With a background as a classroom teacher, a master's in educational neuroscience, and a doctorate in special education, Dr. Neena Saha has seen all facets of education. In her work, she noticed a gap in the research-to-practice workflow for early literacy and dedicated herself to streamlining the process of finding and disseminating the best educational research for educators. Together, Susan Lambert and Neena discuss the need for reading researchers to work together and collaborate in a more focused and concerted group effort, the challenges of implementation, and how educators can best keep up with research that often feels overwhelming.
Show notes:
Quotes:
"What I did was focus really on dissemination, right? Getting rid of that hurdle of, you know, there's so many journals out there." —Dr. Neena Saha
"You have to look at the full body, you're like cherry picking stuff if you're going to social media and the person with the biggest megaphone wins or whoever has the most interesting way of presenting it." —Dr. Neena Saha
"We need a more concerted effort. There needs to be a bunch of researchers that come together and hash it out. It can't just be single ones here and there." —Dr. Neena Saha
"Teachers or educators out there right now, when you're feeling overwhelmed and you can't figure out how to find the evidence, or some evidence, guess what? We're affirming for you that there's no easy way to do it...this is more of a systemic problem." —Dr. Neena Saha
"It's not enough to do the science. You have to make sure it gets out there." —Dr. Neena Saha
With a background as a classroom teacher, a master's in educational neuroscience, and a doctorate in special education, Dr. Neena Saha has seen all facets of education. In her work, she noticed a gap in the research-to-practice workflow for early literacy and dedicated herself to streamlining the process of finding and disseminating the best educational research for educators. Together, Susan Lambert and Neena discuss the need for reading researchers to work together and collaborate in a more focused and concerted group effort, the challenges of implementation, and how educators can best keep up with research that often feels overwhelming.
Show notes:
Quotes:
"What I did was focus really on dissemination, right? Getting rid of that hurdle of, you know, there's so many journals out there." —Dr. Neena Saha
"You have to look at the full body, you're like cherry picking stuff if you're going to social media and the person with the biggest megaphone wins or whoever has the most interesting way of presenting it." —Dr. Neena Saha
"We need a more concerted effort. There needs to be a bunch of researchers that come together and hash it out. It can't just be single ones here and there." —Dr. Neena Saha
"Teachers or educators out there right now, when you're feeling overwhelmed and you can't figure out how to find the evidence, or some evidence, guess what? We're affirming for you that there's no easy way to do it...this is more of a systemic problem." —Dr. Neena Saha
"It's not enough to do the science. You have to make sure it gets out there." —Dr. Neena Saha
We have this vast knowledge base out there, but how do we get it out to people that need it?
Susan Lambert:This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. We've officially wrapped up Season 7 and Season 8 is right around the corner. In the meantime, we've got a trio of very special conversations that I can't wait to bring to you. The first is with foundational reading expert Dr. Neena Saha . After getting her master's in educational neuroscience and her Ph. D. in special education, Dr. Saha created the Reading Research Recap. Through this resource, Dr. Saha curates and disseminates the most critical reading research. As you'll hear in this conversation, this is no easy task. Dr. Saha has been regularly combing through more than 60 academic journals. On this episode, we talk about just how challenging it is for educators to keep up with research, and Dr. Saha lays out her vision for a better system. I hope you'll be inspired by this conversation. Well, Neena, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. We're thrilled to have you.
Neena Saha:Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. A huge fan of your work, Susan.
Susan Lambert:Same! I think we're in this together and we're gonna talk a little bit about having this common theme of research translation. But before we get there, we would love if you could tell our listeners just a little bit about yourself and actually, we'll try to hit two things, right? So you became interested in literacy and you have a passion for science. So I think there's two threads there.
Neena Saha:Yeah, there certainly is . So it's kind of funny because I cannot remember a time when I did not know about science. My family has a huge background in it. So kind of going, you know, way back, my great-grandfather on my father's side is a famous Indian scientist, Meghnad Saha . He came up with this ionization equation, so it bears his name, it's the Saha ionization equation, and I'm learning a lot more about it right now. But basically he combined different elements, disparate elements, across different fields of science and could tell you—So I found this poetic way of describing it, it's what is the weight of a sunbeam? So he could tell you the chemical composition of the sun from this equation. And what's amazing is that they did it just by, you know, he did it just by thought, right? There were no sort of telescopes or things that he used. It was just combining these things. So he was nominated for the Nobel. He never got it, but he was elected into the Fellow of the Royal Society, he's FRS, Which is like what Newton and all of those—
Susan Lambert:Right? Wow .
