Schools spend an enormous amount of time teaching students to read — and debating how best to teach reading. (For recent books on the subject, check out this review, and this one.)
Perhaps we could find other ways to help our students develop as readers. One entirely plausible hypothesis:
Students need to learn how to read, and they need broad knowledge so they can understand the topics they’re reading about.
If this plausible hypothesis is correct, the curriculum should make time for topics like social studies and science. When students learn both reading skills and broad academic knowledge, those combined strands work together to create strong readers.
Testing this hypothesis has proven challenging. Back in July, I wrote about a study that seems to support the reading benefits of a “knowledge-rich” curriculum. However, as I noted back then, I found that study less persuasive than others did:
- The benefits of prior knowledge faded over time, and
- The study’s (complex) results suggest that good readers are better at many parts of school, not exactly that a knowledge-rich curriculum directly supports reading instruction.
Wouldn’t it be great if we had a study that clarified those two concerns…
Today’s News
I have indeed found such a study! More precisely, “Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension” reviews data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study — with more than 6500 students in the sample. (Technically speaking, 6500 is an impressively large sample size.)
This study responds –more or less — to both of my concerns above.
First: the authors looked at instructional time over several years, and the effect it had on reading scores at the end of 5th grade. It can’t tell us how long knowledge of any one unit lasts, but it does help us understand the benefits of sustained social-studies instruction.
Second: the authors took the students’ kindergarten reading scores into account when they evaluated their reading scores in 5th grade. For this reason, they can evaluate which students made the most progress — a more helpful question than which students ended up as the strongest readers. After all, students who start as strong readers have a head start over their peers.
Depending on its findings, this report could give us more confidence that the broad curriculum — social studies and science — improves reading scores.
So: what did they find?
50 ≠ 56
To begin with, the authors found that schools devote MUCH more time to reading than to other topics. As reported by the teachers, the schools attended by those 6500 students devote
- 120 minutes per day to ELA
- 82 minutes to math
- 30 to science
- 28 to social studies
The report’s main finding requires careful parsing:
30 additional minutes of social studies instruction per day was associated with a 0.15 standard deviation increase in 5th grade reading scores.
Let’s dig into the nitty gritty.
a) The report can’t say where those 30 minutes came from. It’s just not possible to say — for instance — “if we take 15 minutes out of ELA instruction and 15 out of math instruction, those 30 additional minutes of social studies instruction will work magic.” That’s a plausible way to read the report — but that’s not exactly what it finds.
b) “Associated with” does NOT mean “caused.” Students who had 30 minutes’ more social studies instruction scored — on average — higher than those who did not. But we can’t know for sure what caused the improvement.
c) “0.15 standard deviation higher” does NOT mean “15% higher.” It means — basically — “a large enough amount to be measurable, and to get our attention.” On a normally distributed score scale, it’s roughly the difference between the 50th and the 56th percentile. We wouldn’t do cartwheels after reading such a result, but we would certainly notice and be pleased.
With all those cautions in mind, I think we can be modestly encouraged by this report. As long as we don’t over-interpret its results, we can tentatively conclude:
Our students need to spend meaningful time with a solid reading curriculum. AND — over the long term — their reading will benefit if they get to spend meaningful time with a social studies curriculum as well. We should not cut social studies to create more time for ELA (unless the school schedule is currently atypically focused on social studies).
A Final Thought
As you know, I’m ALWAYS looking for reasons to doubt research-informed teaching advice. In this case, I can’t help but notice: the Fordham Foundation explicitly advocates knowledge-rich curricula. This report’s finding aligns with their institutional beliefs. Perhaps — very subtly — their prior beliefs put a thumb on the scale?
I think we have good reason to discount that fear. Fordham does advocate for knowledge-rich curricula in both social studies and science. Notice, however, that this report does NOT find a measurable association between additional time teaching science and reading — an association which (presumably) the study’s authors would have welcomed.
The fact that they reported a finding contrary to their institutional position makes me more confident when they report a related finding that aligns with it.
In Sum
We’ve always had excellent reasons to teach social studies. As evidence accumulates that history and civics and geography help students develop as readers, we have even more reasons to preserve — even expand — those topics in our curriculum.
