The vast, interdisciplinary body of research known as the “science of reading” offers sweeping insight into the most effective approaches to teaching children how to read. But it doesn’t always explain how to make those approaches work in real-world schools.
As more than 40 states have passed legislation requiring schools to adopt evidence-based practices in literacy education, this implementation problem has become well-documented.
For example: Studies say that teaching phonics is effective but don’t pinpoint exactly how much time teachers should spend on the skill or how to prioritize it alongside all the other components of reading instruction teachers need to deliver.
Or: Lots of curriculum programs purport to incorporate evidence-based practices but don’t have efficacy studies that show whether they improve students’ outcomes in comparison to other methods.
There’s a gap between research into effective practice generally and the development and testing of real solutions, argue two reading researchers in a new paper. The science of reading alone can’t bridge it, they say. But maybe an “engineering of reading” could.
“We’ve got this bifurcated market where people are building technologies and selling them to schools, and they’re not necessarily tested and they’re not necessarily aligned with recent scientific developments,” said Elizabeth Tipton, a professor of statistics and data science at Northwestern University and one of the authors of the paper.
“Then, you’ve got these scientists who are building really thoughtful things but don’t have the engineering way of thinking and the skills and the tools to bring them to schools in the same way.”
Tipton and her co-author, the director of Florida State University’s Florida Center for Reading Research, Nicole Patton-Terry, argue that academics and schools of education need to “build a field of learning engineers” who can bridge this implementation gap.
Education Week spoke with them both about what an “engineering of reading” would look like. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is an ‘engineering of reading,’ and how is that different from the science of reading?
Tipton: Reading is an example of a broader problem that this article is addressing, which is that scientists want to understand mechanisms.
They want to understand how kids read, how the brain works. We have this community of people who are scientists who do this deep work, which has led to—after a lot of federal investment—a real science of reading. And then, we have people on the other end that do improvement science and work closely with schools on how to take things and make them iterate and work for very specific environments.
But there’s this middle space. What we’re calling engineering would be focused on curriculum design. What are curriculum and tools that work in the range of environments found in schools? The goal is to build them and test them and see if they work—not the same scientific goal of doing this work to understand mechanisms.
Patton-Terry: I would extend it a little bit to say, not just curriculum. We could use the same logic for assessments. We can use the same logic for family-friendly resources that we’re often looking for in schools, tutoring programs, things like that.
The core of [Tipton’s] point is, I don’t think this is a reading-specific issue. This is a bigger issue about what is realistic to expect of the scientific process when it actually gets implemented in classrooms, in schools, in real time, under the conditions in which we’re dealing with today—and the level of adaptation that might be required, the level of the the supports necessary for sustainability that might be required, the decisions that are made that often do not put scientific evidence at the forefront because they cannot or should not.
Often, when schools implement reading reforms and they don’t work, it’s portrayed as a failure of implementation. You write about how an engineering framework ‘shifts the responsibility’ for resolving these failures from the user to the engineer. What does that mean?
Tipton: We’ve got different kinds of interventions happening in schools. Some are coming from researchers and scientists; some are coming from the marketplace, and I think they’ve got different issues.
The ones coming from researchers are often great, but they originate with the science. They’re like, “This is how it works. You have to do it exactly this way,” because doing it exactly this way allows researchers to study it. They don’t have the incentive, as a researcher, then to go spend years and money trying to make sure this intervention can work under all ranges of contexts and places and that it’s robust.
The example I always think of is my iPhone, right? My iPhone is built by an engineer. If every time I picked up my iPhone and held it with my left hand, it stopped working, that would mean that they hadn’t figured out some problem with the iPhone that needed to be fixed. I wouldn’t think, “Oh, it’s my fault. I keep picking it up with the wrong hand.”
That’s because they spend a lot of time trying to break it, like, “How do I figure out how to make sure the software works, under all conditions? Let’s break it, and reward breaking it, because then that means we can make it more robust.” That’s a whole job. And the people who are scientists developing things—that’s not their focus. That’s how you get scientifically-based things that don’t necessarily get implemented well because implementation was just not the main goal of the science.
On the other end, you get things in the marketplace that are scaled and sold really fast. Often, they can be implemented in some way. They’ve figured out how schools work and how to get these robust things to them, but they are not necessarily as close to the science as they should be.
And so we’ve got this bifurcated market, where you’ve got things that are made to work in schools, sometimes not working closely with science, and then scientists who are creating things, but they’re niche products that work in a very careful environment.
This question of, how do you put those two together—the science and this ability to make sure that they really work in real environments for real students—is that middle implementation space that is the land of the engineer.
How can school contexts make it complicated to put evidence-based interventions into practice?
Patton-Terry: Let me give you a very real example. I have a monthly meeting with our research-practice partnership with our local school district here. Our research-practice partnership is called Read Up, specifically Reading University Partnership. But we focus our work on issues that are of priority for the district. Right now we have five.
