Many educators believe it is better to focus early-grade instruction on basic reading skills, keeping it simple to ensure students build a solid foundation prior to tackling more complex texts. This seems to makes sense—after all, if 1st grade students, for example, are still learning to decode words and read with fluency, should we really expect them to comprehend complex sentences like “Paleontologists look at the dinosaur fossil record to develop theories and hypotheses about why they went extinct”? As it turns out, the answer may be yes, we should.
A multi-year research project at Harvard’s READS Lab offers promising evidence that with the right supports, 1st and 2nd grade students, including historically underserved students, can read and comprehend complex science and social studies texts (like the paleontologists sentence) while also making significant gains in reading comprehension (Kim et al., 2024).
The approach, called Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), involved students in low income urban schools in 10-lesson science and social studies units, focused on topics such as the survival of arctic animals and the challenges explorers must overcome.
During the units, students engaged in a variety of learning tasks, including listening to teachers read complex passages aloud and discussing them as a class, developing vocabulary knowledge by unpacking the underlying morphologies of words like paleontologist (paleo = old, ologist = one who studies), and using concept maps to consolidate their learning. Students worked together on open-ended research projects; for example, selecting an animal (e.g., snowy owl, arctic fox, or lemming) and writing about how it survives in harsh conditions.
The lead researcher on the project, James Kim, told Harvard Magazine that he hopes this line of study can help educators avoid the false choice of overemphasizing decoding at the expense of challenging students to comprehend longer, more complex texts—which is, after all, the real goal of reading instruction (Paquini, 2024). Kim and his colleagues found that after three years of content literacy instruction (simultaneously teaching reading and content knowledge), students in the treatment group—now 4th graders—demonstrated significant gains in science knowledge and smaller, yet significant gains in reading comprehension and mathematics achievement.
Although the effects in 4th grade reading comprehension were modest, it is noteworthy to see a relatively brief supplementary curriculum put a dent in the so-called “4th grade slump”—the observed dip in student reading performance that emerges as students transition from learning to read to reading to learn (Goodwin, 2011). And they suggest that when it comes to developing productive readers, if doing less means focusing narrowly on basic skills, then perhaps doing more (or MORE) may be better.
