Bridging the gap: What SRI’s classroom research reveals about teaching kids to read

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Key takeaways:

• Across four large urban school districts, teachers are delivering strong, explicit phonics instruction using high-quality instructional materials.
• But students have fewer chances to build vocabulary and apply their skills to real sentences and stories — the “bridging processes” that connect decoding words to actually understanding them.
• SRI Education’s recommendations, found in their brief: Bridging the Divide: Connecting Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in Early Literacy, are things teachers can start doing tomorrow, no new curriculum required.
• The study is now entering its next phase, giving researchers a rare look at how instruction changes over time.

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Anna Jennerjohn, a senior education researcher at SRI, and Sara Rutherford-Quach, a principal education researcher who leads SRI Education’s literacy  and multilingual program areas, have been embedded in a two-year-long large-scale study of how districts teach children to read. The project, funded by the Schusterman Family Philanthropies, combines classroom observations, interviews, and surveys across four districts working to strengthen their literacy instruction. From their research, the team released a brief: Bridging the Divide: Connecting Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in Early Literacy, discussing their findings and recommendations.

A study built for scale

The districts involved have all adopted what’s known as high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM — curricula like UFLI Foundations and Amplify CKLA Skills , now used in classrooms nationwide as more states require evidence-based reading programs. The research team wanted to know not just whether teachers were using these materials, but how instruction was coming to life in the classroom.

To find out, the team used a classroom observation protocol called TERI: Foundational Skills (Tools for Equitable Reading Instruction), developed by Julie Cohen’s team at the University of Virginia. Classroom observation at this scale is rare, Rutherford-Quach says, mostly because it’s complex and labor-intensive. “A lot of times researchers studying something like this are just one or two people at a university, and they don’t have the capacity to do this many observations,” she says. SRI’s multidisciplinary team comprised of literacy experts, quantitative analysts, and trained classroom observers, with financial support from Schusterman, made it possible.

Where the data pointed

Once the team started analyzing foundational-skills observations — phonics and early reading instruction for kindergarten through second grade — a pattern emerged. Teachers across all four districts were delivering clear, explicit phonics instruction. But there were important missing pieces: opportunities for students to learn what words mean, and opportunities to apply new phonics skills to real sentences, passages, and books rather reading words in isolation.

Those two skills, vocabulary and reading fluency, fall into a category called “bridging processes,” termed by researchers Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright.  Bridging processes sit between word recognition (like sounding out a simple word) and language comprehension, and are important for skilled reading.

A lesson that gets it right

Jennerjohn points to a first-grade lesson she observed as a model of what bridging looks like in practice. The teacher taught students to decode words with the “oo” sound, like bloom and look. Then she introduced a less-familiar word for six-year-olds, brook, with a quick picture and definition: a brook is a small stream. Students read a sentence together using the word, then split into partners to read a short story built around it.

“They had the opportunity to apply the phonics skill, think about word meaning, and apply it to connected text,” Jennerjohn says — all three pieces, in one lesson.

Why it’s striking a chord

The field of reading instruction has a long history of swinging between two camps: a focus on explicit phonics instruction and focus on whole language as the initial path to reading. As the science of reading movement has pushed districts toward more explicit phonics instruction, researchers worry about overcorrecting and losing sight of embedding meaning within phonics instruction, which becomes more apparent around third grade, when comprehension suddenly becomes the main event on state tests.

For multilingual learners in particular, Jennerjohn and Rutherford-Quach say, the stakes are even higher. Students who are learning to read and learning a new language at the same time need every opportunity to build meaning alongside decoding skills.

What districts can do tomorrow

The recommendations don’t require new curricula — just more intentional pacing and attention to the bridging processes. Teachers can build in short vocabulary moments throughout a phonics lesson rather than treating word meaning as an afterthought. And connected text practice, which most curricula already include but often place near the end of a lesson, can be woven in earlier and given to every student.

“This is something people can implement tomorrow,” Rutherford-Quach says. It can happen at the classroom level, the coaching level, or the district level, where leaders can make bridging processes an explicit part of professional learning plans.

The study is now heading into its third year of data collection, which will let the team track whether instruction is shifting in response to the findings — something Rutherford-Quach says they’ve already seen happen with an earlier brief on reading comprehension. “You don’t always get that type of opportunity to directly apply research and have it impact schools and teachers and kids as quickly,” she says.