Disciplined Reading in an Undisciplined 21st Century Meltdown

Who Knows?

Jun 06, 2023

(Patricia A. Alexander & The Disciplined Reading and Learning Research Laboratory [DRLRL] (2012): Reading into the Future: Competence for the 21st Century. Educational Psychologist, 47:4, 259-280)

Whomever ‘we’ is, the voices at DRLRL speaking above (so to speak) pointed to some daunting challenges for competent readers working toward expertise in schools bound and determined to prepare them for the real world, and we here at ltRRtl will take a look at those challenges. The speaking ‘we’ in the quote promises more than just a cogent analysis of the problem: a solution, not ready made like instructional materials or scripts you can order and train on—no, learning to harness a superpower like relational reasoning takes uncomfortable and demanding work. It’s complex, not simple like SoR with all the moving parts laid out in circuits and loops that activate automatically once you learn them. The DRLRL solution is a three-dimensional solution to a profound human challenge about relations among ideas, reasoning from known facts to compelling conclusions, and understanding how to use cognitive strategies. Oh, and it’s not surefire—this notion can “address” the problem, but it’s nothing miraculous like phonics is purported to be. We here at ltRRtl will ‘discuss’ the solution, too, before concluding this post. Bear with me, and, please, let me know what you think. There is a place here at ltRRtl for real discussion. I know how to turn on the comment button, but after my first full year of earnest work on this newsletter, I’ve not learned how to motivate earnest responses. I know some of you are reading, but I don’t have a clue about your thinking.

21st century education became a rallying cry after Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech in 2006 titled “21st Century Schools for a 21st Century Economy,” setting in motion a quest for a smoother flow of humanity between school and the workplace. “Today we are failing too many of our children,” he said. “We’re sending them…through the doors of 20th century schools.” 1 Witness words from his speech delivered just two years before he was elected the next President after the one he references in the first line:

Like the DRLRL group, Obama identified the problem: heightened challenges to reading and learning from reading in a new century. But his solution is magical thinking. More money isn’t the answer, though it’s a start. If it’s spent on phonics materials and paraphernalia, it could simply be wasted. Nor will better tests provide a clearer path. We needed a clearer path and then we needed better tests. We got neither. Soon after this speech, we got a new path called the Common Core State Standards, but I leave it to you to decide if it’s clearer. We didn’t get a new test. Instead we got Smarter Balanced. In fact, our best chance of getting a new test was foiled in 2021 by the same uninformed political ideologues who enacted NCLB and hijacked the NAEP comprehension test 21st century redesign. More on this later.

Alexander and her colleagues at the University of Maryland published their document about challenges competent readers face and a potential solution six year’s after Obama’s speech out of “…concern in the actions of community, business, and political leaders who are attempting to address perceived inadequacies and inequities in reading achievement or in workplace performance.” The concern—again, from the speaking ‘we’— was that these actions did not arise out of “…an adequately comprehensive understanding of the nature of reading and its development.” Apparently, the democratic ‘we’ took the Simple View.

Indeed, the speaking ‘we’ from the DRLRL wasn’t a lone voice in the wilderness. Valencia, Pearson, and Wixson (2011) published a conceptual paper with earnest and scholarly advice about a design framework for changes needed in reading comprehension tests then on the Smarter Balanced and PARCC drawing boards, reaching essentially the same conclusion as the DRLRL. Drawing partly on the scientific work Alexander and the DRLRL had been doing for several years and from other important, innovative research, Valencia et al. took on the task of synthesizing fit-for-purpose design principles for school-based formative and summative assessments of reading comprehension supporting what I judge to be a flawed call for complex disciplinary reading in the Common Core State Standards.

