Classroom teachers, families, reading coaches, and, most importantly, students have all experienced reading levels. In this compelling episode of Literacy Talks, special guest Dr. Matt Burns shares his research and insights and their application to literacy learning, extra support, and growth. It’s a candid and refreshing look at assessment, measurement, and the changes in how the profession can challenge the whole notion of reading levels. This is an episode that just might change your thinking! Tune in and learn about the new ways of assessing and, most of all, growing students’ reading abilities.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
Subscribe to our podcast digest.
Download the new Reading Horizons Discovery Product Guide.
Access the show notes.
Read the transcripts.
Classroom teachers, families, reading coaches, and, most importantly, students have all experienced reading levels. In this compelling episode of Literacy Talks, special guest Dr. Matt Burns shares his research and insights and their application to literacy learning, extra support, and growth. It’s a candid and refreshing look at assessment, measurement, and the changes in how the profession can challenge the whole notion of reading levels. This is an episode that just might change your thinking! Tune in and learn about the new ways of assessing and, most of all, growing students’ reading abilities.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
Subscribe to our podcast digest.
Download the new Reading Horizons Discovery Product Guide.
Access the show notes.
Read the transcripts.
Hello literacy leaders and champions. Welcome to literacy talks, a podcast series from Reading Horizons dedicated to exploring the ideas, trends, insights and practical issues that will help us all improve our professional practice knowledge and confidence in teaching reading. Our host is Stacy Hurst, professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor at Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education. And Lindsay Kemeny, an author and a Utah based elementary classroom teacher. In today's episode, we welcome a special guest, Dr. Matt Burns, a noted literacy and special education researcher, university faculty member and one of the professions leading voices. From rethinking students screening level two effective objective progress monitoring, this episode will give every reading teacher and coach important ideas and insights that matter in every classroom. Let's get started.
Stacy Hurst:Welcome to this episode of literacy talks, I'm Stacy Hurst to host and I'm joined by my awesome co hosts, Lindsay Kemeny and Donell Pons. And today, we have a really exciting guest with us. And I need to preface this by saying he's only our second guest. We've had an Anita Archer, those of you know, and now we get to have Matt Burns join us. So thank you for joining us today, Matt.
Dr. Matt Burns:I can't believe I'm second to an either Archer, that's pretty fantastic. Actually, in that same sentence, I'm pretty happy with that.
Stacy Hurst:Well, we have you right up there. And then we also realized that happy accident that it's alphabetical order. So we're gonna with Archer then Burns? I don't know who were who are we going to have next? Who starts with C? We'll have to, we'll have to think hard about that. Anyway, so we are going to just have a conversation, as you know, our format is we basically show up and talk about literacy. So I was able to email Matt some topics that we would love to hear what he has to say about and Donell and Lindsay, I know you have lots to say about these things, too. So this will be just really as informal as we are. And we'll just start, I think we'll just dive right in. First, I do want to ask Matt, and just a little bit about your background. Could you I don't know that. I don't know that I know this. But I've heard this. Where are you from? How did you get into teaching? Where did you go to school? All those fun things?
Dr. Matt Burns:Yeah, so I'm a professor of special education here at the University of Missouri transition, to join the UFLI at the University of Florida, which I'm extremely excited about. I was at University of Minnesota for 10 years as Central Michigan University for five years, I've actually seen school psychologist, but before that no special administrator, I was a special supervisor for one year. And after one year, that was enough time to conclude that's a terrible job I didn't want to do that. Did something else. I got into literacy, really because my area of expertise was were learning disabilities. Early on in my career, I was I was certainly the person that you call it when you didn't know what else to do. I still used to say that was my sort of one of my job. And I loved it. And I still love, I still love those kids, those are still the ones that are closest to my heart. But then when I was with your kids and realize that that number was going up and up and up, then we would go need to change something if there's a systems issue here going on. And that's why it's changed my focus from how to help this individual care data help more than one.
Stacy Hurst:How that is great. Thank you for sharing that. This is a topic that's impacted all of this on some level. That's a pun, because we're going to talk about reading levels. But um, and I know I've been accused of being overly dramatic about this. But as a young teacher, I was brand new probably year one, year two. And if you've listened to the podcast, Lindsay and I have totally owned that we fully embrace balanced literacy. That was what we did back in the day. And I was really enamored with the idea of reading levels, specifically Fountas and Pinnell. And I'd learned a little something of readability formulas in my undergrad education. So I really was trusting and relying on the fact that there was a solid formula to those levels. I used them before I had the thought to look into what they were. But I remember the moment that I realized that there really isn't a very solid psychometric formula that went into those levels. And I do describe it like this, my heart dropped. That's the dramatic part. But then I thought about the implications of that I had been communicating those levels to my parents of my students. I had been, you know, all of my instruction was focused around that, Lindsay, I'm sure you can relate. And to realize it was basically a myth was really impactful. So I know you've done some really awesome research and about this, could you share with us what you found?
