The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody. You are listening to the Authority Podcast here on the Be Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. Really pleased to have you here for this conversation, which is part of our National Literacy Month with RIF campaign. It's a partnership between the Be Podcast Network and Reading Is Fundamental.

To host numerous productive conversations across our network of podcasts about developing kids reading and literacy skills, the things we can do at home, what we can do in schools. We're talking to a whole bunch of different experts and practitioners and voices that are helping us really understand the state of reading in the United States, the things we can do.

To give kids more access to [00:01:00] books, to reading skills, and to continue hopefully moving things in the right direction. And we certainly will cover a lot of that today with my guest, Dr. Molly Ness. Molly is a former classroom teacher, a reading researcher, and a teacher educator. She earned a doctorate in reading education at the University of Virginia and spent 16 years as an associate professor at Fordham University in New York City.

Molly serves on the Board of Directors. Directors for the International Literacy Association and is a New York State chap of the Reading League. She is the creator of the End Book Deserts podcast, which brings awareness to two million American children who lack access to books. And she is the author herself of five books, including Read Alouds for All Learners and Think Big with Think Alouds.

Molly, welcome to the show.

Molly Ness: Thanks for having me.

Ross Romano: So I wanted to start out the conversation talking a little bit more about yourself. So, letting listeners sort of hear about your, your background in reading education [00:02:00] and everything that brought you here to being part of this discussion today. So let's just start kind of big picture just as far as your interests, your motivations, your, your, your history.

What drew you toward being so involved with reading education specifically?

Molly Ness: Well, I started as a classroom teacher right out of college. I joined Teach for America. and spent a few years teaching in Oakland, California. I was a middle school teacher who at the time had very little advanced preparation actually thought I was sort of building my resume to go off to law school and just going to use this experience for some, some, a nice line on my CV but quickly realized that public education and specifically literacy were the social justice issues that mattered most to me, but that I did not know enough.

So continued teaching for a bit on the West Coast. And then came back east and spent four years looking at reading comprehension instruction as well as reading clinics in my doctoral studies at the University of Virginia. My real interest [00:03:00] was the gap between researchers and classroom teachers.

And so I, after finishing my doctorate, became a university professor in a graduate school of education where I really was aiming to, to make research, which too often lived in ivory towers and academic journals readily applicable to classroom teachers and school leaders. So I was a university professor for almost 20 years and my writing and my.

books are really meant to sort of bridge that research to practice gap. And I started that podcast I guess in 2019, when I discovered the research around how book access is such a prevalent problem all across the country and started the end book. podcast to highlight the 32 million American children who lack access to their, to books in their homes, schools, and communities, and also to shine the spotlight on the innovative people and programs who are working all over the country to get books to kids in a [00:04:00] very, a wide variety of different ways.

Ross Romano: Yeah. And, and I definitely want to talk a lot more about the podcast and about the book deserts topic in general, is that. You know, kind of bridging to that. What, what are some of the things you kind of, I guess you've seen experienced firsthand and, and I guess the, the meshing of your experiences, like going all the way through to a doctorate degree in reading education, combined with your experience in the classroom and then other roles.

Are there, you know, are these, you know, Challenges, things that have been relatively persistent, that you've gained different perspectives, become more aware of, are there trends that have been happening over the past, you know, decade or so with respect to either accents or just, you know, reading skill development.

Molly Ness: Well, I would sort of say that this particular moment in the literacy landscape, I [00:05:00] find probably the most exciting time of my career because the conversations about reading and a term that many of us keep hearing which is the science of reading. It feels like so many people are coming to the table to have conversations about how to improve the literacy trajectory of children from birth to, through even college.

And the conversations have never been so just ubiquitous. Podcasts and documentary films and mainstream media and social media looking at how we not only need to improve our students as the quality of their reading, but also really address that so many of our students are opting not to read.

So we're sort of facing this, this dual crisis of illiteracy as well as alliteracy, children choosing not to read. And so, There's this particular moment I've never seen such a sort of clamoring for information. Teachers really want knowledge. They want to understand how the brain learns to [00:06:00] read. And for so many of us that was not something we got in our former, our formal education.

