No Merch, No Problem: Why SSSR Was Worth It — with Researcher Jake Downs

In this episode, the Literacy Talks team is joined by researcher Jake Downs for a lively recap of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) Conference. From practitioner-day takeaways and cutting-edge studies to unexpected laughs and zero conference swag, they unpack the insights, surprises, and trends shaping the future of literacy instruction.

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Transcript

Narrator: 0:03

Welcome to literacy talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere, brought to you by Reading Horizons. Literacy talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies for helping all learners reach reading proficiency. Our hosts are Stacy Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Donnell Pons, a recognized expert and advocate in literacy, dyslexia and special education, and Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author and speaker. Now let's talk literacy.

Stacy Hurst: 0:46

Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst, and I'm joined by Donnell Pons, Lindsay Kemeny, and we have a special guest today, Jake downs, and the topic is the fact that Jake and I got to attend the triple SR conference in Calgary. I'm going to say the name the Society for the scientific study of reading conference, and we thought we'd do a recap. And so happy Jake that you can join us for this recap. Glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, and we'll mention this another time too. But Jake also has a podcast, and is it called Teaching with Jake? What's it called teaching literacy podcast? I knew it had teaching in it. It's really great. So we recommend that you listen to that too. And Lindsay and Donnell were not able to come to this conference. But Donnell, you've been to the triple SR conference before.

Unknown: 1:49

Yes, I've been to it was in Newport, and I even did a recap on the podcast. Was a lot of fun to talk about, so this will be a lot of fun for me to hear about the experience you got. Zach, yeah, and Jake. Oh, sorry, Lindsay, what were you gonna say? Oh, I'm just, I'm excited to hear about it. You know, we're like, living vicariously through you guys. Stacy, I have to say, I was a little disappointed that you didn't have the live Google Doc and that you were typing notes while we could watch, which is what happened if you guys listen to our, our episode about the reading league Summit. Donnell was there, and she was like, live posting for us in just a private document. It was so fun. So anyway, I'm excited to to hear, you know, your takeaways. Both of you. Yeah, it was fun. I remember accessing that during class, even because I wanted to hear and I did fail miserably, but in my defense and Jake, I don't know if you know this about Donnell, but her first career, she was actually a news reporter. I do not have that muscle, so I was just soaking it all in and and loving what I was hearing. I really wasn't reporting anything out. So next year, we'll do a breaking news you know, this just in for yeah, good

Stacy Hurst: 3:02

plan. Okay, I'm gonna remember that Jake, just to kind of set our listeners up who may not know about the organization or the conference. How would you say it differs from other conferences that most educators attend?

Unknown: 3:19

Yeah, I think the major difference here for Triple S R is that it is a research conference, and so the folks that are presenting there are, you know, almost exclusively, researchers at institutions of higher education or, you know, like, You know, other related organizations. So it isn't the type of, I wouldn't say it's not, it's not practitioner friendly, but it's researchers talking to researchers. So you have to be able to code switch a little bit and be able to think, Okay, well, what does this mean for practice? And there definitely is stuff there for practitioners. And this year they had a their first ever practitioner day, which was the day before the regular conference, which they said was like 10 years in the making. They've wanted to do it for a long time. Finally, we're able to do it so that that's exciting to see it going forward. But I would say that the difference is, is that it's researchers talking to researchers, rather than researchers or reading experts talking to teachers, practitioners, you know, those types of stakeholders. Yeah, that's a that's a great description of it. I also

Stacy Hurst: 4:32

had the thought while I was listening to some sessions. This is where what ends up being presented in other conferences. This is where it starts, right. You can see the the research that leads into the practice. And so I bet we could have a window into the future. We could probably name a few sessions that we would be attending at other conferences based on the research that was shared here. So yeah, it was really great. And Jake. You and I have both been practitioners. You taught elementary school as well, right? And Jake is also teaching at the university level. So I felt like that practitioner day was it was very impactful for the educators that were there, and I was really tapping into my practitioner lens there. I thought was really good, any takeaways that you think were very applicable for classroom teachers from that day,

Unknown: 5:32

you know, from the from the practitioner day, I really enjoyed Dr Matt burns his presentation. It was on, it was on assessment, but it was on thinking about aligning assessment with instruction. And he basically made the point and, and I hope, and this is a caveat throughout the whole podcast, I hope that I'm not putting words in any of the people we talk so, you know that we talk about, you know, putting words in their mouth. But what I might take away from it was that he basically said something along the lines of, you know, without assessment, everything else is less important that it's assessment is what really decides what makes it into prime time instruction, what is second priority and what is a we'll get to that if we, if we can. And that was just such a, I think, a relevant, you know, it's it's easy to assess students. It's easy to over assess students, but being able to curate the the right configuration of assessments that can work together to really identify what your students needs are, and of course, like triangulate that with classroom observation and such, but being able to use assessment to make the instructional time very lean, because minutes are limited. So I thought that was I had so many notes I took from that, that presentation, yeah, and something that he said that stood out to me. I've heard him say this in other places too, that if you are perplexed about a student and the way they are not progressing, then you actually just haven't found the right assessment. Because with the right assessment, you will be able to target what the student needs and see that progress forward. He also mentioned, and I thought this was a great piece of practical advice that he just kind of said As an aside, but I noticed he just published a paper about curricular programs that people use, and he he mentioned it in there too, but he said, You need at least 12 data points when you're progress monitoring to really make any really informed decisions. And that made me think we progress matters, sometimes weekly, but not always, right? So even that little tidbit of how we look at the data was important, and Stacy was the practitioner day, and Jake or Stacy other one of you can answer. And I'm outside the Bozeman library, by the way, so I'm a little I'm on location, as you might say, if you see my background, and I'm proud to say the Bozeman library is very busy. They didn't have any space this morning for a conference room. So I'm pleased with that people are accessing their library in Bozeman. But the question I had was about the practitioner day. Was the material practitioner focused? And did they also speak about the challenges practitioners have in implementation. Or was it just that the material was more focused on practitioners, or were they also trying to address how difficult it is to implement some of these things?

