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Enjoyment or Skill? The Case of Reading
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 16, 2025

Enjoyment or Skill? The Case of Reading

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Do we want our students to ENJOY math, or to BE SKILLED AT math?

At first, this question sounds like a false choice. Obviously, we want BOTH.

As an English teacher, I want my students to have fun analyzing the books we read…and I want their analyses to have heft, merit, and substance.

I suspect that most teachers, no matter the subject  — Math, English, Chemistry, Religion, Pickleball — want our students to revel in core ideas and arrive at correct answers.

At some times, alas, we probably need to prioritize one or the other. Especially at the beginning of a unit, should I focus on …

… ensuring that my students like this stuff (even if they don’t immediately understand it), or on

… ensuring they understand the stuff (even if they don’t immediately like it)?

In teaching as in life: if I try to accomplish both goals simultaneously, I’m likely to accomplish neither.

Reading Research

I’m not surprised to discover in a recent study that students’ enjoyment of reading correlates with their skill at reading.

That is: students who get high scores on various reading tests report enjoying reading more than their low-test-scoring peers.

Of course, correlation (say it with me) isn’t causation.

Does the enjoyment lead to the skill? The skill lead to the enjoyment?

Both?

Neither?

To answer these questions, Elsje van Bergen’s research team looked at twins in Finland — more than 3500 of them.

In theory, if we ask all the right questions, gather the right data, and run the right calculations, we should glean insight into the correlation/causation question.

So: what did Team van Bergen find?

But First…

Before you read the answers to that question, you might pause to make a committment. Try to decide NOW if you’re inclined to trust this methodology.

That is:

a) you think well-done twin studies are likely to be a good way to answer this question. For that reason, you will be inclined to accept this answer even if you initially disagree with it.

or

b) you think twin studies can’t answer questions about skill and enjoyment. Thus, you will not cite this study to support your beliefs even if it aligns with those beliefs.

If we’re going to use research to make decisions about education, we should be scrupulous about doing so even when research contradicts the conclusions we had initially held.

Answers, and Questions

Now, back to this post’s main narrative…

Unlike many studies, this one can be summarized in a few pithy sentences.

A young student looks at a book open on her desk and scratches her head in confusion

Based on the twin data they analyzed, van Bergen’s team concludes that:

  • reading skill increases reading enjoyment,
  • reading enjoyment has no effect on reading skill,
  • genetics influences both positively.

Unsurprisingly, the stats get all stats-y. But the above-the-fold headlines are that simple.

Because I don’t teach reading, I’ve always hesitated to be too opinionated on the topic. Now that this study is in the wild, I do think it adds a useful perspective while the reading wars rage on.

For instance: teachers whom I like and respect have told me that older methods might not have science behind them, but they’re excellent at “making students feel like readers.”

This claim has always puzzled me. How can a student feel like a reader if s/he can’t read?

Van Bergen’s study, I think, gives me permission to address that point directly: “this study suggests that skill at reading will be the more important place to start in reading instruction.”

Zooming the Camera Back

While this study and this post have focused on reading instruction, I do think there’s a broader message here as well.

We frequently hear about the importance of intrinsic motivation; that is, a motivation that springs from students’ natural interests, not from external encouragement (or pressure).

This study, to the contrary, finds that the work teachers do to improve students’ skill simultaneously enhances their motivation. That motivation might be — in effect — extrinsic; but, it’s working. (Working = students read better, and want to read more.)

Overall, I believe we need a substantial rethink of the (false) intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy, and the (unhelpful) criticism of motivational strategies that many teachers currently find themselves using.

If you want to join me for just such a rethink, I’m giving a webinar for Learning and the Brain on April 5th. We’ll be talking about several research-informed approaches to intrinsic motivation, and brainstorming strategies to make those ideas fit in our classrooms.

I hope I’ll persuade you that we have better ways to talk about motivation than “intrinsic/extrinsic,” and those better ways give us useful teacherly guidance.