Dr. Matt Burns:Yeah, so I am enamored with levels as well. But a slightly different take probably early on in my career, I still do research in this area, we took a bunch of kids who are identified as emotional, emotional behavioral disorder, or ADHD, non medicated, you know, just really pretty kind of walk test kids. And all we do is one or two things, either give them a book, or passage actually use passages because that is more tightly controlled, so that they can actually read or take wherever they're supposed to read the class and do some pre teaching so that they could actually read it. And their timeline test goes way up every single time that we've just finished about analysis of a couple years ago. Now, we found there's a moderate effect on behavior for almost any academic intervention we do among kids with behavior problems. So based on that, we will go back to deeply and act on before that even even on the back to harvest bets. That's the nice part point six don't quote me on the exact date, said know what kids can learn better if they can read about 95% of the words correctly. That anecdotal observation went to woods. And bats became the father of Informal Reading Inventory. In this entire industry of Levels Level Assessment. Well, hardest this group, eventually, a getting started developing a measurement system, once you have the kids read what they're being asked to read and see, can they actually interact with the text. So the research I did focused on that lead, then, so we have a kid between the ages and the words correctly, a simple pre teaching, give them up to 93, 95 97%. And we see time on task, chest operation testing, we should go way up. The problem is the other side of that, of that bridge went the other direction, that Informal Reading Inventory. If I could wave a magic wand in education, probably the first thing to do would be to get rid of informing the choice. So Stacy already mentioned that there's no real, reliable formula. That's true. So research I've done with the participant now others with the DRA. And Jerry, John's basic reading inventory, we see that those levels are remarkably inaccurate, about as accurate as flipping a coin. And the worst part is, is the kids who are struggling readers, we found an article article and published in the Journal of school psychology, we found that the kids who were low readers couldn't read the books that we're doing. So the kids that need the most are the ones that have the most trouble reading a book, that's appropriately at their level. An issue is not the construct of instructional level, it's with the measurement. Data never generalize to or from an individual. And so if I do work, so that means if I do a study with 5000 kids, that I find x to be true, that doesn't mean x will be true for this individual kid. The flip side of that is if I collect data from one kid that doesn't generalize anything else. So even if I have a good measure, which always measures tend to have poor reliability, but you can play a good measure, when I assess the kid and the kid was an M, and the M was a meaningful term child would do this, let's say this, we still don't know that they'll be able to read an M book, it just can't get that level of generalizability. Any measure in the history of psychological testing. That's why I say, abandon the measures, and abandon levels. I'd love to see a world where we no longer said kids read a second grade level. What I'd rather see is if there's a kid, can they read this particular text? That's really all the best we can do.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, that's great. I was gonna that was in my next question, how does that look in application?
Dr. Matt Burns:There should be a general rule where we can see that this book is a higher level than this one. Okay, I can accept that. But I think Lexile does that pretty well. I can live with lexiles as a baseline. And I'm going to give you yours, don't worry about it among the good readers, let them pick the books they want to read and choose. They want to let them go great. If occasionally need some support. All right, chances are they won't. But the striving readers, the low readers, those the ones are going to take them back whatever they want to read, get assigned or something they pick have them read to you for a minute. And just simply see, can they read 93-97% of the books. That one little assessment we've done I don't know how many studies now but we find that those are reliable data. We found that modifying to match that increased comprehension completion time on tasks, we've replicated that a number of times. So among the struggling readers just take a book that roughly approximates their Lexile. And just make sure that you read it just take one minute to read probably 95% words 93-97%, that will give you a better estimate of the child's ability to successfully interact with a text to any reading measure that takes 20 to 30 minutes to do.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking about all the time spent on those Informal Reading Inventory all the time we've spent,
Dr. Matt Burns:I was working with a district not long ago, who was a Fountas and Pinnell district, I showed him 50% accuracy, I should be to be more clear, the participant, our benchmark assessment system, the accuracy of that data was about 54%. So pretty inaccurate. When you look at the skills of the kids on the same level, let's say G, for example. And I actually don't make that up. I was debating a teacher not long ago about the importance of Fountas and Pinnell, and she was arguing was important. So I asked you to pull up her data. I literally just grabbed a bunch of G's, and did no manipulate just just grabbed a bunch of G's. And one kid was at the summary page bunch of data, all of the G for the benchmark assessment system, one was at a MAP test 73rd percentile, and one was the MAP test. First percentile. One is reading 80 words a minute on dibbles. And one was reading 20. But according to the benchmark assessment system, both kids have the same reading needs. So I was I was showing this data to a school a few years ago. And they actually said, Okay, well, we'll try it without it. And the two of the teachers, and the decision making biases, maybe 10 teachers, they're two of the teachers actually started to cry, didn't know what to do. They're upset, you know? And they said, no, no, we spend the first two weeks of school giving this assessment, I can ask them the first two weeks of school teaching, they were so happy, they literally broke down in tears.
