In conversation with Dr. Carolyn Brown on literacy, technology and the future of reading.
INTERVIEW | by Victor Rivero
With a passion for understanding, Dr. Carolyn Brown is Chief Academic Officer and co-founder of WordFlight, an edtech startup that identifies and addresses gaps in basic reading skills to help students become fluent readers. When teachers use WordFlight to develop students’ decoding and automatic word recognition, they equip students with the foundational skills they need to become skilled readers. WordFlight is evidence based and aligned with the Science of Reading and the principles underlying Structured Literacy.
‘For as long as I can remember, my mother always reinforced her belief that all children have equal potential as learners and are deserving of the best education and experiences possible to reach their potential.’
Over the past 30 years, Dr. Brown (pictured) and husband, Jerry Zimmermann, have co-founded three companies (Breakthrough to Literacy, the Iowa Language and Literacy Institute and Foundations in Learning). Each of these endeavors has focused on optimizing student learning and facilitating access to literacy. Through intensive work with children and teachers, they developed and implemented Breakthrough to Literacy, a blended literacy program for PreK-3 that served schools across the country. A decade ago, they began developing an innovative tool that incorporated a robust learning model into a technology framework to evaluate and optimize instruction for students who struggled to acquire and/or generalize reading skills.
This work led to WordFlight, a blended online instructional and assessment tool. Through partnerships with schools, the learning model has been continuously tested and refined. The online assessment tools were validated by Phase I & II SBIR contracts from the Institute of Education Sciences at the Department of Education. An ongoing collaboration between FIL and the University of Iowa has resulted in a strong track record of independent and collaborative R&D (both product refinement and basic research) that marries theory and practice—setting the stage for all students to access gateway reading skills essential for educational success. Brown and Zimmermann are both adjunct professors in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa.
In this EdTech Digest exclusive, Dr. Brown shares her impetus for improving learning through technology, more about the science of reading, the importance of fluency, what can be done, some results, and a look ahead.
You have dedicated your career to supporting reading literacy. Why are you so passionate about this work?
I grew up in a New Mexico farming community where my classmates—many of whom did not speak English and had little experience with formal education—brought diverse cultural, language, and literacy experiences to school. This upbringing, as well as the value my mother placed on education, was very influential in cultivating my commitment to learning.
For as long as I can remember, my mother always reinforced her belief that all children have equal potential as learners and are deserving of the best education and experiences possible to reach their potential. More specifically, she believed all children can learn to read, and often emphasized the critical importance of language and literacy as they relate to exploring the world, nurturing empathy, developing ideas, and fostering curiosity.
This helped me form a deep interest in the development and use of oral and written language, so much so that I focused my early research at the University of Iowa on inferential processing in young children. This allowed me to explore and study how children learn to learn and learn to read.
My husband Jerry Zimmermann, who is also a research scientist, and I have now spent the last four decades working to optimize language, learning, and literacy development as part of our commitment to reading and equitable education for all students.
There is a lot of focus on the Science of Reading today. Can you tell us how your company’s approach intersects with this focus?
This question gets right to the heart of our current work. The Science of Reading (SOR) movement has impacted national awareness and the implementation of evidence-based practices for reading development. The importance of explicit instruction, which is core to the SOR, focuses on “what” must be learned.
And, while this is an essential step in building foundational skills, it is not enough.
Today, many students still cannot reach fluency, especially those most at risk and historically marginalized. At least 50 percent of these underperforming students do not have automatic word recognition, a critical precursor to fluency.
To address this problem, Foundations in Learning, the education company Jerry and I co-founded in 2009, pivoted to the Science of Learning (SOL), which includes decades of research about how automaticity and fluency develop in complex skills across many domains. After years of development and testing around both SOR and SOL, Foundations in Learning operationalized the parameters of structured practice to focus on “how” students learn and launched WordFlight.
WordFlight is an actionable online solution that integrates systematically-structured, rich, and varied practice to transition students from basic reading skills to develop automaticity and ultimately reach fluency. It seamlessly integrates learning science, reading science, and personalized learning.