I hope you’ll join us!

van Bergen, E., Hart, S. A., Latvala, A., Vuoksimaa, E., Tolvanen, A., & Torppa, M. (2023). Literacy skills seem to fuel literacy enjoyment, rather than vice versa. Developmental Science, 26(3), e13325.

“If I Want My Students to Learn Math, Should I Teach Them More Math?”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October 06, 2020

“If I Want My Students to Learn Math, Should I Teach Them More Math?”

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We all agree, I suspect, that students should learn math. And reading. They should learn history. And science. SO MANY other topics.

What’s the best way to meet these goals?

If I want my students to learn math, is math teaching the best way to go? If I want them to understand history, should I teach more history?

Or, instead, is there a handy shortcut?

If I could help students improve their reading by teaching something other than reading, that alternate approach just might be more efficient and motivating.

In fact, two candidates get lots of attention as “alternative approaches.”  If either or both pan out, they would offer us more choices. Maybe even a higher chance of success.

Music and Math

I don’t remember where I first heard that music education improves math learning. Specifically: learning to play the violin ultimately makes students better at learning calculus.

The explanation focused on “strengthened neural circuits” “repurposed” for “higher cognitive function.” Something like that. That string of words sounded quite impressive, and inclined me to believe.

Given the complexity of calculus, that would be really helpful!

But: is it true?

A recent meta-analysis looked at 54 relevant studies, including just under 7,000 participants.

Their findings? Let me quote key points from their summary:

Music training has repeatedly been claimed to positively impact children’s cognitive skills and academic achievement (literacy and mathematics).

This claim relies on the assumption that engaging in intellectually demanding activities fosters particular domain-general cognitive skills, or even general intelligence.

The present meta-analytic review shows that this belief is incorrect.

Once the quality of study design is controlled for, the overall effect of music training programs is null.

It gets worse:

Small statistically significant overall effects are obtained only in those studies implementing no random allocation of participants and employing non-active controls.

In other words: you get this result only if the study isn’t correctly designed.

And worse:

Interestingly, music training is ineffective regardless of the type of outcome measure (e.g., verbal, non-verbal, speed-related, etc.), participants’ age, and duration of training.

That is: no matter what you measure, the answer is still “no.”

Violin training sure strengthened some neural circuits. But that additional strength doesn’t get “repurposed for ‘higher’ cognitive function.”

If I want my students to learn math, I should teach them math.

Chess and Intelligence

If you watch The West Wing, you know that President Bartlet is smarter than everyone else because he won a Nobel Prize, and he plays chess frequently. He says things like “rook takes queen in five.” And then Leo nods appreciatively.

So smart.

It might be true that being smart makes you better at chess. (Although, Anders Ericsson says “no.”)

Is it true that playing chess makes you smarter? If we want our students to learn math and reading and science, should we teach them more chess? Would some neural circuitry get repurposed?

Let’s go to the tape:

In contrast to much of the existing literature, we find no evidence of an effect of chess instruction upon children’s mathematics, reading or science test scores.

In this case, by the way, the “tape” is a randomized control trial with more than 4,000 students in it. So: that result seems impressively well established.

So far, it seems that if I want my students to be better at X, I should teach them X. Teaching them Y and hoping that Y makes them better at X hasn’t panned out well…

Social Studies and Reading

Reading might be an interesting exception to this rule. On the one hand, reading is a skill that students must acquire.

And, at the same time, they have to apply the skill of reading to the content being read. The more that students know about the content, maybe the better they’ll do at reading.

In any case, that’s a plausible hypothesis.

A recently released report from the Thomas Fordham Institute crunches the numbers, and finds that additional time devoted to social studies instruction ultimately improves reading scores.

Two key sentences from the executive summary:

Instead of devoting more class time to English language arts, we should be teaching elementary school children more social studies — as in, rich content about history, geography, and civics.

…

Literacy gains are more likely to materialize when students spend more time learning social studies.

In fact, they find that social studies instruction most benefits students from lower-income households, and from non-English speaking homes.

