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History, Geography…and Better Reading?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October 04, 2026

History, Geography…and Better Reading?

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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.

The Complex Relationship between Knowledge and Reading
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 12, 2026

The Complex Relationship between Knowledge and Reading

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Given the time constraints that all teachers face, what are the most effective strategies to help our students with reading comprehension? Should we focus on particular reading strategies: say — finding the main idea of a passage, predicting what will come next, visualizing the scene? Or do we serve students better by building overall historical, cultural, and scientific knowledge: say — the development of the silk road, an understanding of erosion, the innovations of Martha Graham?

Like so many debates in education, this one prompts heated — often exasperated — debates.

A recent study considers such questions.

Faith Bandler, and Beyond

A group of Australian researchers worked with 8-year-olds at a relatively affluent school. Over the span of eight weeks, students learned about several topics: artifacts, fossil fuels, a famous Australian voting-rights activist named Faith Bandler, Nelson Mandela, and so forth. Typically, the sequence went like this:

  • Teachers taught a multi-class unit on one topic. At the end of the unit, students took a short-answer quiz on that topic.
  • Soon after, students read a passage related to the topic. Once again, students took a test.
    • Some of the questions simply tested knowledge from the reading passage.
    • Others required drawing inferences based on the reading passage.
    • Still others required drawing inferences from the preceding unit taught by the classroom teacher.

By following all these steps, researchers could consider important questions:

  • How much did prior knowledge from the unit help students understand the reading passage?
  • And: did the individual student’s skill at reading matter?

I should also describe one important variation from this typical sequence. In most cases, the reading passage and test came soon after the classroom unit on a topic. With two topics, the teacher waited four weeks after the classroom unit for students to read the related passage and take a test on it. For this reason, researchers could answer another important question:

  • Do the benefits of prior knowledge fade within four weeks?

Given all these steps and calculations, what did the researchers conclude?

Certainty, and Uncertainty

Because this study measured so many different variables in so many circumstances, I’m not going to report numerical results. (You can find all the data here if you’re curious.) Instead, I want to focus on plausible conclusions.

More broadly, I want to push back on strong claims I’ve been hearing about this study. When I first came across it, the quick headlines read — in effect — that this study shows conclusively the importance of prior knowledge for reading comprehension. By implication, this study has been offered as a way to support a “knowledge-rich” curriculum. I’m not persuaded by that reading of these data; let me try to explain why.

Conclusion #1: As you recall, on two occasions students waited four weeks after the unit before they read the related passage and took the follow-up test. How did those students do on the reading test compared to their peers who read the passage right away?

Sure enough, after a four week gap, the benefits of that prior knowledge had begun to fade. Students in the waiting-four-weeks group scored lower than the read-right-away group.

On the one hand, this finding makes great sense. I’m not surprised — and I doubt that you are — that students who have background knowledge fresh in mind will understand a reading passage better than students who haven’t thought about the topic in the last month.

On the other hand, this conclusion cuts two ways.

  • Yes: it highlights the importance of prior knowledge.
  • However — and this is a big “however” — it doesn’t necessarily support the broad claims of a knowledge-rich curriculum. These students didn’t benefit from having gotten relevant background knowledge at some point in the past. They benefited from getting that knowledge immediately before reading.

In their strongest version, claims supporting a knowledge-rich curriculum emphasize that getting knowledge will benefit reading comprehension at some point in the future. This study does not support that claim — at least if that “point in the future” is a month or more after initial instruction.

At a minimum, this finding suggests that a knowledge-rich curriculum should include frequent review in order to benefit future reading comprehension.

More Uncertainty

If I put several parts of this study together, I can also summarize one theme this way:

Conclusion #2: Strong readers did better at almost everything.

  • They knew more topic content at the end of the classroom lessons than the weaker readers did.
  • They scored higher on the factual knowledge part of the reading tests.
  • They were more successful at drawing inferences on the reading tests.
  • Whereas the four week delay reduced scores for weaker readers, that delay did NOT (statistically significantly) reduce scores for stronger readers.

Let’s go back to the first of those bullet points: “stronger readers knew more topic content at the end of the classroom lessons than the weaker readers did.” This result strikes me as very puzzling.

I understand why weaker readers learn less from reading, but why might they have learned less from teaching? Did the strong readers already know more about these topics before the lessons began? (There was no pretest, so we don’t know.) Did the classroom lessons rely heavily on reading? Is direct instruction less beneficial to weak readers for some obscure reason? I just don’t see an obvious reason that those two cognitive capacities — “ability to read” and “ability to learn from classroom lessons” — should be related.

