Conclusion
The Utility of Theory

At the start of this book I set the task of explaining the mental processes required to read a brief passage from Billy Bathgate. We've seen how my mind organized black marks on a white screen into letters and words, and how the correct meaning of the homonym “right” was accessed in my memory. We've examined how my comprehension of the passage required very local and very global thinking at the same time: local such as the deduction that Berman was describing the combination to a safe; global in that my immediate reaction to Berman's death was determined by my view of his character, an amalgamation of his actions throughout the novel. We've considered why I and some others on that airplane chose to read when we might have done something else, and we've surveyed evidence showing that my experience was no more than a little different because I read from a screen rather than paper. I hope you have found this account interesting. Here, at the book's end, I'd like to reconsider its utility for practitioners and policymakers.

Practitioners

You'll recall that I commented on the relationship of basic science and education in the Introduction, and I took a fairly cautious stance. Basic science differs fundamentally from the enterprise of educating children. Scientists seek to describe the world as it is. Indeed, that's the goal I set in the Introduction, to describe the mind as an experienced reader reads. Educators, in contrast, don't seek to describe what happens, but to make something happen. Seeking to make a reader out of a child who does not read is an educational goal, not a scientific one.

This difference in goals drives differences in the practices of basic scientists and those who seek to make practical use of science.¹ Here I'll focus on just one. Scientists must simplify. When we study complex systems, we start with simple cases. Galileo didn't try to describe how a leaf falls from a tree in a windstorm; he started with a sphere rolling down an inclined plane. Likewise, scientists usually study reading in simple situations, for example, a child reading a short text with no distractions. But children don't always read short texts in quiet environments. That difference limits the implications of research in two ways.

First, we must ask if the research finding will hold in a different environment. Classrooms offer more distractions than a laboratory environment, for example. Then too, the child may be less motivated to read in a classroom, compared to a laboratory situation where she agreed to participate in the study, and so feels she ought to give it her best. Do these differences matter materially to the findings?

There's a second problem. Scientific findings often apply to just part of the complex process of reading. The implication you draw to address one part of reading might have a negative impact on some other cognitive process. For example, I might learn that background knowledge is important to reading comprehension and conclude that students ought to memorize long lists of facts, so as to acquire background knowledge. That sounds like it would be terrible for motivation. (Lists are also a terrible way to learn new facts, by the way.)

So a basic scientist like me faces a dilemma. On the one hand, we know that the applications of our knowledge are limited. On the other hand, we also know that practitioners are confronted with snake‐oil salesmen at every turn, who are only too happy to claim scientific backing for their products. If scientists won't step forward and say, “we think research supports this practice,” then we yield the stage to the mountebanks.

My choice in this dilemma is plain—I ended each chapter with a section labeled “Implications.” You'll note that the implications I drew were usually accompanied by research citations. So it wasn't the case that I just looked at the science‐of‐reading findings and said, “Huh. You know what I bet would work?” I was tying theory to other research in which people had actually tested a hypothesis, or tried an intervention in a classroom.

But if that's true, how is the basic science helping? For example, in Chapter 4 I concluded (based on laboratory studies) that morphology is an important cue to help readers deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words, and then I cited studies showing that teaching morphology to kids helps them work out the definition of unfamiliar words. Why did I need the first bit at all? If teaching morphology helps, then it helps, whatever the scientific theory of reading says. What's gained by going into the theory? Why not just stick with the practice?

To get some purchase on this challenge, let's quickly review the conclusions I drew (Table C.1).

Table C.1. Conclusions drawn.