For a variety of reasons, this study looks at correlation, and so can’t demonstrate causation.

However, the underlying theory makes sense. If students can decode the sounds of the words “Berlin” and “Wall,” but don’t know the geography of Germany or cold-war history, they’re unlikely to make much sense of a reading passage about that in/famous border.

In Sum

Students improve at the skills they practice. Those skills — alas —  rarely transfer to distantly unrelated disciplines.

To help students learn math, teach them math. To help them read, teach them to read — and also about the scientific, historical, geographic, and philosophical concepts that make reading so important and so worthwhile.

Can We Improve Our Students’ Executive Function? Will That Help Them Read Better?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 01, 2020

Can We Improve Our Students’ Executive Function? Will That Help Them Read Better?

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Here’s a fun exercise. I’m going to give you a list of words. You try to sort them into two groups, based on the sound they begin with:

cup, bag, bread, can, box, cookie, cake, bucket, corn, beans, crate, banana

Presumably you came up with /k/ sounds and /b/ sounds:

cup, can, crate, cookie, cake, corn

beans, bread, banana, box, bag, bucket

Okay, now go back and RESORT those words into two groups, based on the category they belong to.

Presumably you came up with containers and foods:

cup, can, crate, box, bag, bucket

cookie, cake, corn, beans, banana, bread

If you succeeded, BRAVO! You demonstrated cognitive flexibility: an executive function that allows you to change your thought process mid-stream.

Believe it or not, we have to learn this particular skill.

In video below, for instance, 3-year-olds sort cards according to their color (“red goes here, blue goes there”). They’re usually good at that. However, when the rules change to focus on shape (“trucks go here, flowers go there”), they struggle to follow the different instructions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXZau5VIIvU

Why? Because they haven’t yet developed the executive function of cognitive flexibility.

New Research: Improving Reading

For a number of reasons, we might think that this general executive function (cognitive flexibility) might support a specific academic skill (reading).

If that’s true, then maybe we can help struggling readers by training their cognitive flexibility. (This possibility relies on several assumptions; the scholars who did this work have lots of research supporting each one.)

To test this possibility, Kelly Cartwright & Co. had teachers spend several weeks training a group of 2nd – 5th  graders in cognitive flexibility.

Basically, those students repeated that word-sorting/resorting exercise you did at the top of this post. And, they tried a more complicated fill-in-the-blank version of that task as well.

The results?

Compared with other struggling readers, these students got better at cognitive flexibility. And — here’s the big news — they got better at reading as well. (More specifically: they didn’t get better at individual word recognition, but they got better at reading comprehension and grade level reading.)

So, in this research, Cartwright’s team found that training a particular executive function helps struggling readers do better.

Technically speaking, that’s awesome.

As Always, the Caveats

First: as Dan Willingham says in his Twitter bio, “One study is just one study, folks.” Even if Cartwright and Co. did everything right, it’s possible their results are a fluke. We won’t know until many other scholars succeed in replicating and extending this finding.

Second: We shouldn’t extrapolate too far based on this study. We don’t know if training other executive functions would help struggling readers. We don’t know if training EF benefits typical readers; or, people first learning to read; or, improves the performance of sophisticated readers.

Those questions are important — but not addressed directly by this research.

Third: Both reading instruction and executive function are hotly controversial topics. (Heck, I wrote a post about a month ago questioning the very idea of a “general” executive function.) I wouldn’t be surprised if this research (or my summary of it) prompted stern rebukes from scholars/practitioners with a different understanding of reading/EF processes.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if those stern rebukes were correct. If you’ve got an alternative perspective (and some research behind it), please let me know.

But, with those caveats in mind, this research strikes me as exciting and potentially powerful. Any strategy to help struggling readers should get our attention. One that a) costs essentially no money, b) doesn’t take very long, and c) can be done so easily might be a real boon to schools, students, and readers.

Watch this space…

Does Teaching HANDWRITING Help Students READ?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 11, 2020

Does Teaching HANDWRITING Help Students READ?

