The researchers whose shoulders we stand upon have really dug into what does it take to build knowledge. And what we've learned is that it's the knowledge schema that we create.
This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We're onto episode six in our reading reboot—reexamining and building on foundational literacy concepts. Last time, we talked about neurons, neural networks, and the brain science behind learning to read. Today, we're focusing on supporting texts, and why it's critical to be strategic about text selection.
My guest is Dr. Susanne Nobles, chief academic officer at ReadWorks. On this episode, she tells us about ReadWorks and its Article-A-Day program. The conversation also features information and advice for educators regarding quality text and topical cohesion. We'll also talk about text selection and supporting multilingual learners. So now, let me bring Dr. Susanne Nobles onto the show.
Well, Susanne, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. I'm so excited to have you here!
Yeah, thanks so much, Susan. I'm really excited to be here as well! I've listened to the podcast for a long time. Excited to be part of it.
That's amazing. You know that what we always do is have our guests introduce themselves to our listeners. So I would love if you could introduce yourself. Maybe talk a little bit about your background, and how you landed at ReadWorks.
Sure, happy to. Susanne Nobles, I'm the chief academic officer here at ReadWorks. My background is that I've been in education my whole career. I was, for over 20 years, a classroom teacher, school administrator, English teacher. Mostly in Virginia. And when my family moved, I was also in what I affectionately call my latent-life PhD work. We moved. I had to leave the school where I was teaching.
Finished up my PhD. And moved into education, nonprofit work, focused on helping ed tech developers really imbue research across their product development cycle. Got to know ReadWorks actually through that, tangentially. Wanted to get back into the ELA space, and landed here at ReadWorks, doing the research, product development work, pedagogy work for five years now here.
That's so amazing to hear that story, because I know lots of our listeners probably know something about ReadWorks. Many of them probably use the texts that you offer. But for them to know that nope , it's really somebody that's passionate about research. And passionate about literature, that has actually come to lead. What's happening there at ReadWorks? Can you tell us a little bit about ReadWorks?
Who you are, what you do, what resources you provide?
Yeah, yes. ReadWorks is a nonprofit, and I like to start there, 'cause we're ed tech . But we really are a nonprofit first and foremost. And so, our mission is to help teachers. And I start there as well. We are not direct to student. We always go with and in partnership with the teacher. And our focus is building students' background knowledge and vocabulary in support of reading comprehension.
So, as a nonprofit , we are a hundred percent free. Yes, really. There's no paywall.
Amazing, amazing.
And we are intentionally supplemental. We provide, as you referenced already, Susan, over 6,000 texts in our library, on a diverse range of subjects, to be used in any classroom, from K to adult learners, science, history, ELA, in any way to build into that curriculum that already exists, what resources are already there to enrich the knowledge and vocabulary reading that students can do. So that's who we are.
That's amazing. Besides those texts that you provide, you do a few other things. Don't you?
Yes, yes . Thank you for the prompt. We do these 6,000 texts. We then hand curate them into different kinds of text sets. While teachers can come on and do that great search for the perfect text, that takes time. We want to be able to provide them really easily crafted sets, that they can either combine with novel studies, they can bring into a year-long Scope & Sequence around the Next Generation Science Standards.
We have alignments as well with knowledge-building curricula. Bringing together our texts, that are nonfiction and fiction, and blending them in a way that supports the content already happening in a class. Because that's how you learn best, is through that bigger schema of conceptually related learning.
And we're gonna talk a little bit about that idea of topical cohesion, why knowledge and vocabulary are so important. We'll sort of put that on the side and not go there yet. But, I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about your impact, because since you've been there at ReadWorks, you've really been trying to study the impact that your texts and your approach sort of have.
Can you talk about that recent study that you did?
Sure. Yeah. I'm excited to . We do, to your point, Susan, we have spent many years building up our research . We've always been built on research, existing research. So, building up the study to make sure that what we built does what we hope it does. And that's really important. Implementation is the key. Nothing does it by itself. It's how that implementation happens.