Lindsay Kemeny: 8:30

Yeah. I mean, I think it definitely was focused on practitioners and application for classroom setting, I would say that it varied by speaker talking about implementation, but overall, you know, my my takeaway was that there was an emphasis on, and this is what it means for implementation, rather than just here's theoretical constructs, right? Like this is what, this is what you can do about it. But I think it did vary a little bit by speaker, yeah, I think it's very fitting that they had Dr burns speaking and that on that practitioner focused day, because that's just something I love about him, is I feel like he really helps us, like, with the research. He's like, I just, I admire him, because I think he's pretty passionate and very helpful with helping teachers, talking to teachers, and trying to help us access this information. But Stacy, that's really interesting. What you said about needing 12 data points in your progress monitoring, and you think about, gosh, if I was progress monitoring every other week, then that's like 24 weeks before you really see that clear pattern. That's a little concerning, right before you pivot, make a pivot. So something to think about is that, for some of our students, can we get that progress monitoring data quicker and and weekly, like you said,

Stacy Hurst: 9:52

and then Dr Kerns also presented and that day. And as most if you if you're familiar with his research. He mostly talks about, well, he has many things that he shares, but one thing that was the subject was how to break a word into syllables. And I know he really feels like it's important for students to simplify that task, and so that I thought that was useful for people to be there too, and Jake, some of our side conversations were about that, you remember, because Jake, some of your research has to do with you. Actually did a study, didn't you about the way that is it, every syllable has a vowel. What's the acronym? He

Unknown: 10:39

shot lob? I think is how okay. I'm sure pronunciations vary, right set for variability there, but I think Isha, love is, is what I've heard it as. I don't know, echelon, I don't know. I don't know I saw it. And I thought, is that a Hebrew word? Like, what does that mean? And I realized,

Lindsay Kemeny: 10:56

what was he suggesting for how to break it up?

Unknown: 11:01

Well, I think the idea here was a he was saying that what something that's super important for learning the code and learning it well is repetition and volume of practice. And so sometimes we push in metalinguistic things with our word instruction that might not be as super productive, like, if I remember, and I hope I'm not putting words in his mouth, but, you know, he said that, well, students don't really need to know the difference of, like, a digraph. What like the actual dictionary definition of digraph, tri graph, you know, quadrigraph. He's like, just call them consonant teams. And the same thing. It's like, you know, with a vowel team or a diphthong, just call them Val teams, you know, for students, like being able to strip away some of the metalinguistic stuff and get it to be very as few functional rules as possible, because that will allow time for a higher volume of practice. I think that was the, one of the major things I remember. And then the second thing being, you know, talking about, especially with, like, multi syllabic reading, that, you know, syllables is actually a feature of the sound of our language. It's not a feature of the orthography. And so that's why, like doing syllable types. And you know, the longer a word gets, the more likely it is to be irregular, essentially. So sometimes that starts to fall apart. Once we get beyond very orthographically transparent basic compound two syllable words, it starts to get bit more complicated in the upper grades and so with the Echelon strategy saying that, well, really what matters is, how can we, how can we group, how, like different groupings are a Okay, when we're splitting apart a long word, we just want to group it around the syllables in a way that that makes sense. And he had some really great, great examples. But, you know, like, I don't have any off the top of my head. This is, you know, poor preparation on my part. But, you know, like with some words, well, it doesn't matter if the L sound is coming at the end of the first syllable or at the beginning of the second syllable. Like, we shouldn't be too super nitpicky about where the syllables are divided, because that's actually in service of being able to actually read the long word accurately, which is where we want to get to, and then being able to coach students on changing vowel sounds. So if the short vowel sound doesn't work, try a long vowel sound. If the long vowel sound doesn't work, try, you know, a schwa sound, and teaching them to be flexible with reading multi syllabic words to help them get to the accuracy part to map it Stacy. Is there anything that you would add on to that, or any additional context? Yeah, which was my question going into it, because he was very adamant about, we over complicate this for students. And I agree, actually. And so I was like, but what are you recommending in place of that, kind of like Lindsay's question was alluding to, so you did talk about that, and the peeling off strategy, where we look at morphemes, like prefixes and suffixes, and going that route too. Yeah, I thought it was very interesting.

