EP63| Is Comprehension Instruction Getting Better? with Dr. Phil Capin

Forty years of classroom comprehension instruction. It's coming up on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Teaching Literacy Podcast. I'm your host, Jake Downs, and I am joined today by Dr. Phil Capen from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. We also of course have Patrick Wells helping out with the back-end production.

This is the show where we work to bridge literacy research into practice. If you're new here, I'm an assistant professor at Utah State University and it is great to have you here for episode sixty three. If you appreciate what you hear on this podcast, it would be great if you can leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. That will help others find the podcast and be able to use it in their classroom.

My guest today is Dr. Phil Capin. He recently co-authored a study that investigated how reading comprehension instruction has evolved over the past 40 years. In this episode, we are going to discuss how much time teachers devote to comprehension instruction, what practices they typically use, and how well those practices align with the research base.

It'll be a great episode with lots of takeaways for your classroom. And after the show, make sure to stick around for Jake's take on the topic. Dr. Phil Capin, welcome to the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Thanks for having me, Jake. I'm excited to be here.

We're glad to have you on the show. This is such an excellent study that I learned a tremendous amount from. I'm curious, what made you interested in looking at a study that looked at how comprehension instruction has evolved over the last several decades? Yes. So we originally were conducting a study with fourth grade teachers focused on improving.

social studies instruction and and making sure to infuse it with language and literacy. I know you're a fourth grade teacher, so this will hit home with you, Jake. And in this study we randomized students to two conditions. We had a treatment condition and we had a comparison condition. And we wanted to understand when we helped teachers to infuse their instruction

We're in Texas at the time, so it was uh Texas state history instruction with language and literacy. Do we see improvements on vocabulary and comprehension outcomes? And when you're doing randomized control trials, it's really important to understand your intervention. It's also really important to understand the counterfactual, the comparison condition. And so as part of that work.

We r recorded all of the teachers, the fourth grade general education teachers instruction, and then we coded it to see how are they supporting social studies knowledge development and reading comprehension. And we found that two thirds of teachers

or excuse me, two thirds of instructional time was allocated to supporting vocabulary reading comprehension, which is really exciting. You know, common core progressive state standards call for teachers to be incorporating language and literacy throughout the day. And so we were excited by this.

However, when we looked really closely at the instruction the teachers were providing, we found that some of the instruction was really dominated by teachers. The teachers were reading the text aloud and then asking doing most of the talking about the text. And it re reminded us of some prior work that was conducted.

a long time ago by Dolores Durkin. And that was sort of the impetus for beginning this work is I had done this one study, but I wasn't sure, you know, is this something we're just finding with this group of teachers or is this a broader trend? So you were conducting a study in Texas uh that was integrating social studies and reading comprehension instruction, and y you saw some things in there where there was tech.

stuff happening, uh, but it sounds like it was mostly teacher directed and that let you hearken back to some earlier research that led to this study we're talking about today. We're gonna be primarily talking about observational studies.

Can you describe to us what an observational study is and what types of questions observational studies can and can't answer? What type of knowledge does it provide us? So observational studies in the context of the work that we originally did, the the study I just described, where we looked at the counterfactual or the control condition.

And in the systematic review that we'll get to, our goal is to document naturally occurring instruction. And so we're not modifying that instruction. We're just observing. at least in the work that I'm talking about, we're observing instruction as it naturally occurs and or documenting the present. of oftentimes certain practices. And so we're trying to determine to what extent are teachers working with tech. And to what extent does their instruction align with evidence based practices?

So something like this is you're observing instruction in the wild. You're not necessarily manipulating anything. You're not trying is this better than this? You're just saying, what are teachers doing? What practices are they doing? How much time are they taking? What types of text are they using?

And in this specific study, your findings, they uh called you back to a study by Dolores Durkin completed back in the late nineteen seventies. So let's hop back in the Wayback Machine and circle back to Dolores Durkin. Who was Dolores Durkin and what was her influence on the reading research community?

Yeah. So I didn't know Dolores Sterkin. She passed away a couple of years ago, but she did a lot of important research, pioneering work related to reading comprehension instruction. And maybe one of her most influential contributions was her critique.

of traditional or reading instructional practices in curriculum. And so she looked in the late seventies at the reading instructional materials that were available to teachers and their instruction and tried to evaluate the extent to which it aligned with evidence based practices as they understood them at that time.

Yeah, so a really big name and I think that time period of the late seventies and the early eighties, she was really doing a great job of sort of bringing the research community back to some very basic assumptions that were happening and challenging them.

one particularly influential study that your findings hearkened back to was her nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine study on reading comprehension instruction. So Talk to us about this study, its findings, why it has been so influential for almost fifty years, and and how you saw findings from that study in your study that you were conducting so many years later.

