Fourth graders wearing braids and friendship bracelets encircle preservice teacher Zoe Lightcap at Weinland Park Elementary School in Columbus. The children don’t know it, but Lightcap, in her fourth year studying teaching and learning at Ohio State, is putting research into practice as she reads The Kindness Book. And she’s working the crowd like a pro.
“Kindness is listening,” she reads, then stops, scanning faces in front of her.
“Have you ever said something, and everyone else is talking and not listening to you?” Lightcap asks, as if she’s letting the children in on her secret.
Everyone’s hands shoot up, including that of mentor teacher Beth Stultz, ’98 MA. Lightcap has knit the classmates together in their shared experience.
“It’s happened to all of us,” Lightcap exclaims. “How does that feel?”
“Unbalanced,” one child says.
“Disrupted,” says another.
“Not in the green zone,” says a third, referring to social emotional training at the school.
“I like that you’re using those words,” Lightcap responds, before telling students to discuss with a partner how they are kind to themselves and others.
Lightcap has carefully constructed her knowledge to this point. In core literacy courses, Ohio State students role play and critique interactive read-alouds, the technique Lightcap used. Research has shown that developing linguistic processing skills, which dialogue encourages, can build vocabulary and comprehension.
At Ohio State, research underpins this training in all teaching and learning instruction. Course curricula are continually updated to reflect the latest scientific evidence, ensuring that theories and research are put into practice.
But Lightcap didn’t just learn about language concepts in class. She helped to research them. For three years, the undergrad interned in the lab of Professor Shayne Piasta, who has conducted more than 50 literacy research studies.
As a sophomore and junior, Lightcap assisted in a multi-institutional, federal study that tested a targeted intervention for first-graders who were having trouble comprehending what they tried to read. The language-focused intervention taught strategies to help students learn vocabulary, make inferences and monitor comprehension – generally improving their understanding of texts.
Lightcap administered assessments in central Ohio schools to determine if the instruction improved children’s reading comprehension. For Lightcap, the experience underlined an idea her cohort discussed in class.
“That concept of teacher as researcher, and how once you’re teaching, you’re constantly researching and refining your craft,” Lightcap said. “I saw through my research experience how much those things can overlap.”
“If we do see ourselves as researchers,” she said, “then we can create amazing classrooms.”
Continually guided by evidence
American children lost ground in reading during the COVID-19 pandemic, but in truth had struggled for years before that disruption. Many states have recently restructured teacher training to not only support teaching language and comprehension but also to focus more on helping children hear and manipulate sounds in words — phonemic awareness — and piece those sounds together to make words.
All teacher education majors in the College of Education and Human Ecology have been trained in dedicated phonics courses since 2001. But over those decades, literacy courses — including phonics instruction — have been continually refined as research comes to light.
Piasta is among researchers contributing to the science of reading and also the course supervisor and an instructor of the course, Language and Word Study for All Learners (EDUTL 5469), one of four reading core courses that teaching students must take.
“I’m constantly updating the course,” Piasta said, to reflect ongoing research she and others were doing. That includes reinforcing concepts about alphabet knowledge — that children should be taught letter sounds and names simultaneously — based on Piasta’s own seminal research.
“We get to the level of understanding phonetics, understanding how different phonemes or sounds are produced,” said Piasta.
“For example, if you say the F sound and you say the V sound, it’s actually being produced in your mouth very similarly,” she said. “It’s whether or not your vocal cords are vibrating. And the reason that we now teach teachers this is because you would often see kids writing an F when it should have been a V or vice versa, and that’s a very logical mistake for them to be making. We are teaching much more detailed, deep content.”
When Piasta worked again to revise the autumn 2024 course, she, along with Assistant Professor Julia Hagge and senior lecturer Maria Borkowski, incorporated even more practices for teaching children who speak different languages and dialects, because they hear and speak sounds differently. Undergraduates view videos about language learning and evidence-based literacy practices and read journal articles, some so new they’re only available online ahead of print.