Our latest study was a clustered, randomized control study.
Ooh , fancy words.
Yes, fancy words. A clustered, randomized trial study. A CRT instead of an RCT. And it was this past school year, on our knowledge-building routine called Article-A-Day. This is one of those hand-curated text set routines. Quick overview of that. It is what it sounds like. We have weekly text sets where students can read an article a day.
There's a writing component, there's a speaking component, bringing together reading, writing, and speaking. This past school year, we worked with fourth grade teachers around the nation, actually California, New York, Colorado. And they implemented Article-A-Day for nine weeks and focused on science knowledge. So that was this focus area. And then we tested students on their growth in science knowledge and vocabulary.
Our finding, which was very exciting, validating of Article-A-Day, is that students in our experimental group improved by approximately 11% on their science background knowledge from pre to post. That is three more questions correctly out of 28. What is really powerful about that is that in contrast, students in the control group showed no noticeable improvement. So, this was from zero to that improvement.
It really shows the positive impact of Article-A-Day on students' knowledge building, which was the goal of us building this routine. A different finding though, that we're very excited about as well, is that all students, regardless of group, showed increased engagement and motivation throughout the study. We saw this in what we call their Book of Knowledge entries. This is the writing component.
So students read an article a day. And then they write in their Book of Knowledge what they learned. And, on average, all students wrote a third more words. So they increase their word production by 33%, during the last week compared to the first week. We all know writing is hard. And it's hard to get students to, by choice, do more writing.
And we do know, from teacher report and knowing how the teachers were implementing this, this was not a requirement. Teachers were not saying you have to write more. So that increased motivation through Article-A-Day was really exciting to see students building that confidence in their reading. Excitement about what they were learning in order to increase those Book of Knowledge entries.
Yeah. That is really, really exciting. We talk a lot about building knowledge and building vocabulary helps with reading comprehension. We pay less attention to the fact that it also helps with writing composition. You can't really write well about something that you don't know anything about, or have the words to communicate about. So you actually saw that representation grow.
Yeah, yeah. And we had heard anecdotally from teachers that students really got into their Books of Knowledge. To see that quantitatively was really very powerful, because it does prove, Susan, exactly what you're saying. That when students have something to say, they do want to say it.
So can I ask you a little bit about this article of the day? Is that, did I get that right?
Article-A-Day.
Article -a-Day? OK. I'm assuming, because ReadWorks is all free and available to any educator, that a teacher can sign up for Article-A-Day. And, logistically, what does that look like in their inbox?
A teacher signs up for their free account. We have a Scope & Sequence of Article-A-Day, from kindergarten through eighth grade, where teachers can sign up for an email where we send them, each month, sets. And they can digitally assign, or print, or they can go on to our website and see the whole year. In a few clicks, assign a whole year of Article-A-Day. Those topics are related chronologically to the school year.
You would have, for example, in April, we have our Earth Day texts and our nature texts. Or teachers can go in and search by subject and tie Article-A-Day, for that week, that month, to what they're studying in class.
So they can actually use it as an extension of the content that they're actually covering in their own classroom.
Yes.
That's really exciting. And that coherency is really important. We're gonna get to that in a minute. But how many do you track? How many people actually engage with your Article-A-Day program?
It's tens of thousands of teachers. I believe it was between 30,000 and 40,000 last year.
Wow!
It is great! We have many, many resources, which we will study all of them in our research agenda, but upwards of 800,000 teachers do use us a year.
Wow.
So, there are many ways that teachers use us. Article-A-Day is one of those key ways.
That's great. And what we will do is actually link our listeners in the show notes to all of this so that if they're not familiar, they can just be one click away. Let's talk a little bit about this text selection. You talked a little bit about articles that are related to each other. So, Article-A-Day they read, and maybe the next day they read another one that's similar.