Right. In nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine she conducted a study and it looked at teachers in grades three through six and she observed their English language arts instruction. as well as their social studies instruction. And w she was wondering what is the amount and quality of their reading comprehension instruction in those contexts.

And what she found was that many of the assumptions that she brought to this work were not supported, as you indicated. So she assumed that teachers would support students in processing tech. And that there would be a lot of time spent on reading comprehension. And what she found is that very little time was dedicated to instruction of reading comprehension.

And I think that some of that could be attributed to the instructional materials that were available to teachers at that time. She did a separate study in which she looked into basal curriculum b materials. and found that they didn't provide adequate supports to teachers. And so in this conversation today, you know, I was a teacher. I think I actually engaged in some of the same instructional practices.

that I've observed that were maybe are not ideal. And so I I don't want this to turn into like sort of we're saying that reading cop teachers are doing a poor job of teaching reading comprehension. Particularly at that time, I think some of the materials that were available to them were not that supportive.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's shift and talk about specifically comprehension instruction and thinking about comprehension instruction versus comprehension assessment, because that was something that Dolores Durkin coded for when she was observing these teachers' teachings. part of her coding scheme included comprehension instruction and comprehension assessment. And her definition of comprehension assessment, I think, is uh slightly different than what many folks might

think of how it's happening during instruction. So can you talk to us about the difference about how she coded these and why that distinction matters? Yeah, that's an excellent question because um it gets complicated here. So for reading comprehension instruction, she defined that is a teacher doing or saying something to help Children understand or work out the meaning of more than a single isolated word.

And so, you know, if you're teaching a child a vocabulary word, that would not be considered read comprehension instruction. But if you were to read a text and then ask the student to come up with a question about the text, that would be considered. Or if you ask students to talk to their partner about what they had just read and answer some questions, that might be counted as instruction.

She did draw this distinction between reading, comprehension, instruction and assessment. And she defined assessment as when a teacher does or says something in order to learn that what was read was comprehended. And so Here, she's not using assessment in the way we think of, you know, assessments like a state test assessment.

She's thinking about assessment in what is the goal of that teacher's instruction? And so if you gave a student uh a text and you asked them to answer a set of questions on a worksheet. She argued that's not instruction. Really what you're doing there is you're testing their reading comprehension. She also said if a teacher is standing at the front of the room and ask a question, like, let's say you and I, Jake, are talking about ancient Egypt, and I ask you, who are the leaders?

in ancient Egyptian society. And then you said the pharaohs. And I said, Great job. That's correct. The pharaohs were the leaders. She would consider that to be assessment rather than instruction.

With the idea being that you didn't really support the students in understanding what they read. Now, you know, for me, I don't know that I totally agree with that conception because when you ask questions, you are sort of prompting them to think about what they've read, right? And I think good comprehension instruction does involve asking students questions.

But I think there are more generative ways to support reading comprehension that go beyond just asking a low level literal comprehension question. Yeah, I think that's a really big deal to talk about is that if I'm at the front of the classroom teaching and you're in the back of my classroom watching from the kidney table and I ask student A a question and that student

doesn't know the answer, then go, Oh, okay, student B, do you know the answer to that question? She would have viewed that as I was sort of surveying knowledge, I was assessing knowledge, I wasn't actively building knowledge with those students and perhaps making the argument that yes, to a degree in order to generate comprehension you have to have an idea of

sort of what the baseline is, where students are at, but I mean there's other ways than doing it of just sort of surveying and peppering kids with questions or giving kids the worksheet that has the open ended questions or even the multiple choice questions afterward that Thinking of those as well. Assessing or surveying a basic level of comprehension rather than generatively building comprehension with those students. Am I understanding that framing correctly?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think it wasn't just that people were asking these literal questions. I think it's just the prevalence of It was that it was occurring so often and in comprehension instruction didn't go beyond that. And so, you know, I was a teacher, I also have two young children. When we read at night, I do ask questions like who's the main character in the story?

You know, what's the problem that they're uh addressing? But I also go beyond that and ask inferential questions and that's one on one, right? In a whole classroom, right? And maybe I could talk about some of the comprehension programs we're developing later on, but in those programs we're really trying to remove all of the teacher talking, provide students more opportunities to engage in language and literacy learning using text as a vehicle.

but engaging with their peers. And so I think this distinction becomes really important when all the instruction is really limited to low level questions.