Stacy Hurst: 14:11

And a lot, I think there was a lot of buzz about that, as he was talking about it, from the teachers in the room. So it was great. And that was day one, that was the practitioner day. And then there, there were some people, a few that I recognized that stayed for the rest of the conference. And a couple of them had mentioned to me that the tone of the conference was very different after that, right? Because then it wasn't focused on practitioners, it was more about research. And some of them felt very overwhelmed to be there for the research parts. But I so I think the practitioner day definitely was successful for the intention of it, and I was really happy that I was able to be there. So yeah, for the first one ever, there we are.

Unknown: 14:59

And.

Stacy Hurst: 15:00

Then day two, we started with the research studies. And to be honest, out of the gate, the very first session I attended, I was just so happy to be there. It was great research. They were talking about Jake. Were we in the same session that first? I don't think so. I actually I skipped the first session because I had slides that I was finishing up. Oh yeah, that's right. Don't tell anyone. No, no, I already gave Jake a hard time about that,

Unknown: 15:29

and I did attend his presentation, which was fantastic. So I hope we can talk about that too. Actually, do you mind Jake just talking about what you presented on? Yeah, I can just briefly, you know, my I presented on data that we're we're kind of framing it as like, this was just a natural experiment where there was a school district that had adopted a particular reading curriculum during the reading first era, you know, 20 plus years ago, and they've really used and refined that decoding curriculum, you know, over the course of those years, and then during this current, like science of reading era and legislation that they were like heavily encouraged to update their curriculum and to use a new curriculum. So it was just comparing, you know, in the first half year of implementation, how did one group of students in the district do with the new curriculum versus, you know, how students did in the regular curriculum that they've you know, that they've used? So kind of comparing, and these are both fairly large curriculum from each of those areas. So, you know, like I framed it as comparing a curriculum from a reading first era versus a science of reading era. And it wasn't, it wasn't the Reading Horizons curriculum, so sorry, you know, but it was anyway so, but that's what I was presenting on. And you know, there, there were a lot of outcomes that were similar, but on the decoding measure we had, so we used the core phonics survey that the the newer curriculum outperformed, and more the more complex skills on in that phonics inventory, the students in the new curriculum did better on so more, more to come. There I'm working on, like, doing like, a really formal analysis and writing it up, etc, but that's, that's, that's the brief of it. But I,

Stacy Hurst: 17:26

you know, it was kind of meant to be us, like a snapshot of this is one school districts experience, but with signs of reading legislation and the era that we're in, similar things are happening, you know, in how many school districts across across the country. So it was kind of framed as like a current, you know, slice of reality. And here's some data to talk about trade offs of implementation. I really loved it because it's rare that you do hear the focus on the curriculum right? Usually it's on teaching practices or aspects of it, but I really liked the comparison, and you did, your time was well spent on the slides. You did knock those out of the park. Also something to note about the these presentations, they can be very research heavy, and I wouldn't go right to entertaining, although I view research as a story. Every study is a story that I get really invested in. But I will tell you, Jake had everybody laughing. They were all engaged. It was just a really engaging presentation, too, and some really great questions at the end as well. So Jake, I did have a question. It sounds super interesting. Are you going to follow those students to see what the outcome is a few years down the road as well? I'm intrigued.

Unknown: 18:47

You know, I haven't, I haven't talked with the school district to partner on anything like that. It just would get really tricky, of because it's not that each group stayed in that specific curriculum. This was at the end. This was the last half of first grade. So it's like tracking them through into second grade and beyond. I think there just would be too much noise in the data to pull, to pull anything out long term, especially, you know, the sample size, I think it'd be, I think it'd be pretty, pretty messy, because they might have been using either of the curriculum in the next year. Okay, you can't keep it pure, but, boy, you're asking a really interesting question. Because, like you say, this is a juncture at which a lot of people are at, is okay? So if we make the changes, you need to show how much better, or if right? Yeah, and those changes, so, gosh, this is great research. And I think it's, this is where, you know, sometimes researchers are interested in slightly different things than practitioners. So if I'm setting up, like a quasi experimental study or a randomized control trial, you know that the control group, you know, I'm just really looking to set up a control group. That's going to be an accurate comparison to see, you know, did my treatment, you know, improve? Basically, you know, the equivalent of being like against a placebo and active. You know, control groups vary widely, but typically, like practitioners are more interested in, well, which, which curriculum is going to do better, you know. And so this one was more of, sometimes you hear them called race horse studies, of like, well, let's just give to curriculum rock and roll and see what happens. And there's, there's a lot less of that in the reading research world, but I think there's room for for more. And I even had, I mean, there were a couple of the researchers that people I respect, that I think are important in the field that came up to me after and and told me, Hey, we need more, we need more racehorse studies like this that are published in peer review journals, you know, to help researchers kind of keep their finger on the pulse, but also to help, you know, practitioners, people that are selecting curriculum to have an evidence base to make decisions off of, I really helps me. We talk so much about bridging research to practice. I think of it more like, ideally it should be a swinging door, right? We're not quite there yet, but that's one study that, one type of study that will really help with that. I mean, it's very front lines, right? I really appreciated that. It was great. Thank you. Yeah, it was, it was my first trip SR presentation, and my first time presenting statistics in front of people that understand statistics better than I do. So I was, I was nervous, but I was, I was pleased with how it went. You could not tell. You could not tell. I wanted you to say, I'll be here all week, folks like, he really was,