Donell Pons:So Matt, you've said something really important that I don't want to pass by here. You've said something about knowing where the student is at. And that takes time listening to the student do the thing you're asking him to do and that is read. So let's talk a little bit about because you talked about those first two weeks where teachers are taking data? And are we actually sitting next to a student and listening to them read? Because I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a classroom and asked a teacher where some students are at what do you think they could read this passage? And there's the look of blank like, geez, I don't know. And we're mid year, because I've never heard that student read? Can you talk to that a little bit,
Dr. Matt Burns:I can't emphasize how important that is, as a as a reading interventions, some will call me and say, Hey, come come help me with my kid. The very first thing I'm going to do is have that kid read to me. My issue with the benchmark assessment system, the DRA. And all of those is not what Beth is about any more time I will do, I will say this, I have no confidence in the score. Sitting down with the kid having them read to you from a grade level passage or a couple of them. You know, even easier one and more difficult one, I those that can be really helpful information. But the issue is we tend to look at the score, and make all the decisions on the score. It's a score that has no reliability that no, it's a score, that's the problem. That's one of the advantages of dibbles acadiens. And all of those is you actually have the kid read to you, which I still think are invaluable data without a running record, when so I will be clear about that VI issue with running records is there's too much subjectivity, it depends on decision you're making, right? So you're just wanting to work with a kid and you're just kind of assessing him. And formally, any authority record type approach, we just kind of judge things is totally fine. But if you're using it to screen kids are using it to make, you know, decisions that will involve different interventions and resources. And those data aren't reliable enough. That's why something like Acadience or Dibbles, or all those others, Easy CBM, Fast Bridge, AIMSweb, those give you a more a more structured framework that is not subjective, or has much, much, much less subjectivity. And therefore the data are more reliable.
Lindsay Kemeny:And they don't take long, right? I mean, I love using Acadience in my classroom and progress monitoring. It's it's two minutes, you know, and it lets me know if Okay, we're on track or, oh, let's revisit what we're doing because we need to change something.
Dr. Matt Burns:Yeah, we spent terribly inefficient when it comes to assessments. You know, we have this mindset that will 30 minute assessment gives you more data than a one minute assessment. No, feel it'll give you a different data, maybe but not necessarily better. We waste a lot of time in schools, with assessments, the schools that assess kids with every kid gets Dibbles, MAP, Fountas and Pinnell, that's such a waste of time. And I tell schools, when you do that, look at the decisions you make. If you're making if you're, for example, identifying all the same kids that have been When all three of those measures, pick the cheapest one and use that,
Stacy Hurst:yeah, that's a good point. And I know I, as a literacy coach, I was guilty of that, too. We, we also embrace the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark system. And that was decades ago, just to clarify, but I do want to say too, I think an unintended outcome of that is that teachers start viewing assessment as separate from teaching. It's something we do the first two weeks of school, and then we teach, right and let to your point, Matt, there is a huge range. You can look at a level M, if five kids on that level, they're all on that level for different reasons, their accuracy is different. Their you know, automaticity is different from one kid to another. So I appreciate that we're having this conversation. I just have one more question related to this. How does decodable text relate to the conversation we're having
Dr. Matt Burns:decodable texts are a very specific tool. decodable texts are designed to help the kids practice the skill you just taught me, you have to do that. But that's you can't have good instruction without that step in the sequence. So decodable texts are different. They're designed a bit now, a decodable text means that there are some some things you just taught the kid. But there's other things that the kid has already been taught. And so they're not, it's not new material. So by definition, a decodable text should be an instructional level. Because the new stuff that's involved in there should be the things you just taught them. So by definition, if instruction is going well, every decodable text should be an instructional level connected. And we use that decodable text to have them practice what you just taught. But you certainly are probably going to be having the kids engaged in other types of reading as well. Yeah, and you want to make sure we have the children able to read the text of the reading for that purpose as well. The child should be doing more connected text reading and then just have decodable text.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, agreed.
Lindsay Kemeny:And that's one thing I think is so exciting. I just finished a you know, my first year teaching first grade. And I love that moving them from decodables, to regular text and just kind of gently helping them and some of them needed more scaffolding. And it was so exciting to see and be able to all sudden apply all those phonics skills we've been learning, you know, in a regular text.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah. And that they get excited about that, too. i Yeah, my heart will forever be in first grade. And that's one reason just to see them become grown up readers right before your eyes. Um, what I do have a question to you about, in first grade, I could control how often my students read whether that vote was always out loud at that point. But I have worked since with a lot of teachers who are teaching older grades in dental, you can really relate to this, I'm sure. In other subject areas that have never heard their own students read, they're making a lot of assumptions about those older learners that they've been taught to read or that they're reading is, for some students may be more proficient than they assume. What do you recommend in those kinds of settings,
Dr. Matt Burns:while I'm working with the school, secondary school district, but they were wanting to start an MTS S system, the high school and the representative, the ELA department was on the team. And I kept referring to that person about literacy. And then finally, she stopped me and said, very appreciate how respectful you're being. But us you understand my major college was literature, not literacy. I can tell you whatever you want to know about Shakespeare, I do not know how to teach you how to read. So I do think that we have spent more time with secondary pre service teachers and in service teachers, just the basics of read just as long as you know what fluency is what comprehension is, and in some basic ideas of what decoding is, they don't need to be literacy expert. Absolutely. They don't need to. But I will say that we gave them very basic knowledge of literacy at the secondary level makes social studies in science, wonderful opportunities for literacy, instruction and intervention. It's not a complicated process, we can call the materials that align with the scope and sequence of the curriculum, and have them do practice repeated reading with social studies content, super easy, for example. So it doesn't take much beauty we have to be a little more intentional and to support those teachers, both pre service and in service. But when we do we have a wonderful opportunity to to help build both contact knowledge and literacy. But to have a grant now, we're doing that very thing at the middle school level. We're looking for schools to infuse literacy practices into social studies, mostly vocabulary word mostly for lots of vocabulary and try and see to Let's see if we can see increases in reading comprehension. But more importantly, more importantly, we're more likely one of these kids who are struggling readers now the access to content more effectively. So just a little bit of work with the secondary level, we can increase witness deals and increase the content acquisition.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, man, I'm taking notes, there's a lot to be done. Especially in that space. I know I'm teaching graduate level course, and about half of my students right now or a teaching in high school. And they've, they're taking the course because of this, because they know that they have students who can't read, and they want to help. And I am glad to hear you say that they don't have to be reading specialists, because I get overwhelmed thinking, Oh, how can I teach them everything they need to know. But you're right, if they do know the basics, then it kind of becomes the challenges probably are more systemic at that point, than they are with the teacher in the classroom, I guess.