So I'm seeing a lot of requests for understanding brain science, understanding the science of reading, and so many interdisciplinary people coming to the table. We've got people who are reading researchers like myselves. We've got speech language pathologists and psychologists and even pediatricians understanding that a A child's literacy development is so important to their lifelong trajectory.

When we look at rates around literacy, we can really sort of correlate some, some significant challenges in terms of reliance on on public assistance and incarceration and unemployment and mental health. And so when all of these, these voices come to the table, we can really start to push the needle forward with regard to the literacy landscape.

Ross Romano: Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the challenges to, to increasing equitable literacy development in [00:07:00] particular nationwide is the book deserts as we referenced earlier. And so for, for listeners who may not be familiar with that term, what is a book desert and how widespread are they in the US?

Molly Ness: Sure and if listeners are not familiar with it, no shame there, because it was relatively new to me, and I had spent, you know, 20 to 30 years in reading research. Book Deserts, as the name sort of implies, are geographic areas where books are scarce or hard to come by. I intentionally talk about books.

book deserts as not just being geographic regions but also populations of children. So for example, our children living in the foster care system, they may not have access to books in ways that children who are sort of have more home stability do. Our children whose parents are are deployed or incarcerated, they often lack.

Access to bedtime stories and such as their parents are sort of not in the formal home setting. So it's not [00:08:00] just a geographic thing, but it's also sort of those populations that don't have access to literacy in ways that their that, that many of their colleagues do. And the statistics are, are pretty staggering.

When we look at poverty in its link to book access, we know that Up to 60 percent of our low income families don't have any books at home. And when we sort of further dig into that, the kids who don't have access to books at home so often are living in neighborhoods where public libraries are losing funding or their schools may not have school or classroom libraries.

And probably I think the most compelling research around book access came out of researcher Susan Newman at New York University. And she did this really brilliant study in 2019 where she and her research team went to three different metropolitan areas and they literally pounded the pavement. So they sort of, you know, rode bicycles and walked the [00:09:00] sidewalks and took public buses to sort of emulate How if they were children outside of school areas, what they would need to do to get access to books.

And so they looked at how prevalent books were in these communities and to add a level of sophistication to it, they looked at high poverty neighborhoods as well as areas that had a lot more financial prosperity. So let's take Washington, D. C. They looked at Anacostia, which is a neighborhood of about 60 percent poverty, and they found that outside of school hours, 830 children would have to share a single book to have access to it.

Whereas you go, you know, just a few miles away, you'd to Capitol Hill, obviously a much wealthier area, children had 16 times as many books. And so we really start to understand how much poverty influences book access and how those complications really influence kids in their lives outside of school. (ad here)

Ross Romano: [00:10:00] Yeah. And, and another piece, I guess, in the definition of the book deserts, it was, you know, lack of access to books and book, book culture. Could you elaborate a little bit on, on what book culture is beyond just access to the books themselves?

Molly Ness: Sure, so book culture is a community that is in your family or your neighborhood or whomever your sort of social network is that sees reading and understands how literacy is a part of of our success as adults. It is people who model reading. It is people who consider themselves readers and talk about reading and have behavioral actions that show they value literacy.

So go to the library, are in book clubs, read the newspaper identify themselves as readers. Because it's not just, I want to be really clear, it's not just, well, let's just dump a bunch of books in these communities and think that. Solves the [00:11:00] problem. That's the easy fix. It's relatively easy to sort of books are highly transportable.

They don't have an expiration date They're not, you know attached to a human being in terms of sort of disseminating knowledge So they're they're pretty easy to disseminate what's harder is the grassroots efforts that take longitudinal work to really build up why literacy matters so much and how literacy can improve a human being's life trajectory.

So it's it's all of those literacy behaviors, not just sort of having books in your home and on your shelves.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And that, I mean, that's particularly in light of the fact that this, this can't really be defined geographically in the modern world. I think that culture part is so important to it. You know, a term I'm sure probably the you know, the term that the book deserts came from, people might be familiar with food deserts, right?

