Everything Scientists Know About the Teaching of Reading

This session will be a brisk tour of the scientific research on the teaching of reading, focusing on four components of competent reading: fluent decoding, comprehension, high reading motivation, and successful completion of discipline-specific reading tasks. For each goal we will review pedagogic techniques that have proven successful with a broad variety of students and in a broad set of contexts. We will also review popular pedagogic techniques that have a frail or absent research base. A cross-cutting theme will be that, although each of the four factors tends to be associated with particular grade levels, teachers at any grade should have an understanding of each factor, and can contribute to student success in each.