our English language learners to just just keep that in mind as we're selecting texts, as we're helping them comprehend and helping them just become lifelong readers. Great. Well, thanks so much and really appreciate joining us today. Thank you, Susan. It was a pleasure to be here. We're so grateful to our amazing guest today and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading the Community or send an email to [email protected]. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. Here's it's Susan with a quick announcement. Our listener mailbag is open again and we want to bring your questions about comprehension directly to our expert guests. I think that's a very important question and I think it is a question that many people will have. Please submit your questions about [email protected]/s-o-r mailbag. Bonus points for anyone who submits their question as a voice memo.