Stacy Hurst: 21:42

it was great, informative and entertaining. You can't get better than that. Like, it was really awesome. And that kind of helps me pivot a little bit. Some of the sessions I went to that I think stood out a lot to me, and I'll ask you the same question a minute, Jake, were about teacher knowledge, and that very first session, talked about, what is the difference, you know, that teachers knowledge makes for their students. And I thought there were some really interesting outcomes that were reported. One that was a particular interest to me, and nobody will be surprised by this was, and I think this was a Texas University. They also give a test that's about the Foundations of Reading, and they were measuring they gave the teacher knowledge of basic language construct survey to their pre service teachers, and then compared results from that to how they did on that state test to get their license. And they saw high correlations between students who knew those who did well on the first survey and how they did on the testing. And that is interesting to me, because my master's thesis was that basic was on the teacher knowledge survey, and I continue to give it to my students every semester. And we also have a test, so I have all this data that made me think, now I need to start making comparisons and see what I'm learning with that. I even mentioned to Jake at one point like I think I've designed 15 different studies in my head, just going to all these, these sessions. But another interesting thing from that particular session, and I think this will resonate especially Donnell with you, but they did, and this, I think, was Middle Tennessee State, they cited some research about teacher knowledge and who was working with the most striving readers. And they learned that they surveyed teachers, classroom teachers, reading specialists and special education teachers. And significantly, the people that had the least amount of knowledge were the special education teachers. And frequently, those are the very personnel that are working with the students who have the greatest need. So their research concluded that we really need to ensure that pre service teachers, especially who are getting a degree in special education, are equipped with the same information that a classroom teacher reading specialist would even have. That was, I can't say that was surprising to me, but it was impactful,

Unknown: 24:27

yeah, and I think that's where, you know, you mentioned the swinging door analogy, and I really like that analogy. I'm going to keep it, but that I do see the field being responsive to things that are happening in the practitioner world as well. And I think that's one, there's been a lot of talk the last few years around teacher knowledge, and it's important, there's been a lot of professional development initiatives to promote teacher knowledge. And so, you know, there are, there is a decent set of researchers that are going out. And you know how. How, like, what, what is the value of research? How does research or what is the value of knowledge? How does knowledge read to practice lead to practice, lead to student outcomes? And trying to untangle all that, because it is, it is really complex. Coaching would be like another similar area, area i i haven't seen a ton of like coaching research in the last few years, and maybe that's, you know, just the silos that I'm in, but I haven't, at least reading specific coaching. There hasn't been a ton, but I felt like there was quite a bit, you know, at Triple S, R and so, and I hope these are things that presentations that turn into publications that can get pushed out there, because there was a lot of really interesting stuff on thinking about the role of coaches and how coaches can support instruction.

Stacy Hurst: 25:49

Yeah, I noticed that too, and they all, they all stated, what I know to be true is that just because you have a coach at one school in the same district, their job actually may be very different than somebody else, so there was a call to kind of institutionalize that coaching in a way, make it more

Unknown: 26:11

consistent. I think, yeah, and even in the research, I think this was a comment in the one session that we were sitting next to each other in. But you know that, you know so when you look at the like, systematic reviews, or, you know, where they've kind of looked at studies of coaching, like across studies, and kind of summarize them that there's a lot of very the results vary a lot across coaching studies. And the point was made was that it's not just in practice that it varies, but it's even in even in the in the research literature, you know what the coach was doing in this study, versus this study versus this study, you know Can, can vary widely. So that was, that was a something that I've been munching on on a little bit, is,

Stacy Hurst: 26:59

I don't think anyone's going to argue that coaches are invaluable, right? But there's definitely a range of practices that coaches are engaging in, which therefore means there's a range of what's going to be more or less effective. And so a need to kind of hone in on what are the biggest rocks that coaches can attend to, especially when we're talking, you know, reading, reading achievement, and being able to hone in on that. Yeah, and I think we were in the same session together where Dr Washburn was talking about the study they did on teachers who had completed the letters training and how that had impacted their practice, and they watched hours and hours of videos, and the conclusion was that it did impact their declarative knowledge and their procedural knowledge, but not their conditional knowledge. So their recommendation was coaching to help them to actually explain why, like they were modeling they were doing that, but maybe not explaining why they were modeling in the way they were, or being very transparent about their thought process to their students as they were doing that. And that was one suggestion that coaching would be able to help with.