Neena Saha:So , yeah. Kind of of crazy story that I'm rediscovering now. Like I always knew we had this famous science ancestor, but more immediately, you know, both my parents are scientists. My dad since passed away, but he was a physicist, my mom's a biologist. And funny story about my mom, she has two Ph.D.s. So her first one was in history and it was on the history of science, but she liked the science so much that she switched over to become a biologist.
Susan Lambert:Two Ph.D.s, wow. That's a big thing.
Neena Saha:Right ? Doctor, doctor.
Susan Lambert:So how did that put you in the world of literacy then? If you come from this background of science.
Neena Saha:Well, I think I kind of rebelled, you know, when it's so much science growing up, I had, you know, I was one of those children that just learned to read kind of naturally. And so language came easy to me. I always loved words and word origins and vocabulary. And I think that was, not to blame my parents, parenting is hard, but I think that it was a little bit overlooked. Everything was kind of math and science in our household. And so I kind of stayed away from science for a bit and I'll tell you how I came back to it, but loved literature and went to a school that was a school of the arts and focused on reading and stuff. And so one of my first jobs out of college was being a special education teacher. And so I had to teach students who are ninth and tenth grade with severe reading difficulty . So really persistent dyslexia. They were reading at maybe a second- and third-grade level. And I was trained. Luckily we had a principal who's really kind of aware of the science at the time. I got trained in the Wilson Just Words program.
Susan Lambert:Okay.
Neena Saha:Implemented it with fidelity and some of the students, you know, did great, and others still didn't. And this was, this question of what's going on. And I knew , we, I always had that scientific background, so I was thinking, sure , what could be happening here? Why did some do great and some not? Now we know from the science, or I guess it was always known, I just didn't know that there's a group of really, they call 'em treatment resistors that are, it's really hard to figure out what to do for them. And so I was really interested in that. And two reasons kind of led to me going back to school and getting my master's in educational neurosciences. Interested in figuring out what, why that program didn't work for them, what was I doing wrong, how could we help them? And also kind of on a sad personal note, my dad had passed away and I was kind of thinking, you know, maybe it's time, I think people could relate to this, when you lose someone, you kind of go back and you wanna figure out who they were more and all those questions you didn't have. And so I turned kind of back to science in a way and kind of came full circle, so.
Susan Lambert:So you did your master's , but you also went, went beyond your master's , right? So what happened in that process of, what did you learn in that master's program and then what brought you to a doctoral program?
Neena Saha:Yeah, it's a great question. So I was really fascinated at the time, and I think a lot of people were, and maybe still are with these beautiful fMRI images. And if you know, the listeners don't know, fMRI just stands for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, may have gotten that wrong, but something along those lines, where you put a kid in the scanner and you can see these areas of their brain light up. And there's the thought at the time that this would have, it's gonna revolutionize education, like educational neuroscience. We're gonna combine what we know about the brain, figure out why those treatment resistors, those kids that I was tasked with teaching, why they weren't learning. And it was really interesting. But I learned at the time, which is why I got my master's in educational neuroscience, but I was, it still felt a little bit far removed from the classroom where I came from.
Susan Lambert:Mm-hmm.
Neena Saha:You know, we don't put kids in scanners to see if they can't read. We can just listen to them read out loud, right? We know from behavioral, evidence I should say, and behavioral here, I just mean, you know, their behavior of reading out loud.
Susan Lambert:Yeah.
Neena Saha:So I looked at different doctoral programs. I ended up choosing one at Vanderbilt with Laurie Cutting because she had this amazing lab that had behavioral research as well as neuroscience. So I got to see what I liked and I quickly focused in more on the behavioral part of it.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . That's interesting. And it was during this time, was it during your time at Vanderbilt that you actually thought, "Hey, I'm gonna start this thing called the Reading Research Recap?"
Neena Saha:Actually, it was a little later.
Susan Lambert:Was it ?
Neena Saha:Yeah.
Susan Lambert:Oh , okay. Tell us about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the seeds of it started there because I had a son , you know, I became a mom like the second year in my program. And my son actually had language delays.
Susan Lambert:Okay.
Neena Saha:And here I was trying to figure out, you know, I knew a lot about reading, but I didn't know about language delay. And I have access to cutting-edge research and researchers who know about this. But I still felt lost. And it's like, if I feel this way, I can't imagine what parents who aren't enmeshed in the research world, how they feel. So it's like I started thinking about science translation and access and issues of that. And the Recap started, it's kind of [an] interesting story. So I wasn't set on academia and part of my research at Vanderbilt resulted in a new measure for K–2 text . So we have lots of readability formulas or Lexiles are great for 3–8 market leaders, but we don't have a whole lot in that early reader space focused on decoding.