Why is that important to sort of have this topical coherence?
The researchers whose shoulders we stand upon have really dug into what does it take to build knowledge. What we've learned is that it's the knowledge schema that we create. When a student reads an initial text, for example, on a bird , they may hear about wings, and then they read about flying, and then they understand that wings support flying, and that there's feathers. So they're building that knowledge.
Our brains retain, I'll use the Natalie Wexler phrase of, "like Velcro," really pull that knowledge together. There's also repetition of vocabulary, either specific vocabulary or word families. They're starting to piece together the words that come with a knowledge area, with a content area. And all of that creates the ability for us to retain that learning first, and then to start to put it to our long-term memory second.
And that gets us to why knowledge is even important to reading, which I can tell you all about now. If , I should go there.
Please, please. Yes, please go there.
So, we know the Science of Reading, we know Scarborough's Reading Rope. We're sitting on the language comprehension side of that reading rope . That's where background knowledge and vocabulary sit. And what research has shown is that knowledge supports readers in making inferences that are there, because there's gaps in everything we read. An author doesn't tell us every detail that we would need to understand.
And we must, as readers, fill those gaps. So when we know many, many things, we are more likely to have the knowledge to fill those gaps. And when we know things well, we can activate that knowledge automatically during reading, which frees up our working memory to do the harder part of reading, which is to piece together across paragraphs, and across an entire text.
And then to make those deeper inferences once we have filled all of those gaps. That's why knowledge and vocabulary are so critical. And no teacher, no curriculum can do it all for students. That's why we exist in that supplementary space, because more is always better. We're there to help make that easier.
That's great. And we recently had Hugh Catts on who talked a lot about the same thing, about background knowledge. The way you explained it was beautiful, but it was a real "Aha!" for me that sometimes, and many times, inferencing is automatic.
Because you have enough knowledge to be able to activate that, which means those easier inferences, I don't know how else to say it, with the background knowledge can come really quickly. So that was a real "Aha!" for me. I never thought about that before, that inferencing actually could be automatic.
Yeah. And it's such a good point, Susan, to make, because often those of us that teach reading were good readers. We don't remember the struggles. For us, well, for me, I shouldn't speak for you, but for me I read a lot. I enjoyed reading, and gained all that knowledge, and am not aware of the inferences that I'm making. I don't think about those.
It can be hard to remember that there's a lot going into my reading today that I didn't have all along.
Yeah, yeah.
That is happening really automatically.
Or you were building all along, right?
Yes.
That's the really exciting part of the upper part of Scarborough's Rope, is that those language skills continue to develop throughout our lifetime. And the more we know about a topic, the more we can learn. And the more, subsequently then, we know about the topic. As long as you're a lifelong learner, that never, ever, ever stops. On a side note, did you recently introduce some decodables as well into your collection?
We did. Yeah. We're very excited about these. We have written nonfiction decodables. They are content rich. They are building knowledge while students are practicing those phonics skills. We have them for K to grade two. Still 100% free. And we have aligned them to Article-A-Day. Working to build knowledge, even when students are at the listening level, so they can listen to Article-A-Day.
That higher syntax, higher complexity of text structure, higher language. Build that knowledge. We did a pilot study this spring. Teacher reported average student data, so let me just state that from the start. But students outperformed their predicted growth on their decoding by using Article-A-Day and decodables. Based on their ongoing DIBELS scores, they outperform themselves using these resources.
We are working with an external researcher to set up a formal study to, we hope, quantify those positive findings for this school year.
That's really exciting. And, I think that the important thing there is that you just said, "Not just decodables, but decodables that are content rich ." But also giving kids access to the texts that they can't yet read through a listening environment. We forget that reading aloud to kids, or having kids listen to texts, actually helps develop and grow their knowledge and vocabulary. That's great.