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I recently saw a newspaper headline suggesting that teaching students HANDWRITING ultimately improves their READING ability.

As an English teacher, I was intrigued by that claim.

As a skeptic, I was … well … skeptical.

In this case, we have two good reasons to be skeptical. First, we should always be skeptical. Second, claims of transfer rarely hold up.

What is “transfer”?

Well, if you teach me calculus, then it’s likely I’ll get better at calculus. If you teach me to play the violin, it’s likely I’ll get better at playing the violin. But: if you teach me to play the violin, it’s NOT likely that this skill will transfer to another skill — like calculus. (And, no: music training in youth doesn’t reliably improve math ability later in life.)

In fact, most claims of transfer — “teaching you X makes you better at distantly-related-thing A” — end up being untrue.

So, is it true — as this newspaper headline implied — that handwriting skills transfer to reading skills?

The Research

This newspaper article pointed to research by Dr. Anabela Malpique, working in Western Australia.

Her research team worked with 154 6-7 year-olds around Perth. They measured all sorts of variables, including…

…the students’ handwriting automaticity (how well can they write individual letters),

…their reading skills (how accurately they read individual words),

…the amount of time the teachers reported spending in reading/writing instruction.

And, they measured handwriting automaticity and reading skills at the beginning and end of the year. For that reason, they could look for relationships among their variables over time. (As you can see, Malpique’s research focuses on many topics — not just the writing/reading question that I’m discussing in this post.)

Tentative Conclusions

To their surprise, Malpique’s team found that more fluent letter formation at the beginning of the year predicted more fluent word reading at the end of the year. In their words, this finding

suggest[s] that being able to write letters quickly and effortlessly in kindergarten facilitates pre-reading and decoding skills one year later.

In other words: this research allows the possibility that teaching writing does ultimately help students read single words.

However — and this is a big however — the researchers’ methodology does NOT allow for causal conclusions. They see a mathematical “relationship” between two things, but don’t say that the writing ability led to later reading ability.

They warn:

Experimental research is needed to confirm these findings[,] and systematically evaluate potential explanatory mechanism[s] of writing-to-reading effects over time in the early years.

They specifically note that they did NOT measure reading comprehension; they measured single word reading.

To put this in other words: we would like to know if

a) teaching letter writing leads to

b) improved letter writing fluency, which leads to

c) improved single word reading, which leads to

d) improved reading comprehension.

These findings make the b) to c) connection more plausible, but the certainly do not “prove” that a) leads to d).

Classroom Implications

This research doesn’t claim we should make big changes right away.

I do think it leads to this conclusion:

Some schools are replacing books with computers and tablets. I can imagine (although I haven’t heard this) that advocates might make this claim:

“In the future, no one will need to write by hand. Everything will be keyboarding, and so we need to get children typing as soon as possible. Let’s replace handwriting instruction with keyboarding instruction, to prepare our kids for the future!”

If we hear that argument, we can say:

“I have LOTS of objections to that logical chain. In particular, we have tentative reasons to believe that handwriting instruction improves reading. If that’s true — and we don’t yet know — we should be VERY wary of doing anything that slows our students’ ability to read. We might not be handwriting so much in the future, but we’ll be reading forever.”

In sum: I don’t think that newspaper article captured essential nuances. However, this research raises the intriguing possibility that transfer just might take place from writing instruction to single-word reading. We need more research to know with greater certainty.

But, given the importance of reading for school and life, we should be excited to find anything that can help students do better.

How to Help Struggling Readers?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
February 25, 2020

How to Help Struggling Readers?

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Reading interventions can suffer from two lamentable problems.

First, they can — paradoxically — benefit strong readers without helping weak ones. Here we see the dreaded “Matthew Effect,” where the rich get richer — in this case, the strong readers get even stronger.

Second, they can require lots of training in complex theories and pedagogical strategies.

We would, of course, like a strategy that benefits everyone — especially the weaker readers. And, one that can be implemented without lots of time-consuming, pricey training.