We’re doing projects that are related to reading, where we’re looking at the implementation of an evidence-based curriculum. But we’re also looking at adolescent literacy: What do you do in middle school and high school in content-area classrooms where the teacher is not a reading teacher but the students are not reading on grade level? We’re also looking at challenging behaviors. What do we do to lower the temperature in schools and interactions between students and educators so that learning can actually flourish? How do we create spaces that allow for that safety and support, not just for the students but also for the teachers?
In that same school, we’re looking at college-and-career pathways because middle schools have courses that begin certification processes for kids to graduate with workforce-readiness credentials or certificates. That also relates to the dashboard we made for principals, because principals need to be looking at attendance because attendance is a real issue. And even if we do the best job at providing evidence-based instruction, it doesn’t matter if kids are not in school. All of those conversations are about one midsized school district in the U.S.
Tipton: Many of the interventions that we have that are scientifically based and that have been tested are narrow. They’re developed to focus just on reading and they’ve been tested in some very specific environments.
Now, a school comes along, and they want to pick that up, and they say, “Well, wait a second. It looks like we’re in a rural school district, and these are only ever tested and developed in urban schools. How is that relevant to me?”
The engineer would say, “How do we take that nugget of an intervention and develop it in a way that is scalable, that works in the range of schools?” It’s a reading intervention. But we know it’s going to have to also address attendance; there’s going to be attendance problems. This curriculum needs to be made robust so that it can work in this range of environments and that it can address these other issues that are not just focused on reading but that also co-occur in schools.
Is anyone doing this kind of ‘engineering of reading’ work now?
Patton-Terry: In the paper, we gave a couple examples, like design-based research, [University of Colorado Boulder professor] Bill Penuel’s work in his collaboratory co-designing solutions with teachers. He’s been doing that work for a very long time; it’s been going quite well. We also gave the example of SERP, the Strategic Education Research Partnership and the work that they are doing.
I spend a lot of time in the research-practice partnership space, and you can find in those spaces examples where solutions are being built. I also spend a lot of time in the [federally funded] Regional Educational Laboratories; I happen to be the director of one. In these R&D labs, you see the development of these sorts of tools and resources.
We’re not suggesting that we’re so far away from this possibility. You can look in learning sciences or you can look in engineering education—there are fields from which we can benefit to design how we might want this to look for us in the education research space, and we have examples of it happening. It’s just about economies of scale.
Tipton: One of the difficulties now is that the incentive structure in academia is for you to be doing your work so that it contributes to theory. The people who are able to make this work in academia are these superstars who figure out how to both be contributing to theory enough that their career is going well, and on the side, they get to go help people by doing what we’re calling engineering. Or they try to figure out, “How can the same study both meet my academic requirements to be focused on theory development and do this?”
We’re saying, why don’t we just free people? Create a field that can free people from the need to say that they’re trying to do theory and just say, “It’s actually great, what you’re doing to create a scalable solution or to create a curriculum that is not breaking ground on any new scientific theory or any new research but is making a massive contribution because you’re creating an evidence-backed curriculum or program that can be used in school.”
Is there anything that schools should be doing to further an engineering of reading, or would they mainly be beneficiaries of work that’s happening in academia?
Tipton: I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that because academia hasn’t been doing this, schools are also having to figure out how to do it on their own. I’ve gotten a variety of emails related to this paper from people who are reading specialists or people in the field who are saying, “Wait, this is what I do. I’m reading the science and I’m figuring out how to do this in my job.” I would bet that they are not trained in this way of thinking; they are having to figure it out on their own.
Some people will figure things out on their own. But wouldn’t it be great if we provided them the tools and said, “Hey, there’s actually whole ways of thinking, ways of design thinking, iterative processes that engineers use. There’s a whole way of doing this that we can help you with.”
Patton-Terry: Educators and leaders in the field have developed knowledge and expertise that is a benefit to themselves and their students and the families that they serve, and it often goes unrecognized. It’s often unpaid labor.
It’s often in the same way that [Tipton] was talking about, faculty who do it as a side hustle. It becomes this extra thing that is not incentivized, recognized, or rewarded. But there is such brilliance there, and I spend a lot of time trying to create spaces in which we can share their stories, lift up their innovations, help position them in a position of power and authority as the experts on what their problems are and how to develop solutions for them. I think providing spaces where engineering principles are leading the way really elevates and amplifies their contributions to our fields.
What else do you hope people take away from this paper?
Tipton: We’ve gotten a little pushback. There is a concern that what we’re saying is, we just need more ed-tech products, that that “engineer” means tech. We tried very hard to be clear that that’s not what we’re saying.
Obviously, yes, there are engineers who build technologies like smartphones and things that kids use in schools, but you could just as easily be an engineer and a design thinker and be somebody who is building an entirely paper-based reading program for a classroom.
Our point is that the main place we’re seeing this kind of thinking happening is in ed tech, and that if academia and researchers don’t start paying attention to that, we can’t compete.
But we’re not saying this is all about technology. This is really about making things that work in actual schools and making sure they’re still scientifically based.