Mental process or structure	What scientific research indicates is needed	Implications for practical action
Decoding by sound	Automatic letter‐sound translation.	Reading. Phonemic awareness activities. Hearing children's literature. Explicit phonics instruction.
Decoding by sight	Lots of orthographic representations of words and letter “clumps.”	Reading practice. (Self‐teaching hypothesis.) Spelling instruction.
Broad vocabulary	Familiarity with lots of word meanings.	Reading. Hanging around people who use rare words. Explicit vocabulary instruction. Instruction in morphology. Instruction in using context to deduce word meaning.
Deep vocabulary	Efficient representation and interconnection of sound, spelling, and meaning. Connection of meaning with other, related word meanings.	Reading.
Comprehension	Broad background knowledge to aid inferences and construction of the situation model.	Reading. Other activities that promote background knowledge, e.g., watching serious television programming, conversations with knowledgeable people. Exposure to a school curriculum that is knowledge‐rich and carefully sequenced. Instruction in the need to make inferences.
Attitudes toward reading	Positive emotional attitudes.	Positive reading experiences. Association of reading with things the child already likes.
Motivation to read	Evaluation that reading is worthy, and that reading will be successful.	Many factors—most important are previous reading experiences which lead you to conclude that reading is valuable, and that you usually succeed in reading tasks. Practical utility or social utility of a particular reading task.
Choosing to read	An environment that facilitates reading.	An environment in which choosing to read is easy, and in which reading is the most attractive choice. Very easy access to books.
Reading self‐image	The child sees herself as a reader.	Living in a house where reading is value: reading is modeled as is enjoyment of learning new things.

Reviewing the actions that promote reading (according to our cognitive analysis) shows that basic science is useful in that it generates intervention ideas we might not have come up with otherwise. For example, research highlights the role of spelling instruction in reading, the importance of wordplay for young children, and the importance of parents emphasizing not just reading, but openness to new intellectual experiences. Research also helps refine some ideas we might have intuited, but used too bluntly. For example, it seems obvious that easy access to books might encourage kids to read; it will help more if kids are virtually tripping over books.

Research has also revealed the importance of timing. Parents who promote reading at home do so in advance of when these actions actually pay off, even though that's probably not by design. Think about it this way. The importance of different components of reading becomes apparent at different times. The importance of decoding is obvious in Kindergarten, when children are first taught letters and their associated sounds. Kids from reading homes will be prepared for decoding via months or years of activities that promote phonemic awareness, like read‐alouds from children's books and chanting nursery rhymes.

The importance of comprehension becomes obvious around fourth grade. That's when most children can decode fairly fluently, and the expectations for comprehension greatly increase. Kids from reading homes will be prepared with rich background knowledge to help make inferences in these more challenging texts; that knowledge (and rich vocabulary) was building for years, but the contribution to reading remained hidden while children were learning to decode.

The importance of motivation becomes apparent in middle school, when time pressure mounts and leisure reading tends to get dropped. Kids from reading homes will have been thinking of themselves as readers for many years, and reading will be more likely to retain a place in their lives. Thus research has not only suggested ways to promote reading, it has clarified when problems are likely to arise, and highlighted the importance of taking steps to prevent problems far in advance of their emergence.

We might also question the necessity of the reading model we've laboriously built over the course of this book (Figure C.1). If we know what to do to guide action in the classroom or home, and we know the basic science behind the action, why fool with orthographic representations, idea‐webs, situation models, and all the rest?

Figure C.1 Model of reading.

The model does two things. First, it provides a deeper level of understanding as to why classroom practices are effective (or not). For example, at the shallowest level of understanding, we might simply know that children who play phonemic awareness games learn to read more easily than those who don't. At a deeper level of understanding, we can explicate the role of phonemic awareness in the learning of the alphabetic principle and letter‐sound pairings. But it's still more satisfying to have that knowledge coordinated with knowledge about the other components of reading. Knowing what to do and knowing there's research behind it is like comprehending the story about Carol Harris without knowing it's really about Helen Keller. There's “why” and then there's “big‐picture why.” The latter makes things hang together and gives you insight into some details that you would otherwise miss.

If we think the model of reading that we've built over the course of this book as comparable to a situation model in reading, we see utility beyond the satisfaction of knowing why things work. A situation model affords better inferences. If an educator has a model of reading in her head, like a complex clockwork, she can predict what will happen to the system as a whole when a part of it changes in some way. Having this model in memory can serve as a summary of important mental processes and their relationships, to be called on when thinking through instructional decisions and anticipating their outcomes.