Unknown: 28:13

Yeah, super interesting, super interesting stuff. I want, I like, want more coaching research. Like, let's, let's do this, like, let's get more out there. Yeah, you know, it makes me think about stay, you know, having a practitioner day, that's fantastic, but it almost as if we need a decision maker day. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, how do you, how do you get this to filter into the places where it needs to go in order to impact decisions that are being made that directly affect students? That, to me, is another level to this. Yeah, like a stakeholder, a stakeholder date, right? So, yeah, principals, district, literacy, admin, you know, etc, etc, yeah, this is your data Interesting. Yeah,

Narrator: 28:55

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Stacy Hurst: 29:33

Yeah, that's a really good point. And I'm thinking of teachers like Lindsay, because Lindsay You don't, you didn't attend this conference. What do you do to get research? You apply research really well in your classroom. How do you do that? How do you know what your I dive into topics that I'm interested in, right? But there is

Lindsay Kemeny: 29:55

a research like and I will, you know, it's so weird. But like. You can get a lot of PD through social media, and especially if you're following researchers and things. And one researcher that I follow, Shane piasta, was at Triple S R I was curious if any of you, either of you, went to any of her sessions.

Stacy Hurst: 30:18

I love her research, and I did not. I didn't go to hers. Did you Jake? Yeah. I went to,

Unknown: 30:26

yeah. I went to the language symposium that I think had two of her for sure, one, but I think two of the presentations she was a co author on, and then our CO presenter, I guess. And then there was a poster session

Lindsay Kemeny: 30:41

by Alita Hudson that she was also a co co author on. But, yeah, I think, I think Dr PIAs is doing just really great stuff. And like her LinkedIn, like she's doing good on the social media side to, like, push stuff out to those that are interested. And that's what I was watching. I was watching her conference recap, and I was particularly interested in one of her research studies, it's called patterns of preschool phonological awareness, development and later literacy outcomes really interesting because one of the major takeaways is that and they were studying over 300 preschool students, and They found that focusing solely on phonemic awareness might be insufficient. Focusing on phonological sensitivity instruction is also important, especially for at risk children. So my question was, is that specific to pre K, or, you know, is that also the take the takeaway for kindergarten? Because that's, I mean, that's huge right there, because we've been having this shift where phonemic awareness is most critical. Don't get stuck with the larger units, which is true, phonemic awareness is very critical. But do we need to be training some of that phonological sensitivity in kindergarten as well? And she told me, well, she's presenting at the reading league conference, just like in October on this. And so I'm really excited to go and listen to hear what she has to say. But Jake, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, so that was Aleta Hudson's poster, which I I'm just throwing this out to the universe. I think the practitioner conferences should do poster sessions. So it's, it's a big room. Researchers have posters, and you can go up, and it's just a lot more interactive than like a sit and get anyway, I'm just throwing that out there, right? Because teachers don't have time, we don't have time to read all the research studies. Just tell me what I need.

Unknown: 32:38

So I, I talked with Alita about this, about her poster, for probably, like, 20 minutes, and it was really interesting. Yeah, the date, and I'm, you know, Alita would be the one, and Shane would be the ones to really talk about it. But, you know, from what I recall, it was a it was a profile analysis. So they were kind of looking so profile analysis is where you group. You have different variables, and you group students by those variables. It's a statistical technique of like, oh, like, these were people that started off, you know, with high phonological sensitivity, but they had low growth. And here are people that start off with low but they had medium growth. And so they had a chart that had all sorts of lines, you know, going across to show the different profiles. And I can't remember, you know, the the specifics, but I, but I, yeah, I do remember the takeaway being that phonological sense. So training phonological awareness alongside phonemic awareness, that that those students that had both of those produced the most, or, you know, grew the most or had the best reading outcomes. I think it was at the end of first grade. But see, you're really astute. Lindsay to ask like, well, is that, is that feature of the pre K population, or does that transfer to kindergarten? And first, I don't, I don't feel qualified. I mean, that's not my line of research. So I, I'll give a couple hypotheses. And, you know, we could maybe have some, some some capital E experts chime in their thoughts. But, you know, okay, Option A is, it could be, yeah, attacking both on is going to be beneficial, because it's a way of getting, you know, additional volume that, yes, we know that phonemic awareness is really important, especially blending and segmenting, but even phonological work is is going to be exercising those muscles. And so maybe we don't need to think of it as this linear path, but we we need to think of it as a bit more like hierarchical that we can be doing all of those things with an emphasis on blending and segmentation, and that's going to have good, good results, because it's exercising that flexibility part that's really important for future reading. B there could be ceiling effects, right? That phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, it is a constrained skill there. There is a ceiling where. More phonemic awareness is not necessarily going to have the same downstream benefits, you know. So it could be that with preschoolers, you know, they're particularly primed to need phonological awareness work, because that's going to lead into more productive phonemic awareness work. So it could be a feature of preschoolers that, because they are starting out at, you know, ground that the ground floor, they are starting out from the beginning, that it would make sense that those students would be particularly primed to benefit from, you know, receiving both that we're going to be start with the basics of where they're at, but we're also going to sprinkle in some where they're headed at the edge of their current Proximal Development, those, those would be my two theories. And this was the study. It wasn't like a control trial. It was sort of take like there wasn't a, here's treatment a, here's treatment B. Let's see what happens. It was sort of taking existing data and then triangling That with instructional practices that teachers reported were happening, or maybe they were observed. I can't remember, but so that's kind of like something to remember as well. But whether it's a, you know, Route A that I talked about, route B that I talked about, or some other route, you know, I I don't know.