Dr. Matt Burns:What's your class, your teaching Stacy?
Stacy Hurst:It's foundational knowledge of literacy. It's for the literacy specialist endorsement here in the state.
Dr. Matt Burns:Oh, it's great. They're taking that 10th grade social studies teacher probably doesn't need to have a strong background in teaching morphology, for example, you know, they know what reading fluency is and how to build reading fluency. But how do so directly increase comprehension? Well, that's probably the level of schooling.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah. And that's a great segue, because fluency is another topic we want to talk about. And I, I want to actually have Lindsay share, to start that she has implemented something that you recommend. And Lindsey just talked about your experience with that, and what you've seen?
Lindsay Kemeny:Well, it's called partner reading paragraph shrinking, and I learned about it from you, Matt. He did a presentation for Patton. And, you know, that year, I was teaching second grade. And this intervention is designed for second through eighth graders. And it was at the beginning of the year. And I remember, I was already just frustrated, because I had, you know, half my class was well below the benchmark, the Acadience benchmark and, and I'm just thinking, what am I going to do? How do I, you know, and so he gave this presentation about a class wide reading intervention. And I just, I was like, Oh, my gosh, that's exactly what I need. I need a class wide intervention, because I can't, you know, it's like, so hard to do intervention, or over half your class. And it's really simple. There's many research, there's, you know, Matt, you, I guess, did the research study on it. And it's, it's a pared down version of pals. PALS, right. And so I think our class median was 50 words correct per minute, I did this intervention for two weeks. And our class median was 64 words correct per minute at the end of two weeks, and I was just sold. So I, you know, kept doing it throughout the week. But I'm always just saying how grateful I am for that presentation that you gave and your work on that Matt, because that has just made such a difference in my classroom. You probably
Dr. Matt Burns:remember we tweeted about that. October 12 2021. And your dude asked if I can invite you, if you don't mind. If I share that tweet, screenshot it, I put it in lots of presentations. And I'm looking at it right now. Oh, cool. The secondary 50 words a minute or to 66. I love that you do that. And I plug your website, every time I present. I tell them the ways I understand that you made not changes to the intervention, but to make it more kid friendly. And it's really cool. That innovation came from working with Crest path to excellence in school sites. When I was at Minneapolis in Minneapolis, at the Minnesota Senate green research, we developed this really cool innovation COVID. And when we were started running the interventions, we had a huge grant from Target Corporation. So we were drunk on money. We had all kinds of money. And so I had 24 research assistants. So I saw what you're picking up early on. And you know, the 25 kids and 20 of them are low. I have the resources. I just had a bunch of small group interventions with all my research assistants. There we saw the kids doing really well. But the number of kids scoring the Proficient range didn't go up than what your benchmark assessment, and it hit me. Amanda Vanderheiden taught me this many years ago, 2003 that would all be core instruction, nothing else matters. And so we panicked. And we went and bought pals, all the teachers, Peer Assisted Learning Strategies, which will be mentioned mid cap with tip of the plug that and that, you know, that's the table. And we showed it to the teachers and the teachers that basically said, No, we don't want to do that. So we peeled everything else back and just brought it down to fluency bit and partner paragraph shaytans is a comprehension technique. But basically we focus on fluency. And the reason we did that was for a while there around the early 2000s. We saw a big push for reading fluency in the classroom. But we Influency workers seem to have been forgotten a little bit more lately. And Tim Shanahan and Tim Resinsky talk about this all the time. But fluency is that way to build automaticity fluency is basically automatic decoding, right? And so if you're doing fluency, you're you're taking what they're learning and decoding and making it automatic. And we found two studies I've done, saw that unless kids can read 60 words a minute in elementary school, they tend not to comprehend. So if I have a kid reading 30 words a minute, and the teacher says all comprehension, comprehension comprehension, the first thing I'm gonna do is fix the fluency problem. The most of the time, when we do that, the comprehension problem becomes much less severe, and sometimes even just goes away. So we said, okay, let's just build this fluency building practice. And we did that for two weeks. And we didn't pick two weeks, we said, try this, this first group of teachers here, try this for two weeks, just because we thought they'd agreed for two weeks. And we say, okay, so we'll try for two weeks. So we'll come back, we'll do an assessment, we'll talk to you and see how it went. And they actually have paper here, inside the open, but the medians, the very first time we did it, in second grade, I went from 81 words, to 104, to 87 words to 113, just in students. And so, we have said to study this quite a bit, and we published it. We've done randomized trials, we publish it in various journals and such and you see that you have this quick little 20 minute, fluency practice every day, for two weeks, with an additional three weeks at the middle school to see results in really nice jumps in fluency and resulting comprehension. Monica Rivero, a student of mine, who just defended and is going to be an assistant professor next year at University of Texas, Austin, did her dissertation on this. And she was the first one to really study the effect on comprehension, and comprehensions, where we saw the bigger jump. So we actually addressed that fluency issue, we tend to see big jumps in in fluency and comprehension.