So yeah, I don't want to take away from this podcast or the paper to be that we're against, you know, asking basic comprehension questions. No, I think there's certainly a role for that. It's just how can we go beyond that? Because I think what we know and what's sort of commonly agreed to among researchers is that asking those low level questions are probably unlikely to help students

to develop the metacognitive skills they need to when they're reading a text to check and do I understand what I'm reading? And then to fix up those understandings. It's probably gonna not lead to supporting a really deep comprehension of text. And you know, we want students to engage in really difficult, challenging text comprehension processes. And so I think we need to go beyond the literal questions. Yeah, I think that's such a great point of thinking about

question asking as a probing method that can be used as a complement with other generative instructional practices. The terminology that she used for this sort of question asking process was IRE initiation response evaluation. So the the teacher sort of initiating the question. the student uh or group of students or whoever the students providing a response and the teachers evaluating was that a good answer, was that an incorrect answer, is it a partially correct answer and then moving on.

And and she saw a preponderance of that being the majority of what teachers were spending their time on instruction and sort of thinking about it perhaps more nuanced as that as a specific practice within a constellation of other practices as well. We had Dr. Marianne Rice on the podcast a few episodes back talking about inferences

And, you know, she talked about well, what if we scaffold a question? What if I take a question as a teacher, I can provide some think aloud or we can find some text evidence, rather than just directly peppering kids with the questions, but I can scaffold the question as well.

We do know a lot about comprehension instruction and and there's just been a tons of great work completed since Dolores Durkin's study. So in thinking about what other practices we could use alongside question asking, what practices do we have really good evidence that are productive for promoting reading comprehension in students?

I'm sure you're familiar with this, but maybe not all of your listeners are. There's the uh Institute of Education Sciences, which is the research arm of the Department of Education, has within it the WhatWorks Clearinghouse. And the WhatWorks Clearinghouse serves many functions, but one great function that it's it serves is it develops practice guide.

And those practice guides will review the extant literature on a certain domain, for instance, middle grades ready comprehension, you know, which is of high interest to me and to you, Jake. they'll look at the literature and then make recommendations based on that evidence. And so as part of our work, we've reviewed those practice guides to try to see what are the evidence-based practices. And so I think maybe in the show notes or somewhere we could share those practice guides.

Uh,'cause I think they're excellent. And I I sh I share that because I think it's a great resource for teachers and because I don't want you to think I'm just making up these instructional practices. These are things that have been recommended from prior research. So I think a few key practices that we'd want to see in high quality reading comprehension instruction, you know, we want to build students' word and world knowledge.

And so it's very difficult to understand a text if you don't know the individual words, right? It's sort of fundamental. And so building students' vocabulary knowledge is critical. And the way we can build students' vocabulary knowledge is we can teach them, you know, really critical academic words that are likely to be seen across the curriculum.

also encourage them to become word learners, right? And so we can develop this word consciousness in students. We want students when they get to a word that they don't know, you know, they don't just keep reading, right? It's not a race, that they stop. Recognize I don't know that word and try to look within the word. So there's morphological units within the word. Perhaps there's a base word that they know or perhaps there's an affix, a prefix, or suffix.

that they'll know that will help them to infer the meaning, or they could read around the word, right? To use context to support their understanding. And so, you know, developing vocabulary knowledge is crucial. And then world knowledge You know what we know, particularly for older readers, is that

Your background knowledge on a topic becomes very highly associated with your text comprehension. And so like you can think about for me, if I pick up a high level physics text, it's unlikely I'm actually gonna have very good reading comprehension. But if I read Jake your paper on reading comprehension, it's likely I would have stronger reading comprehension. That's because I have background knowledge.

That I can bring to bear to the task. And so building word and world knowledge. And how do we build world knowledge? We focus on high leverage concepts. And then we systematically organize our reading instruction so that it's organized around developing knowledge. And this is something when I was a teacher, I didn't do as good a job as I could have. Sometimes I would pick a text on A I on day one and then day two it would be something completely different, right?

And my best instruction was when I was working on helping students to process text, engage them in rich activities, and that the texts were building over time to build their knowledge. around a content area. And so I think building world word and world knowledge is key. I think supporting students and engaging actively and purposely with complex text is another recommendation.

And for some students, they'll engage in text-based activities pretty readily and they'll have active engagement. They'll be able to maintain engagement. For some students though, and I'm particularly interested in students that have difficulties and want to support those students. It may be the case that you have to provide them some supports for them to engage and maintain engagement actively. And so that's where reading comprehension strategies can come in, helping students

As you're reading, you know, here's a conscious plan that you can apply to this text, like asking and answering a question. That's a strategy that you could help give to a first grader or a fourth grader as students develop. put the onus on them to be in charge of their comprehension monitoring by asking them to ask and answer questions as they read.

And the one word I wanna just, you know, push in on a bit there is like focusing on complex grade level text. I think that sometimes there are students who have difficulties reading text and so sometimes we think, Oh, we gotta make the text a little more accessible to students. And that resonates with me. I taught students with difficulties.