Stacy Hurst: 36:16

I don't feel, I don't feel expert enough to, like, make a supposition, but those would be my guesses. Yeah, great thoughts. It's super interesting. And I'm just like, even more, like, looking forward to attending her session at the reading league this October, to hear more, yeah, and you know, I will say I heard more um, research studies on pre in preschool, then I feel like I have for a while. I know they've been happening, but maybe they were just emphasized here. One of them had to do with content area instruction in preschool and having basically having a language objective at the same time, and the impact that that had on students. And I thought that was really interesting, being more dialogic in those subject areas.

Unknown: 37:08

That connects to another one of Shane PIOs presentations. We're talking about language as a vehicle. You know that typically when teachers are using language practices, they're not using it just for language sake, although that is an important benefit, but they're using it to Drive content based, you know, learning and understanding. And so thinking about, how do we, how do we support content learning via oral language in those early grades was that was a big takeaway for me. But I think, you know, I'm, you know, my line of research is more with upper elementary that's more my background. I really care about, okay, after kids have, like, the basic code down, what next? You know, what is the net? What are the next thresholds? And I think that same analogy applies really well to reading comprehension, that, you know, various strategies or standards, the, I call it, you know, the quote, unquote comprehension, things that we're doing, they're not productive in a vacuum, right? They're they're productive when we're using them to learn content. And I think sometimes the last few years, like knowledge learning, you know, learning for knowledge versus learning for strategies like that, those have kind of pitted against each other, but it's actually like the strategies are the verb in the sentence that are getting you to the noun or the outcome or the comprehension that's happening. And, you know, models of comprehension are similar to models of language, because it's, you know, comprehension is language via orthography, right? So it would make sense that those two to apply, but, yeah, yeah. Super interesting stuff on oral language in early elementary and pre K stuff happening out there, yeah, what were some memorable presentations or speakers for you, or takeaways, or what were some of the things that, yeah, you know, one, that one that really stuck out to me. Well, there, there were, there was a symposium. So symposium, being that, it's a group of researchers all presenting on the same thing, that's organized by a specific person, so it kind of has like a theme was, was Freddie Hebert's symposium, which, you know, I, I always find Freddie's stuff so interesting. But there was, there was one presentation by Dr Matthew Borken Hagen from the Florida Center of reading research. And it was sort of showing models of how, like AI can be used to simulate the orthographic mapping process, which was really interesting, because if you think about, you know, like, how many, okay, you know, a student is learning, you know, ch that ch says, Sorry, I shouldn't have it, right? It says, you know, how many interactions does it take for that specific letter sound combination to be on? Automatic. Okay. Well, then how long does it take for, you know, words that are having ch to be automatic? And then, okay, in a corpus of text, they had a corpus of text that was, you know, from a couple popular core reading programs that they were seeing, like, how often those words were present that had those, those sound letter sound combinations. And it was really interesting. I mean, they played some, like, simulations of, I mean, I can't remember, but it was like 10s of 1000s of interactions showing how automatic the sound and the words would become over time. I'm, I'm sure, I'm, like, butchering what the presentation was actually about. Because it was like, you know, I yeah, it just was really over my head, right? But, but that was, like, super interesting. And it is just like, you know, we know that word learning, there's more to it than just the the phonologic and orthographic connection. And that's, I think, a major limitation right now the AI models. It's not taking in, you know, semantic or syntactic stuff or other things that matter, but that is a huge part of it. And so kind of understanding how many repetitions it takes, and then what are the how many repetitions are they likely to get with the text that teachers are commonly using? I mean, that was, that was really interesting, you know, that was really interesting to me in a different session, Dr Deborah Reed, the whole, her whole presentation was, was great, but, you know, she just, she had one slide that opened her her presentation where she talked about different cut offs that are used to determine if a student has characteristics of dyslexia or not. And she was really careful to point out that talking about, you know, typically in schools like we're we're not diagnosing students with dyslexia, but we're trying to say, you know, what are the characteristics that they might, you know, that they could have so but looking at the cut offs being and some of these were cut offs from studies, some of these were cut offs from state agencies, but the fifth percentile of reading, the 10th percentile, of reading the 15th percentile, the 25th percentile, you know, all those being different, cut offs of reading achievement, where student might have characteristics of dyslexia. And you know, that was, that was just really interesting to me, because, you know, if I'm in a state, or, you know, whatever, in my contact text, if they say it's the 20th percentile, let's say, are the reading needs of the kid at the 19th percentile that different than the kid at the 21st or even the 30th, you know, probably, probably not like I it's still the same game plan for me As a teacher, I'm just, you know, trying to be more strategic, more diagnostic, more prescriptive. You know, as students have lower, you know, levels of achievement, but you know her anyway, her point kind of being with that is there really is very inconsistent in research and in practice of, well, what, what cut offs are we going to accept? And that's, I think, an area where, you know, we could do better at as a field of researchers and a field of practitioners, you know, but, but at the end of the day, I it's not that the 15th versus the 25th and maybe, maybe I'm wrong here, but it's not that they need completely different stuff. It's just that the need to be more intentional with screening, more intentional with diagnostic, more strategic, with instruction, more responsive to data, is where that primary difference is going to be. But the orthographic mapping process being able to go from non reader to reader to automatic reader. You know that that cognitively, like the very there is, there's just not a lot of variation, and in how that, like that sequence of things, it just matters in our instruction of how well we can accelerate students along along that. So that was a really diluted conversation for a single slide, but that that was something I've thought about a lot as as well.

