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Known as the beginning of formal reading research, Edward Huey published his landmark study of adult readers' eye movements during reading.
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Beginnings of diagnostic and IQ tests. "All of these tests exist in some form today and gave rise to a proliferation of testing and research tied to these tests, including a surge in correlation studies as a basis for predicting reading success" (Tierney & Pearson, 2021, p.13).
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Ideas of mental age and pre-reading skills determine students reading readiness, coupled with developmental psychology through the 1920s.
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Argued that oral reading and reasoning, versus silent, were better opportunities for meaning making and ideas. Thorndike also assisted with developing various assessments and exams for universities. -
His studies on how children assimilate and accommodate knowledge based on their schema and across stages was the beginning of cognitive development. -
Word lists and various formulas developed to assess reading difficulty of material or design materials for students at different levels.
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Behaviorism is a passive approach to learning in which readers response to stimuli. In education, it is based on routines such as drill and practice, lectures, and other ways of building a student's memory bank.
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One of the first diagnostic tests in reading that examined students ability to read aloud. Became a model for other assessments. Versions of this test continued to be published even through the early 2000s. -
William S. Gray began writing the Dick and Jane books, a series of basal readers that helped teach children to read. The final book was published in 1965. -
A social psychologist, Bartlett wrote Remembering, a landmark book declared meaning is not what one gets from the text, but rather what one brings to the text. -
Separately, in their arguments on vocabulary, argued for "separate instruction in content area reading skills during reading lessons with provisions for later opportunities to transfer to content areas."
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Influenced American schools in reading selections with teacher guidance and supplemental activities, reflecting a skills-based orientation to reading curriculum. -
A theory that argues that learning is a process of acquiring and storing information – external and internal – with an emphasis on memory.
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Comprehension is the ability to understand what is read and create meaning from text. The 1950s - 1960s were a peak for comprehension studies and understanding its significance in literacy. While previously thought that the text contains meaning, more emergent studies show that meaning is in fact created by the reader though various connections and strategies.
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Her article, "What Research Says to Teachers of Reading," addressed issues with teaching reading and calls on educators to ask higher-level questions and use higher interest texts. She argues that comprehension begins before students ever enter school and teachers should meet students where they. -
Flesch offered views on the decline in American reading scores with an emphasis on economic, social, and political development. Unfortunately, Flesch did not offer much in the way of instruction. The publication of this book is credited with igniting the “Reading Wars” that still remains a debate in the world of literacy today. -
The International Reading Association was created. This was the first U.S.-based professional organization focused on reading. The first president was William S. Gray. This eventually became the International Literacy Association
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Presented a landmark paper that explained the language-learning capabilities of young children, detailing that all humans are born with language understanding. His theories are based on the notion that languages all hold similar rules and structures. -
The theory of Constructivism argues that learning is an active process that builds understanding through experiences such as experiments or real-world problem solving. Constructivism believes that the reader, not the text, is the meaning maker - has influenced today’s reader response and the various ways students respond to texts.
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After decades of not being taught and even being banned (1930s!), phonics is included in teacher manuals and begins to be taught in schools. This pillar of literacy teaches students how words work and to understand the relationship between the letters of written language and the sound of spoken words.
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Fries wrote "Linguistics and Reading," establishing a method of reading that is based on linguistics. He argued that linguistics is a visual and automatic process, and demonstrated that reading was aligned with other areas of literacy such as writing, speaking, and listening. -
Conducted by the US Office of Education, the goal of The First Grade Studies was to determine best methods for teaching reading. They found that effectiveness will vary depending on the teacher, setting, and students. Two major implications that were discovered: there is no one size fits all approach and mixed approaches may be advisable. Determined it was necessary to train better teachers rather than depend on materials.
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The ESEA was a civil rights law that gave aid to low-income schools, including grant money for textbooks, special education centers, and scholarships. -
Reading Research Quarterly became the first research journal that was solely about reading research and nothing else. They include a yearly summary of that year's reading research.