And I did have that inclination at times. But I think if we really want students to meet the higher expectations that are set for them and the standards, we have to give them opportunities to read texts that are complex. Maybe I'll just point out one more recommendation. Is that I think I'm not sure.

Another key mechanism is providing students collaborative learning opportunities. And so we talked a little bit, Jake, about how sometimes reading comprehension instruction can be really teacher led.

And sometimes the teacher, the one with the develop reading comprehension, is actually doing most of the talking. They read the text and then they talk about the text. And when a student doesn't know the answer, you know, they'll explain the text, right? And obviously if we want students to develop these skills, we need to

put them in supported opportunities to learn with their peers. And that's where heterogeneous groupings of students, so you have higher performing students working with lower performing students to grapple. with understanding text, I think could be helpful. I said I was just gonna say one more thing, but I I gotta say one last thing, which is key to supporting reading comprehension.

is making sure that students have foundational word reading skills, right? And so I'm not sure this should occur in the context of a reading comprehension lesson. Or if you're reading a fourth grade social studies text, I'm not positive that you should be working on foundational word reading at that time.

But I think if we want students to develop reading comprehension, we do have to make sure that they can read the words accurately off the page. And that's why there's, you know, this scientific consensus about developing students' word reading ability in the early grades and this push

for screening students with difficulties and providing phonics instruction in the early grades and why that, you know, is important for developing their decoding and word recognition skills, but also their reading comprehension. Thanks for s covering so much ground on effective reading, comprehension, instruction in such little time. That was impressive.

We will absolutely link to the IES practice guides in the show notes and listeners might be interested. We did interview Doctor Deborah Reed and several of her colleagues on the most recent one on providing reading interventions for students in grades four through nine. The episode's in the thirty something, so you might wanna check that one out. Thinking about here's a whole bunch of practices.

And then we also have the IRE initiation response evaluation question asking approach that's typical as well. Let's transition and talk about your specific study that you conducted. So you did a systematic review. Of observational studies covering the period from nineteen eighty to twenty twenty three.

Talk to us about what that means, what types of studies you were looking at, and specifically the things that you were interested in learning from looking at all of these studies across those years. So we were interested in casting a wide net and looking at in kindergarten to grade twelve. What is the state of reading comprehension instruction? So I need a study that included a teacher, not a researcher or somebody else providing instruction.

what is the amount of time that they're spending on text comprehension and what are the ways in which they're supporting text comprehension. And so

You know, uh you'll know this well, Jake. We did a big systematic review where we found like thousands of records and we meticulously went through all those and we ended up with about sixty two studies and those spanned publication dates from like the nineteen ear eighties to two thousand twenty three and some of the studies were focused on first grade, some were focused on, you know, tenth grade.

And going back to your earlier question, which I don't think I answered, is like what could this answer? What kind of questions can observational or search answer. They can answer like what's happening questions, right? They don't really answer what's working questions. And so, you know, we're just sort of documenting what does observational research tell us about naturally occurring reading instruction.

Excellent. So it's comprehension instruction in the wild that it's naturally occurring environment documenting it. And you looked at was it sixty-three studies that involved Yeah. That evolved that observational approach.

So overall, how would you describe the progress in reading comprehension instruction since Dolores Durkin's seminal article in the late 1970s with with your findings? Well, I mean you see a lot of heterogeneity across the studies, so a lot of variability, I think. One thing you see and we saw on our twenty twenty one paper is that teachers are spending more time supporting vocabulary and reading comprehension than they were in nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine.

However, we do see some of the same instructional practices that Dolores Durkin identified, such as the initiation, response, and evaluation patterns. still occurring and so you're seeing that a a considerable amount of time It is dedicated to whole class reading activities in which the teacher, well I think what Dolores Durkin would say, is assessing reading comprehension. And so we're still seeing a lot of focus on these literal comprehension questions.

So a bit of a mixed back here. More time devoted towards vocabulary and comprehension, which we would say that's plus. That's a good thing that's happening. Yes. But as far as practices, perhaps still some low leverage techniques occurring.

In talking about time specifically, and yes, this is going to vary across all the studies, right? But across the studies, How much time were teachers devoting to comprehension? And how does this change by grade level, by if the study is an older study versus a newer study? What trends or patterns can you pick out from the time teachers were devoting to teaching comprehension? We found I think twenty three percent of instructional time was dedicated to reading comprehension.