“Because of the key role that reading comprehension plays in the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge,” Valencia et al. (2011) wrote, squarely referencing the domain-specific nature of competent reading Alexander and colleagues are interested in, “getting reading comprehension assessment (and instruction) right may be our most important milestone on the pathway to preparing students for success in higher education and the workplace.” Witness their concluding paragraph:

I do not think that the DRLRL would disagree in principle with an R&D test design model called “Text-Task Scenarios” as a springboard to the fast lane in the sociological imagination it’s going to require to finally clear the fog in the field. In particular, the speaking DRLRL ‘we’ saw a need for “what has been missing in the collective discourse” namely, an informed view of what is known about the “development of expertise and about epistemic beliefs,” i. e., about the critical role of each reader’s growing domain-specific understanding and knowledge of concepts and ideas, about the impact of interest and curiosity as drivers of hard cognitive work as expertise grows, and about what the reader believes to be valid ways to build knowledge through reading.

Knowledge, relational reasoning, reading, writing, interest, motivation, language, intentionality—all of these elements interact to strengthen and deepen knowledge and expertise. Without this conceptual anchor for what reading can do for robust learning about the world and what learning in and about the world does for reading when learning feeds writing, neither pedagogy nor its attendant, assessment, will have much impact on the future of complex literacy challenges. 20th century reading instruction and testing dominates the 21st century right now and is focused on information management, not on competence in knowledge building, a focus that could not be more ineffective as preparation for college or the workplace.

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Golf balls and footballs are alike, but they are different. Tennis balls and silver balls on Christmas trees are different, but they are alike. Golf balls and silver balls are different, but they’re not opposites. Are basketballs more like golf balls than like footballs? Tennis balls and baseballs anyone? Are basketballs like soccer balls? What about the cat in the backyard and the squirrel in the tree? The bird perched in the treetop? The dog chasing its tail? DRLRL claims that relational reasoning of this sort, a kind of reasoning that has intrigued philosophers of logic and mathematics since ancient times, is a class of reading comprehension strategies. Discerning patterns in an avalanche of information that reloads and reshapes itself at the click of reality’s mouse may be by analogy the equivalent of phonemic awareness in cognitive terms:2

Relational reasoning begins in infancy and fuels the emerging intellect to sort and grasp sensory percepts, little by little using information to build informal concepts which soon become magnetized through language. As cognition strengthens its capacity in its marriage with language, percepts lodge as visual and kinetic data in the ground floor of knowledge, and Piagetian reflective abstraction begins to build infant expertise. This expertise creates biases that automate recognition and insight somewhat, affording identification of percepts quickly and effortlessly but risking mistakes. We learn to attend and then to ignore. Soon language begins to consume consciousness and becomes an amazing psychological tool that amplifies the uniquely human penchant for understanding the world and acting on that understanding. If you’re looking for magic, start here.

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Claude Goldenberg, a researcher at Stanford, who has become an important voice in the Science of Reading movement, has considerable expertise in reading, reading pedagogy, and English language learners. I appreciate Goldenberg’s implication that SoR has become fractured, much like the Grand Old Party, that political partisanship has distorted its truth. Yes, there is replicated, scientific evidence that most children need direct instruction in phonics, that the alphabetic principle the species somehow uncovered three thousand years ago isn’t obvious and easy to use. Goldenberg demonstrates through his work that even experts in the knowledge domain called “beginning reading instruction” use relational reasoning strategies to make sense of how phonics relates to comprehension. His nuanced argument in the domain-specific debate about the three-cueing systems vs phonics first will serve as a useful example of the relational reasoning strategies the DRLRL advocates for—and point to a novel meaning of the phrase “phonics first.”

Goldenberg argues that three resources interact to form the “foundation” of reading: phonological processing, syntax, and semantics. As I reason relationally (DRLRL call this particular flavor “analogical reasoning”) about this notion, I come to see that what Goldenberg is saying is on the surface identical to Kenneth Goodman’s three-cueing model, but I’m sensing some dissonance, some sort of exclusivity between Goodman and Goldenberg. How can Goldenberg advocate for SoR and for phonics, syntax, and semantics simultaneously? Here comes my reasoning. The partisan faction of the SoR movement treats phonological processes as a special resource, separating this resource from syntax and semantics, in effect erecting a wall between phonics and comprehension (absent syntax and semantics, there is no comprehension). In DRLRL parlance, when we erect walls between ideas, we use the strategy called “antinomy.” I like that word. When you spot an antinomous relationship, proceed cautiously. Mistakes in reasoning here can seriously weaken a knowledge structure. Matching letters with spoken words, apprehending how those words function together in grammatical structures, and understanding the meanings of words in context—these three ideas form a pattern we in the field call “reading” in a basic sense.