Susan Lambert:Mm-hmm.
Neena Saha:And so we created a measure, we published some initial validation evidence on it, and I was really interested in seeing if I could take that and productize it. I wasn't sure we could, but I wanted to see if there's a way to make it useful for parents, teachers, and sort of matching, finding books.
Susan Lambert:Mm-hmm.
Neena Saha:And so I didn't go into academia. I ended up starting my own company, Elemeno. And as part of Elemeno is when I started the Recap, I was listening to a podcast, actually, about Substacks, the company where you could create a newsletter super easily. And I was like, well, if I were to create a newsletter, what would it be on? And I was like, well, research comes out all the time and there's no easy way to stay on top of it as a doc student.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. So that's where it came from. Okay. We , I gotta stop because I have to take a little bit of a turn. It's so interesting for you to have said, "Well, because I'm a mom, and I had a son that had issues with language," because there's so many of us, there are so many of us in this field that come into this field for some very similar reasons , because of a child that struggles.
Neena Saha:Yeah. And you don't, I think it hits you, you know, it becomes so personal, when you have , when it's that close to you. 'Cause like I said, language was always really easy for me. So I'm like, "Where did this child come from? Is he mine?" Like, I had no clue how to help him. So to feel that helpless, I don't know . So yeah, that's part of the impetus, too, is like, how do we get, we have this vast knowledge base out there, but how do we get it out to people that need it?
Susan Lambert:Yeah. And and the other thing that I thought was really interesting, and I'm finding this more and more, is that it's, teachers really struggle and probably parents and others, too, with understanding the difference between language and reading. And I wouldn't even say difference, but how important this idea of language is to reading development.
Neena Saha:Oh my gosh, yes. And I even came late. You know, it's to that idea, right? Reading is mapping what you know about the oral language to print. And I didn't know a whole lot about oral language or alphabetic, you know, and I learned a lot in the process and seeing the activities that the therapist did with Alex about what can you do to help a child learn to use their words and, you know, he turned out fine. He was in the, like, seventh percentile when they tested him at first and then caught up to his peers. Early intervention! Tennessee. We were in Tennessee. It works. It's amazing.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . Shout out, early intervention works. That is, that's so wise. So for those listeners that don't understand what we're talking about with the Reading Research Recap, so the Reading Research Recap was a newsletter that you actually pushed out that what you did was you scanned the most current research related to reading. And you then sort of translated it, sort of what we're trying to do on this podcast. You translated it for normal people to be able to read.
Neena Saha:I tried to translate it! So full disclosure, I still struggle, and I think the field does, with translation, as they should. I have not seen a good example. We have examples out there. W ell, we could talk about this later, I'm sure we'll get to it, too. But I did curate, so what I did was f ocus really on dissemination, right? Getting rid of that hurdle of there's so many journals out there, which are the quote-unquote "good" peer-reviewed journals with high i mpact factors? 'Cause there's hundreds, right? But if you do this for a w hile, you start to see, you recognize where the leaders in the field are publishing and there's a handful, maybe about 50 or 60. And you, do you want me to talk about my process?
Susan Lambert:Oh, that, yeah, I would love to. Let's do it now.
Neena Saha:So what I did is I signed up for journal alerts. A lot of people don't know you could go to the journal homepage, sign up for an RSS, and they'll alert you when a new journal's out. Now some make it pretty complicated and they only do like table of contents alerts once there's an issue put together. So it's kind of hard 'cause I had to come back , kind of triage. I get all these emails a day from these journals, but I have to make sure I haven't seen them before. And then I also do Google Scholar alerts.
Susan Lambert:Okay.
Neena Saha:So if listeners don't know this, you can go to Google Scholar, type in keywords, and it'll kind of give you even web pages , dissertations that come out with that. But I'd have to say a lot of it isn't great. What I did was take all this sort of like grunt work out of compiling what I thought as someone in the field would be interesting to other researchers, teachers, parents.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. So when you just said that there's like 50 or 60 journals, do you literally go in and subscribe for an alert to each one?
Neena Saha:I did. Isn't that crazy?
Susan Lambert:That's so crazy.