To make this point a different way: this study’s title is “The Importance of Knowledge for Reading Comprehension.” I think it makes that case, although in a limited way. Based on the conclusions I’ve just listed, I wonder if a better title might be: “The Importance of Skilled Reading for Academic Success.” Or an even more accurate title: “Skilled Reading is a Good Proxy for General Academic Success (but We Don’t Really Know Exactly Why).”

To be clear, I think this study shows that active prior knowledge enhances reading comprehension. (Those benefits dissipate with time, as that prior knowledge becomes less “active.”) But it also points to a bigger question: how does skilled reading connect to — or cause, or result from — other categories of academic life: motivation, vocabulary development, self-efficacy, working memory capacity, attention, and so forth?

Both this blog post and the study that inspired it started by focusing on background knowledge as an important variable in reading skill. I’ve ended up more curious about the relationship between reading and academic success more broadly. I’m sure that background knowledge matters — and this study has left me equally sure that there’s much more to the story…

Smith, R. J., Snow, P. C., Serry, T. A., & Hammond, L. S. (2026). The Importance of Knowledge for Reading Comprehension: A Quasi-Experimental Investigation. Reading Psychology, 1-27.

Do Captions Turn Screen Time Into Reading Time?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 14, 2026

Do Captions Turn Screen Time Into Reading Time?

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A year ago, I found myself drawn to an intriguing question: when showing educational videos, should we turn captions on to help students learn or focus? In my experience, most video services provide caption capabilities, and many turn them on by default. For this reason, I assumed that we have good reason to use captions. But, do we?

The best known research summary answers with an emphatic YES; the title says it all: ““Video Captions Benefit Everyone.” Its first two sentences:

More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video.

Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults).

I quickly learned that this summary’s confidence lacks much justification. The 100 empirical studies it reviews rely on self-report data, focus on college-age students, and/or look at data for language learners: that is, for example, English speakers learning Spanish by watching captioned videos. (While this last category is certainly interesting, it’s a very specific use of captions; it doesn’t obviously generalize to answer the broader question.)

In my search, I found exactly one study using objective measures to look at neurotypical K-12 students learning from same-language captions. That study suggests — but does not conclude — that non-struggling readers learn FEWER words when they watch videos with captions.

Given the alarming dearth of evidence, I concluded:

  1. We just don’t have enough evidence to make strong claims one way or another, and
  2. I really hope that someone starts reseaching this topic.

Dreams Realized

Even as I wrote that blog post, my hopes were being met by a research team in England. This team, led by Dr. Anastasiya Lopukhina, worked with 127 six- to eight-year-olds in England. All the children spoke English at home; none had diagnoses for special needs.

In some ways, this study was quite straightforward. For six weeks, half of the children watched TV with captions on while at home. The other half watched with captions off. The researchers gathered pre- and post-data on oral fluency: specifically, timed reading of words and non-words, and timed reading of a passage. In an especially thoughtful move, they also used eye-tracking software to test how much time the children spent focusing on captions.

So: did the caption-on children become more (or less) fluent after six weeks? Did they spend more (or less) time focusing on the captions?

In a word: nope. Both groups read more words after six weeks, and read them faster. On both fluency tests, they made roughly the same amount of progress. To be statistically precise: the differences between these groups did not achieve statistical significance.

The eye-tracking data yielded interesting results as well. Here again, both groups spent a bit more time reading the captions…but the changes were roughly the same in both groups. This result strikes me as especially surprising; the captions-on group had been practicing reading captions, while the captions-off group hadn’t. And yet: both groups developed in the same direction at the same rate.

Intriguingly, more than half the time the children didn’t engage with the captions. They fixated on roughly 40% of the captioned words, which means they overlooked roughly 60%.

In brief, I think we can safely say: if the goal is reading fluency, this one study gives us no reason to think that captions help or harm young readers.

Pushing Back

People who champion the use of captions might offer several rejoinders to these conclusions:

  • One study is just one study. We need more research to draw strong conclusions.

I absolutely agree.

  • This study measured reading fluency, not learning. Captions could help fluent readers learn!

Very true. We don’t have research to support (or contradict) that claim, but it could be true.

  • Six weeks isn’t long enough. The benefits won’t show up until more time has passed.

This critique, while possible, strikes me as less plausible. During this time, the children watched — on average — sixty-six hours of TV. If a teaching strategy doesn’t help after 66 hours…well, it’s hard to feel lots of confidence that 120 hours will be different.

In this field, I’m often the guy saying “let’s slow down — that study doesn’t say what people claim it does.” In this case, I’m the guy saying “this study asks an important question, gathers appropriate data, and comes up with a clear and unhyped conclusion. We should take that conclusion seriously.”

At this point, the burden of proof lies squarely on those who claim that captions help children develop reading fluency.