Stacy Hurst: 44:05

Stacy, what were your most important like, what were your sessions that you had most interesting takeaways from so many? One that was an unexpected takeaway. It was another symposium, and I actually don't remember what the type the subject was, but one research study that I remember looking at the studies that were listed in this symposium and thinking, I'm not as interested in this study. It was very interesting to me, and it was a Chinese researcher, and they've actually created robots to be in classrooms that used AI to help students during literacy and all kinds of learning, right? And so I was right away like, oh, they showed pictures of the robots. And I thought, oh my gosh, first graders would love this, you know. But the findings were surprising to me and somewhat comforting to be honest, because I think the question was, are these robots ready to replace teachers? And resoundingly, the answer was. Know, because those robots were kind of powered by AI, and AI, as we know, currently still makes mistakes, mistakes that the first graders noticed. And so they were less likely to trust those robots in their classrooms. And so they saw them more as a teaching assistant or a friend that was learning along with them, but definitely not somebody that had the knowledge to help them out. So I thought that was an interesting finding that is happening that was in China, like I said,

Unknown: 45:31

and so I'm interested to see where that goes. I don't know. I thought that was in the session that I presented, and it was kind of like, oh boy. It's a brave new world out there. Yeah, I think, like, let's use AI to grade and give feedback, and then let's use, like, teachers to teach. That's kind of my that's, that's where I'm at with things, but I don't know. I mean, we'll see where things are at in a year or two years before. Yeah, things can change so rapidly. But yeah, that was kind of a oh boy, yeah, what's on the horizon? No, I was like, Oh, wow. And then the other thing, you know, as you were talking about that session of Dr Hubert,

Stacy Hurst: 46:12

I was so comforted, because it was probably the furthest away from swinging door practitioners, because it was very I mean, if you think it was over Jake's head, it was double over mine. But somebody there asked a very sophisticated question that I maybe understood 30% of the question. And Jake turned to me and said, That's exactly what I was gonna ask. Of course, he was kidding, but it made me feel like, okay, I'm not the only one that's like, feeling like, this is but I think there's a there, there, right? That eventually it'll get to the point and where we're talking about applying these things, I think of Dr Hebert almost in the same category, not quite as Dr Aries research, because that research is very robust. It has not historically been translated into practice as much as I think it should be, and I think Dr Hubert is closer to that. I mean, definitely, but there's so much more that goes into what she studies that I think those of us who are practitioners, we still don't have the tip of the iceberg on that, and I know you work closely with her, so you probably have a greater understanding than most. Yeah, I've been, I've been lucky enough to have a fellowship with Freddie Hubert from the, from the reading Hall of Fame as an Emerging Scholar thing. But, you know, I mean, I think a lot of like, I gravitated towards Freddie stuff when I was a practitioner. I know a lot of practitioners that do, and I think her main contention is, I mean, her website is called Text project, right? So her main contention being that, well, reading is always a function of like the text, like, if we are reading, by definition, there is a text that's being read. And so, you know, her work is saying, Well, what do we know about texts that are being read? What do we know about the text we're putting in front of of students? And she has a very strong vocabulary thread in there of, well, how do we what do we know about the vocabulary that's being used and its orthographic properties and how easy or hard it is to decode, and, you know, but what about, you know, using text for productive purposes? So, you know, she's kind of like the other she's the other side of the coin, right? Like we're always talking about instructional practices and what's happening in the brain, and all those are important things. And then Freddie saying, Yeah, but let's also remember that there's an interaction with the text that's happening that we also can't ignore, because that helps us understand how to be responsive with instruction and how to understand how the processes are happening in the brain. Yeah, I'm looking forward to more people really understanding that and how that will improve their practice, honestly. And speaking of that, Kate, would you come our also presented her research talking about comprehension. And she's also, in my opinion, always very refreshing to hear, because she's very blunt a lot of things, no guessing what she's saying. But I've also been really impressed with her outcomes of her studies on text, right? Her main idea there is to teach students the structure of text to get to all the things you need to do to understand and learn from it.

Unknown: 49:23

Did you attend any of her sessions or I'm sure? Yeah, I so good, so good. I really think the field owes a debt to Kay wajikumar and her colleagues, of like, what they've been able to do, you know, and what they've been able to do has been a has pushed, like, the reading research field forward, you know? I mean, she's just been involved on just some really good meta analysis, some really good papers that are just trying to untangle everything we know about comprehension and kind of like, make it fit, you know. But in the practitioner world, what what she's doing is. As well, is really impressive. So, you know that Texas A and M machine that she has going is a great thing, but, yeah, she, she will call it like it is, you know, one of the studies, you know, that she presented on they talked about the importance of, you know, in a lot of the practitioner stuff they've done, they've just trained the teachers. And this one, They broadened out, and they included coaches and principals. And they were actually like, teaching the coaches and principals how to write summaries and things like that. And, you know, they were talking about the, you know, the Peter Principle of, if you don't have it, you can't give it. And so if the coach doesn't have the skill to write a summary, it's gonna be really hard for them to give that to the teacher, for the teacher to then give it to the to the students. And I hope I'm remembering that correctly, because it's been a couple of weeks, but really interesting stuff there. Yeah, I was in that session too. I do remember that I was so back to your you're noticing about coaching, right? And how important that can be. Yeah, that's really cool.