If that sounds good to you, keep reading…

It’s So Simple, It Just Might Work…

Researchers in Great Britain wanted to test a remarkably simple proposal. What would happen if classrooms stopped teaching “leveled” short reading passages, and simply read two long, challenging books?

To answer this question, they worked with ~350 12-13 year-olds, and 20 teachers, in 10 schools. Teachers chose long novels that they deemed challenging; often, they chose books typically reserved for “higher ability” students: Frankenstein, for instance, or Now Is the Time for Running.

The researchers insisted that the teachers move at a fast pace. The classes had only 12 weeks to get through both challenging books. In fact, some participating teachers worried that the combination of challenging book + fast pace would be too much.

As long as they moved briskly, teachers had lots of freedom. Most read the books aloud for long stretches of time. Others used audio-book recordings, or had students take turns reading in circles. Many would stop to ask or answer questions. Basically they used their teaching skills in whatever way they deemed fit.

So, what happened? Were the teachers right to worry about the challenging book and the fast pace?

Dramatic Results

To measure the effect of this strategy, the researchers used a test of “reading age.” Students in these classes took that test before and after their 12-week reading adventure.

Students in all the groups they measured improved, including the average readers and the advanced readers.

But, what about the struggling readers? That is: what about those who were more that a grade level behind in their reading?

Their “reading age” score improved by 16 months. Three months of this strategy produced almost a year-and-a-half worth of gain.

That’s astonishing.

I should note: those struggling readers remained well behind their peers. But, gosh, they were a lot less behind than before. In other words, this intervention produced a reverse-Matthew Effect: everybody got richer, but the poor started to catch up.

A Hidden Surprise

Part of this research finding, by the way, surprised the researchers.

Half of the teachers in the study simply relied on their experience to make this strategy work. The others got a day-and-a-half of training in…

cognitive reading processes […], and pedagogic strategies including reading the text aloud in class at a fast pace, inference-making, guided group reading and the use of graphic organisers.

How much difference did that additional training make? Um. None. Students who had “untrained” teachers made as much progress as those who had “trained” teachers.

It was the strategy, not the training, that helped. (To be clear, the training led to some statistically significant differences, but not in the ultimate measure: who learned more?)

So, as far as we can tell from this research, we don’t need fancy training to make this strategy work. Our own teacherly experience is — on average — enough.

Boundary Conditions

First: this research was done with 12-13 year olds in an English education system. It might not apply to your teaching context. And, it isn’t remotely claiming to be a method for teaching students to read in the first place.

Second: I don’t know if this research has been replicated. We’re always more comfortable with a strategy when it’s been shown to work many times.

Third: the fact that this strategy seems to have worked for reading doesn’t mean it will work in other disciplines. We should not assume that, say, students will learn to play the violin simply by hearing someone play the violin; or learn to do math simply by watching others solve math problems.

At the same time, I do find this research helpfully intriguing. In fact, if you’re thinking about this strategy, I encourage you to read the initial study. It’s unusually well written. And, it includes helpful details — including comments from teachers in the study.

If you give this a try, I hope you’ll let me know how it goes. According to the initial study, the students loved it.

Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching by J. Richard Gentry and Gene P. Oullette
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
September 16, 2019

Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching by J. Richard Gentry and Gene P. Oullette

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Far too many children are not learning to read well. New research about reading has not sufficiently informed teaching practices. In Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching, J. Richard Gentry and Gene P. Ouellette, expert reading researchers and education consultants, use the new science of reading to suggest ways to support students in becoming strong readers. They explain recent brain- and behavior-based findings about how kids learn to read.

Brain words, as used by the authors, are words for which students know the pronunciation, meaning, and spelling, such that they can read, write, and use the word correctly and comfortably. This book seeks to help instructors guide students in building brain words by offering ways to assess reading abilities as well as scientifically-backed practices for teaching reading. They emphasize especially the overlooked importance of teaching spelling. The authors offer specific, practical tips for teaching reading in kindergarten through sixth grade. They conclude with advice for schools and parents about how to support students with dyslexia.