Lopukhina, A., Cooper, H., Hsieh, C. Y., van Heuven, W. J., & Rastle, K. (2026). No evidence that same‐language subtitles improve children’s reading fluency. British Journal of Psychology.

Beyond the Science of Reading by Natalie Wexler
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD
February 17, 2026

Beyond the Science of Reading by Natalie Wexler

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There is something almost combustible about stepping into the reading debate right now. Say “science of reading” in a room of educators and you can feel the temperature shift. For some, it represents long-overdue clarity—systematic phonics, structured literacy, fidelity to research. For others, it signals narrowing, mandates, and a fear that reading will be reduced to drills and decodables, wondering if we read to understand. Into this landscape, Natalie Wexler offers Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning, and instead of choosing a side, she reframes the question.

Wexler does not dispute the importance of phonics. In fact, she acknowledges the significant policy shifts since 2019 that have pushed states to align early literacy with evidence on decoding. But she argues that we have misunderstood the scope of the problem. America’s reading crisis, she suggests, is not simply a decoding crisis. It is a learning crisis. Comprehension is not a transferable skill we can practice in isolation. It depends heavily on knowledge stored in long-term memory. Without that knowledge, strategy instruction becomes performative students can “find the main idea” on a worksheet yet struggle to understand a complex text about history, science, or civic life.

That distinction matters, especially in the current U.S. context where much of the conversation has centered on foundational skills. Wexler argues that while systematic phonics is necessary, it is insufficient. Many schools have treated comprehension as a set of abstract strategies—predicting, questioning, visualizing—rather than as the natural outgrowth of accumulated knowledge. The result has been stagnant achievement and persistent gaps, particularly for students who rely most on schools to build background knowledge coherently over time.

What makes this book especially compelling is how it situates literacy within the broader science of learning. Wexler draws on research about memory, cognitive load, retrieval practice, and writing to argue that reading instruction should be inseparable from what we know about how humans actually learn. Knowledge does not accumulate randomly. It requires intentional sequencing, cumulative review, and opportunities to retrieve and apply information. Writing, she argues, is not an add-on but a powerful mechanism for strengthening understanding. In this way, the book moves beyond the reading wars and toward something more integrative: literacy as part of a coherent instructional system grounded in cognitive science.

Equity runs quietly but forcefully through her argument. Students from knowledge-rich environments often acquire background information incidentally. Others depend on school to provide that structure. When curricula fragment into disconnected units or prioritize skills over substance, it is those students who are most disadvantaged. Explicit, content-rich instruction is not about rigidity or indoctrination, as critics sometimes suggest. It is about access—about ensuring that all students have the cognitive tools necessary to engage with complex text and ideas.

What I appreciate most about Wexler’s approach is its refusal to collapse into slogans. She does not romanticize knowledge, nor does she dismiss the importance of engagement and joy. Instead, she asks a more demanding question: if comprehension depends on stored knowledge, and learning depends on how memory works, then how should we design literacy instruction differently? That question extends beyond phonics mandates or curriculum purchases. It touches teacher preparation, assessment practices, and the long arc of content coherence.

In a moment when debates about reading often feel polarized and reactive, Beyond the Science of Reading invites intellectual humility. It challenges us to expand our definition of evidence-based literacy so that it encompasses not just how children learn to decode, but how they learn—period. Decoding may open the door to literacy, but it is knowledge, deliberately built and revisited, that allows students to walk through it with confidence and understanding.

Are Science Videos Really the Answer for Struggling Readers?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 14, 2025

Are Science Videos Really the Answer for Struggling Readers?

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Obviously, we want our students to learn science. But: what if they struggle to learn the science by reading?

One solution: we could use VIDEOS to teach science. Videos can transform the written words into an audio track. Voila — no reading required!

A recent study explores this very question. To paraphrase its conclusion: “YUP — students learn more from science videos, so we can/should use them in science classes.”

While the study itself strikes me as well done in a number of ways, I want to push back against this conclusion. Ultimately, this disagreement might reveal the tension between a researcher’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective.

The outline for this post:

  • I’ll start by summarizing the study, and noting its strengths
  • I’ll then try to explain why I’m not persuaded that this study should make science teachers favor videos — even for weaker-than-average readers.

All The Right Steps

Doing education research well requires enormous care, because it can go wrong in so many different ways. Consider all the expectations that we have — and should have! — for research.

  1. We want to have enough participants in the study for the results to be meaningful.
  2. We want researchers to compare plausible alternatives — not just show that “doing something” is better than “doing nothing.”
  3. We’d like reports on meaningful results — not just “did the students have fun” or something like that.
  4. We’d be REALLY happy if the research took place in typical school conditions — not in some hermetically sealed zone that bears little resemblance to actual classrooms.
  5. We expect lots of statsy/mathy results (even if we don’t promise to read them carefully).