What is basic reading like? It seems as if basic writing would fit the bill. Analogical reasoning (relational reasoning type 1) suggests that reading and writing are very much alike. You need all three resources for both. Are there any anomalies (RR Type 2) in the relationship, any ways they differ? The application of phonological skills in reading is decoding, the application in writing is spelling. So reading and writing rely on phonological processes, but they use these processes differently (identification vs. generation of spellings). Reasoning by antinomy (type 3), that is, examining reading and writing for exclusivity, uncovers a difference between reading and writing regarding meaning: Writing is done to express meaning, reading is done to understand meaning. In that sense there is a wall between them. Are reading and writing in opposition (type 4, antithetical reasoning)? Using hot and cold as a touchstone, I think not, but I’m open to discussion.

Ah. They may be opposites in one important way with regard to semantics. It’s all but impossible to conceive of writing without semantics except in the case of Jabberwocky where not even at the word level can you find conventional sense. Any serious attempt to write without regard to meaning is ludicrous, punctuation for the fact that writing makes sense. Writing done in mockery of writing. Period. But what about poetry? Poetry makes its own kind of meaning. Wait a minute. Are writing and poetry exclusive to one another (antinomy)? Or are the anomalies just more salient than the analogies?

According to certain constellations of relational reasoning, competent reading is best accomplished through teaching with texts like Jabberwocky, aka decodables. Partisan SoR claims that reading IS phonological processing walled off from syntax and semantics (antinomy). In fact, in the vernacular, reading is decoding. But is this claim relationally defensible? Can reading be done with no necessary link to semantics? Is decoding nonsense words reading? Is the relationship between reading and verbalizing nonsense antithetical? Could it be epistemically believable that reading means making meaning while simultaneously it also means simply mouthing words?

Entering contested ground called the 3-Cueing debate, Goldenberg pushes back on this absurdity. Of course mouthing words is not reading. But the debate itself must be framed in a relationship between the two sides. According to Goldenberg’s reasoning, this debate is not about reading at all, but about reading pedagogy. In the following audio excerpt (referenced above), he cites Linnea Ehri, a seminal researcher who unearthed the concept of orthographic mapping and was in on the ground floor of the Science of Reading journal:

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This approach sounds a lot like Reading Recovery, eh? Furthermore, it removes the troubling dichotomy positioning learning to read as mastery of nonsense while learning to write involves sense-making. Examining the possibility of a false dichotomy opens the gate to more competent knowledge building. A bit later, Goldenberg relies on the relationship of antinomy between the reading process and reading pedagogy. They are categorically different concepts. And he defines a difference, an anomaly, between 3-cueing pedagogy and cross-checking that seems to elude many of the rocket scientists in the debate but satisfies his drive for expert knowledge:

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You may want to push back against Goldenberg’s analysis as an advocate for explicit phonics instruction or as a Whole Language advocate. Partisan SoR folks might resist cross-checking as they make a case for four or five months of precious time spent in beginning reading pedagogy devoted to the Jabberwock. Partisan Whole Language advocates, a dying breed (some might say extinct) for sure, might resist the insistence on phonological processing as the first resource to deploy. But if you decide to challenge Goldberg’s reasoning, that is, the antinomy of cross-checking phonological processing against syntax and semantics vs. moving on by hook or by crook, you are faced with Goldberg’s objection to irrational pedagogy—and by golly there is some irrational pedagogy going on. The value of relational reasoning strategies in the reading of research on reading according to my epistemic beliefs is affirmed.