“Teachers need to know how to teach students to map text to speech and vice versa,” she said. “They need to be able to teach beginning readers (and) middle school level readers. So, the bones of the class are always there. But as we learn more from both research and practice, we are updating how those things are being taught, and if necessary, what is being taught as well.”
New studies funded to refine knowledge
The body of research and scholarship that informs literacy education is extensive — more than 1 million academic texts since 2019 appear on Google Scholar. Many studies are being done by the college as well: Researchers are currently working on multiple literacy research projects funded at more than $17 million.
Professors Jerry D’Agostino and Emily Rodgers have conducted extensive federally funded research, testing a literacy intervention for children with learning difficulties called HEROES. In their Ohio State University Reading Lab, they tutor children as a way to test instructional approaches and inform their research. (They currently are recruiting children 6-9 to receive the free tutoring.) The lab will soon hire undergraduates to assist in the work.
There, they developed a reading assessment tool that they have incorporated into the undergraduate Foundations of Reading course (EDUTL5468), Language and Word Study for All Learners and reading endorsement courses (EDUTL5470 and EDUTL5471), for teaching struggling readers.
“It is something that we’re developing as part of our funded research here in our lab,” Rodgers said, “and we’re teaching pre-service teachers and in-service teachers how to use it.”
Teachers listen as students read a passage and then calculate students’ accuracy based on the number of errors but also the kinds of errors they make. For example, do they read only the first letter of a word correctly, missing subsequent parts of the word?
“This assessment is more focused on how they actually process the print,” D’Agostino said. “We go deeper into … why are they making the errors? It’s drilling down into trying to — through an observational, behavioral perspective — observe the mental decision-making the child is having at that point of difficulty.”
Phonics instruction talks about cracking the reading code: Teaching students to decode words by sounding out letters.
“We’re teaching teachers what the code is and ways to think about how children are using print to decode,” Rodgers said, “and then how to scaffold them from there.”
A lot of phonics instruction works to help children decode words in isolation, which is critical, D’Agostino and Rodgers said.
But, “this (research) is teaching teachers to teach decoding while reading,” Rodgers said. “At some point, the reader’s got to come to text and know how to decode while reading.”
Their research takes phonics to the next level, then puts it into practice by training undergraduate students and professionals to use it.
Is your teacher training validated through testing?
Reading science dictates a two-pronged approach to teaching children to read — helping them learn to decode and read words, but simultaneously bolstering skills that allow them to comprehend what they read.
Today, dozens of professional learning programs train teachers in science of reading practices. Most contain what the experts call “the pillars” of literacy: vocabulary and oral language, phonological awareness, fluency, word reading and comprehension.
“In that very global sense, they would be research-based because they’re targeting the skills we know we need to target, based on research,” Piasta said.
But few training programs have been research tested to see if they actually result in kids reading better. Piasta stresses that major distinction to her graduate students: The elements of a training or intervention might be research based, but is the training or intervention itself research tested as a whole?
Most trainings “do not have a study showing that if you use this program, (which) schools are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for, your teachers will benefit and students will have better literacy outcomes,” Piasta said.
So, Piasta and Ohio State will partner with University of California – Irvine and University of Cincinnati to determine if one popular training works: Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), by Lexia. Teachers will train for two years, with researchers following them and their students to see if the training enhances classroom literacy instruction and reading improves.
The study will make LETRS among the few teacher training programs to be potentially validated. A control group will be followed for comparison.
Trials will be conducted in California schools, where teachers will begin training using science of reading next year – some using LETRS. (Many teachers in Ohio have already completed LETRS or a similar training offered by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.)
The first kindergartners taught by the study’s LETRS-trained teachers will be in fourth grade when it is completed. Good research looks at the effects of a reading program on students over time.
“It’s a lot of work,” Piasta said. “It’s slow going.” That’s why she’s pursuing a new avenue for answering pressing literacy questions more quickly.