Stacy Hurst: 51:04

Anything else that stood out to you or that that you feel like will really impact your work going forward.

Unknown: 51:12

You know, as far as like, stuff I'm interested in, I've kind of been munching on word difficulty lately. And Laura tortorelli and Laurie Brunner had a session in Freddie's symposium that was that was talking about that, but, you know, thinking about, like, what text factors make a word easier or harder to read? You know, like, we know that, okay, like, orthographic regularities can be part of it, but there's also, you know, length, there's morphological structure, but there's other things we don't think about as much so, like how concrete or how abstract the word is. Like, abstract words tend to be have a lower likelihood of being read, you know, accurately. And the one that's kind of cropped up in a couple studies that that Laura tortorelli has done now is actually age of acquisition. So words that are acquired later have a greater likelihood of being read incorrectly. And some of that's like, Okay, well, you know if, if words are, you know, there's a length co varying there as well, right? But even when they controlled for length, like on this study, they present. I believe age of acquisition was still like, controlling for, like all some of those variables I just mentioned, and others, but age of acquisition, you know, was there, and kind of thinking about that as you know, there is anyway. There's a lot of factors that contribute to how easy or hard a word is to read accurately. The Age of acquisition, you know, that might be an a repetition effect, right? That if a if a word has a higher age of acquisition, then it's less likely to be encountered in text, so therefore it's less likely to be, you know, orthographically map. Well, what does that mean for, you know, the books we give students, you know, in it for instruction, right? Does it mean that we give kids books with higher age of acquisition with lower age of acquisition. Like, and the difference here is on the fringes, right? We're thinking about like a money ball approach of like, well, if we can make texts 2% more efficient, you know, for orthographic mapping, like, what kind of output does, you know? How does that change things longitudinally? You know? So these types of things are starting to play at the margins, but I think we have enough of the big rocks in place. You know, the margins are what's, what's really important. So that was something I was really interested in, especially, like, you know, thinking about multi syllabic reading, reading long words. How to do that with connected, challenging text? So there, there was, there. I mean, I had a ton of takeaways, but that's something I've really been munching on since the conference. Yeah, and how to scaffold for those things. Just in conclusion, too, I will say it was so good to be exposed to those researchers who are doing the research that I consume. But we had it was her misfortune, but our good luck that we were on the same flight home as young Sook Kim, she had, yeah, that's a whole other story, but we were able to talk to her about her model, her dire model of of reading, and how that's evolved over the years. Yeah, dear, how they say it, how it's evolved over the years. And having her, she was into many of the sessions that I attended, and the questions she asked were so

Stacy Hurst: 54:27

astute. I thought, oh, man, I want to have that ease with research that she does. So it was really, it's a small enough conference, you know, back to how it differs from other conferences we might go to that you do? You get to see these researchers and hear from them face to face. Also, there was absolutely no merch

Unknown: 54:50

being sold. Yeah, there's, there's no vendor Hall. There's no merch. I didn't even, I didn't even get a pen from it, right? I actually took one from the hotel. But. It that? Okay, that's different, yeah. Hotel. Do you know where it will be next year? Where will it be held? Netherlands. Oh, neat. Okay, it's in, not Amsterdam. It's a just south of Amsterdam. And then the after that, it's in Santiago, Chile. So, I mean, it is an international conference. I ate dinner with someone from Russia. You know, there are presenters from China there. Australia has a strong contingent. So, but they do kind of alternate between, you know, northern hemisphere, like, you know, they all, they just, they switch, they switch locations, yeah. And one of the researchers that shared her research said, This is my first presentation in English. So yeah, you get to have a lot of exposure to what is happening research wise in other countries, it's really great.

Stacy Hurst: 55:50

Well, thank you so much, Jake for this conversation. I Jake and I were on the same flight to the conference too, and probably right after I said, Hey Jake, the next question out of my mouth was, do you want to join us for the rehab? And I'm so glad you did. Thank you so much. Thanks for the invite. It was a this is a great time chatting. And it was, it was great to hang out with you a bit in Canada as well. Yeah, likewise, and all of you who are listening to our podcast also listen to Jake's. It's a little bit different than ours, but you will learn a lot from listening, so it's really good. Recommend it. Donnell Lindsay, any other final questions or Well, thanks you guys. Thanks for joining us. It's been great. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the conversation. Thanks again, Jake, and thank you to our listeners, and hopefully you'll join us for the next episode of literacy talks.

Narrator: 56:47

Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where literacy momentum begins. Visit reading horizons.com/literacy talks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading you.