Learning to read does not happen automatically. In fact, reading is effortful and as others, such as Maryanne Wolf, have explained, the brain’s distributed reading circuitry is not present at birth but rather develops with exposure to and instruction in reading.
Gentry and Ouellette state that most teachers are not trained in effective literacy instruction practices, and many do not have access to science-based teaching resources. As such, the authors review best practices for teaching reading in light of current research.

As Daniel Willingham and other reading experts have argued also, Gentry and Ouellette state that using both phonics and whole-word approaches to teaching reading is more effective than relying on only one of these strategies. Phonics is necessary for building reading skills, while whole-word reading provides motivation for engaging in active reading. Spelling is a critical step on the road to reading with comprehension, and yet accountability assessments do not measure spelling competence. As a result, many schools do not have spelling curricula. The authors call for a spell-to-read approach to reading instruction. They offer reflective questions that teachers can consider to improve their reading instruction.

Gentry and Ouellette detail a quick and effective way to determine students’ developmental reading phase based on a carefully designed spelling test. Students’ performance on this test can be parsed into phases. The non-alphabetical phase involves children using shapes that might resemble letters but not writing in any recognizable form. The pre-alphabetical phase involves using letters but the letters the child writes do not systematically correspond to sounds. The partial alphabetical phase involves some matching between letters and spoken language. In the full alphabetical phase children spell with one letter to represent each sound. When children can spell nearly or completely correctly, they can begin to read independently. With an understanding of students’ reading and spelling abilities it is possible to optimally facilitate reading instruction.

The authors suggest a “listen first” approach to learning spelling and reading in which students first hear a word, then say the word, write the word, read it, and use it. In older grades a spelling pretest, which students correct themselves while reflecting about the reasons for their mistakes, is an effective teaching tool. The most important measure for improving students’ vocabulary and reading abilities is to support the students in reading more.

Between five and twenty percent of the population is affected by dyslexia. This reading disorder has a neurobiological and a genetic basis. People with dyslexia are not less intelligent nor are they less hard working. The authors explain common signs of dyslexia at different ages (e.g., abnormal spelling, trouble articulating words, or trouble with arbitrary sequences). Early identification of dyslexia is very important for helping these students learn to read and achieve academically. Gentry and Ouellette conclude with suggestions for how parents and schools can support students with dyslexia.

Brain Words will inform educators about recent advances in the science of learning while also offering practical and effective techniques for improving reading instruction. This book can help educators help more students learn to read well.

Gentry, J. R., & Ouellette, G. (2019). Brain words: How the science of reading informs teaching. Stenhouse Publishers.

When Parents Teach Reading, Do They Also Promote Math Skills?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 28, 2019

When Parents Teach Reading, Do They Also Promote Math Skills?

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Parents begin teaching children well before schooling starts. Obviously.

In fact, parents often teach children topics that we might consider “academic”: say, how to read, or, how to count.

Researchers might investigate this parental pre-school teaching with some reasonable hypotheses.

For instance:

Presumably, the way that parents teach reading influences the reading skills that their children develop.

Likewise, presumably, the way parents teach numbers and counting influences the math skills that their children develop.

Let’s ask a more counter-intuitive question:

Does the way that parents teach reading influence their children’s math skills?

In other words, does early teaching in one discipline influence understand in a different discipline?

That question might raise skeptical eyebrows, for a number of reasons. In particular, most research that asks this kind of transfer question comes back with a negative answer.

That is: learning in one discipline (say: playing piano) doesn’t usually make you better at another discipline (say: doing calculus).

Today’s Study

Researchers in England wanted to explore this surprising hypothesis. They had hundreds of parents fill out questionnaires. Some questions focused on parental approaches to reading:

How often does the child discuss the meaning of a story with an adult?

or

How often is the child encouraged to name letters or sound out words?

Other questions focused on parental approaches to numbers:

How often is the child encouraged to identify numbers in books or the environment?

They then tested the children on a variety of number and math skills.