Researching how to research more efficiently
Longitudinal randomized control trials like the LETRS study measure effectiveness by following participants for several years. One group receives an intervention while a second group (or control) does not, or continues their typical practices. Data collection and analysis can be lengthy. The process is necessary to validate many practices and interventions, Piasta said.
“But for certain things, we can use a different design, a within-subjects design,” Piasta said.
A scenario explains: Imagine if you want to determine whether students should learn upper- and lower-case letters at the same time, or separately — a question teachers regularly ask Piasta.
A within-studies design might simultaneously teach all students some upper and lowercase letters, like W, E and H, and then teach another set of letters, like I, P, and G, first focusing on uppercase forms and later on lowercase forms. Each student experiences both methods of teaching, so researchers can see how they perform learning both ways.
“In this design, every kid serves as their own control, and every kid gets some instruction,” she said. “And you don’t need as large of a sample size, necessarily, as you would for a randomized control trial.”
A new Battelle Engineering, Technology and Human Affairs grant will allow Piasta to research this question, but the work goes beyond alphabet instruction.
“On a broader scale, the project is about doing a better and more efficient job of validating educational practices,” she said.
The study will be done entirely online, an innovative method that will require working with the Institutional Review Board and technical assistance.
“If this can work, there are tons of advantages over other ways of validating practices as being research-tested and effective,” Piasta said. “One, the sample size can be smaller. Two, if we can do this completely online, we can make sure that we have diversity in our sample, not only of teachers and kids in terms of race and ethnicity and languages spoken, but also geographic diversity,” allowing rural teachers and students to be included.
Large, randomized control trials won’t end, Piasta stressed. (In fact, she just received funding for a new such trial to determine the best strategies for teaching phonological awareness.) But if successful, the BETHA project could be scaled up to more quickly answer questions about reading practices and better instruction.
Then, maybe teachers won’t have to wait years to know what works, and what doesn’t, to get children reading.
A massive challenge for kids
Consider the immense challenge placed on young students when they are asked to read, said Ian Wilkinson, professor of teaching and learning who instructs the undergraduate Foundations of Reading course.
“It’s not only understanding how print maps onto the sound system within spoken language,” Wilkinson said. “But at the same time, they have to have enough cognitive resources left over to integrate what they’re reading with their background knowledge. When you think about the background knowledge involved in reading, it’s immense.”
Artificial intelligence draws from huge, “large language models” to make sense of the world. But children are just beginning to develop knowledge of their surroundings. And some have far fewer resources than others. Getting students talking and interacting allows them to build that knowledge base.
“When students can pool their intellectual resources, they can come up with thinking and with answers and knowledge that go way beyond what any one of them alone was capable of,” he said. “When children think together and combine their intellectual resources, then they can attain levels that, heretofore, we hadn’t seen.”
Wilkinson’s research considers how classroom talk — or dialogic pedagogy — can impact reading comprehension and how even young children can comprehend and formulate arguments, “to weigh up opposing points of view and come to their own decisions about what to believe.”
He gets excited when he sees teachers stepping back, giving more agency to their students. “Almost two-thirds of the (classroom) talk is teacher talk, and at best, about a third is student talk. If we introduce dialogic pedagogy, we can flip that,” he said.
Putting research into practice
Wilkinson and all Ohio State teaching and learning faculty continually incorporate new research — theirs and others — into the coursework students receive. Which means Lightcap, who took Wilkinson’s Foundations of Reading course, isn’t just a preservice teacher. She’s a continuation of that body of research.
“You’re constantly asking yourself research questions like, ‘Did that lesson work? Did they learn? Was that actually effective?’ And then if the answer is no, or if the answer is ‘kind of,’ then just constantly refining it and always collecting data, seeing your classroom as a little laboratory.”
Lightcap doesn’t want to simply hope that her students learn what she’s teaching. She wants to prove they will.
“I want my (class) to be like a little beehive, like a workshop,” she said. “We’re always asking questions and doing something better and improving.”