Policymakers

And what about policymakers? Do cognitive psychologists have anything of value to offer them? Cognitive psychologists are (or ought to be) chary indeed of commenting on policy. We understand something about the individual mind, and that knowledge becomes less applicable when the mind is situated in a classroom with 30 other minds. How relevant is that knowledge to principles of action by governments and other organizations that influence people from a distance? Not very. Still, if education policymakers set out to influence reading in schools and homes, knowing something about the reading mind might help. So here I set out a handful of very big‐picture principles of reading I think ought to interest policymakers, one or two for each of the three abilities on which successful reading depends: fluent decoding, comprehension, and motivation. Reading is analogous to a three‐legged stool, in that if any one of these abilities is missing, reading falls on its behind.

Children are most likely to grow into fluent decoders if they have received explicit instruction in the letter‐sound code (that is, phonics instruction) and if they practice reading. The idea of practice—reading helps you become a better reader—has not been controversial. Phonics instruction has been, but there are few topics in educational psychology that have been more thoroughly studied, and for which the data are clearer.² For educators on the ground, the picture might be foggier, because the amount of explicit phonics instruction that children need varies; it depends on their phonemic awareness coming into school, the quality and quantity of oral language to which they've been exposed at home, and other factors. But it's clear that virtually all kids benefit from explicit instruction in the code, and that such instruction is crucial for children who come to school with weak oral language skills.

In Chapters 4 and 5, we saw that comprehension occurs at four levels: individual words (that is, depth and breadth of vocabulary), understanding sentences, connecting sentences, and deriving a situation model. We also saw that for each level there are formal rules we can describe about how to make meaning: ways to use context to understand an unknown vocabulary word, syntactic rules that describe roles that words play in a sentence, principles by which sentences are connected, and features of texts that guide the construction of a situation model. We also saw that these content‐free mechanisms are not a complete description of comprehension, and that knowing something about the topic of a text has a big impact on comprehension at every level.

Policymakers should bear in mind the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension. But it's not enough to say, “It's good to know things.” That principle suggests a lots‐of‐stuff curriculum, and that's insufficient. The curriculum must be sequenced, planned. If student comprehension depends on some familiarity with the topic, then educators must select texts that have the right balance of familiar and new content, so that students are continually exposed to and challenged by new ideas, but not overwhelmed. Teachers already do that, of course, but the importance of background knowledge to reading suggests that this planning must span years. Another reason that's true was not discussed in this book, but it's rooted in an intuitive feature of human memory. People forget. If you want students to remember content, it needs to be repeated in one form or another, across years. That requires curricular planning across years.

The third leg of the stool is motivation. I include motivation because a glance at Table C.1 shows that “reading” is often among the activities that leads to reading improvement. That's coupled with research discussed earlier in the book showing that excellent readers read a lot, and although the relationship between “reading excellence” and “reading” is doubtless reciprocal (that is, people choose to read more if they are good at it), at least part of the way they got to be good readers is by reading. Hence, reading motivation matters.

Two factors in motivation could be considered “big ideas,” ones that policymakers should know about. First, reading attitudes are emotional. Trying to persuade children to read with rational appeals—it's the best way to succeed in school, for example—simply won't work. They are not ineffective because kids may have a long history of doubting that school is valuable to them, although they may, and that's important for other reasons. They are ineffective because reading attitudes are emotional, not cognitive. Persuading kids reading makes you smart is comparable to persuading me that broccoli is healthy. I believe you, but I still won't eat it. It's the emotional tenor of children's reading experiences that ought to matter to adults.

That's challenging, because getting kids to have a positive reading experience requires that they do some reading in the first place. Still, other methods of persuasion may help, by tying reading to things that students value now, rather than appealing to what we hope they will value in the future. For example, researchers were able to improve teen eating habits by making rejection of junk food seem an act of rebellion, of resisting manipulation by corporate authority.³ Young men in Texas were persuaded to think differently about littering after an advertising campaign framed the improper disposal of trash as “messing with Texas.”⁴ There's no reason to think that a similarly innovative method could not be found to foster positive reading attitudes.

In addition to considering the nature of reading attitudes, policymakers must recognize that liking reading is not enough. Leisure reading is a choice, which means children must like reading more than whatever else is available to them at the time. Hence, we cannot think about reading in isolation. We must think about the child's entire environment, all of the choices that are available, and how to shape that environment so that reading is most likely to be the activity selected.