Communities where there's, [00:12:00] there's no you know, no grocery store local or at least no fresh fruits and vegetables. And, and if it's in a city, you may have to take a bus to a totally different part of town to get to a grocery store, rural areas. You know, there may only be a dollar store or something like that in town, and you have to go to a totally different town to go to a supermarket, right?

And that's Of course, you know, largely defined by geography, but in the age of Amazon and all of this, there's, there's different ways to get books other than them being down the street. But lack of public libraries in different neighborhoods where it's free and anybody can go and get books or, as you mentioned, like the culture, the understanding around what it means to be a reader and to, to want to have.

access to books or for families to read books together. I mean, I've noticed myself especially over the past handful of years [00:13:00] since having my own son and, and reading and all of that, that I haven't necessarily always been impressed by the way that people who have access to books, utilize that access, right?

Sometimes if I'm at someone's house and they, they don't even know what books they have because they've never read them. And you know, and so it's, it's important to, you know, help kids develop that identity, to prioritize it and to, of course, make sure that, that it's just. you know, something that, that we avail ourselves of, and then we can continue to make progress toward ensuring that that's the reality for every kid.

And, You know, it seems as though, based on some of the statistics certainly around the financial barriers and the ability to purchase, you [00:14:00] know, full price books, that it's not only at home, that that's a barrier, that schools in the U. communities, you know, schools that have less funding also are not as equipped with the same number and, and I'm sure the same up to date ness of reading materials, right, available to the students in the school as at home, which is something that is. a little bit different about this, you know, crisis of access than some other things, you know, sometimes when we talk about digital access, the digital divide, it's, the assumption is that we have these things in school, but some kids have it at home or they don't. But even, you know, if they're attending a school that [00:15:00] may have the same resource challenges at home.

It's something that's not, you know, automatically there's not a solution in that way.

Molly Ness: Yeah, and I will say that as bleak as the statistics around book access are what is completely overwhelming and just innovative and engaging and just downright fun is how this problem has been tackled over the years. from the grassroots level to huge organizations. You know, many of us know JetBlue Airlines.

Well, JetBlue Airlines had book vending machines that they strategically put in high visibility, high traffic areas for kids to literally go up and just get free books. And they were, you know, at the WIC centers and the boys and girls clubs and the local playgrounds. I've interviewed on my podcast, people who have taken dilapidated school buses and, you know, re redone them and literally had [00:16:00] them be a mobile library that they drive into kids neighborhoods on the weekends and school hours.

There's so much innovative stuff that's going on at all different levels of funding. There are book banks that are very mindful that if a family needs services, if you need books, chances are you also need school uniforms and sports equipment and diapers and food. And so like the Maryland Book Bank, I think, has this really lovely model where they've collaborated other organizations in this gigantic one stop shopping community sort of warehouse for people who need those services.

And they're very mindful to meet people where they are. And that, that innovative approach to building literacy, not just in access, but in the culture is is what gives me hope and what keeps me continuing to do my podcast because I want to showcase these ideas so that other people can say, Hey, if it worked in Philadelphia, maybe it'll work in Phoenix.

If it [00:17:00] worked in San Francisco, let's try it here in, you know, in Austin or what have you.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Are there any, again, speaking of, you know, you've had said on your podcast, many different guests from organizations that are tackling this through a variety of different approaches and solutions are there any that stand out, you know, in particular as really promising approaches or ones that have just clearly had an impact in a, in a certain way?

Molly Ness: Sure. So, the ones that I just think are so genius are some of the laundromat library centers. So, people who go to public laundromats, the research shows that if you go to the laundromat, you typically go to the same one and you go once or twice a month and you are there, you're sort of a captive audience for an hour or two.

And so, the Laundromat Cares Association literally spent about 500. We're not talking about. thousands of dollars to make over a corner [00:18:00] of the laundromat to have it be a kids learning nook. So they, you know, got kids furniture and got books and they would have a librarian who would volunteer an hour or two, basically knowing if you're a parent who is trying to do your laundry while you're managing your young kids, rather than give them a device, which so many of us do, let's have this be a literacy center.

And there's some really compelling research around those. Many of us know. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. I always like to make the bad joke that she is working far more than nine to five to get books to kids because what she does in her programs is when kids are born in particular counties that participate in Imagination Library, they sign up, they are mailed a book to their home for every month of their life until five years old.