Stacy Hurst:It's a connector between those lower parts of what we call phonemic awareness and phonics and vocabulary, and comprehension. If we're talking about those five varies, it's really impactful, Lindsey, whoever you're gonna say,
Lindsay Kemeny:Yeah, well, I love it. Because it's just an opportunity to practice. I think a lot of teachers just think fluency is going to develop on its own or the silent reading is going to lead to fluent reading, but they need more practice reading aloud. And that's what the this intervention provides. And then I was switched to first grade this year. And so you'll remember Matt, because I went back and forth with you like, what intervention did you use in first grade and, and all this? Well, I tried partner reading paragraph shrinking in first grade, I waited until it was very end of January, after our middle of the year benchmark. And I just, I started everyone out with the quotables decodable passages. And I'm like, Hey, this is just an opportunity for them to practice to help, you know, automatize, some of those skills, and then I transition to them into regular text as they were ready, which was a little bit different for the different students. And then I also had, you know, I took longer to introduce it. So I didn't do paragraphs shrinking at first. And I took a little bit longer teaching them, you know, the first half of the intervention. And then I had my literacy coach come in my room with me when we first had them try paragraph shrinking. I'm like, I don't know if this is too much for first graders helped me know what you think we're gonna walk around and listen. And it was really exciting to see how well they did. So before the intervention, they had 37 words correct per minute, that was our class median. And after, I think I did it three weeks, and it was 60 words correct per minute.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah. And research continues to tell us that repeated reading is the best way to increase fluency. Right?
Dr. Matt Burns:Yeah, you can make an argument. Best way, but it's certainly an effective way. But it was important relative actually is important. It doesn't happen on its own in silent reading fluency doesn't necessarily mean the translation to reading fluency. So I really encourage partner meeting is great. It's they read to each other. It's fun, we, Lindsay, we rarely see behavior problems happen during this during this intervention, your first graders,
Lindsay Kemeny:and the same thing, because guess what, you're giving them all something that they can be successful with. And they're all engaged and doing something the entire time. And, in fact, I when I gave a presentation on it, and I did a little video clip, showing my students all doing it, you know, I just kind of panned across the room. And I remember in that presentation, that teacher raised your hand and said, Well, it looks like you don't have any behavior issues in your class. So what about if we have kids that struggle with behavior? And I'm like, No, I do, but they like this activity. They can do it.
Narrator:Say hello to the new Reading Horizons Discovery, the evidence based foundational literacy program educators asked for within Innovative technology to support teachers and students, a complete collection of decodable books, a digital sound wall, built in real time coaching, and more, Reading Horizons Discovery puts it all together to help K through three students achieve reading proficiency. Now you can take off with a trusted science of reading approach and simple instructional method. It's easy to stay on top of student progress and individual needs with a tech enabled tool and streamline student data. Take action to transform reading challenges into literacy success, go to readinghorizons.com/productguide to download your program overview today.
Dr. Matt Burns:We had a kid one time who was a very cute little boy, but emotional behavior disorder. And I forget the grade for only like maybe third grade. And the teacher didn't have the kid participate in this activity. Well, he had given him saw that and said, well, we'll try it. And she was having a potential anxiety boy was really, really, really high. And she had a partner who is going very well accompany her kids. So she decided to switch back and she'll pay I'll take the student emotionally have disorder put him in and see what happens. And the first time, he basically his partner got very little accomplished because he was so happy to be participating. He giggled the entire time, and I'm not kidding he giggled the entire time, he couldn't get himself to the point where his partner was this kind of quiet, started giggling to be big time. But the next day, he was on test the entire time. And it worked really well for him. Just in terms of being able to do that. It's amazing to watch. We had we developed this in inner city, Minneapolis, and we were in some schools with, you know, there were frequent reprimands, etc. and redirects for behavior. Never during this only wants to be seen teachers say I really think I'd like to do something with behavior because they don't be on task they want them to be. So that teacher gave them a goal. And she gave them to behaviors, behaviors, keep your voice low and talking about random something. And she'd walked by, and if they're doing what they're supposed to be doing shoot a checkmark on the little folder, we give them a beautiful week, and they had some number of checkmarks they got some prize, which that took care of the problem right there.