I think frankly it's hard to interpret that because there's so much variability across the studies. And so that was twenty-three percent of ELA instruction was dedicated on supporting reading comprehension. But you had studies in grade one in which they were primarily looking at instruction that was focused, perhaps rightly, on helping students to read words. And helping students to develop reading fluency. And there was less time on helping students to process and understand the

And then you had, you know, tenth grade instruction in which teachers are focused on social studies, for instance. And there, you know, they're trying to cover a lot of content and so you might see slightly less instructional time dedicated to reading comprehension and so I think it it's a little hard to interpret this, but in terms of the trends, what we see is that newer studies

had elevated numbers. So more time uh appeared to be spent on reading comprehension in studies that were published more recently, which I think aligns with progressive state standards. We also see that in the elementary grades, you see more time spent on reading comprehension, particularly in the upper elementary grades, which, you know, makes sense as this is a critical time in their development to work on this.

So that twenty-three percent of time i it's gonna really vary depending on, you know, if I'm an upper elementary, if I'm lower elementary, if I'm secondary ELA. But you also looked at connected text reading as well. How was the volume of connected text reading across these studies? So a lot of researchers reported that there was limited connected text reading opportunity.

There's a series of studies conducted by Jade Wexler out of Maryland and Sharon Vaughn Elizabeth Swanson out of the University of Texas at Austin. And Christy Murray at UT Austin. And what they report is that there's limited time for students to work with connected text in content area instruction and even in English language arts instruction sometimes.

And so the obvious problem there is it's hard to get better at understanding and grappling with complex text if you don't have opportunities to engage with those texts. So connected text being the raw material for comprehension. It's hard to have really productive text comprehension instruction if there's not a lot of connected text that's been read and processed to be used for comprehension instruction. Um That's exactly right.

So you also looked at the presence of evidence-based comprehension instruction practices. What did you learn about what practices were being used and how they were being used in these studies? So we looked at a bunch of evidence based practices like the ones I mentioned earlier, like developing word knowledge and general knowledge, engaging students in collaborative reading opportunities, extended discussion.

And what you find is that higher rates of vocabulary and general knowledge building are occurring. Some things it was hard to code for. You know, oftentimes researchers wouldn't evaluate whether teachers were purposeful with their tech selections or engage students in motivating context. Those are recommended practices, but they're just hard to, I think, code for when you're looking at naturally occurring instructions. We saw text based collaborative learning opportunities were occurring

less frequently relative to other practices. We also saw strategy instruction was occurring, but oftentimes it was occurring without instruction on maybe how to apply these strategies or when to apply these strategies. Oftentimes teachers would say, okay, what's the main idea of this test? Right. So they're drawing on maybe this main idea strategy, but they weren't asking questions or providing instruction that would help students.

to know, you know, when do I apply this and why am I applying this and giving them the sort of opportunities to take command of that metacognitive process. So some good practices happening, some practices sort of being implemented, but not perhaps to the degree of rigor efficacy that we would hope. What low level practices were lurking in these studies? Did they talk about the presence of the low level IRE questioning approach? Let's talk about the low leverage practices.

Yeah, so many studies did reference Durkin's original study. and they would document the presence of this initiate respond evaluate conversation pattern. So for instance, There's a study by Parker and Hurry in two thousand seven, and they evaluated teachers' discussions about tech. And they concluded that teacher talk was often used to evaluate rather than extend students' contributions. And so that sort of aligns with that IRE.

There's you know several other studies that found a similar preponderance of initiate, respond, and evaluate. And this occurs from after the two thousands as well, well beyond the publication of Durkin's original study. And so that's maybe one low leverage practice. And I think the other low leverage practice which I sort of just referenced is

this the comprehension strategy instructional. So there's been a push for comprehension strategy instruction, which I think is based in research. You know, there is research to show that when you help students to monitor their comprehension and give them strict conscious plans to support their reading comprehension, it's effective. And particularly for students that have some difficulties.

And so there's a couple studies that looked at this, one by Magnussen in twenty nineteen, and then there's a Dutch study in twenty twenty-two. And they coded extensively for reading comprehension lessons. And what they found is that teachers We're often referencing strategies they prompted or they mentioned or they referred to those strategies, but they didn't provide students

instruction on sort of the conditional knowledge you need to be able to apply those strategies. So when is it helpful to use this? What kind of text type?'Cause we know that strategies should vary by text type. You know, the the narrative text includes these story grammar elements like character settings and the sheeting events, problem solutions, all of that, right? And then there's expository text.

Which have a different structure. And so strategies that work for expository text I think are less likely to work in narrative text and vice versa. And so that's I think a low leverage practice is where there's references to reading comprehension strategies, but the teacher's doing most of the work by asking questions about them as opposed to putting students in command of, okay, you know, read this text, apply this practice, and then provide you support as needed.