And one of the things that teachers reported from this past spring, again on that engagement and motivation side of things, is that the students gaining that knowledge from Article-A-Day made them excited to tackle the decodable, and to talk about the decodable as, I mean not literature, it's not fiction, but as something they've read for meaning and not just for practicing words.
They then found that their students were excited for their next DIBELS in ways they hadn't seen before. It brought meaning to their reading in a way that is so exciting for us, because, sometimes, I have a fear that a lot of too much decoding practice can become, "Why am I reading?" We lose the ultimate point of why all of us read, which is to learn and to gain meaning.
Yeah, or enjoy text. Hugh Catts reminded me of that. Decodable practice is a great instructional practice. But, getting kids excited about topics, there's nothing like arming our early learners with really rich content and information . They love to learn.
Yes, yes.
They LOVE to learn at that age. So let's talk a little bit about text quality, because I know you think about that a lot as you're evaluating texts, as you are identifying high-quality texts, as you're having authors write high-quality text. So, how do you think about text quality and evaluate that? What's the ReadWorks process to get high-quality text?
Yeah, we spend countless hours thinking about this. I do wanna start by calling out that high quality and free don't usually go hand in hand . We work really, really hard to continually have the highest-quality texts. So, before we even start to create or curate texts, we combine our research-based focus on building knowledge with a deep awareness of our library and the topics and voices that we wanna elevate.
I begin there, because for us, producing high-quality content does start with ensuring our products are inclusive and reflective of everyone who uses them. We have developed an in-depth and internal, this isn't externally visible on our site, but an internal tagging system to evaluate the strengths and then the gaps within our library.
Because it's important that our content provides those windows and mirrors for all of our readers. We know that that work is continual. We're never gonna be done with that work. And so, that's where we begin, is with what is the quality content that is needed? Where are we lacking? Where are those gaps in our library?
Once we've identified that need for new texts, every ReadWorks text goes through several rounds of review before being published. It's written, and then many, many rounds of review. With our content team reviewing factual accuracy, going to multiple reputable sites to make sure we've captured the factual accuracy from the perspective of the population we're writing about.
The grade appropriateness of the content, we look across at national standards on where content falls in curricula . Now, that's not a singular answer, but it gives us a good kind of ballpark. The flow of the language, the grammar.
And so from that initial conception, looking at our library, to the writing, editing, sensitivity review, fact-checking, it can take weeks, and in some cases months, for trickier text for a new article to pass through the sequence of review. And I say that, because we're a particular kind of library. We work to be very evergreen. We do not have new texts appear on our site every day.
We're not drawing from another source, and really putting out current event texts. We're really looking to have that knowledge building happening in both our nonfiction and fiction, in deep ways. And then it doesn't end at publication. We are continually reviewing content, going back to older content, revising it, bringing it up to date.
I will call out here our great museum and cultural partners that are our experts in many particularly of our science fields. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, we have AMNH , the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the International Quilt Museum. I mean, go on to our site, and just put quilt into the search bar, and it's just astounding.
We learn so much from all these texts ourselves, but the world of quilting and the cultural and societal impact of it is ... you'll learn a lot.
I might just do that. That's really interesting. I remember when I was a third grade teacher, it was really hard for me to find resources where kids could dig into something that was interesting to them, or tangential to something that was interesting to them, in the classroom. So this must be a great research mechanism too, for not just adults but for kids.
It, it is, yes. I opened by saying that we're always through the teacher. A teacher sets up a digital class, o r does the printing. In our digital class, we do have a student library space. If a teacher's using us digitally, there is a space for the students to go where they can search. And it's a wonderful research resource.
We're like a controlled classroom library, and they can put in a topic, and pull up all the nonfiction passages we have. We do cap it to two grades above. So they're not gonna see all the way to 12th grade material if they're a fourth grader. So it's a controlled space for great research.
How exciting. How are you thinking about educators supporting our multilingual learners? I'm sure you've probably already thought about that a lot. Help us understand that.
