Reviewing the “Knowledge Matters Review Tool”

For a variety of reasons, the “Knowledge Matters Review Tool,” a rubric available for free online, deserves careful consideration by teachers and administrators serving locally in individual schools or districts. The tool itself is under ten pages, a workable space for a rubric. I can’t locate a list of authors on the document itself, but the Knowledge Matters Campaign website provides a list of reading scientists who are thought leaders of the new, emerging, expanded Science of Reading, which I’ll distinguish from the outdated, incomplete “Science of Reading” by using SoR to refer to the new, upgraded version complete with psycholinguistics and educational anthropology and SoR ©️ to refer to the past version.

The roots of the Campaign seem to grow organically from the disparate strands of research in the mainstream field of reading from the 1960s through the 1990s and beyond. Tellingly, the KMRT, my tongue-in-cheek, ironically delicious abbreviation for the “Knowledge Matters Review Tool,” carefully distinguishes between background knowledge and content knowledge, highlighting a philosophical stance implying an epistemic division between informal knowledge building in and out of school and more specialized, disciplinary concepts requiring guided instruction of the sort provided in school. Bringing this issue to center stage is crucial to understanding the tool.

A dominant theme of the rubric, in fact, is a deliberate awareness of the public school classroom as a public, regulated space where professionals locally plan and implement an evidence-based approach to the adopted curriculum from antiquity, which as a structure for mass education has served America as well as could expected. Designed to dovetail nicely with the Common Core Standards for the English-Language Arts K-8, “knowledge building” in ELA classrooms does not mean, for example, targeting these classrooms to teach students necessarily how to read and write technical documents or to learn about mitosis and meiosis. In the Campaign’s own words, here we learn the pragmatic underpinnings of its mission with firm grounding in the reality principle:

“The Campaign initially focused on increasing the instructional time students receive in history, science, geography, art, music, and literature, particularly in the elementary grades. Students in grades K–6 receive a mere 16–21 minutes a day on social studies and 19–24 minutes on science, which defies everything we know from research about the critical role knowledge plays in learning to read and write well.”

While the KMRT takes a strong stance on a coherent, structured, and transparent approach to early reading pedagogy, insisting on sustained instructional attention to decoding and fluency consistent with the Common Core and with mainstream research, it insists as well that all instruction starting day one must be viewed through an epistemic lens: All children must have rich opportunities to build knowledge. Seen in the light of knowledge, much of what makes up the conventional machinery of pedagogy available off the shelf leaves much to be desired. Here is a snippet from the website discussing this very point:

“Importantly, these [new KMRT] curricula look and feel very different from traditional basal readers and popular ‘balanced literacy’ programs, which encourage many practices that have largely been discredited by research. In addition to taking a haphazard approach to building content knowledge, such programs generally focus lessons on single skills (like ‘find the main idea’ or ‘draw inferences’) or isolated standards. They typically embrace a leveled reader approach that denies many students access to rigorous texts. Finally, the sheer bulk and bloat (‘kitchen sink’ approach) of every basal program examined dilutes any individual strengths it may contain.”

In prefatory comments written on the rubrics itself, the Campaign is clear that change is needed. The sheer number of minutes dedicated to “reading instruction” largely dictated by the scope and sequence chart of basal readers, which becomes a proxy curriculum, has engulfed the elementary school day, dramatically limiting the number of minutes available for content areas. One way to reallocate time across the curriculum is by recognizing that Language Arts have a role to play in contributing to knowledge building.

Another important change is to acknowledge the counterproductive consequences of insisting that every phonics program must adhere to one, and only one, approach to beginning reading. One need not accept one program because it sequenced the vowels thus and so, and reject another because it doesn’t. On this score the SoR diverges from the SoR ©️ in implementation but not on science. Decoding, fluency, and spelling count as foundational and non-negotiable:

“While it describes eight important dimensions of knowledge-building ELA curricula, this tool does not describe the absolutely essential foundational skills, such as systematic and structured phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling, and fluency, that are the very bedrock of any great ELA curriculum and crucial to students' reading success. This is by design. Many review tools exist that do this well. None, however, deeply support educators in discerning an ELA curriculum’s strength in building… content knowledge.”

The fact that this rubric opens the door to principled, careful, guided and planned exploratory uses of natural language algorithms in the English Language Arts program through knowledge building, AI’s strength when it is supervised and designed through training in local curriculum, raises the significance of the KMRT in the moment. As I read through the rubric, though he is not listed anywhere I can find on the website or the document, I can hear the thoughts of the writers pausing to think “Hmmm… I wonder what David would think?”