Yeah, I you know, I have mixed feelings on comprehensive strategies. Yes, I see that there is an evidence base and I've read those studies and I see what they're d doing, but at the same time From experience, I feel that doing a comprehension strategy instruction really well is actually really challenging of trying to provide students with the knowledge of when and how to use it and to make the strategy as a vehicle for leveraging text meaning rather than the strategy as

the outcome that you're trying to teach in and of itself, that it's part of the process. It isn't what you're trying to learn. It's you're trying to learn it to leverage text, if that makes No, I just wanna say that I totally agree that strategies need to be a means to an end, not an end to the

to themselves. And so I do sometimes see that in instruction. I think at the times I when I provided instruction, I was too focused on the strategy and not focused enough on engaging students in really relevant texts and supporting them.

And I think, you know, when we think about reading comprehension strategies, I think they should not be the main focus of instruction, right? They should be a supporting mechanisms. And particularly for those students with reading difficulties. And so if you think about reading theory

you know, reading occurs through engaging with text and activating background knowledge, right? And for many of us that occurs pretty naturally. But for some students When it doesn't occur, we sort of recognize it, right? And so it's more mostly bottom up processes. Like I'm not thinking, okay, I'm gonna read Jake's paper. I'm gonna make sure that I'm monitoring my comprehension, right? I'm just reading Jake's paper, I'm enjoying it, I'm learning about fluency and

It's naturally occurring. Now, when I don't understand what I read, then I do have some top down processes where I th I can sh my coherence is not there. And so when there's gaps in my coherence, I can go back and fix it. And so I think for struggling readers, for some struggling readers, students that have difficulties reading and comprehending text

Strategies can be helpful. But I agree with you, Jake, that big push for knowledge right now in our field. And I think it makes good sense to be organizing instruction primarily around knowledge and using strategies as a scaffold.

Yeah, such great point. So In looking at your findings, how do you make sense of all this of Okay, more minutes looks like being devoted now versus than forty years ago. It looks like there's more evidence based practices being used, but there's still some lurking low leverage practices. Overall it seems like there still is a lack of connected text reading, a low volume there. How do you make sense of all that and thinking about what does this progress look like that we've made?

You know, I'm a sort of half glass full kind of person and so I think that we have made progress, but there are some things in our study. that are a bit discouraging. And I visited classrooms in the Boston area just a few weeks ago and was looking at some social studies instructors who are engaging students in

a reader's theater about the social studies unit they were working and then they were engaging students in primary sources and the teachers had very clear goals for instruction. The content was relevant to kids. Students were doing most of the work and teachers were providing scaffolding as needed. Students had opportunities to read and to write in every lesson. And so, you know, when I see some of the really high quality instruction.

that I'm able to see sometimes and I'm sure you're able to see. I do think there is a bit of a gap between what we see sometimes in our very best reading comprehension instruction and what appears to be occurring in many classrooms based on this research. Yeah. Well that's such a good point. And something we should probably point out is that, you know, these studies aren't necessarily a

direct representative sample of all comprehension instruction that's happening around the world or in the US or English speaking countries that this is just a sample of what's out there. But I think it does represent trends that at least that I feel reflect things that I've seen in classrooms.

So in thinking about practice now, what would you recommend for teachers who wish to perhaps A, evaluate, am I doing enough comprehension instruction? How do I know if I'm doing enough? And B, how might I increase the amount of instruction if I feel like I need to be doing more? More. I think that's a good thing. When we think of text as a vehicle for building students' knowledge, and we really invest in giving students opportunities to engage with texts in every lesson, in every class.

I think we're gonna make a difference. Sometimes, you know, in schools we think, oh, the English language arts teacher or during my ELA instruction, I'm gonna focus on reading. But we know that reading is critical to social studies, to science, to word problems. And so I think one suggestion I would have is to ensure that in each of your lessons, whether it's across content areas, that we're providing students opportunities to engage with tech.

I think that that's really key. And then I think that there are some practices that are really important to supporting them and that can be applied across text time. And so helping students to identify a purpose question or to have a purpose for reading and comprehending is really critical. And so there's some practices that I think, you know, we could think about applying across

classrooms and across settings. And I know there's some interesting work by Elizabeth Stevens and others focused on aligning instruction. And I think one way You know, it's hard for one teacher to shoulder the r the load, like in a middle school, of supporting text comprehension. So we all have to pitch in on it. And if we can align our practices across, so like perhaps

every teacher is in engaging students with text in every class period. Not maybe the whole time in social studies or science, but for some of the time. And that their every teacher is helping students to develop a comprehension purpose question, some purpose for reading. And then maybe there's some vocabulary supports. Maybe there's a common graphic organizer. Or

Or there's some helping to teach students to be word conscious, like we talked about earlier. Those might be some ways that we could increase the amount and volume of text reading during the school day. I really like that notion of first off thinking about text comprehension as this isn't just an ELA thing. that we can do a lot of text comprehension instruction.

