Using Knowledge-Building Curriculum Doesn't Guarantee 'Robust' Reading Comprehension
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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E. D. Hirsch
13 min read
Hirsch is the founder of the Core Knowledge curriculum mentioned in the article and the intellectual architect behind knowledge-building approaches to literacy. Understanding his cultural literacy theory provides essential context for why these curricula exist and what they're trying to accomplish.
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Reading comprehension
15 min read
The article centers on the distinction between surface-level and robust comprehension instruction. The Wikipedia article covers the cognitive science of how comprehension actually works, including the role of background knowledge, which directly explains why skills-based instruction alone fails.
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Outcome-based education
18 min read
The article describes how literacy standards are driving teachers to modify curricula in counterproductive ways. Understanding the history and theory of standards-based reform explains the systemic pressures teachers face and why 'unpacking standards' has become so prevalent.
Adopting a truly knowledge-building elementary curriculum—one that is rich in content, including topics in social studies and science—is crucial for improving students’ education outcomes. But no matter how well-constructed a curriculum is, it’s possible for districts and schools to implement it in a way that doesn’t work well. And that happens surprisingly often.
A new study from SRI analyzed reading instruction in four large districts that had been using effective knowledge-building curricula for several years, long enough to figure out how to implement a curriculum well. And yet the researchers found that most reading comprehension instruction—about two-thirds of the lessons observed—supported “surface-level” rather than “robust” understanding.
According to the definitions the researchers used, “surface-level” comprehension instruction focuses on “completing tasks”—often the kinds of tasks laid out in state literacy standards, like describing the setting in a story or explaining how an author uses evidence in an informational text.
“Robust” comprehension instruction, in contrast, might have students engage in some of those tasks, but the focus is on the overall meaning of the text. In other words, instead of using a text to teach a skill, a lesson that leads to robust comprehension puts the text in the foreground, bringing in whatever skills might help students understand and analyze that text.
As one illustration of the difference between surface-level and robust instruction, the study describes two third-grade lessons on the same book, One Giant Leap, about Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. In one classroom, the teacher guided students to identify literal and nonliteral language in the text—a skill matching a literacy standard—and stopped there. In the other, the teacher not only helped students identify literal and nonliteral language but also asked them what Armstrong meant when he described his first step on the moon as “one giant leap for mankind.”
The researchers observed comprehension lessons in 111 classrooms, nearly all of them third- to fifth-grade, focusing on a group of representative schools in each district. The study, conducted during the 2024-25 school year, also involved teacher surveys; interviews with teachers, district and school leaders, and instructional coaches; and observations of professional development sessions.
The study is “methodologically one of the strongest observational studies” of comprehension instruction in the last 50 years, according to the report, and its findings should be applicable nationwide. Those findings also echo a recent meta-analysis of observational studies of comprehension instruction done between 1980 and 2023, which
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