Lindsay Kemeny:I like that that's a good idea. I sometimes I guess with the first graders paragraph shrinking, sometimes they would, I don't know, if they were really off task, though. They just would start well, maybe a little bit, they start talking a little bit more about it. But it's usually just because they might need more help and directing. Or they usually were pretty good about raising their hand and saying, you know, we disagree on what the most important person is in this paragraph. And then I would go and help them. But yeah, that's awesome.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, this is really great. And I think it just emphasizes and with the last topic it emphasizes to students need to be reading out loud, frequently, in a school day. And I know there's been research done about how many minutes a student will read out loud in those early grades, and it's minimal. But we need to increase it. I know, when I was a beginning teacher, I read research about fluency. And we had just started giving the dibbles assessment in my state. And so I was really interested in how that develops. But I think it was Rim Rasinski and I read that if they were reading out loud for 20 minutes a day 20 to 30. And we had read aloud time in my class, it wasn't partner reading. I wish I had known about that. They literally were reading out loud each individual student at the same time every day. And we had a lot of processes and procedures around that. But I think that made more of a difference, then a lot of other things I could have tried. And of course it sounded you have to be able to tolerate a certain level of cacophony there were all reading different books. But I really, they think that is one takeaway any teacher could have right to increase the time their students are actually reading in the school day.
Dr. Matt Burns:Yeah, but doing so in a structured manner. Yes, why partner reading is so important, you know, just really kid you want to play that? There's better higher quality or when activities that demand so just make sure it's structured and engaging. You can see really, because it goes through that quick little intervention.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah. And again, everybody's on task. That was really exciting to see and talk about. Okay, we have had a lot. I know there's been a lot of conversation lately about phonemic awareness. And I would say this whole conversation with or without letters of instruction. I honestly think a lot of the we've talked about this a lot between the three of us. The timing that this became known to people I think was problematic, but talk to us about I know you, I feel that you're strongly on this side of introducing letters with those phonemes. Talk to us about that, how you concluded that and what your your thoughts are about that practice.
Dr. Matt Burns:I'm going to contextualize out a broader point, especially specifically, I, of course, as everybody calls is involved in are involved in each passionate about making sure the instruction is based in science. And I think we've had many mistakes when it comes to literacy in the past, and one of which is, we tend to do a lot of hero worship in literacy. I keep threatening to do the study, I'm overwhelmed. So I don't want to make everybody mad. But I want to look at the citations in the reading country, meaning teachers a binder of which a research practice journal, I use it and lots of colleagues who do what the citations I've noticed in the reading teacher tend to be today less quantitative research. And they're citing a bunch of a bunch of opinions. We get our heroes, and I think whatever that hero says is true. And sometimes that's okay. Oh, no, never. Sometimes you get away with it, because the hero is a researcher, etc. But then we've got people who are likely to come up. I mean, just listen to the story, Emily Hanford is is braver than I am, she'll, she'll call. It did. We think just because they said it must be it must be true. Well, we now know perceptual. And what they were saying wasn't based on research. So but now we're doing it again. The advanced phonemic awareness hypothesis is exactly hypothesis. It's an interesting idea. It's never been studied. I would actually argue it's inconsistent with previous research, but it's an interesting idea that's never been studied. Well, so let's research it. Let's learn from our mistakes. Let's see what we're doing. Let's look and see if this is really an effective practice or not, before we start using it all across the country. So I have an advanced phonemic awareness hypothesis. I've never seen any studies about it. See, if I could find something you've been finding them. Then obviously, I realized schools all over the country doing these quick one minute drills and teaching them. Here's the big issue. Here's why it seems so interesting is on the science of reading Facebook page science reading what I should have learned in college people post other high, this kind of a kid, I mean, how would you recommend? I have a fifth grader who's really struggling reading, what should I do? And people kept posting all these phonemic awareness intervations, be great now. So I went back and looked at the original National Reading Panel, the effect size for grade for preschool was 1.25. The first grade went down to .49. Now they did second through sixth grade, all one, I wish they would have broken up more, and they didn't. So I can't really report like fifth grade versus whatever. But clearly, the younger the kid is that the more effective putting records interventions are. And the other one that really struck me was if it included letters, as part of the instruction, the effect sizes, point six, seven, if it didn't, was .38. Now, that's not 0.3 is not zero, right, but it's almost twice as effective to include those. Most of the other studies did include letters, or small number of them that just did on your awareness, only ordered point of awareness for like, a month and then taught letters. Most of the studies that neither started letters, like on the second week, or letters were incorporated throughout the entire intervention process. So using vendors makes it more effective. And it makes it more effective at phonemic awareness outcomes, and it makes it more effective on reading outcomes. So that's why I sort of got interested in this research and started playing that a little bit and thinking through a little bit more. But clearly, those are these two things that jumped out at me was age, and the inclusion of letters. So if you if you include letters again, if you don't use backsies, it is not zero, it's there's a pattern of that. But it's much more effective if you include others. And by putting the letters most of the studies did something like they would teach blaming or segmenting and then teaching the three or four others that may not as much teach and teach them after you've discharged sort of shown the four letters that made the sounds they worked on today. And like that type of thing. Quick little, at the end of it just shown what letters you use, or do a couple of minutes I'm teaching letter sounds as well.