So they, this is, you know, easy lift for parents. They're carefully curated books to be the most, you know, diverse, representative, inclusive, engaging texts. So there's everything that [00:19:00] does those sort of big corporation ideas. But then I also really like, some of the organizations which are really mindful to serve some of those overlooked populations.

For instance, there's a great one called United Through Reading. which looks at children whose parents are deployed. And knowing that your parent is serving on an army base overseas, that child may lack kind of classic bedtime story. And so what they've done is every single army base in our country, every sort of battleship, because of this organization literally has an audio recording room where you as a parent, you can find out it.

My eight year old just made the soccer team, and one of the volunteers will work with you and choose a book that's relevant either, you know, for an event or for who your kids interests are. You then take that book, You go read it and record it. The organization sends the recording home to the child in addition to the book to sort of say like this is a way to bridge [00:20:00] literacy for families who are separated because of their, their parents being service members.

So I think those ideas are just so genius. But there are just so many. I've had the pleasure of. probably having 50 or 60 guests on my podcast, and I've learned something from every single one. Some people, you know, literally being the the, the classroom teacher who soups up their bike and goes into communities all the way up to these multi million dollar organizations.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Are there, are there, you know, Any uh, solutions, but, but any of it stands out as things that whether it's systemically within just. The education system or the government or or corporately that stand out as opportunities to, I guess, facilitate better penetration of these programs that are working to be able to enable them to scale, to make them more commonplace, to, you [00:21:00] know, fill in some of the gaps where there are, you know, Things out there that clearly are working, but yet there's still more kids to reach or more kids to reach more, you know, frequently, right, to get a kid that now that went from having zero books at home to five.

How do we get them to 10 and 15 and so on?

Molly Ness: Well, there's a great study that I often reference by my she's, I'm sort of a big fan girl of reading researcher Susan Newman. She did a lovely study of a Philadelphia initiative around literacy. So Philadelphia had about 90 different programs that were all literacy based, either, you know, working with, babies, all the way up to adult literacy.

And she sort of looked at these 90 programs across the board, what what was working, what wasn't working. And she, she found that there was often miscommunication between different organizations. So people were doubling up efforts in one [00:22:00] community and sort of overlooking another community. They were often sort of working in isolation and not communicating with each other.

And then they did something that most of the other researchers hadn't done, which was really try to tap into the families and caregivers who were on the receiving end and what they wanted more of, what books worked in their homes, what literacy practices were sustainable. And they found that so many of the book donation organizations were giving these really rich, lyrically sophisticated picture books, and they were choosing them because they had background knowledge and sophisticated vocabulary, but they were often sort of overwhelming and too intimidating for families who may have had low English proficiency or low levels of literacy themselves, and so they were able to sort of say, Hey, you know, well intentioned, but should we be more mindful in the texts that we're disseminating to to the families and caregivers that we are, we're working with?

[00:23:00] There's an organization in New York that I think just is brilliant. It's called Literacy it's, it's link. org. And what they do is they when you sign up as a parent or caregiver, you get daily text messages from this organization that are literacy tips. And they're not just. Reading per se tips, they are if you're waiting for the bus, find a billboard, talk about the letters that are in that billboard ways that you can use storytelling and turn, you know, everyday moments like grocery shopping or like, You know, doing laundry into literacy rich moments and what I appreciate about those efforts is we're helping people understand that literacy is not just reading, it's reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and that, to me, reaches a whole level, a whole different population who may not have strong literacy backgrounds themselves, or may not consider themselves readers.

But when you say to a family or caregiver, talking to your baby, singing with your child, is building [00:24:00] literacy, then we make literacy more welcoming and more inclusive.

Ross Romano: Yeah, literacy has a, you know, a foundation for communication and everything that that means. It, you know, it does reading, I guess, has the risk of falling into the same trap as, as many other things that we teach in schools. Or if, if we fail to make those connections and contextualize what this skill means in life, right, and it just seems like it's just about reading just for the sake of reading, which can, you know, have its own pleasures, but isn't necessarily as much of a motivator to learn it if you're struggling with it, or if you haven't learned it yet, but understanding all the different things that literacy means In life and, and the doors it opens up and et cetera.