Can you put two ducks in the pond?

Can you point to the number 5?

If two horses are on the path, and another joins them, how many horses are on the path?

So, what did they find? Did either of the reading approaches predict number and math skill? Did they predict those skills better than the parents’ direct focus on numbers and math?

The Results

Yes, and yes.

The parents’ approach to reading predicted math success better than the parents’ focus on numbers.

And, when comparing the two approaches to reading,

A focus on letters and sounds led to better math performance than did a focus on the meaning of the story.

In the dry language of research:

Only letter-sound interactions could predict statistically significant unique variance in counting, number transcoding and calculation.

What Should Parents Do?

This research pool is deep and complicated, and — as far as I can see — we’re not yet able to offer definitive parenting advice.

So, this study found that parental focus on letter-sound interactions improved later math skills.

But:

Self-reports aren’t always reliable (although they’re very common in this field), and

The differences weren’t all that great, and

We have many different goals when we teach children to read.

That is: if our only goal were to help students understand numbers, then this study would encourage parents to focus substantially on letter-sound relationships.

But, of course, we want our children to think about the meaning of stories too. That’s one way they learn important developmental lessons. That’s how they think about meaning in their own lives.

This study — especially if it’s confirmed by later research — encourages us to use several strategies to teach our children about words and reading.

And, it gives us reason to think that those multiple approaches will help them with books, and with numbers too.

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
December 20, 2018

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf

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How often do you read in a deep and sustained way fully immersed, even transformed, by entering another person’s world?  In her newest book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,Maryanne Wolf cautions that, the way our engagement with digital technologies alters our reading and cognitive processes, could cause our empathic, critical thinking, and reflective abilities to atrophy.  This in turn could undermine our democratic, civil society.

Wolf, the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University and the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, has written a series of nine warm letters to her readers encouraging us to think about the perils of a changing reading culture and promises of supporting media biliteracy in young readers.  She argues that we should teach students distinct ways of reading print versus digital sources and help them switch between these modes of reading.  Drawing on evidence from across cognitive neuroscience and education and on her own experiences as a teacher, parent, researcher, and non-profit founder, Wolf suggests helpful parenting practices, ways teachers can support reading and digital literacy, and how policy might increase the number of students who can fully immerse themselves in written thought.

As important as reading is to our thinking today, we did not evolve to read and cannot learn to do so without support.  It is through an elaborate process of neural recycling—of repurposing brain areas that have evolved for other reasons—that we are able to become readers.  With whimsical analogies to the circus Wolf explains how the act of reading even a single word requires coordinated activation across many neurons in regions distributed throughout the brain.  She explains properties of attention, vision, sound, and affective processing in the brain that contribute to reading.

Wolf then explores how digital reading may endanger deep engagement with text and empathizing with others by limiting our attention span and background knowledge.  Surprisingly, we are reading more than ever before—on average about a hundred thousand words per day. Because we are so overloaded with text, simplifying, skimming, and reading in short bursts are reasonable compensatory mechanisms. Wolf’s concern lies in this skimming style of reading becoming a habit that we exercise across all content. She is troubled by the trends of decreasing empathic abilities among young people, increasing rates of attentional disorders, and increasing susceptibility to “fake news”—all of which have occurred in parallel with a rise in digital reading, media multi-tasking, technologically mediated social interactions, and outsourcing of knowledge to the internet. Deep reading, on the other hand, causes people to take perspectives—a process that requires patience and increases our knowledge of the world and our ability to behave morally.

By fourth grade only a third of children in the U.S. can read deeply. Nearly half of African-American and Latino student are not reading at even a basic level. Wolf offers advice about countering this trend in the digital age. Drawing heavily on The Big Disconnect, Wolf suggests that before age five, children and parents should jointly read physical print-based books as often as possible and largely limit digital reading. Reading to children exposes them to the sounds, visual representations, and word-meanings in our language and builds their knowledge of the world. Schools can support reading by determining students’ readiness to read and helping all students improve, including struggling readers who have been underexposed to text and readers with learning disabilities. Phonics should unequivocally be a part of reading instruction. Teachers in higher grades should learn to teach reading since many of their students may not be proficient.  Policy makers can help by investing in early childhood education, literacy, teacher professional development, and equitable access to print and digital media.