One final observation on the application of basic scientific principles to education policy for reading. I offered basic principles that apply to fluent decoding, comprehension, and motivation—principles that I suggested be borne in mind. But these suggestions presuppose a particular goal, a particular type of reader one is hoping children will grow into. My assumption has been that the goal is the intelligent layreader; someone who can pick up the Washington Post or Scientific American and read almost any article with understanding. Furthermore, it's the type of reader who might want to read magazines and newspapers in his or her spare time.

Are there not adults who are “good readers” by a different definition? Suppose someone were an engineer, never read in her spare time, didn't have broad background knowledge, and so probably couldn't read everything in the Washington Post with good comprehension. But this engineer has deep background knowledge in her domain of expertise and so can easily read technical material related to work, and is happy enough with her reading. I offer this example to highlight that education is a goal‐driven enterprise, and before one starts discussing how to apply findings from basic science to make education better, one needs to be clear about what “better” means. And science will be silent on that matter. The goals one sets for educating children reflect personal and community values, not scientific truths.

On the Beauty of Theory

Americans generally think that science has practical utility and that funding scientific research is a good idea.⁵ The notion that public investment in basic science brings benefits to society has been part of our collective consciousness since World War II. Before that, government expenditure on science was trivial. Elected officials assumed that industries should fund scientific research, should they need it. High‐profile scientific successes during World War II, including the development of the atom bomb and the production of antibiotics at scale, changed that. Policymakers came to believe that investments in basic science brought long‐term benefits to society. Economists verified that the investment in basic science more than paid for itself in increased economic productivity.⁶

When the occasion arises, I'm quick to point out the successes of my own field in making life better. Cognitive psychologists can help people learn things more efficiently,⁷ they can make software and other products easier to use,⁸ they can make athletes more mentally tough,⁹ they can help people make better financial decisions,¹⁰ and they can even help people create better PowerPoint presentations.¹¹ And I think we can help children develop into great readers. Naturally, there's satisfaction in the thought that the work you do might in some way contribute to public good.

But in truth, these altruistic concerns played a small part in my decision to make psychology my life's work, and selfish thoughts loomed large. I simply find it fascinating. Upon my first exposure to the subject (during my freshman year of college), I was dumbstruck by the fact that most thought is unconscious. Not furtive lust for your mother as envisioned by Freud, or wily manipulations of your buying behavior as advertisers naively hope for, but the bulk of what the mind is set up to do: seeing, moving your body, using language. In each case we are aware of the result of thought—what we see, how we move—but not the mental computations behind it. Some testimony to their complexity is that it required a book to explicate just 10 seconds worth of just one behavior: my reading that brief passage of Billy Bathgate.

Thirty‐five years later, I still find the explication of these abilities fascinating. I hope I have conveyed some of that feeling. My fondest hope for this book was that the contents not only would be useful, but that you would, in the words of the epigraph, “gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”

References

1. 1. For a more extended discussion, see Willingham, D. T. (2012). When can you trust the experts? San Francisco, CA: Jossey‐Bass.
2. 2. National Reading Panel (US), National Institute of Child Health, & Human Development (US). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence‐based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.
3. 3. Bryan, C. J., Yeager, D. S., Hinojosa, C. P., Chabot, A., Bergen, H., Kawamura, M., & Steubing, F. (2016). Harnessing adolescent values to motivate healthier eating. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(39), 10830–10835.
4. 4. Thaler, R. H., & C. R. Sunstein. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
5. 5. National Science Board. (2014). Science and engineering indicators 2014. Chapter 7, “Science and technology: Public attitudes and understanding.” Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation (NSB 10‐01). Retrieved from www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/chapter‐7/c7h.htm/.
6. 6. Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century. (2007). Rising above the gathering storm: Energizing and employing America for a brighter economic future. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
7. 7. Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L. III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8. 8. Norman, D. (2013). The design of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.
9. 9. Beilock, S. (2010). Choke: What the secrets of the brain reveal about getting it right when you have to. New York: Free Press.
10. 10. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and slow. New York: Basic Books.