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Clay coined the term Emergent Literacy which described the behaviors of young students as they begin to respond to reading and writing. This is different from reading readiness in that it focuses on how children learn to read rather than a series of adult-created tasks, helping students to begin to comprehend. -
Chall wrote Learning to Read: The Great Debate. After studying decades worth of literacy instruction and its influence, determined that the “Look/Say” method was not best. Chall also called for a correction in instruction and methods, including a transition to synthetic phonics. -
The work done by Fry made clear that what students read should be at a level they can read and understand, and he created a readability graph of sight words that is still in use today. -
Lev Vygotsky and colleagues “highlighted the nature and the significant role of the social in mediating development of the individual – the “in the head” learning" (p.116). -
Metacognitive Theory: Readers should be aware of their thinking and self-monitor their comprehension - today, students are taught metacognitive strategies and ways to monitor their thinking.
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Whole Language Approach: Exposure and immersion will develop literacy in children naturally - teachers today create print-rich environments using signs, posters, word walls, and anchor charts.
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While not a new teaching concept, vocabulary instruction was directly influenced by the events of the 50s and 60s, including the Race to Space and Civil Rights, as an answer to what kept American students from succeeding on a global scale. Instruction improved in the 70s as there was an increase in vocabulary across content areas, and the 80s as strategic reading enable students to use vocabulary to comprehend texts and teachers more explicitly taught vocabulary. This included activating schema.
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LaBerge & Samuels argued that humans can only focus on one thing at a time but can alternate attention between multiple activities. Their Automaticity Theory is one of the first modern theories of fluency. It argues that reading should be done at such an automatic level that minimal cognitive attention is used, thus reserving capacity for comprehension.
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John Bransford demonstrated the power of schemata: “his work highlighted that new meanings are developed as readers enlist their knowledge of the world to formulate meanings with the text – in other words, meanings to not come from the text or author, but from the progressive refinement of meanings suggested by the ideas gleaned or put forward the reader” (Tierney & Pearson, 2021, p.46). Readers predict meaning as a result of their knowledge of the world and relationships between ideas. -
Their work on schema demonstrated that schema helps to develop new learning and meaning. They demonstrated the power of schema in learning through experiments by triggering and not triggering schema prior to reading. -
Her textbook The Psychology of Reading stated, "“The beginners must learn to use spelling-to-sound correspondences; there is nothing in language behavior or other content previously acquired by the child that will transfer to this aspect of the reading task” and her research proved that students use distinctive features to identify words. -
Chomsky (1976) researched repeated reading through immersion of the text being read to students. He found that repeated readings allowed readers to develop and use cognitive resources, resulting in positive results not only on practiced texts, but also on new texts and in the attitude of readers.
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Flavell introduced the idea of “meta-memory” - a precursor to metacognition. -
Rosenblatt's transactional theory meaning making and speech act theory detail that comprehension is the result of the transaction between the reader and the text, suggesting that meaning is not fixed, as previously thought, but elastic. -
Stanovich redefined automaticity theory into the interactive compensatory explanation of reading fluency which he reasoned that “a major difference between good and poor readers was in the way they processed text while reading” (Fresch, 2006, p. 112). -
Activating background knowledge and adding new information will help to develop literacy - teachers in today’s classrooms help activate schema through pictures, videos, websites, and through the use of graphic organizers.
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The 1980s saw the joining of reading and writing into the term "Literacy" as they both involve making meaning across texts.
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The whole language movement focused on immersing students in books and authentic texts. It focused on meaning and choice. Traditional methods of teaching phonics and spelling took a back seat.
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The theory of Critical Literacy was a natural extension of social and cultural developments. Tierney and Pearson state that “with regard to the classroom and the text – became sites for analyses of books and instructional regimes relating to issues of identity, representation, and power” (p.138). This theory argues that people should critique and make changes as their identity is built through literacy. This theory brought forth positive changes in inclusion and ethics.
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Historically neglected, fluency emerged in the mid 70s-80s as researchers began to identify the importance of automatic word recognition. Studies in the 90s continued to find a direct relationship between fluency and student performance, including the use of repeated readings in instructional settings. Today, fluency consists of: automaticity, accuracy, and prosody. It is recognized as a multidimensional concept and a bridge connecting decoding and comprehension.
