Helping educators build and maintain healthy literacy ecosystems to support transfer of knowledge at scale and improve student outcomes.

GUEST COLUMN | by Ethan Scherer

What does science and social studies have to do with moving the needle on nationwide reading outcomes? 

• Only thirty-five percent of 4^th grade students were proficient readers before the pandemic, and this has declined. 
• Research shows that high-quality science and social studies units can help build skilled readers.

The good news is that your ELA block doesn’t have to work alone to achieve your academic goals.

Instead, educators can steadily and systematically build connections over time to help students transfer explicitly taught knowledge to new, untaught topics —in the classroom and beyond.

‘…educators can steadily and systematically build connections over time to help students transfer explicitly taught knowledge to new, untaught topics —in the classroom and beyond.’

Developed out of READS LAB at Harvard University, Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) is an elementary science and social studies program that improves academic outcomes – including literacy and math. 

How does MORE do it? Schemas. What are schemas? They are knowledge frameworks that help students organize and connect information. 

READS Lab found that their schema-building program caused lasting improvements in elementary-grade students’ ability to read for understanding in science, social studies, and English language arts.

How did they get such powerful results?

It wasn’t just due to standards-aligned lessons. MORE’s unique focus on schemas and returning to topics and concepts year-after-year with increasing complexity, encouraged students to “hang” new vocabulary and topics onto existing knowledge to make connections and bigger patterns visible. For example, in economics, students “think like a buyer” in first grade and think about market systems as a whole by third grade. 

Through an innovative, digital portal that can be incorporated into a classroom Learning Management System, MORE equips teachers with three evidence-based tools:

• Lessons
• Digital activities
• Formative assessments of transfer

Teachers use these three tools flexibly to get their students reading, writing, and discussing complex science and social studies topics.

READS LAB

Thanks to the funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the team behind MORE was able to conduct a randomized controlled trial – a rigorous study using the highest levels of evidence –  to follow students who received MORE over time, as well as after the program completed. They found that:

• The difference in reading for long-term MORE students was equal to more than two months’ worth of additional literacy learning after embedding MORE within the science and social studies blocks for only 6 weeks per year.
• MORE also improved state mathematics scores.
• The results of MORE persisted two years later without additional lessons.

But teaching schemas doesn’t start and end in the classroom.

The MORE team spent years distilling research into core principles and practices that build schemas throughout the school day. The next phase is all about making these principles and practices available to a broader audience. MORE has developed a unique model to successfully scale up and transfer these significant results by:

• Building a low-cost, high-impact teacher training model that is being used by more than 1,800 teachers.
• Developing a robust technological infrastructure that lets teachers, administrators and district leaders cohere around a common goal and leverages resources, real-time data, and tools to adapt the program to their context.
• Empowering local educators to adapt the core concepts of MORE to meet specific needs of their students and fit flexibly into their school day.
• Increasing the number of students served by more than tenfold in the last three years.

Based upon this strong foundation, MORE won a highly selective federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant to continue to scale its impact to help kids learn to become skilled readers.  The combined support of CZI and the EIR grant expands the reach and access to MORE, and provides an additional runway to allow for long-term sustainability and growth of the program.The grant and CZI’s continued support will provide funding through the end of 2029, providing time to develop MORE’s self-sustaining model.

Here’s the bottom line: MORE’s core principles and practices – their emphasis on schemas and transfer – can be applied to any subject in any classroom. So, instead of skimping on science and social studies, try a schematic approach to improve academic outcomes. If you are a district with over 20,000 students and want to hear more, let the MORE team know via the MORE website sign-up page. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed about our offerings as we continue to scale.

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Ethan Scherer is the Director of READS Lab at Harvard University. READS Lab helps educators build and maintain healthy literacy ecosystems to support transfer of knowledge at scale and improve student outcomes and created the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE). Connect with Ethan on Linkedin.

The post The Untapped Potential of Schema Awareness: Connecting and Organizing Knowledge  appeared first on EdTech Digest.