The74 highlights SRI’s vital work helping urban school districts unlock the full value of “science of reading” approaches.
Across the country, school districts have been implementing “high-quality instructional materials” (HQIM) for reading comprehension — often associated with a “science of reading” approach — to improve literacy outcomes.
The74, a highly regarded nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system, recently singled out one particular effort to understand the impact of this approach: a new research brief from SRI titled Beyond the Surface: Leveraging High-Quality Instructional Materials for Robust Reading Comprehension.
While noting the immense potential of innovations like HQIM, the SRI research team worked with large urban districts in Texas, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina to ask: How effectively is this new approach being implemented on the ground?
The bright spot: The report notes that these districts have reported a strong uptake from teachers, with 72–89% of teachers using comprehension-focused HQIM daily or almost daily. The researchers observed “near-universal focus on comprehension with quality texts and active student participation across hundreds of classrooms.”
“We observed significant time spent on comprehension tasks, strong curriculum use, and highly engaged kids and teachers. Those are powerful foundations for reading.” — Dan Reynolds
The report also notes room for improvement: “[M]ost lessons — two thirds — resulted in teachers and students doing work that only facilitated surface-level understanding of texts.” While surface-level understanding is a critical first step, the report identifies opportunities to move from surface-level comprehension toward what it calls “robust comprehension.” Surface-level comprehension is shallow work where students complete tasks such as annotating text or categorizing text features, but without addressing the full meaning of the text. In contrast, robust comprehension work uses tasks to guide students toward the deeper work of understanding the meaning of the text as a whole.
“These districts have achieved widespread HQIM implementation, raising the floor for knowledge-rich comprehension instruction across hundreds of classrooms,” comments Dan Reynolds, a senior education researcher at SRI and the lead author of the research brief. “In our research, we observed significant time spent on comprehension tasks, strong curriculum use, and highly engaged kids and teachers. Those are powerful foundations for reading. We see our report as an invitation to build on those foundations and catapult readers to further success.”
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