And so on. If researchers skip any of these steps, we can complain from the sidelines: “this study doesn’t include an ‘active control group,’ so we shouldn’t rely on its results.” (Honestly, I’m one of the people who object to studies without active control groups.)

Because I’m so aware of these expectations — and lots more — I felt more and more impressed as I made my way through this study. This team has clearly thought through many of the possible objections and found ways to anticipate and mollify them.

  • Enough participants? More than 100.
  • Active controls? Students learned by watching videos, or by reading an illustrated text (with identical words!). In my view, that’s an entirely plausible comparison.
  • Meaningful results? Researchers measured how well the students remembered and transfered their learning…up to a week later!
  • Within a school? Yup. In fact, students had RECESS in the middle of the study, because that’s how they roll in Finland.
  • All the stats? Yes. (More on this point in a minute.)

Thus, I was inclined to be persuaded that, as the abstract says:

The results indicate that videos are beneficial to most children across reading skill levels, especially those with weaker reading skills. This suggests that incorporating videos into primary school science intruction supports diverse learning needs associated with weaker reading skills.

By the way, in this case, “primary school” includes 5th and 6th grade.

A Teacher Has Doubts

Despite this study’s strengths — and I’m being quite serious when I compliment them — I was struck by the actual statistical findings.

The research team focused on three results:

  • how much cognitive load did the students experience while watching videos or reading illustrated texts?
  • how much difference did video vs. illustrated text make for remembering the information?
  • how much difference it make for using information in another context — that is, for transfer?

To answer these questions, they focused on a statistical measure called “R²ₘₐᵣ”. As is always true with stats, it’s tricky to explain what they mean. But here’s a rough-n-ready explanation.

Smiling girl wearing a pink shirt and blue headphones taking notes while looking at a laptop; a library-like setting in the background.

Let’s say that when I study for a quiz using Method A I score 0 points, and when I study using Method B I get 100 points. The R²ₘₐᵣ tells me how much of that difference comes from the two different methods.

So, if R²ₘₐᵣ = .25, that means 25% of the difference between the two scores came from the difference in the two study methods. The other 75 points came from other stuff.

Typically, according to this measure:

  • any R²ₘₐᵣ bigger than 0.25 is “large,”
  • a value between .09 and .25 is “medium,” and
  • a value between .01 and .09 is “small.”

Now that we have a very introductory understanding to this measurement, how meaningful were the results in this study?

  • The “cognitive load” R²ₘₐᵣ was .046: right in the middle of “small.”
  • The R²ₘₐᵣ for remembering information was .016: barely above the bottom of the scale. And
  • R²ₘₐᵣ for transferring information was .003. That’s too small even to register as small.

In brief: did the researchers find STATISTICALLY significant results? It seems they did. Did they find MEANINGFUL differences between videos and illutrated texts? I’m not so sure.

Opportunity Costs

My objection at this point might reflect this difference between a researcher’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective.

The researchers can — entirely reasonably — say: “we ran a scrupulous experiment, and came up with statistically significant results. The data show that videos helped students learn science content better than illustrated texts. Teachers should at least think about using videos to teach science — especially for weak readers.”

As a teacher, my perspective has this additional variable: one of school’s core functions is to teach students to read. And: they get better at reading by — among other strategies — practicing reading.

In other words: according to this study, the benefits of video are so small as to be statistically almost invisible. The benefits of reading practice are — over time — likely to be quite important. I hesitate to give up on one of school’s essential functions (reading) to get such a small benefit (marginal increase in science knowledge) in return.

TL;DR

Someone might say to you — as a friend said to me — “this study shows that we should use videos to teach science content.”

If you hear that claim, be aware that this well executed study found only minute differences between videos and illustrated texts. We should consider this finding alongside a clear understanding of our broader educational mission: teach ALL students to read.

Haavisto, M., Lepola, J., & Jaakkola, T. (2025). The “simple” view of learning from illustrated texts and videos. Learning and Instruction, 100, 102200.

Enjoyment or Skill? The Case of Reading [Repost]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August 31, 2025

Enjoyment or Skill? The Case of Reading [Repost]

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Student motivation has always been a concern; never more so than since the pandemic. What guidance do we get from recent research into reading?

Do we want our students to ENJOY math, or to BE SKILLED AT math?

At first, this question sounds like a false choice. Obviously, we want BOTH.

As an English teacher, I want my students to have fun analyzing the books we read…and I want their analyses to have heft, merit, and substance.

I suspect that most teachers, no matter the subject  — Math, English, Chemistry, Religion, Pickleball — want our students to revel in core ideas and arrive at correct answers.

At some times, alas, we probably need to prioritize one or the other. Especially at the beginning of a unit, should I focus on …

… ensuring that my students like this stuff (even if they don’t immediately understand it), or on

… ensuring they understand the stuff (even if they don’t immediately like it)?