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Can relational reasoning be taught in the PK12 classroom?

Patricia Alexander, the origo of DRLRL, thinks so, and she is clearly a bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool classroom teacher in my book. She taught middle grades in public school for ten years and decided to become a professor in the 1970s as the field of reading was immersing itself in psycholinguistics, from whence those who knocked down the conceptual wall between phonological processing and syntax/semantics came, and cognitive psychology, from whence the conceptual edifice we call comprehension came. As near as I can tell, with her core professional identity stabilized as a teacher, she broadened and deepened her expertise as a thinker, learner, teacher, writer, and researcher and became a powerful voice for reading pedagogy with a long reach within the research literature on reading and educational psychology.

As I understand it, Reading into the Future (2012) from which my opening quote was excerpted is a product of a collaborative effort Alexander led to uncover the degree of match between reading education at the dawn of the 21scentury in the real world and literacy demands public school teachers and learners would soon face in the new era. That was then. This is rapidly becoming now as the information avalanche becomes a mix of artificial and real. Reading this document from ten years ago with hindsight, I find its prescience uncanny and its message of great relevance to 2023. As researchers like Lorrie Shepard and Linda Darling-Hammond write about with an urgency today, almost emergency, the time to begin the transformation was yesterday. The challenges DRLRL identified in 2012 remain unsolved, in some areas exacerbated. Some of the challenges arise from inevitable changes in technology writ large. Some of them arise from social discord. Taken together, they become a light flashing red. Warning Will Robinson:

In her recent talks on YouTube, Patricia Alexander moves with alacrity from her experiences in the cauldron of the public school classroom to the cutting edge of neurobiology and technology. Her roots in classrooms ground her approach to research in the key of pragmatism sorely needed these days. She reinforces the fact that laboratory research has produced a wealth of scientific knowledge about reading ranging from phonemic awareness to comprehension processes. How to apply this knowledge in a living classroom as a professional teaching force is not well researched.

In a 2021 YouTube Webinar event held by APA Division 15 on March 12, 2021, in the role of an established academic journal editor (she is current editor of 14 journals), she and a colleague fielded questions about the future of publishing in academic journals researchers-in-training must understand to prepare for it. In the following audio excerpt she responds to a moderator question looking to the future of research in reading, and she centers her burning research questions in the area of research in the classroom:

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As co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly, sharing the role with Amanda Goodwin, Robert Jiménez answered questions in 2021 about the recent special issue of RRQ devoted to the science of reading. Amanda Goodwin describes her primary identity as a teacher, much like Patricia Alexander, whose curiosity motivated her to become a researcher; Robert Jiménez describes himself as a researcher who spends his time in classrooms fascinated by the complexity of teaching reading to second-language learners. When they put out a call for a special edition of RRQ to be published in a record six month, they were awed by the response of senior researchers willing to write and submit articles in a few months’ time. After the dust settled, they compiled a powerful collection of ideas and perspectives attesting to one theme: Although reading is not a simple process, we do know a great deal about its complexity. What don’t we know? Here’s Robert Jiménez from the YouTube:

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Donna Ogle (1986), who invented the KWL instructional strategy, had been doing observational research on reading in classrooms with a particular interest in how learners are taught reading as a knowledge building process. She knew that students then read a lot of narrative fiction in the elementary grades in the context of reading instruction, building a fund of knowledge about reading and about stories, and that students were expected to read more and more non-fiction expository material as they grew older. However, as near as she could tell, few teachers were doing any reading instruction to promote the practice of strategies learners could use to bring their prior knowledge to bear before reading an informative text and then after reading to consolidate their new knowledge. Witness how she described what she saw:

The classroom has changed considerably. Patricia Alexander’s student, Courtney Hattan, won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Literacy Association in 2019 for a naturalistic mixed-methods experiment comparing three distinct approaches to targeting prior knowledge as an element of pre-reading instruction. Mobilizing prior knowledge (Ogle’s KWL), Annotating (Traditional), and direct instruction in relational reasoning strategies went head to head in a comprehension showdown among middle-school students in history class followed up by semi structured interviews with a low-performing and a high-performing reader in each condition. Dr. Hattan now does her research at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, a campus with a laboratory school, and her recent publications suggest she has broadened her research agenda to examine relational reasoning as it interacts with factors like interest and motivation.