And also as well, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, [00:25:00] viewing that as a cross curricular endeavor and not and seeing it as I, you know, every. Educators job, every professional educator and informal educator, but their job to be fostering those literacy skills versus, well, it's this one teacher's job.

And if I'm the social studies teacher and I have kids who can't read, I'm just, I'm a victim of the fact that the kids can't read well enough, right, to engage in my curriculum versus it's also part of my job to help them develop those skills and how effective that approach can be. So getting into, so as I've referenced in the, the.

Introduction. I'm the author of five different books, and that's typically what we're focused on. This show is talking about authors and their books. And then due to this campaign, we're expanding that a little bit. [00:26:00] But you know, one of your books, I think your most recent is read alouds for all learners.

And so I wanted to definitely spend some time to touch on that and touch on, you know, read alouds. in general, and how they contribute to students becoming strong readers. What's the, what's the case for read alouds?

Molly Ness: Sure. So, well, I will start with sort of the rationale of why I wrote the book. So in these conversations about the science of reading, we've sort of Placed so much focus and emphasis on foundational skills of phonics and decoding and sort of lifting words off the page, but that's not the only thing that you need to be a successful reader.

To be a successful reader you need background knowledge, you need vocabulary, you need to understand how our language works, and you need language comprehension, and language comprehension really is built through read alouds. So what I have been seeing, and what the research has verified, is that we've sort of pushed out the time for the read aloud.

[00:27:00] It's not something that you can necessarily quantify, you can't sort of assess student gains from a read aloud, so it's one of those things that we've sort of said, oh, you know. We don't have time for it, it would be nice if we got to it, but it isn't seen as a necessity. So I wrote this book to show that read alouds are really the cornerstone of effective literacy instruction.

They build background knowledge, they give Rich vocabulary exposure, they build language comprehension, and so they're not a sort of, they're not a luxury. They're a must do, should do, want to do, get to do, have to do, and the research is really compelling around it, that we see just so many benefits when kids listen to teacher delivered or parent delivered read alouds.

We see increases in expressive and receptive vocabulary. We see students have better feelings about their own identities as readers and writers. We see improvements in comprehension. I can go [00:28:00] on and on and on because the research is just that robust. So I really wanted to write this book to say We got to carve time for them and moreover, we also have to be intentional and explicit in our planning when I think back to my days as a classroom teacher.

I didn't plan my read aloud. I just sort of grabbed a book and did my thing. And there's a great study that shows that when we don't plan our read alouds, we miss instructional opportunities. So not only do I want to, in this book, make the case for the necessity of the read alouds, but also give a way to use read alouds that are intentional purposeful, and really maximize student learning.

And so that's a big portion of the book.

Ross Romano: What what grade level should be using read alouds?

Molly Ness: Sure. So, I would argue that we never age out of read alouds. If we did, audiobooks, you know, wouldn't be as big as they are. It's something that Donna Lynn Miller, who is a [00:29:00] sort of well known librarian, lets us, lets us know. I wrote the book for pre K through grade eight and I am very intentional in saying that does not say that is not to send the message that read alouds are not for high school kids.

I just don't have any credibility as a high school teacher. I never was a high school teacher, so I don't want to write something that I haven't had lived experience through. But again, we all benefit from read alouds. There's actually some sort of new science that shows that read alouds are particularly effective for adults who are struggling with memory and dementia and some of those language processing things.

So we never age.

Ross Romano: And so read, you know, read alouds certainly can take place anywhere. But I guess specifically thinking about having our educator listeners in mind The planning process and taking the steps to really plan to integrate read alouds into the classroom in a more intentional way. [00:30:00] What, what would some of those steps look like?

Molly Ness: Sure. So, well, my first step would be selecting purposeful texts. And that's sort of an obvious one. But research shows that teachers tend to choose books. Fiction highly, highly dominates. That the average book book selected by a teacher is about 25 years old, and they're very narrow in their focus, so they tend to be Christian based holidays or American focused, and that's not reflective of our entire population.