Our focus priority communities are the ones that have fewer resources. As a nonprofit, we're free to everybody, but we really want to support the teachers that don't necessarily have all the resources as other districts. And, in our partnership with those districts, we hear daily of the really rich, multicultural, and multilingual classrooms that they have.
Just this summer, so brand new, exciting, we released 65 new Spanish-English paired texts. We have f ocused on Spanish, because, as all the data shows, that's the predominant language. And reaching as many as we can, as soon as we can. We'd love to work in other languages, with the funding to do that.
But, what is super interesting to me about these, and my colleagues, Nathalie Karimian and then M anjula R aman really led this work, so shout out to them, they a re not translations. That's where I w anna start right now.
These are authentic, Spanish-language passages that build knowledge and vocabulary in a student's home language, i n Spanish, and they're paired with an English-language passage on a conceptually related topic. What this is doing is leveraging s tudents' existing Spanish-language skills to enhance their English reading comprehension, and really integrating their language systems in that way.
Research shows that we bring the linguistic skills of all the languages we have, to bear, coming together to help us move our reading forward. And ReadWorks' mission is to improve reading in English. And to do that, really drawing upon those students' Spanish-language skills, sorry, their linguistic assets. That's a lot of S's coming together. We've just had such great uptake of these.
We partnered with Vanderbilt University, working with their professors there, and then talented Spanish-speaking authors that come from different places, so t heir writing a nd their heritage language. It is really allowing students that access to different language varieties that they may be familiar with, and to just bring them in in different ways. It's exciting.
Yeah. And this must have been an exciting thing for you to roll out, in terms of supporting educators in the spaces that they need to be supported in.
Yes. Yes. And we have a constant feedback loop, as I said before. We hear from our educators all the time, which is great. But, we also go out and ask as well, to hear from more and more of them. These were the two areas, the teaching of English language learners and then the pre-fluent readers, that we did not yet have supports built directly for.
And so, staying in our lane, how can we supplement and support this instruction? Bringing knowledge building and vocabulary building into these instructional practices in the easiest way. That we can develop a routine for teachers to just pick up and use tomorrow in their classrooms.
I love that. And I love the focus on biliteracy that you have here too. To really recognize those students in their home language. To help them carry those assets over into what they're reading. Have you put any of those Spanish resources together in your Article-A-Day process or not yet?
Well, you're reading our mind Susan so that is our goal for next summer. We have picked the English texts that we've been building out are ones that are also part of our Article-A-Day sets. We do try before we launch something to have a full resource, so that teachers don't come on and get frustrated.
Our goal for this coming summer is to have attached to Article-A-Day sets topically connected Spanish texts as those on-ramps for those Spanish speakers into the Article-A-Day set. And all of our texts can be listened to. So those Spanish speakers can then listen to the English as well. So Yes is the short answer, and look for it in summer 2025.
That's amazing. And you just, you just made a little tiny comment that I think is worth highlighting. You said all of your texts can be listened to, is that right?
Yes. Yes. We have audio for all of our texts. The majority of them are human-voice audio, but not all of them. We have a high-quality, synthesized voice, but that's not human. We are always looking for volunteers to read, particularly diverse voices. If I loop this back to the Spanish text, what's very exciting for us is the authors of the texts then read their passages.
So it's their heritage language, and then they recorded the passage. So when you listen to the Spanish text, you're listening to the author read their text aloud. And there is a filter on our site where you can narrow our library to just the human-voice audio ones if you want.
That's amazing. It just makes me think that indirectly the support that you have there for potentially students that struggle with the decoding piece of it, that are older readers, we don't want to keep them from the knowledge and vocabulary development. So utilizing the recorded text is amazing.
Yeah, and to loop back to our decodables, because they're nonfiction and they're content rich , they do not feel baby-ish to older students. We do know that teachers of older students are using our decodables. They also have real-life pictures, not drawings. So they read like an article, what they're learning about.