Stacy Hurst:I love that we're at the point in teaching with science that we can refine our knowledge. And I know there that everybody's on a different learning curve. And some people are just learning about the science for the first time. But I really appreciated what you had to say about hero worship. I think we need to be careful of that. And one thing I've been really impressed with, with you and with Tim Shanahan honestly, is that and Tim shanann I've, you know, been familiar with my whole career, but I feel like it's In many ways you do. Do you do that you follow the research. In fact, recently on Twitter, I saw you kind of get into it with Tim Shanahan you're correcting him, you'd say that he'd said, there's no research on it. And you said you were wrong. There they are. Right? I appreciate that. Because the focus isn't on that person. It's on the facts, or, you know, we know, part of the problem with that whole phonemic awareness thing you pointed out accurately, is that, you know, well, if so and so says it, it must be true kind of a thing. I also think it became so divisive because of that, in part, that as a whole, we weren't so solidified in the science. We didn't have foundational knowledge enough to say, Okay, let's look at this objectively, it kind of upended the applecart for a lot of people, I think. And so it became more of an issue, then if it were to come up now. That's just my an expert opinion.
Donell Pons:And you know, Stacy, another thing and I'm so glad we're talking about this, and Matt, you did such a good job of diving into this area that can be fairly contentious. We need to be careful to to remember that something that we read or learn, we need to stay closer to what we read and learned as we get into teaching. So I see a lot of practices that then take off once a teacher is in a room, sometimes, and pretty soon, you're doing 15-20 minutes or something and you don't even have anything to originally back it up, you started with a good idea. But you always have to make sure you're maintaining your knowledge and checking yourself to make sure you're staying on the track. Because it's pretty easy to get off track, sometimes with something that feels good or feels right. And to make sure you check and maintain where you're at. It's
Dr. Matt Burns:We also remember, as I said earlier, always a good idea. gain and never generalize to a common individual, you do something and it works for one pinners classroom. We have no idea why they did or didn't work. And we tend to think oh, well, it worked for that kid. So it must be something that's better than whatever else is in and we don't know that to be true, quick story that I used to do a lot of work with Chris Riley Tillman was our Dean's he doesn't, you know, join me in presenting researching as much anymore. But he, he and I used to do trainings on interventions. And ketones is talking about trying to identify what the cause is because he does behavior map, when he has a kid that they've written a behavior plan and tried everything they can try. And then all of a sudden, the kids are doing well. It's all said, we found that we found the behavioral interventions, it didn't spring break happened. And they came back from spring break. And the kids behavior was as bad as ever since they talked to the parents and found out the parents told the kids look was two weeks until spring break, you do really well to now and then and we'll take you to Disney. And so it had nothing to do with the interventions. That happens a lot in education, kids do better. And we don't really know why we assume it's because of what we're doing right then. But that very moment may or may not be. So we take that learned the lesson and apply it next year and assume you'll see the same results, but it may not. So if you see something that works and try it again, I'm not saying don't do that, absolutely. But be sure to be assessing it objectively as well as make sure it really was what you're doing and not something else.
Stacy Hurst:teachers as learners and scientists and then we look for those kinds of things. Right. So I know that you had made mentioned to me that you were excited to move to the University of Florida. And that part of what you get to focus on is dyslexia. And how will that look and what is your interest and, and background with dyslexia.
Dr. Matt Burns:reading disability is always my my passion. I love those kids. My work with Dyslexia as a couple of things, I can look at things from the assessment perspective. So I like to look at screening, I do an erection work as well. And I can talk about that. But But I look, I focus a lot on screen right now because of the Decoding Dyslexia movement. So Decoding Dyslexia is a wonderful movement. I'm about to disagree with them. So I've been my nice words ahead of time, which is they they're wonderful parents, mostly parents, and I was involved in the Decoding Dyslexia group in Minnesota before I moved here. So that was around 2003, I'm sorry, 14 to 13. And they were fabulous. That everything we said was going on, we need to make sure higher quality phonics instruction is happening. It was it was great. My disagreement with them was I don't think the reason your kids aren't doing well is because they have to stop and think we're not doing well because you're not teaching them as they as they in so I'm a little hesitant to be identified children with dyslexia as an explanation as to why they are doing so because they are I looked at some some screening measures because this economy is slightly a little bit. We see every state and country now basically has a dyslexia law on the books, and most of them deal with screen. So we did a study and we saw that Sally Shaywitz scale, it's called the Shaywitz dyslexia screening, and dibbles and we use the CTOPP Comprehensive Test of phonological processing as our criterion as well. Don't worry about the Undiagnosed dyslexia. GPS, though, did the kids have a better phonological passing or not? They didn't. That was just like, we found that dibbles predicted got it right, you know, 85% of the time section actually pretty poor readers, even better like 90%, whereas the Shaywitz scale was less than 50% accurate, and so has terrible accuracy to the screen. And I will still contend two things. Number one, schools waste too much money, I said earlier time, we waste a lot of money, you want to buy the new thing that you bought, and rush out and buy this new scale. And, honestly, the second point I want to make is, the best way to assess reading is to have the kid and so dibbles screened better for dyslexia than any dyslexia screening, we saw it only dibbles per se, but you know, dibbles is great, although CBM or when those measures are probably better screeners of dyslexia than most measures. Unconscious. In the RAN, the way I ran is a great example of rapid automatizing, rapid automatized naming has been long linked to relay bombs Institute, rabbit automatised kneading predicts reading best if the measure, there's something like letter sounds or the remains, pictures, shapes, the coalition with them, and really measures drops quite a bit to you know, point three, which is fine. So if again, the best measure of RAN is learners, unless the kids don't know the relatives, right. So it's a preschool and the lockdown or the learning you can't that's our measure when he learns them. But if they know that earnings, it's a better measure of RAN, anything else we can buy? So the only kids you know, there are probably a better indicator of meeting difficulty than almost anything else we can do.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, well said. And I do think with Decoding Dyslexia, I look at it from a sociological perspective as well, they were able to move the mark and get a lot of legislation. And that helps us to meet the needs of any student. Again, it helps me really emphasize with my pre service teachers, the importance of knowing what goes into reading development, because if you can identify where that breakdown is, and you know how to fill that gap, then all of our students are going to have a much better chance of being fluent readers and comprehending and doing all the great things that we can do once we can read fluently
Dr. Matt Burns:and I was about to say in my opinion the science of reading movement was born out of decoding dyslexia. That group that probably got the country to sit up and say, Wait, something's not working.