So when I say start with a good book, I mean push the envelope with, you know, let's move out of our comfort zone of reading the book that we loved as a kid, because kids today have access to lots of different texts, so, and also being mindful that we can read. nonfiction texts, and that serves a whole nother sort of purpose and has lots of other benefits.

I also think we have to really go into the text, already having evaluated the text, [00:31:00] for its obstacles and its opportunities. So where are things that you really want to hone in on and focus on, and where are places that if you don't do something before the read aloud, kids are not going to understand it?

What is the background knowledge that kids have to have coming into this text? So I always reference a well known picture book, Mo Willems picture book called Knuffle Bunny, which takes place in a laundromat. And if you don't know what a laundromat is, Going into the text because maybe you've never been to one.

Maybe you have a laundry room or a washer and dryer in your home. You already are. Your comprehension is already compromised. So we have to go in to text sort of knowing what we need to do front loading and pre teaching to get background knowledge in order to support comprehension. Then another big thing as I plan my read alouds is I use think alouds.

And when we look at the language that parents and caregivers use, used during read alouds. It's mostly [00:32:00] questions to assess kids comprehension. So we'll ask them recall questions. Where did the boy go next? What was the girl's name? Or, you know, what do you think might happen next? Well, those are all assessing comprehension.

They're not building comprehension. And a think aloud is when we sort of take that invisible process of understanding and we kind of crack open our head and use first person narrative language to show what we're doing to a kid, for a kid to make sense of a text. There's a whole slew of research around the power of think aloud.

So a think aloud is something like, I wish I could ask the author. whatever. Or, I'm getting the sense here to show an inference. And that is literally modeling. So, a big thing for me is moving away from just questions to assess comprehension, but really language that builds comprehension, which is the think aloud.

Ross Romano: So, what what might the read alouds look [00:33:00] like across different subject areas? You can either, if there's a couple of examples or whatever you think is the best way to illustrate that, but keeping in mind that this is a possibility. in really any classroom in any, any subject area that it's not just in the language arts classroom,

Molly Ness: Yeah

Ross Romano: are there ways in which it might look different or, or may just be integrated in a, in a place where it's not as traditional?

Molly Ness: Sure. So we also have to push past this notion that the read aloud only counts if you're sort of the kindergarten teacher in a rocking chair with all your kids on the carpet in front of you. A read aloud, I always aim for like 15 minutes a day at least. And it could be in short duration, so it doesn't have to be a picture book start to finish.

It could be a you know, a newspaper article. If you're a science teacher talking about climates, you can bring in the newspaper article, which shows, you know, the rise in temperatures this past summer because of climate change. If you are [00:34:00] a P. E. teacher, I actually worked with a P. E. teacher who was constantly changing games and sports that he was introducing.

And normally he would just show a video of here are the rules and or explain them. And so instead he, when he was teaching volleyball, he literally went to the U. S. Volleyball Association and read aloud and did think aloud of those rules and procedures. If you are a social studies teacher and you are studying a particular political figure or leader, read their speeches, read their letters, read their journal entries, because we have to help kids understand that all these different formats and genres of text help us in different ways to gain knowledge and that a read aloud doesn't only count if it's sort of the traditional idea that we have in our in our head that math teachers can do read alouds.

There's actually a pretty compelling body of research showing that when kids are read to in math, their computation increases, their [00:35:00] ability to do analytical thinking and solve mathematical you know, apply mathematic concepts increases. So it's not just for the English arts teacher in that sort of warm, fuzzy, kids on the carpet kind of environment.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Are there any other, you know, I'm sure there's a long list, but but as far as I guess some of the key You know, current understandings from, from the up to date understanding of the science of reading. And and as you, you mentioned earlier, teachers having a lot of interest in understanding that better particular things that are worth highlighting that maybe were, you know, at one point out of favor or thought to not be effective or because as you, as you've, indicated there's, there's a lot of pieces necessary to what it means to be a strong reader.

It's not just the mechanics of it. You [00:36:00] know, there's the comprehension and the subject matter knowledge, background knowledge, and and, and all these different pieces of it. And and it's certainly an area of teaching and learning that Has been debated, and there's been, you know, a lot of different approaches taken and, and just within the U.