In teaching as in life: if I try to accomplish both goals simultaneously, I’m likely to accomplish neither.

Reading Research

I’m not surprised to discover in a recent study that students’ enjoyment of reading correlates with their skill at reading.

That is: students who get high scores on various reading tests report enjoying reading more than their low-test-scoring peers.

Of course, correlation (say it with me) isn’t causation.

Does the enjoyment lead to the skill? The skill lead to the enjoyment?

Both?

Neither?

To answer these questions, Elsje van Bergen’s research team looked at twins in Finland — more than 3500 of them.

In theory, if we ask all the right questions, gather the right data, and run the right calculations, we should glean insight into the correlation/causation question.

So: what did Team van Bergen find?

But First…

Before you read the answers to that question, you might pause to make a committment. Try to decide NOW if you’re inclined to trust this methodology.

That is:

a) you think well-done twin studies are likely to be a good way to answer this question. For that reason, you will be inclined to accept this answer even if you initially disagree with it.

or

b) you think twin studies can’t answer questions about skill and enjoyment. Thus, you will not cite this study to support your beliefs even if it aligns with those beliefs.

If we’re going to use research to make decisions about education, we should be scrupulous about doing so even when research contradicts the conclusions we had initially held.

Answers, and Questions

Now, back to this post’s main narrative…

Unlike many studies, this one can be summarized in a few pithy sentences.

A young student looks at a book open on her desk and scratches her head in confusion

Based on the twin data they analyzed, van Bergen’s team concludes that:

  • reading skill increases reading enjoyment,
  • reading enjoyment has no effect on reading skill,
  • genetics influences both positively.

Unsurprisingly, the stats get all stats-y. But the above-the-fold headlines are that simple.

Because I don’t teach reading, I’ve always hesitated to be too opinionated on the topic. Now that this study is in the wild, I do think it adds a useful perspective while the reading wars rage on.

For instance: teachers whom I like and respect have told me that older methods might not have science behind them, but they’re excellent at “making students feel like readers.”

This claim has always puzzled me. How can a student feel like a reader if s/he can’t read?

Van Bergen’s study, I think, gives me permission to address that point directly: “this study suggests that skill at reading will be the more important place to start in reading instruction.”

Zooming the Camera Back

While this study and this post have focused on reading instruction, I do think there’s a broader message here as well.

We frequently hear about the importance of intrinsic motivation; that is, a motivation that springs from students’ natural interests, not from external encouragement (or pressure).

This study, to the contrary, finds that the work teachers do to improve students’ skill simultaneously enhances their motivation. That motivation might be — in effect — extrinsic; but, it’s working. (Working = students read better, and want to read more.)

Overall, I believe we need a substantial rethink of the (false) intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy, and the (unhelpful) criticism of motivational strategies that many teachers currently find themselves using.

If you want to join me for just such a rethink, I’m giving a webinar for Learning and the Brain on April 5th. We’ll be talking about several research-informed approaches to intrinsic motivation, and brainstorming strategies to make those ideas fit in our classrooms.

I hope I’ll persuade you that we have better ways to talk about motivation than “intrinsic/extrinsic,” and those better ways give us useful teacherly guidance.

I hope you’ll join us!

van Bergen, E., Hart, S. A., Latvala, A., Vuoksimaa, E., Tolvanen, A., & Torppa, M. (2023). Literacy skills seem to fuel literacy enjoyment, rather than vice versa. Developmental Science, 26(3), e13325.

Enjoyment or Skill? The Case of Reading
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 16, 2025

Enjoyment or Skill? The Case of Reading

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Do we want our students to ENJOY math, or to BE SKILLED AT math?

At first, this question sounds like a false choice. Obviously, we want BOTH.

As an English teacher, I want my students to have fun analyzing the books we read…and I want their analyses to have heft, merit, and substance.

I suspect that most teachers, no matter the subject  — Math, English, Chemistry, Religion, Pickleball — want our students to revel in core ideas and arrive at correct answers.

At some times, alas, we probably need to prioritize one or the other. Especially at the beginning of a unit, should I focus on …

… ensuring that my students like this stuff (even if they don’t immediately understand it), or on

… ensuring they understand the stuff (even if they don’t immediately like it)?

In teaching as in life: if I try to accomplish both goals simultaneously, I’m likely to accomplish neither.

Reading Research

I’m not surprised to discover in a recent study that students’ enjoyment of reading correlates with their skill at reading.

That is: students who get high scores on various reading tests report enjoying reading more than their low-test-scoring peers.

Of course, correlation (say it with me) isn’t causation.

Does the enjoyment lead to the skill? The skill lead to the enjoyment?