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Flesch published Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, criticizing the whole word method and analytic phonics. -
Chall's book Stages of Reading Development claims that students follow a certain progression as they move from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." -
Heath's nine-year study of two different communities highlighted that “literacy is embedded in social interactions and the variety of ways in which it is constituted across communities and schools” (Tierney & Pearson, 2021, p.120). -
Graves' Writing: Teachers and Children at Work had a large influence on teaching writing. His results found that:
-Reading teachers shifted to integrate reading and writing, altering approaches to reading instruction.
-Students engaged in reading/writing experience acquired abilities and attitudes that carried over to their engagements in reading. -
Flower and Hayes developed a model of writing process based on writers’ think-aloud process that suggested how writing may shape thinking.
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This US federally sponsored report by Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson stated, “The foundation of fluency is the ability to identify individual words. Since English is an alphabetic language, there is a fairly regular connection between the spelling of a word and its pronunciation. Every would-be reader must ‘break the code' that relates spelling to sound and meaning." They determined that students who score best are those with the most progress in fast and accurate word identification.
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The entire state of California adopted the Whole-Language Approach to Reading Instruction. “The National Assessment of Educational Progress [16], a federal study doing a state-by-state comparison of reading proficiency, ranks California fourth-graders fifth from the bottom among the fifty states. Three years later, gobsmacked Californians find they are ranked at the very bottom (just behind Mississippi). An astounding 77% of fourth graders are ranked “below grade level.” [17]” (Parker, 2021).
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Her exemplar research has had implications for rethinking the nature of learning, focusing on the social construction of meaning by young children. Researching preschoolers, she explored how writing is embedded in social networks and that meaning is made through connections between multiple text worlds. -
Having worked together since the early 90s, these well known literacy experts have contributed to phonics and phonemic awareness instruction through their research-based approach that emphasizes development of reading and writing. They have written multiple pieces of instructional material used in many American elementary schools. -
Having been around since the 70s, phonemic awareness received much popularity in the 1990s as an early predictor of successful reading. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
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Pinnell & Colleagues identified a significant relationship between reading fluency and student performance in silent reading comprehension on standardized tests.
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As a response to the reading crisis, the Reading Excellence Act was enacted to give schools funding for literacy programs.
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Formed by Congress in 1997, the National Reading Panel was formed to assess the effectiveness of approaches to reading and teaching students to read. They argue that phonics has biggest impact on early learners, there is no one program that works best, fluency and phonemic awareness are still needed to develop reading, and suggest a balanced literacy approach. -
A leading expert in reading instruction throughout the 21st Century, and known as one of the world’s premiere literacy educators. He is a member of NRP, and he helped develop educational policies for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. -
Barton and Hamilton worked at detailing literacy in everyday life, indicating that “in the simplest sense literacy practices are what people do with literacy” (Tierney & Pearson, 2021, p.122). They used this knowledge to offer six tenets of literacy, both observable and inferred.
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A balanced approach to literacy focuses on instruction that balances reading and writing, and also teacher-led instruction and independent student learning.
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Though a specific date can not be applied to the Science of Reading (SOR), it has evolved over the years and includes a wide span of research and findings that have been used to create an evidence-based, best practice approach to teaching literacy foundations through structured literacy which includes the five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
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An act of congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including Title I. -
The five pillars of literacy were named in 2007. Teachers use these concepts to drive their literacy instruction. They are: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. -
The CCSS were created to provide a set of uniform academic standards in math and English language arts for K-12. They include whole language and phonics elements and take a balanced literacy approach, including reading, writing, speaking, listening standards. -
An influential literacy researcher, Allington emphasized the importance of phonics and phonemic awareness instruction as part of a comprehensive reading program -
This act reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and replaced the No Child Left Behind act. It gave states more flexibility in education and allowed for transparency for families and communities. -
Using three multiyear research studies over multifaceted vocabulary instruction, Manyak, Manyak, and Kappus found that students in each study demonstrated accelerated growth on standardized tests of general vocabulary.