S., not to mention different ways that it's done internationally. But yeah, anything in, in particular that are some of the things maybe that you've been in discussion most about with educators recently, or, you know, things We now feel like we have a very good understanding of, through the science of reading, that maybe our, you know, maybe practice is still catching up to that.

Molly Ness: Sure. So, well, I think one of the big conversations that the science of reading is bringing to light is the role of background knowledge and how what you know about a topic, so informs your understanding of a text. There's a a [00:37:00] study that was performed in 1988. It's not officially called the baseball study, but many people know it as the baseball study.

So it's an old study, 1988. It kind of pains me to say 1988 is old. I remember 1988 fondly. But in this brilliant study, some researchers took a group of kids. I think there were 64 kids in their sample size. And they had kids that were, according to standardized tests, strong readers, and then there were kids who were weak readers.

They had kids read a passage that was about baseball, and it was really, really thick in baseball language. So it talked about a pitcher winding up and somebody rounding the base and coming home. But what I didn't tell you is in these groups, there were kids who knew a lot about baseball, and then there were kids who didn't know very much about baseball.

The kids who knew about baseball, maybe they played on Little League, or they, you know, watched it with their family and then what they did was these researchers had kids come up to this little diorama that they had created with little baseball [00:38:00] figurines, and they had kids. reenact the passage that they had just read.

So they're basically having kids do a retelling of a story, which is very much a valid comprehension measure. And what they found kind of blew their mind, and it has been replicated time and time again, that your knowledge of the topic mattered more than your reading skill. So, the kids who knew a lot about baseball, but were low readers, or classified as weak readers, outperformed the kids who were strong readers with not very much knowledge about baseball.

So when we have conversations about the science of reading, background knowledge is really getting a heyday in terms of how much it matters. And so that's why we're starting to see all these knowledge building curriculum kind of, kind of come to come to schools and districts and such. That being said, we can't overlook the role of.

teaching kids reading comprehension strategies. So it's not, well, [00:39:00] strategies don't matter anymore, and it's all just, let's double down on background knowledge. We don't, we want to be careful not to sort of over correct. So I think that's one of the things that's, that's really getting a lot of attention in the science of reading.

And then the other thing that, I often share, particularly with regard to read alouds, is a 19, I'm going to mess up the year, it was either 1983 or 1984, meta analysis, and a meta analysis is sort of a synthesis of all these studies, showed that kids listening comprehension, what they can listen, understand when the text is read to them, outpaces their reading comprehension until about age 13, or 7th or 8th grade.

What that means is that if you are teaching Kids who are kindergarten all the way up through middle school, they can access really sophisticated text that's well above their grade level when it is delivered orally. And that when we're giving them those oral delivery of text through these read alouds, we're actually sort of [00:40:00] increasing their literacy by background knowledge and language structures and vocabulary.

And so it's the case for not just reading aloud, but more importantly, reading aloud from texts that is above their grade level. For more information visit www. FEMA. gov (ad here)

Ross Romano: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think, I mean, the background knowledge piece is is, It's really important in a lot of ways I believe. And then it's interesting that, you know, that the study was conducted quite a while ago and yet we're still kind of catching up to some of that. Because I think, you know, You know, part of it comes down to the language that we use to discuss these things, because in my understanding, and I don't have, I certainly don't have your level of expertise, other than I have a lot of these conversations, but background knowledge is A major factor in things such as when there was an investigation of [00:41:00] are standardized tests culturally biased, right?

That really, what it is, is are the standardized tests reliant on an assumption of certain background knowledge that not every student has? And. That being able to have that understanding and that framing could lead to more productive outcomes because it doesn't have the same connotations of malintent, right?

That, that there's, you know, I, I feel like a lot of the struggles to update some of those things are because it feels like it's an attack. Well, this is biased. Oh, well, that means that the person who created it clearly was doing it to be biased versus saying no, if there's a word problem or a reading comprehension thing, and it is referencing things that some students are not familiar with.[00:42:00]

they're going to sort of lose the plot of it and have a harder time following along or in a time test, it might just take them an extra minute or two to figure that one out. And now they've lost time against the other student who was familiar with all of those things. And in some cases, it's not even really the thing it's measuring, right?