Both?

Neither?

To answer these questions, Elsje van Bergen’s research team looked at twins in Finland — more than 3500 of them.

In theory, if we ask all the right questions, gather the right data, and run the right calculations, we should glean insight into the correlation/causation question.

So: what did Team van Bergen find?

But First…

Before you read the answers to that question, you might pause to make a committment. Try to decide NOW if you’re inclined to trust this methodology.

That is:

a) you think well-done twin studies are likely to be a good way to answer this question. For that reason, you will be inclined to accept this answer even if you initially disagree with it.

or

b) you think twin studies can’t answer questions about skill and enjoyment. Thus, you will not cite this study to support your beliefs even if it aligns with those beliefs.

If we’re going to use research to make decisions about education, we should be scrupulous about doing so even when research contradicts the conclusions we had initially held.

Answers, and Questions

Now, back to this post’s main narrative…

Unlike many studies, this one can be summarized in a few pithy sentences.

A young student looks at a book open on her desk and scratches her head in confusion

Based on the twin data they analyzed, van Bergen’s team concludes that:

  • reading skill increases reading enjoyment,
  • reading enjoyment has no effect on reading skill,
  • genetics influences both positively.

Unsurprisingly, the stats get all stats-y. But the above-the-fold headlines are that simple.

Because I don’t teach reading, I’ve always hesitated to be too opinionated on the topic. Now that this study is in the wild, I do think it adds a useful perspective while the reading wars rage on.

For instance: teachers whom I like and respect have told me that older methods might not have science behind them, but they’re excellent at “making students feel like readers.”

This claim has always puzzled me. How can a student feel like a reader if s/he can’t read?

Van Bergen’s study, I think, gives me permission to address that point directly: “this study suggests that skill at reading will be the more important place to start in reading instruction.”

Zooming the Camera Back

While this study and this post have focused on reading instruction, I do think there’s a broader message here as well.

We frequently hear about the importance of intrinsic motivation; that is, a motivation that springs from students’ natural interests, not from external encouragement (or pressure).

This study, to the contrary, finds that the work teachers do to improve students’ skill simultaneously enhances their motivation. That motivation might be — in effect — extrinsic; but, it’s working. (Working = students read better, and want to read more.)

Overall, I believe we need a substantial rethink of the (false) intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy, and the (unhelpful) criticism of motivational strategies that many teachers currently find themselves using.

If you want to join me for just such a rethink, I’m giving a webinar for Learning and the Brain on April 5th. We’ll be talking about several research-informed approaches to intrinsic motivation, and brainstorming strategies to make those ideas fit in our classrooms.

I hope I’ll persuade you that we have better ways to talk about motivation than “intrinsic/extrinsic,” and those better ways give us useful teacherly guidance.

I hope you’ll join us!

van Bergen, E., Hart, S. A., Latvala, A., Vuoksimaa, E., Tolvanen, A., & Torppa, M. (2023). Literacy skills seem to fuel literacy enjoyment, rather than vice versa. Developmental Science, 26(3), e13325.

“If I Want My Students to Learn Math, Should I Teach Them More Math?”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October 06, 2020

“If I Want My Students to Learn Math, Should I Teach Them More Math?”

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We all agree, I suspect, that students should learn math. And reading. They should learn history. And science. SO MANY other topics.

What’s the best way to meet these goals?

If I want my students to learn math, is math teaching the best way to go? If I want them to understand history, should I teach more history?

Or, instead, is there a handy shortcut?

If I could help students improve their reading by teaching something other than reading, that alternate approach just might be more efficient and motivating.

In fact, two candidates get lots of attention as “alternative approaches.”  If either or both pan out, they would offer us more choices. Maybe even a higher chance of success.

Music and Math

I don’t remember where I first heard that music education improves math learning. Specifically: learning to play the violin ultimately makes students better at learning calculus.

The explanation focused on “strengthened neural circuits” “repurposed” for “higher cognitive function.” Something like that. That string of words sounded quite impressive, and inclined me to believe.

Given the complexity of calculus, that would be really helpful!

But: is it true?

A recent meta-analysis looked at 54 relevant studies, including just under 7,000 participants.

Their findings? Let me quote key points from their summary:

Music training has repeatedly been claimed to positively impact children’s cognitive skills and academic achievement (literacy and mathematics).

This claim relies on the assumption that engaging in intellectually demanding activities fosters particular domain-general cognitive skills, or even general intelligence.

The present meta-analytic review shows that this belief is incorrect.

Once the quality of study design is controlled for, the overall effect of music training programs is null.

It gets worse:

Small statistically significant overall effects are obtained only in those studies implementing no random allocation of participants and employing non-active controls.

In other words: you get this result only if the study isn’t correctly designed.