Stacy Hurst:I actually teach at the beginning of my semesters, the history of reading, and I include Emily Hanford is right in there, because the way she brought the attention in concert with Decoding Dyslexia, and groups like that, we owe a lot to them. And I think systemically they're great entities and groups. Lindsay.
Lindsay Kemeny:Well, I agree with that. I'm so thankful for Emily and Decoding Dyslexia, it's great. I just had a question about RAN. So I have, you know, I use a cadence formerly known as dibbles. Next, so we have a letter naming fluency indicator, what's the difference between that and RAN.
Dr. Matt Burns:if you were to untie it, and show every kid the letter and they know all the names, so then it's simply a measure of how quickly they see that's a measure one. And if they don't have the letter names, then it's no longer measured, right? That's why you have to use something like pictures or colors or something like that, where the kids no other students can tell you what it is. It's just simply a measure of how quickly they can see. It's a measure of RAN.
Stacy Hurst:That's a great point, and something for all teachers to be aware of, especially if you're using a CBM like that has that major in it. All right. Now, our time is coming to a close. Danelle Lindsey, do you have any other questions for Matt?
Donell Pons:No, I don't have any questions. But Matt, I have sure appreciated this conversation. It's been fantastic. And it should set an example for having good conversations. And you can talk about things that maybe you find challenging, you know, maybe you had your heart set on something, but there's still room and should always be room for a conversation about well, maybe haven't thought about this. Have you looked at that? I mean, it's been a great example of that. Thank you so much, Matt.
Dr. Matt Burns:Thank you. I do wish we would have those conversations, more people, practitioners in social media, interact with researchers now. But the I can't remember researchers are usually some of the least socially skilled people you'll ever meet. Right? And so so I'm used to saying someone, a colleague next door say Well, no, you're wrong. You know, Johnson Thompson until the eight Thomas you're wrong. So we don't have a good skill set to have this conversation. So I really encourage you to, to engage, but recognize if if they're blocked I just that's how we talk to each other. And we as researchers need to do a better job. And I've learned that through your Donell taught me that and all the social media really taught him the Chapter How to Talk to a practitioner. And so I really think we should work with researchers to learn how to do that better as well.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, actually, being a literacy coach taught me that sometimes the hard way. So yeah, I think it's a very valid point. Lindsay, and I joke about this all the time, sometimes we called candid word. Yeah, Lindsey, what were you gonna say? Oh, nothing
Lindsay Kemeny:that this was great. Thank you so much, Matt, for being on and also for always answering my questions whenever I email you.
Dr. Matt Burns:Thank you. I love the work you do.
Stacy Hurst:Thank you so much for being our second guest. And for all the conversation. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. And thank you for the things you've studied. And your contributions. We wish you a lot of luck in Florida. I think that's exciting. And what a powerhouse you and Holly lane, all in the same department, right?
Dr. Matt Burns:Yes, we are. offices will be next to each other. I can't wait. Oh,
Stacy Hurst:wow. That's gonna be awesome. Well, we look forward to more contributions then from both of you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Matt, anything else you'd like to discuss or leave with us any wisdom or
Dr. Matt Burns:I'd love this podcast. I am a subscriber and listening before obviously, and I really appreciate being the translation of the work that you do and the research that goes on into a very consumable format. So thank you for doing that.
Stacy Hurst:Well, thank you very much. Okay. Well, thank you all for joining us for this episode of literacy talks, and we'll see you on the next episode.
Narrator:Thanks for joining us today for literacy talks, the podcast series for literacy leaders and champions everywhere. We hope you'll join the science of reading collective, our free community, so you can stay current with the professions newest thinking free webinars, resources and more. Visit literacy talks online for access to all episodes and more at reading horizons.com/literacy talks. It's an exciting time to teach reading and help all students reach grade level proficiency this school year. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Join us next time