Like if a math problem says, if I have five sheep and then I get two horses, how many animals do I have? And I don't, I've never seen a sheep or a horse and my mind is sort of wandering, right? And that really it's, do I know how to do five plus two? And yet and, you know, and that's, that's just the understanding of, okay, what is background knowledge?

Why is that so important? How do we follow along with that? I've experienced it myself. One time I had to edit somebody's essay. That they wrote about Game of Thrones and I was like, I have no idea what any of this stuff is Because [00:43:00] all of the names and the things were Things that I was not I'd never seen the show and And I was having a really hard time figuring out how to how to edit the essay because I didn't I just didn't know the show

Molly Ness: Well, let me, let me give you an example that sort of every time I use it drives me a little bit crazy. I do a lot of work with kids who are being evaluated for language based reading disorders like dyslexia. And there is an assessment that I am looking at their language comprehension. So I am, I'm reading a short passage, they're listening to it, and then I'm asking them a question based on the passage.

So the passage that I always, always makes me crazy, is Miguel takes out a bowl, he chops peppers, he gets tongs, he mixes everything together, and then you're supposed to ask the child, what is Miguel most likely making? And the child is supposed to, what I'm getting at, is their ability to make an inference.

But if you've never, you live in a food desert, you don't [00:44:00] have access to peppers and fresh lettuce and things like that, your background knowledge. is, is superseding your ability to make the inference. And so we're not really, in that case, assessing back assessing their literacy, their, their inferential abilities.

We're getting at their background knowledge. And that, to me, is a big issue of equity and making assumptions that kids are all coming to the page with the same life experiences, or funds of knowledge, or those sorts of things. And we just, there's no way that we can not have texts that with all of the background knowledge and assumptions clearly laid out.

Every text would be, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pages. But what we can do as teachers is be mindful to look at the text and say, okay, what does it assume I know about the topic, the character, the setting, the whatever, the timeline? And if my kids may not have that knowledge, what am I going to do to give them advantage going into the text to, to [00:45:00] improve their comprehension?

So just that mindfulness around it.

Ross Romano: Yeah, yeah, and certainly all part of that mindfulness, that intentionality around selecting texts you talked about the selection of books earlier, and, and the typical age of those books, and there's things there, right? There's background knowledge, there's going to be a lot of things probably referenced in a 25 year old book.

That a 12 year old has never heard of and versus, you know, staying up to date as a teacher on being a reader, reading, you know, newer materials and really thinking about, okay, how is this applicable? And and if there's something in, you know, In an older book that's important for them to learn, then I'm making sure to teach them about it and so on so Molly we've covered quite a bit here and, and I'm certainly going to put the links in the show notes to your website.

to the N Book Desert's website where people can find all about that initiative and the podcast and other resources. Is there [00:46:00] anything in particular you'd like to point out on any of those sites or anything else, any other resources that are available that our listeners might want to check out?

Molly Ness: Sure. Well, people can obviously look at whatever their favorite podcast platform is for end book deserts. And I always say that. Desert has one s not two. If it has two, it's dessert, not desert. And there is a ton of information about different programs about these statistics on the end book deserts.com website and my writing and thought leadership and such can be accessed through my personal website, which is drmollyness.com.

Ross Romano: Excellent. We will put those links below. Listeners, you can check all that out. You can learn about Molly's books. There's a variety of other resources there. Of course, the podcast. She's had a number of really interesting guests. So if you're just interested in general about all kinds of efforts to, to make books more available, to promote reading, no [00:47:00] matter what your role is in that, there's a lot of great conversations there.

So check all of that out. Please also do subscribe to the Authority if you haven't already. We'll continue to bring you more conversations around literacy for this National Literacy Month campaign and, and more interviews with authors from across the spectrum. Visit bpodcast. network to learn about all of our podcasts or learn more about Reading is Fundamental at rif.org. Thanks again for being with us and thank you, Molly.

Molly Ness: My pleasure. Thank you.