And worse:

Interestingly, music training is ineffective regardless of the type of outcome measure (e.g., verbal, non-verbal, speed-related, etc.), participants’ age, and duration of training.

That is: no matter what you measure, the answer is still “no.”

Violin training sure strengthened some neural circuits. But that additional strength doesn’t get “repurposed for ‘higher’ cognitive function.”

If I want my students to learn math, I should teach them math.

Chess and Intelligence

If you watch The West Wing, you know that President Bartlet is smarter than everyone else because he won a Nobel Prize, and he plays chess frequently. He says things like “rook takes queen in five.” And then Leo nods appreciatively.

So smart.

It might be true that being smart makes you better at chess. (Although, Anders Ericsson says “no.”)

Is it true that playing chess makes you smarter? If we want our students to learn math and reading and science, should we teach them more chess? Would some neural circuitry get repurposed?

Let’s go to the tape:

In contrast to much of the existing literature, we find no evidence of an effect of chess instruction upon children’s mathematics, reading or science test scores.

In this case, by the way, the “tape” is a randomized control trial with more than 4,000 students in it. So: that result seems impressively well established.

So far, it seems that if I want my students to be better at X, I should teach them X. Teaching them Y and hoping that Y makes them better at X hasn’t panned out well…

Social Studies and Reading

Reading might be an interesting exception to this rule. On the one hand, reading is a skill that students must acquire.

And, at the same time, they have to apply the skill of reading to the content being read. The more that students know about the content, maybe the better they’ll do at reading.

In any case, that’s a plausible hypothesis.

A recently released report from the Thomas Fordham Institute crunches the numbers, and finds that additional time devoted to social studies instruction ultimately improves reading scores.

Two key sentences from the executive summary:

Instead of devoting more class time to English language arts, we should be teaching elementary school children more social studies — as in, rich content about history, geography, and civics.

…

Literacy gains are more likely to materialize when students spend more time learning social studies.

In fact, they find that social studies instruction most benefits students from lower-income households, and from non-English speaking homes.

For a variety of reasons, this study looks at correlation, and so can’t demonstrate causation.

However, the underlying theory makes sense. If students can decode the sounds of the words “Berlin” and “Wall,” but don’t know the geography of Germany or cold-war history, they’re unlikely to make much sense of a reading passage about that in/famous border.

In Sum

Students improve at the skills they practice. Those skills — alas —  rarely transfer to distantly unrelated disciplines.

To help students learn math, teach them math. To help them read, teach them to read — and also about the scientific, historical, geographic, and philosophical concepts that make reading so important and so worthwhile.

Can We Improve Our Students’ Executive Function? Will That Help Them Read Better?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 01, 2020

Can We Improve Our Students’ Executive Function? Will That Help Them Read Better?

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Here’s a fun exercise. I’m going to give you a list of words. You try to sort them into two groups, based on the sound they begin with:

cup, bag, bread, can, box, cookie, cake, bucket, corn, beans, crate, banana

Presumably you came up with /k/ sounds and /b/ sounds:

cup, can, crate, cookie, cake, corn

beans, bread, banana, box, bag, bucket

Okay, now go back and RESORT those words into two groups, based on the category they belong to.

Presumably you came up with containers and foods:

cup, can, crate, box, bag, bucket

cookie, cake, corn, beans, banana, bread

If you succeeded, BRAVO! You demonstrated cognitive flexibility: an executive function that allows you to change your thought process mid-stream.

Believe it or not, we have to learn this particular skill.

In video below, for instance, 3-year-olds sort cards according to their color (“red goes here, blue goes there”). They’re usually good at that. However, when the rules change to focus on shape (“trucks go here, flowers go there”), they struggle to follow the different instructions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXZau5VIIvU

Why? Because they haven’t yet developed the executive function of cognitive flexibility.

New Research: Improving Reading

For a number of reasons, we might think that this general executive function (cognitive flexibility) might support a specific academic skill (reading).

If that’s true, then maybe we can help struggling readers by training their cognitive flexibility. (This possibility relies on several assumptions; the scholars who did this work have lots of research supporting each one.)

To test this possibility, Kelly Cartwright & Co. had teachers spend several weeks training a group of 2nd – 5th  graders in cognitive flexibility.

Basically, those students repeated that word-sorting/resorting exercise you did at the top of this post. And, they tried a more complicated fill-in-the-blank version of that task as well.

The results?

Compared with other struggling readers, these students got better at cognitive flexibility. And — here’s the big news — they got better at reading as well. (More specifically: they didn’t get better at individual word recognition, but they got better at reading comprehension and grade level reading.)

So, in this research, Cartwright’s team found that training a particular executive function helps struggling readers do better.

Technically speaking, that’s awesome.