Wolf concludes by proposing that, since the next generation will enter a job market primarily based on jobs that do not exist today, we need to support young people in building biliterate brains.  That is, they need to learn to work effectively in both print and digital media. As they develop proficiency in both deep and fast ways of reading they will also learn when and how to switch between these modes.  Schools should require courses that openly discuss the intriguing and harmful aspects of internet usage, and responsible practices.

A democracy thrives on diversity of ideas, but if citizens are not able to use new technologies, critical thinking, and empathic skills to evaluate those ideas, society will not advance. Wolf’s strategies for supporting reading in a digital age help us improve as readers and help us grow a stronger, more civil democracy.

Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: Harper Collins.

The Best Way to Read? Paper vs. Screens
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 24, 2018

The Best Way to Read? Paper vs. Screens

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Do you have to print out emails before you read them, because you just hate screens?

paper vs. screens

Or, do you take your Kindle everywhere, because old-fashioned books are just too cumbersome?

The “paper vs. screens” debate has raged for quite a while now.

I occasionally visit schools that have “done away with books” altogether. For reasons of cost and convenience, administrators tell me, e-readers are the only way to go.

Paper vs. Screens: Today’s news

Although I have written about tentative answers to this question, we would love to inform the debate with substantive research. As of today, we can.

Lalo Salmeron and colleagues have completed a meta-analysis comparing the two formats. Their research included several dozen studies, and included more than 170,000 participants.

The results?

In almost every case, students understand better and learn more when they read from paper than when they read from screens.

Some highlights:

Surprisingly, we aren’t getting better at reading from screens. In fact, more recent screen technologies produce greater gaps than previously. As Salmeron writes, “the screen inferiority effect has increased in the past 18 years, and … there were no differences in media effects between age groups.”

Especially when students faced time pressure, the length of the text didn’t matter. That is: even short passages that don’t require scrolling are harder to understand on screen than on paper.

Another surprise: screens made reading information harder. But, they didn’t make reading narrative harder. The teaching implication: e-readers work better for novels than for textbooks.

Paper vs. Screens: Today’s reality

Salmeron’s team has a practical bent as well:

“Given the unavoidable inclusion of digital devices in our contemporary educational systems, more work must be done to train pupils … with reading tasks in digital media.”

On standardized tests, for instance, our students will almost certainly have to read on screens at important moments in their academic lives.

We do need more research on particular strategies. In the meanwhile, this article recommends Lauterman & Ackerman’s article on “Overcoming Screen Inferiority” for places to start.

In the meanwhile, we can help our students understand by having them read from good old-fashioned paper. And no: despite “cost and convenience,” e-readers are not the best way to learn.

Once Upon a Digital Time…
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 10, 2017

Once Upon a Digital Time…

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AdobeStock_52492225_Credit

A recent study suggests that 3- and 4-year old children understand as much, and learn as much vocabulary from, digital books as from read-alouds with adults.

This study hasn’t been published–it was presented at a recent conference–so we can’t look at all the details with the specificity that we usually do. (And, skeptics will rightly be concerned that the research was funded by Amazon: a company that might well profit from its conclusions.)

At the same time, the description I’ve linked to sounds plausible and responsible, so I’m not inclined to dismiss this finding out of hand.

The authors’ conclusions conflict with some other findings in related fields. You may remember a recent blog post discussing Daniel Willingham’s conclusion that, on the whole, students learn more from books than from e-readers.

I’ve also been interested in a study by Ackerman and Goldsmith showing that students regulate their learning better with books than e-readers.

But the current study isn’t about college students trying to learn from books; it’s about pre-readers trying to follow a story that’s being read to them. In this one paradigm, the researchers have found that the right kind of e-book can do the job as well as the right kind of adult.

 

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