The answer is yes. Relational reading strategies help students build knowledge and expertise from reading. And yes, they can be taught. Alexander et al. (2016) explained that “spontaneously perceiving relationships” among objects in the information stream, i.e., “relational thinking,” serves the information manager, but “…the intentional harnessing of pattern recognition to drive higher levels of human learning and performance (i.e., relational reasoning)” is a defining feature of “competence.” As readers progress from novice to competent to proficient, they improve not just in relational reasoning, but in domain-specific expertise, knowledge, performance, motivation, focus, and interest.

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Pragmatism, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “… very broadly – [means] knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it.” We exist self-consciously in cultural-historical activity settings, which define the world for each of us in durable periods, in terms of our ability to participate with others as individuals. We come to depend on the world to hold itself together, we build knowledge, skill, and expertise to better use our agency to adjust and adapt such that the world we get looks something like the world we want. This is the nature of pragmatic adjustment, and it depends on relational thinking.

When human beings perform difficult behaviors of cumulative consequence as social agents from and simultaneously inescapably inside a body in an isolated and tacit world, epistemic competence (what’s going on here?), developed through reflective abstraction (Piaget), applies appropriate biases to reduce demand on the field of attention. Biases are crucial in ignoring or selecting and organizing bits of information quickly to discern meaningful details and decrease risk of ineffectiveness in the moment by deploying precision-guided behavior. Reading a unified text has been described as following a recipe of biases until the author and reader are on the same page biaswise. This was during the time before AI, when ‘author’ meant ‘human being.’

Pragmatically, competence involves both “knowing the world” socially, physically, and historically, and understanding one’s self as an agent—self-interests and desires, strengths and limitations, moral and communal interests, physical and social potentials. Certain kinds of holistic and distributed competence are forged early in life in families and communities embedded in intentional activity settings over long time periods, and later on in public and private institutions, and we have formal schools to develop competence at the level of society, an abstraction that has no physical reality. Because certain kinds of incompetence are harmful to others, because certain kinds of competence are rare, we have licensure to liberate and protect expertise.

Licensure of physicians and surgeons was separated from political and ideological oversight in the 16th century when King George III and an archbishop of some renown ceded authority to license surgeons, based on evidence of sustained and principled observation of their own students, to well-respected medical doctors of the time. The Royalty as well as the Clergy acknowledged that the quality of the training of surgeons stood between superstition and ignorance, on one hand, and a legacy of shared tacit, bound, and scientific knowledge, on the other. Well-trained surgeons can save lives that otherwise would be lost. Untrained surgeons can kill people who might otherwise live (an antithetical relationship).

The American Medical Association, the largest professional organization of MDs, devotes a section of its website to accreditation of medical schools, that is to say, to giving a warrant to a school attesting to its high level of educational expertise. A core requirement of an applicant for a license to diagnose and treat human beings for illnesses and ailments is graduation from an accredited medical school. Physicians and physician educators are active agents in shaping and using accreditation to constantly improve their reading of the future new physicians will face. Witness the following excerpt from the AMA website, evidencing pragmatism inherent in medical school accreditation

Dumas et al. (2014)3 made the case that clinical reasoning ought to be viewed as a core learning outcome of medical education, another example of scientific innovation in medical education with clear links to Miller’s (1990) pyramid of competence with its peak labeled DOING—I’ve come to think of it as the “just do it” pyramid in resonance with David Pearson’s and Mile Myer’s voices in the New Standards Project in 1990s. Here is a segment of the Dumas et al. article abstract:

Clinical reasoning—the steps up to and including establishing a diagnosis and/or therapy—is a fundamentally important mental process for physicians. …[E]rrors in clinical reasoning lead to substantial problems for medical professionals and patients alike, including suboptimal care, malpractice claims, and rising health care costs. For this reason, cognitive strategies…that many expert clinicians are already using…are highly relevant for all medical professionals, educators, and learners.”