Why is reading fluently so important and why do so many students struggle with becoming fluent readers?
Fluency is essential for grade-level comprehension of written text. It is a complex skill that requires the seamless integration of many components of language. Prerequisite to this integration is automatic word recognition, which is critical for fluency because it frees up cognitive resources so the reader can devote more energy to understanding the text’s meaning, making connections, and drawing inferences.
There are many reasons students cannot read fluently. Many students lack decoding skills or cannot efficiently use their decoding knowledge to automatically recognize words. The underlying learning processes needed to automatically recognize words and reach fluency are also often not the focus of classroom instruction.
‘The underlying learning processes needed to automatically recognize words and reach fluency are also often not the focus of classroom instruction.’
With WordFlight, we help students automatically recognize words, individually and within connected text, so they can focus on deriving meaning from the text. This means students can effortlessly read words and generalize their skills to new words and contexts.
What are some ways educators can help students become fluent readers?
For teachers, it is important to realize that without automatic word recognition, students cannot reach fluency. Therefore, instruction and practice need to be systematically structured to provide students with level- and content-appropriate experiences. Findings from the SOL further show that structuring practice around systematic variation—or changing tasks and content—activates long-term memory systems, therefore increasing retention and automatic retrieval.
To impact fluency in the classroom, teachers can:
- Expose students to varied passages. Instead of having students perform repeated readings to improve fluency, expose the student to words in passages that are varied in specific ways. For example, varied passages may contain similar words or word-types used in different sentence structures, but still share similar background information and meaning.
- Find the right tools to support students’ automatic word recognition, as well as continued fluency development. Fluency requires automatic word recognition at the word level, sentence level, and passage level, and it is important to know what components must be integrated into each level. High-quality programs can help teachers with this.
How can technology help get more students on a path to reading fluency?
Technology has shown to be a very effective way to help students develop complex skills. It can help teachers provide students with increased opportunities to “level up” their reading practice, and then teachers can leverage those new skills to improve students’ fluency and comprehension of connected text.
However, for the technology itself to be effective, the underlying learning model, learning goals, instructional design, purpose of practice, and progression algorithms must be sound. The technology also needs to provide teachers with the insights and tools to bring reading to life for students by expanding their knowledge, world connections, empathy, and agency.
‘…for the technology itself to be effective, the underlying learning model, learning goals, instructional design, purpose of practice, and progression algorithms must be sound.’
Simply digitizing existing print materials and activities does not exploit the real power of technology, nor does it drive learning through personalized instruction.
What are some results you’ve seen from educators using a tech-enabled approach to support their literacy instruction?
Teachers, administrators, researchers, and developers have seen a dramatic impact on student success when effective, high-quality technology is implemented well.
Among the most impressive results I’ve seen involves students from a high poverty middle school who were involved in a randomized, control trial using WordFlight. These students were led by a group of committed teachers, as well as their principal, who collectively believed that all students can learn to read under the right conditions. These educators, as well as students, embraced WordFlight as part of their reading intervention and began using the online instructional program 20 minutes per day, four to five days per week. The program provided the essential practice students needed while giving teachers critical observations, insights, and actions to support reading fluency.
As a result of this, students who used WordFlight showed significant growth by the end of the year, out-performing the control group intervention. They notably scored 38 percentage points higher in automatic word recognition and 35 percentage points higher in decoding.
What do you see for the future of edtech or technology and education, especially when it comes to reading?
Obviously, it is hard to predict what will happen in this quickly-evolving digital world. However, I believe the future of edtech when it comes to reading resides in the deliberate and effective integration of learning principles into curricula and professional learning.
Employing the power of technology to deliver learning models built on these principles will not only advance each child’s opportunity to become a proficient and confident reader, it will further our collective understanding of the intersection between underlying learning processes, effective curricula, and classroom practices.
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Victor Rivero is the Editor-in-Chief of EdTech Digest. Write to: victor@edtechdigest.com
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