outside of ELA time in the content areas, and lo and behold, that can actually also help students learn the grade level standards in those specific content areas as well. So almost thinking about as far as increasing the amount of comprehension of I don't need a separate bag of tools for my ELA time versus when I'm doing a text for science or for social studies that

I can use the same practices across the board because they're practices for understanding text, not just specifically like within my 60 minute ELA time. In thinking about I guess maybe can I ask you about text curation? Do you have any recommendations about

purposely curating text if maybe we're thinking about a specific social studies standard or we're thinking about helping students with a specific genre in ELA. How can text curation help this process of doing better with comprehension instruction. I think you're right that we need to think about the instruction we're providing and about the text that we're selecting and both are really important.

I think it all is around for me like fit for purpose. And so if in an English language arts class you're working towards helping students to understand an informational text, then I would be thinking about making sure that I'm providing instruction that's related to that text type and that students have multiple opportunities to engage and to build knowledge.

And then, you know, in a social studies classroom, I think, you know, I was describing that there's many practices that can cross disciplines. And I think that's true. I think there are also disciplinary practices that like in social studies, we want the teachers to support students in identifying multiple perspectives, to evaluate sourcing. To build arguments and counter arguments. And I think that we want to make sure that the students read texts on social studies.

that allow them to work on those different skills, right? And so studies we read biographies, but we're also gonna read different viewpoints on historical events and that will lend itself. So I think you're right that we really need to focus on the text that we're providing students. And there's lots of good resources out there that provide text.

We can think about New Z LA and and there's other ones out there that provide students opportunities to engage in rich informational text. And there's also curricula that have been developed that, you know, have text embedded. So I've been working with the SERP, has social studies generation and those materials are freely available through the SERP website.

And in those materials, there are texts already identified for teachers that are aligned to the lesson goals. And so I think if we're thinking about fit for purpose and identifying text that are aligned to your learning objective and that are complex. You're gonna have to provide word reading supports for some students. You'll have to provide collaborative learning so students that have less background knowledge can engage with the task.

But I think, you know, we wanna hold the same standard of engaging with a complex text and then think about what scaffolds can we provide to get everyone there.

Oh, such great points. I wanna also address question asking as well, because I don't want listeners to leave this episode going, I learned I shouldn't ask questions and so perhaps we can parse for a second, you know, how can a teacher distinguish between a low level questioning practice and a more c productive questioning practice and and perhaps some basic ideas to maybe level up the type of questioning from the just traditional

I'm the teacher going to ask a question. I'm going to call on a random kid to answer that question. And then we move on to the next question. How can we parse these and make it a bit more rigorous? I think you made a really excellent point is that asking literal comprehension questions is an important part of reading comprehension instruction, but it needs to be complemented with more

sophisticated practices where you're asking students to draw inferences. So if you look at the items on state release questions and on NAB, they don't ask primarily literal questions, right? There's a little bit of that. The questions that are asking right there in the text. But many of the questions are requiring students to draw inferences, text to text inferences, or, you know, inferences between what students read in the text and their background knowledge.

And so I think if we want students to to perform well on on state tests and to have the skills that are necessary to eventually perform in post secondary education in the workforce, we have to go beyond the basic questions. So I always start some of the more basic questions. And so if I'm teaching a whole class lesson in fourth or fifth grade, then I might say, okay,

I want you guys to in partners to discuss these two basic questions. We're going to come back together. We'll just check for understanding. And then I'm going to have you, you know, think about these different perspectives. about a a topic and then they're gonna engage in more discourse. And one thing that's in those social studies generation lessons or in other practices is is setting students up to discuss dilemmas, things that are not easy to answer.

And so I agree. A takeaway should not be that we shouldn't ask literal comprehension questions. I think that's foundational. But then we want to put students in charge of their discourse about text. I think part of the problem with this initiate, respond, evaluate is just the lack of student discussion. And so thinking about structured discussion, which is another really evidence based practice that I think maybe is best achieved through collaborative learning opportunities, is crucial.

Yeah, absolutely. So this was a synthesis of observational studies, but you also are actively involved in creating comprehension materials and implementing those through randomized control trials. Can you talk to us about some of the comprehension related projects you've been involved in or are involved in and how those might help us think about productive comprehension instruction in the classroom? Yes, for sure.

And there's as you said earlier, there's a lot of good work happening in reading comprehension, you know. I think it's fair to say we don't know quite as much about how to support text comprehension as we do about the more constrained foundational literacy skills, but we do know a lot. And there's some really great materials that are available for teachers.

