The Science of Reading
- Jo Anne Cooper
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
The “Science of Reading” appeared on the scene a few years ago. It’s a phrase that sounds impressive. In today’s world, how could we not climb aboard this ship and sail it through all our classrooms?
Yet my own experiences with reading—and with the many readers I have known—do not fit neatly into what I would call a science. Each child’s journey into reading seems profoundly individual, shaped by the circumstances of their own life and by their particular strengths and struggles. Reading develops within a personal world that is hard to standardize or control.
That raises a question for me. How could one truly conduct an experiment that isolates a single variable in reading instruction while holding all the others constant? Children bring so many influences with them: language experiences, curiosity, confidence, frustration, family life, interests, and prior learning. The idea that we could reduce reading development to a tidy experimental formula seems, at best, difficult and perhaps impossible.
For that reason, I was grateful to read an article by Paul Thomas questioning the notion that the “Science of Reading” represents a kind of silver bullet for literacy instruction. His critique is thoughtful and worth considering. Any summary I might attempt would fail to do it justice, so, if you wonder about the "Science of Reading," I encourage you to read his post for yourself.
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