The cognitive strategies Dumas et al. advocated for including in the curriculum in medical training are used on any given day in any doctor’s practice, they generate expert tacit knowledge, and they drive self-improvement. They are the same strategies discussed in The Disciplined Reading and Learning Research Laboratory (2012) publication quoted at the beginning of this post: Relational Reasoning Strategies. Best of all, relational reasoning strategies can be taught.

An abdominal aortic aneurism often grows slowly, stealthily, in the background. As it grows, some people may notice a pulsating feeling near the navel. Pain in the back, belly, or side may signal an impending rupture. Arthritis causes difficulty moving the affected joint or joints, swelling or bulging in the joint, pain or aching in the joint, pain around the joint, pain elsewhere, as a person may modify their activities or pattern of movement because of the pain, and redness or warmth around the joint. Bacterial meningitis often causes a stiff neck with limited range of motion, headaches, high fever, confusion, sleepiness, bruising easily, skin rashes, and sensitivity to light. A coronary artery bypass graft treats coronary heart disease by diverting blood around narrowed or clogged parts of the major arteries to improve blood flow and oxygen supply to the heart.

How do relational reasoning strategies serve the practicing physician responsible for diagnosing and treating maladies? It’s possible that a general practitioner might suspect an aortic aneurysm in the morning, offer medication to an old man with swollen joints before lunch, fear a case of bacterial meningitis in the afternoon, and talk about a coronary artery bypass graft with a surgeon before leaving for dinner. How might this doctor’s professional education have prepared him to sort through expert knowledge built through proficient reading of research held in deep storage to find the precise match between the human being presenting symptoms in context and the most compelling diagnosis and treatment decisions?

Dumas et al. (2014) studied the potential role of relational reasoning strategies in clinical diagnosis and prescription:

Here is how Patricia Alexander talked about this study in a recent YouTube:

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What was happening in medical education in 2014 was working well, but training targeting relational reasoning strategies could improve clinical competence. The researchers described the conventional wisdom in the teaching of clinical reasoning in terms that are similar to partisan SoR models of understanding reading, akin to a Simple View. Clinical reasoning theory as it existed at the time of publication is called “dual process theory” and argued that physicians use one of two cognitive gears while engaged in clinical reasoning: “…[S]ystem 1 thinking, which is fast, low effort, and often subconscious; and [S]ystem 2 thinking, which is slower and requires conscious effort.” Unfortunately, the fallout from dual process theory in medical education is also similar to reading education: “[I]t is understood that novices in any discipline must necessarily effortfully use system 2 as they acclimate to their discipline, while experts tend to rely more heavily on automated system 1 processing to make decisions.”

These researchers advocated for a shift from the dual process theory (laborious effort followed by expert automaticity) toward a relational reasoning model whereby novices need self-regulated, structured practice in thinking precisely as an expert thinks from the early stages of learning. In this way, novices build relational links into their knowledge base while building it: When novices look for analogies, anomalies, antinomies, and oppositions as a habit of mind, “…conceptual relations take the form of linking words and crosslinks, and these may be conceptualized as taking the form of relational reasoning strategies such as “similar to” (analogy), “discrepant from” (anomaly), “incompatible with” (antinomy), or “opposed to” (antithesis).” Much as Golderberg and Ehri agreed that every reader must cross-check sound and structure against semantics even during novice reading, novice physicians must begin to think like expert physicians even as they rely on an inadequate knowledge base. Through relational thinking and reasoning, they learn to practice medicine and to build an organized knowledge system with designed-in links.