And so I'm working on a couple of projects. One is helping to support students narrative text comprehension. And so we know that, you know, narratives have these story structures. And when we teach students that macro structure, the story grammar elements, and also provide them lots of opportunities to read stories and to write.

that we're gonna see improvements on narrative text comprehension. So I'm doing some work on narrative text comprehension. In expository text comprehension, there's other people that are doing excellent work. I'd point people to Jimmy Kim's work at I'm biased, but he's also at Harvard and he's doing work on knowledge building, which is really critical in the elementary grades. So he's working on social studies and science and vocabulary and knowledge building development.

There's another program from Sharon Vaughn, promoting adolescent comprehension of text. That program is for social studies teachers, and I think is another really evidence-based approach to supporting knowledge development and reading comprehension in the context of social studies. Yeah, so those are some of the projects that you know I've been working on and and other researchers that I think are important to follow.

Wonderful. Well, Dr. Phil Capin, thank you for your time on the show. Final question. What are you optimistic about with the direction of literacy research and practice? There's a lot that I'm optimistic about. I think I'm optimistic about the dual focus on developing students' foundational reading skills. You know, there's been a lot of legislation.

I don't think all of it's perfect, but there's been a lot of legislation and emphasis on helping students to learn foundational reading skills. I don't think that's the end goal, just as strategies aren't the end goal, but it's a necessary part of supporting students' text comprehension, which is, you know, our end goal is helping them

to read the words off the page, right? And to read with relative ease so that they can comprehend. And so I think the focus on developing foundational real E skills and this push for supporting students comprehension is critical. And I feel like we're in a point where we're transcending some of the debates around whether you have to choose

And people are recognizing that it's not the either or thing. It's a both and that we're focused on foundational reading skills. And even in the earliest grades, we're also focused on building knowledge and on engaging students. In comprehension and vocabulary work. Wonderful. Dr. Phil Capin, thank you for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Thanks, Jake. I appreciate it.

Hey, a big thanks to our guest, Dr. Phil Capin, for joining us on the show today. I have so many comments that I could make on what we talked about, but I want to take a minute and talk specifically about question asking and doing questions better. doctor Capin noted that in Dolores Durkin's study in nineteen seventy eight-seventy nine, that a lot of the questions, a lot of the quote unquote comprehensive instructional practices that were occurring was actually low-level questioning.

of an initiation, I, the teacher, I'm gonna ask a question, I'm gonna call on a specific student, and then I'm gonna evaluate that student got the answer correct and move on to another student and sort of lather rinse repeat that process. And I like thinking about how do we do questions better? How do we take that sort of basic

question format and make it more productive classroom practice. And Dr. Capin mentioned this really clearly, that that's sort of just a de facto, almost automatic knee jerk response to do the text. You know, he mentioned that when he reads with his kids at night,

He's going to ask them questions. I do the same thing when I'm reading with my kids and I tend to ask them questions. I do the same thing with my undergraduates. I tend to ask them questions about what they read and I do that to understand where they're at. But he had a really good point in the episode. He was quoting one of the authors of one of the studies that they looked at and talked about the difference between evaluating and extending.

And I think that if we're asking a question to evaluate, that's not a problem. If we're asking that baseline question to sort of see where our students are at, there's not an issue with that. We just need to look at that as we are surveying our students, we are evaluating our students that that is an assessment practice.

If I am asking a student a question to listen to their response in order to gauge how well they understood a portion or a part or all of a text, we need to look at that as an assessment practice. And we need to complement that within instructional practice as well. So thinking about if I'm asking a question to evaluate. That's just assessment. And if we have a preponderance of that, then we're not actually teaching text, we're just continually assessing text.

But if I ask a question to first evaluate and then I have a plan to extend. Now we have comprehension instruction. And he did such a great job of explaining that in the episode. So maybe before I ask my students to answer it, maybe I'm gonna model some thinking.

around how I might answer that question as an expert reader. Or maybe I might direct my students to some text evidence that they can use to help answer that question. Or maybe I might direct them to find two or three pieces of text evidence before I ask them to generate an answer so that they can have a more rigorous or it's they can have a more thoughtful, complete, more academic answer from the test.

Or maybe I take that baseline of okay, who's the main character? What is the main challenge they're facing? And then I can use that to take a look at narrative plot structure and be able to work on filling out a graphic organizer that It's not about getting rid of question asking altogether. It's about how do I take a question and make it an integrated part among a constellation of high-leverage comprehension practices.

And I think that's a really big deal if we're gonna think about how we can better promote and support comprehension instruction within our sphere. That's all I've got for you today. As always, thank you for joining us on the show. If you benefited from this episode, I would really appreciate it if you shared this with a colleague that you feel might also benefit.

This is Jake with the Teaching Literacy Podcast. And until next time, let's work together to make reading and writing instruction even better.