Children who are struggling to learn to read often need intervention—targeted instruction beyond what they receive in class to help grow their skills.
But not every intervention is a good one, says reading researcher Matt Burns.
Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Florida who studies academic interventions, recalled one observation he made of a special education teacher conducting a lesson with a student.
The boy was reciting letters while jumping up and down on a miniature trampoline—an activity that was supposed to serve as multisensory instruction, a way of teaching reading that incorporates touch and movement. But the jumping wasn’t serving any instructional purpose, Burns said.
“I don’t even need to look that up to know it’s not aligned to the science of reading,” Burns said here at the annual conference of the Reading League, an organization that promotes evidence-based reading instruction, on Oct. 10.
The past decade has seen the rise of the “science of reading” movement, a push to align reading instruction in schools with practices supported by research studies. Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation mandating schools to train teachers, select appropriate materials, and use evidence-based practices in classrooms. Many of them also say educators must identify struggling readers and provide them with interventions.
But as part of this effort, researchers have called into question the efficacy and accuracy of some of the most widely used intervention approaches, arguing that they don’t pinpoint students’ specific needs and as a result, can’t target instruction in a way that will move kids forward.
In this landscape, it can be hard for schools and teachers to know what types of intervention to use—or even what criteria they should consider when selecting an intervention program.
While teachers can review research on their own, they often don’t have the time to do so, or the resources to access paywalled journals.
“I think that’s an unfair expectation,” Burns told the room filled with classroom teachers, of the idea that they should search for studies on every tool they bring into the classroom. “That’s my job. That’s what I do. Your job is to teach kids.”
At the Reading League conference, Burns shared tips from a set of guidelines he created with his colleague, Valentina Contesse, that outline five factors educators should take into consideration. Interventions should, they write:
- Be appropriately challenging,
- Be correctly targeted,
- Give students opportunities to respond,
- Offer explicit instruction, and
- Provide immediate feedback.
For specifics on these criteria, see the paper. And read on for three other takeaways from Burns’s talk.
1.Reading ‘levels’ aren’t the right tool to pinpoint students’ individual needs
Elementary teachers have used reading “levels” for decades—a ranking system that categorizes children by a composite score of their reading ability across several metrics. In a 2020 EdWeek Research Center survey, 61% of K-2 teachers said they use leveled texts in small group work.
But previous research from Burns has shown that one of the most popular leveling systems only accurately predicts students’ reading ability a little more than half of the time.
A more precise way is to test students’ discrete skills—phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, as examples—and then target intervention accordingly, Burns said.
“People ask me all the time, ‘What’s the best intervention?’” he said. “My response is, ‘What’s the kid’s need?’”
2. Practice solidifies students’ knowledge, but not all practice is created equal
Effective practice shares some key qualities, Burns said. Students generate their own response—segmenting the sounds in words themselves in a phonemic awareness drill, for example, rather than listening to a teacher break down the sounds in different ways and choosing which one is correct.
Teachers mix in information students have newly learned with skills what they’ve already mastered, a technique called “interleaved practice.” And students get lots of repetitions of new information.
Just how many repetitions is enough? “We see a direct, strong relationship between number of opportunities to respond and retention. Around 20 repetitions, that number starts to level off,” Burns said.
3. Beware of ‘cognitive overload’
Kindergartners famously have short attention spans. And research shows that trying to cram too much information into elementary schoolers’ heads at once isn’t just a challenge for the teacher—it can also short-circuit the learning process.
Burns shared multiple studies showing that when students were introduced to more new words than they could process in one session, not only did they retain fewer of those new words, they forgot some words they had learned previously.
When working with a teacher or interventionist, if students start getting things wrong that they were previously getting right, it might be a sign that they’re reaching their limit for the moment, Burns said.
“When you see kids getting squirmy and start making mistakes, they’re done,” he said. “They’re telling you they’re done.”
