Parents want what’s best for their children with respect to reading instruction. Teachers and administrators want what’s best for their students with respect to reading instruction. Researchers, teacher educators, and policy makers want what’s best for students with respect to reading instruction. Wanting what’s best for children is the easy part of the reading instruction situation. Knowing what’s best is considerably more complicated.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan provides important information for all of us concerned about reading instruction for children in his 2020 Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ) article entitled “What Constitutes a Science of Reading Instruction?” This issue brief provides a summary of Shanahan’s key ideas in this article, which is one of a host of scholarly papers in a 2020 RRQ themed issue about the science of reading. 

Shanahan emphasizes that the term science of reading has been around for 200 years; its use has peaked during several eras across time including the 1840s, the 1880s, the 1920s and now. Shanahan attributes the upswing in the use of the term to “…coverage of policy initiatives of the International Dyslexia Association, the publication of Seidenberg’s (2017) book Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About it, and an exploration of issues raised in that book by Hanford (2018), a radio journalist for American Public Media” (p. 4).Whereas the term science of reading has been defined differently across this time, “…the term science of reading usually has been reserved for decoding, often with an emphasis on non-instructional research (including studies of eye movements and linguistic analyses of the English spelling system)” (p. 3)

Shanahan’s most salient arguments about the science of reading are outlined as follows:

1.) There are two kinds of science: basic science and applied science. Basic science “…refers to any investigation that is not directly aimed at evaluating whether a particular approach to instruction works” (p. 4). Applied science, on the other hand, refers to studies carried out in actual contexts of practice. As you have likely deduced from reading Shanahan’s definition of the science of reading above, science of reading is basic science. Both basic science and applied science studies can be rigorously designed and implemented. Additionally, both basic science and applied science studies CAN inform reading instruction. HOWEVER...

2.) Basic science does not necessarily lead to quality instructional practice. Shanahan presents myriad examples of how and when basic science has been misappropriated in instructional practice. We share but one example here:

Basic studies of neural processing, perception, and memory can inform reading instruction, but their results can also “…be irrelevant, inconsequential, or misleading with regard to teaching. A famous example is the first U.S. study of reading, or more properly of word perception (Cattell, 1886). Cattell (1986) found that readers recognized words more quickly than letters, which was interpreted to mean that we read words as wholes rather than decoding them. The pedagogical interpretation of this was that word memorization rather than decoding should be taught, and this study was cited well into the 20th century as evidence of that. What Cattell’s study revealed was accurate and reliable—people actually recognize letters within words faster than isolated letters—but the interpretation of this finding and its application to teaching was neither accurate nor reliable. Studies quite consistently have found decoding instruction to be advantageous (M.J. Adams, 1990; Chall, 1996; NELP, 2008; NRP, 2000)” (p. 5).

3.) This example (and the countless other examples that Shanahan presents in his article) “…illustrate the dangers of attempting to move directly from basic research findings to the formulation of public policy or to the widespread adoption of particular instructional practices without direct, rigorous, repeated evaluations of the ability of those insights to improve instructional practice” (p. 6).

“Basic research has an important role to play in reading science but can never be the final determinant of practice or policy; that should always depend on studies that directly evaluate the effectiveness of a practice or policy. Reports such as those by the National Reading Panel (2000) and the National Early Literacy Panel (2008) are the most promising foundation for practice and policy determinations because the panels directly evaluated the effectiveness of instruction” (p. 10).

The main point, though, can be summarized in this quote: “If our goal is to determine how to best teach reading, then we must rely on data that evaluate the effectiveness of teaching, rather than depending solely or even mainly on studies of reading processes or of other noninstructional phenomena” (p. 2).

In other words, according to Shanahan, the evidence used to determine reading instruction in the classroom must have applied science, or instructional research, as a foundation, even as it incorporates basic science for the initial design of the instruction.