The underlying structure of the argument parallels the structure of the argument between phonics first and furious vs. the three cueing systems. Moreover, the older dual process theory, like phonics first, has downstream effects that position experts as performing with cognitive ease without breaking a sweat while novices must be given fragmented, regimented, explicit instruction designed to inhibit them from making and self-correcting mistakes. According to Dumas er al. (2014):

“Possible relevant future research projects… include identifying the existing relational reasoning requirements of high-stakes medical assessments such as board certifications; examining the differential role of relational reasoning within disciplines or specialties of clinical practice (e.g., surgery or cardiology); longitudinally examining the development of relational reasoning strategies as medical students become practicing physicians to enable theory building in clinical reasoning; and empirically testing whether explicit use of relational reasoning strategies can improve clinical reasoning performance of learners in all areas and levels of health professions education.”

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The call for more research into reading instruction in classrooms has crescendoed since the early years of schema theory and KWL, and much classroom research has been done. When Alexander looked deeply into the 21st century future of reading, however, when she used the term “competent reading,” she wasn’t talking about fluency and automaticity, though she was throughly cognizant of their role. She wasn’t talking about performance on a standardized vocabulary or comprehension test. She wasn’t talking about information management, organization, storage, and retrieval under examination conditions. She insisted that competent readers use reading behaviors to build knowledge in domain-specific ways that are motivated, interesting, and self-regulated, leading to increasingly higher levels of both expertise and the drive to improve expertise. And then comes the “proficient reader.”

Twelve years ago when Alexander and the DRLRL published Reading into the Future under the “21st century” moniker, American schools were thawing from the cold, mechanical bureaucracy of NCLB (“no child likes books” as Janet Hecsh quipped memorably one morning in her office while we were having coffee). According to the old legislation (2001), every child in the country was to be a proficient reader according to the read-and-retell regime by 2014 or all hell would break loose. Then we were in 2012 common to the core. Little had changed. The rich got richer. Not every child was proficient, not by a long shot, most were basic, overrepresented by the colored, the poor, and sure enough, all hell broke loose. It just took a few years, but the chickens came home to roost.

His name is Donald Trump, the cock fighter, the least likely ambassador for competent reading imaginable.

During the winter of NCLB, many in the field of the scientific reading research community were deeply into a broad rethinking of foundational theories built after the cognitive revolution to surround these ideas with a century of sociocultural research on literacy. Thought leaders like David Pearson and Patricia Alexander, stewards of the wisdom from decades of interdisciplinary work on reading tucked in under the blanket of cognitive psychology, opened the aperture of researchers to explore social and ideological aspects of reading as they shape cognitive participation in culture and history. The ripples went so far as to supplant the word “reading” with “literacy” in the title of the reading field’s professional organization, the same International Literacy Association that recognized the value of Courtney Hattan’s dissertation.

The other, smaller part of the field was zeroing in on phonemes, brain circuits, and automaticity, claiming the mantle of Science, which seemed to be melting away in the hot sun of subjectivity, in a bid to lay claim to pedagogy in service to an autonomous reading brain. The zeroing in wasn’t a problem. I’ve not yet met an academic or practitioner with expert knowledge and understanding of the scholarship who disrespects the phoneme. But a character named Phoneme in a comic book would not be a super hero, saving the world from the nightmare of the psycholinguistic guessing game.

Alexander noted that neurological studies of brain tissue activation under specific demands promise insights unimaginable today. But the inferential leap from laboratory evidence of cognitive processes devoid of sociocultural shaping to in vivo pedagogy in undisciplined reality is a problem. Pedagogy can be scripted only in Hollywood. David Pearson also spoke about the cauldron of the classroom as the proper target of research on literacy pedagogy right here on ltRRtl.