As Always, the Caveats

First: as Dan Willingham says in his Twitter bio, “One study is just one study, folks.” Even if Cartwright and Co. did everything right, it’s possible their results are a fluke. We won’t know until many other scholars succeed in replicating and extending this finding.

Second: We shouldn’t extrapolate too far based on this study. We don’t know if training other executive functions would help struggling readers. We don’t know if training EF benefits typical readers; or, people first learning to read; or, improves the performance of sophisticated readers.

Those questions are important — but not addressed directly by this research.

Third: Both reading instruction and executive function are hotly controversial topics. (Heck, I wrote a post about a month ago questioning the very idea of a “general” executive function.) I wouldn’t be surprised if this research (or my summary of it) prompted stern rebukes from scholars/practitioners with a different understanding of reading/EF processes.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if those stern rebukes were correct. If you’ve got an alternative perspective (and some research behind it), please let me know.

But, with those caveats in mind, this research strikes me as exciting and potentially powerful. Any strategy to help struggling readers should get our attention. One that a) costs essentially no money, b) doesn’t take very long, and c) can be done so easily might be a real boon to schools, students, and readers.

Watch this space…

Does Teaching HANDWRITING Help Students READ?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 11, 2020

Does Teaching HANDWRITING Help Students READ?

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I recently saw a newspaper headline suggesting that teaching students HANDWRITING ultimately improves their READING ability.

As an English teacher, I was intrigued by that claim.

As a skeptic, I was … well … skeptical.

In this case, we have two good reasons to be skeptical. First, we should always be skeptical. Second, claims of transfer rarely hold up.

What is “transfer”?

Well, if you teach me calculus, then it’s likely I’ll get better at calculus. If you teach me to play the violin, it’s likely I’ll get better at playing the violin. But: if you teach me to play the violin, it’s NOT likely that this skill will transfer to another skill — like calculus. (And, no: music training in youth doesn’t reliably improve math ability later in life.)

In fact, most claims of transfer — “teaching you X makes you better at distantly-related-thing A” — end up being untrue.

So, is it true — as this newspaper headline implied — that handwriting skills transfer to reading skills?

The Research

This newspaper article pointed to research by Dr. Anabela Malpique, working in Western Australia.

Her research team worked with 154 6-7 year-olds around Perth. They measured all sorts of variables, including…

…the students’ handwriting automaticity (how well can they write individual letters),

…their reading skills (how accurately they read individual words),

…the amount of time the teachers reported spending in reading/writing instruction.

And, they measured handwriting automaticity and reading skills at the beginning and end of the year. For that reason, they could look for relationships among their variables over time. (As you can see, Malpique’s research focuses on many topics — not just the writing/reading question that I’m discussing in this post.)

Tentative Conclusions

To their surprise, Malpique’s team found that more fluent letter formation at the beginning of the year predicted more fluent word reading at the end of the year. In their words, this finding

suggest[s] that being able to write letters quickly and effortlessly in kindergarten facilitates pre-reading and decoding skills one year later.

In other words: this research allows the possibility that teaching writing does ultimately help students read single words.

However — and this is a big however — the researchers’ methodology does NOT allow for causal conclusions. They see a mathematical “relationship” between two things, but don’t say that the writing ability led to later reading ability.

They warn:

Experimental research is needed to confirm these findings[,] and systematically evaluate potential explanatory mechanism[s] of writing-to-reading effects over time in the early years.

They specifically note that they did NOT measure reading comprehension; they measured single word reading.

To put this in other words: we would like to know if

a) teaching letter writing leads to

b) improved letter writing fluency, which leads to

c) improved single word reading, which leads to

d) improved reading comprehension.

These findings make the b) to c) connection more plausible, but the certainly do not “prove” that a) leads to d).

Classroom Implications

This research doesn’t claim we should make big changes right away.

I do think it leads to this conclusion:

Some schools are replacing books with computers and tablets. I can imagine (although I haven’t heard this) that advocates might make this claim:

“In the future, no one will need to write by hand. Everything will be keyboarding, and so we need to get children typing as soon as possible. Let’s replace handwriting instruction with keyboarding instruction, to prepare our kids for the future!”

If we hear that argument, we can say:

“I have LOTS of objections to that logical chain. In particular, we have tentative reasons to believe that handwriting instruction improves reading. If that’s true — and we don’t yet know — we should be VERY wary of doing anything that slows our students’ ability to read. We might not be handwriting so much in the future, but we’ll be reading forever.”

In sum: I don’t think that newspaper article captured essential nuances. However, this research raises the intriguing possibility that transfer just might take place from writing instruction to single-word reading. We need more research to know with greater certainty.

But, given the importance of reading for school and life, we should be excited to find anything that can help students do better.

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