Being able to have these tech support students who are older but need to catch up on some of those skills that they didn't get when they were younger. And a teacher can see the grade level that we put with it, but the students never can. So, whether it's in the library, whether it's printed out, or in their digital classroom, the students do not see a grade level attached to the text.
That's amazing. You've just given some of our educators that teach older grades some ideas for utilizing the resources that you have. One more thing that you said too is illustrations that go along with the texts. Do all of your texts come with illustrations?
Yes. Yes. We source from public domain sources, because we're not an image creator. So we have public domain images that go along with all of the texts. And the captions also get read aloud.
That's exciting, man. For anybody that doesn't know about ReadWorks, you need to jump in and figure it out! So, just jumping back to both text quality and cohesion. What advice do you have for educators as they're thinking about both the quality of the text and the cohesiveness of it?
Yeah. I'll start by saying something that I know many educators know, but I think it bears repeating, which is that kids know when a text is worth their time. Our ultimate goal, as teachers of reading, is to have students that choose to read. Are they choosing to read something that they enjoy? And one of the things that I know was frustrating to me as a teacher is that the research doesn't go the way we want it to.
We want to put a great book in a kid's hands and have them get excited about reading and therefore get good at reading. And it really goes the other way. And so it's, once you build that ability to read, then that excitement comes with reading. Really having that engagement early on when they're learning to read is so key, because they're not hating reading. That text quality matters.
Really looking at rich language that's saying something. That's the core of our quality, is that a student will walk away feeling respected because they learn something from that text. And then the cohesion, to go back to the research, conceptual threads matter . That schema matters. And repetition matters. Again, we sit in the supplemental space. But, if you think about your curriculum, more is always better.
The more times we encounter something, the more likely all of us as humans are to learn it. So, to bring in a rich text to help your students deepen that grasp of the knowledge and the vocabulary is always a win.
Two really important points that you just made there. Thank you for that. And I know that I wish I would've had ReadWorks when I was a classroom teacher. It would've helped me a whole lot. And my kids would've loved it. Before we let you go, I wanna give you a moment, if you have any final thoughts for our listeners.
I will say that yes, I'm here from ReadWorks. Yes, we're free, please use our resources. That's why we exist. But really all the thinking that any teacher can do around putting together that kids are learning about something rich, and having something to practice with, and the power that, that gives students to say, "Wow!
I can learn, I can use my skills, and I can see the growth in myself," is just incredibly exciting whenever we as teachers see that magical moment happen. We're happy to be a part of it, and to know all that teachers are doing to make that work happen. Thank you for that, teachers!
It's not an easy job.
It's not an easy job. We have the easy job, creating these exciting, fun texts.
Well, thank you, Susanne, for joining us and telling us all about ReadWorks and the rich research base on which you're built. Like I said, we will link our listeners in the show notes to all of this information. And so thank you again for joining.
Thank you, Susan .
That was Dr. Susanne Nobles, chief academic officer at ReadWorks. Check out the show notes for links to connect with Dr. Nobles, and to learn much more about ReadWorks and Article-A-Day. Next up in our reading reboot, we're exploring the topic of neuroscience and literacy with Dr. Ioulia Kovelman from the University of Michigan.
It's going to be a fascinating conversation about developmental cognitive neuroscience, and why it can be so valuable for educators to know more about this work.
The use of neuroimaging allows us to, for instance, compare children who might actually have the same reading abilities, but may have very different strategies for reading.
We'll also take on some neuroscience-related questions from our listener mailbag. Remember to submit your own literacy questions by visiting amplify.com/sormailbag. By submitting a question, you could also win a visit from me to your school. If you know someone who might like this reading reboot, please tell a friend or colleague about the show.
The best way to get new episodes is to subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, please leave us a rating and review. You can join the conversation about this episode in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert, and thank you so much for listening.