Turbulence in the aftermath of the latest pendulum swing between the poles of a false dichotomy, reading as phonemic mastery and reading as sociocultural and phenomenological experience, set the stage for compromise. NCLB passed like a gall stone, and most of the states absorbed, as Jeb Bush described it, a compromise, a viewpoint on a common core literacy curriculum, one in which, arguably, schools are utilitarian institutions that train students to function productively and profitably in a complex economy requiring the capacity to manage information and problem-solve, not necessarily to build knowledge and expertise in a domain. Reading became cognitive again, a processing of source text for evidence to make or break an argument, and writing became what you do to prove that you read, annotated, and organized the textual cues in harmony with the rubric. As it was in the 19th century in Alexander Bain’s world of the paragraph as the essay in miniature, writing was a matter of packing information in narrative, expository, or argumentative rhetorical structures.

The group of reading scientists at DRLR Lab was watching readers and reading carefully in school and out, five or ten or fifteen years old, investigating for example to find out whether reading on paper or on a screen makes any difference in behavior. Readers on a screen annotate less, but when they do, they select things worth annotating. Readers on a screen also read faster. They saw profound changes in behaviors among non-standardized children in a digital world, an intensification of forces rewarding information management and eliding knowledge building..

A deep political challenge also linked to the regime of the standardized test in the factory model metaphor showed itself during the process of revising the framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading comprehension test design specifications4. The following table presents a proposed definition of reading comprehension offered to the NAEP Board in 2021 to bring the new test design specs into the 21st Century. Following a hijacking of the Board by conservative ideologues, the definition was changed in subtle, but profound, ways:

Shift #1 removes “cognitive” from the “reading process.” The proposed language calls reading a “complex cognitive process”; the adopted version calls reading a “complex process.” In one fell swoop, the hijackers excised the cognitive revolution from the field of reading; perhaps mistakenly, they left unchanged the adjective—“complex” could have become “simple” which would have assuaged the simple viewers.

Shift #2 is an entailment of shift #1. If reading is not a cognitive process, it cannot be influenced by the sociocultural surround, though it takes place in a surround. Reading is a matter of an individual and their ability in isolation. Leaving out the role of thinking, reading becomes a matter of “personal resource.” Noting that the DRLR Lab lifts up the importance of “relational reasoning,” a discrete kind of cognition, as the key element of instruction needing attention, one is taken aback by the devaluing of “cognition” in comprehension in the nation’s reading comprehension test. Instead of occupying space at the heart of reading, thinking is a “personal resources” like “language.”

The force of this shift shows up in the final bullet. The proposed language emphasizes that reading is done for “various purposes” in various contexts, linking back to the “shaping” of cognition by social and cultural forces. In the hijacked definition ultimately reified in the official document, readers simply do the activity of reading in social and cultural contexts that have nothing to do with “various purposes” shaped by and negotiated with others. Reading as black-box activity is unrelated to sociocultural dynamics. Reading is autonomous.

These shifts are examined thoroughly in the paper cited in footnote 4. I shall end here with another spoken ‘we,’ this time from the field of reading to those of us in an even larger ‘we’ watching this retreat unfold in real time. I invite you to comment and respond to one another in this space.

“We as a literacy field must remember that even though many of the research-based recommendations we made in the name of increased equity, relevance, and fairness were rejected, many were also adopted. It remains to be seen whether those that were adopted will make their way into the passages, tasks, comprehension items, process indicators, surveys, and reports developed from the 2026 NAEPmReading Framework. As a literacy field, we need to make sure that the NAEP community (the Board, NCES, its subcontractors, and advisers) follows through by taking the Framework seriously in the development, analysis, and reporting of NAEP Reading in the Nation’s Report Card. Join us in making sure that promises are kept and in imagining an even bolder set of promises for the next Reading Framework.”

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

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Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

Disciplined Reading in an Undisciplined 21st Century Meltdown

Who Knows?

“…[T]he challenges we… describe for competent reading in the 21st century can be…addressed by learning to harness the power of… relational reasoning strategies.”

(Patricia A. Alexander & The Disciplined Reading and Learning Research Laboratory [DRLRL] (2012): Reading into the Future: Competence for the 21st Century. Educational Psychologist, 47:4, 259-280)

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