Neena Saha:It is crazy, and Susan, sometimes it gets to me, you know, there's some days, 'cause I've been doing this for three years now and it was weekly when I first started. So there's pros and cons to that. Whereas now it's kind of monthly. But here's the thing, right now I used to do summaries or copy the abstract or give something so they wouldn't have to click out of the page, just to make it easier. Now I just kind of list the articles and people by a heading. So I should say the Reading Research Recap was acquired by MetaMetrics, Elemeno was acquired by MetaMetrics and the Recap was an asset that they acquired. And so I continued that through them. And you can sign up through, if you go to Lexile, the hub.lexile.com, you can sign up to get on the monthly version now, which is the only version.
Susan Lambert:Okay.
Neena Saha:A lot of people still go to SubStack and try and sign up, but that one's discontinued, so don't go .
Susan Lambert:That's good to know.
Neena Saha:So yeah, and we could, I'm sure we could put those in the notes.
Susan Lambert:Yep, we can put a link in the show notes for sure.
Neena Saha:And so what I do now is I take one study that I think has relevance to the current debates that are going on or to the classroom. And I'll do a deep dive and then I'll just link other ones that I think are really important under headings, like phonics, phonological awareness, comprehension, etc.
Susan Lambert:Okay. And if I was a teacher listening to this, I'd be like, "Well, no wonder we don't have access to anything. No wonder I don't know what the latest findings are." Because to even think about doing that process—
Neena Saha:Oh my gosh, I know. We have so many problems and I think about this all the time. Like, how do we... And I've listened to a lot of your, the podcast that you've hosted and the guests on the shows talking about this medical model. And I think people, I just listened to Claude Goldenberg and he was talking, people are saying they don't want to hear it being compared to that. But there are some things we can learn. There are some great things. And these associations that exist for translating, synthesizing, translating, like the American Heart Association takes the research and puts it into standards of care that, "Here's what you do based on it." And I think Claude had mentioned a few, too, like the AERA and you know, the What Works Slearinghouse exists, but there's, I'm putting together a talk for the Reading League where I'm kind of thinking through these different things right now.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. There's just not a good way for teachers. And so because of that, resorting to social media, which isn't the best way to get what you need to get because who knows who's right and who knows who isn't right.
Neena Saha:Exactly. 'Cause you have to look at the full body, or you're cherry picking stuff if you're going to social media, and the person with sort of the biggest megaphone wins, or whoever has the most interesting way of presenting it. And it's not great. And I know a lot of researchers, you can make the argument, you know, it's an improvement because researchers now are tweeting and talking about their own research. But we need a more concerted effort. There needs to be a bunch of researchers that come together and kind of hash it out. It can't just be single ones here and there and following. 'Cause you have the same problem. It's like, who do you follow? And you have to follow all these things and.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Yeah.
Neena Saha:I don't know . It's just overwhelming.
Susan Lambert:And then your social media feeds get as overwhelming as what it sounds like to sign up for 50 or 60—
Neena Saha:Yeah.
Susan Lambert:So that you can find out what the new articles are.
Neena Saha:Ugh.
Susan Lambert:Alright, well let's, let's take a couple of steps back. And so, you said that you look through to find maybe what's most relevant. How do you think about and decide which articles you wanna bring to both the Reading Research Recap or then that you want to summarize a little more deeply?
Neena Saha:It's a great question. And I don't have, it's hard to sort of create, a checklist of like, here's what I look for. Some are sort of obvious given, you know, I'm covering one that's coming out on new research on decodable versus non decodable texts and K–3 struggling readers. And I'm not gonna give away, you guys are gonna have to sign up and see what the result was! But I mean, that's an obvious one to cover because even if there isn't a clear cut, you know, here's what they found, people are gonna be talking about it anyways. So I want to kind of join, guide that conversation if I can. I follow social media, too, and I see what people are talking about and try and choose what's relevant. Other times there could be one that, I think that I covered one on comprehension and it was just a beautiful design where I thought they did a really good job. It was July's one about Bayesian network meta-analysis. And I won't go into it here 'cause people can watch it, but I love the design and it answered a question that couldn't be answered in a different way. And it was really good. But I try not to cherry-pick because I think that is the problem with social media is like, you're presenting one paper absent of the context. So I try and put those links at least below for people who are interested. If it's one of those 60 journals that I think are good and other people think are good because they're publishing in them, the leading researchers, then I'll put the link there. I usually don't discriminate much about posting a link, but choosing the one to do a deep dive on is tough. Because sometimes I'll like almost get to the end of one and then another article comes out and it's like, nope, I have to cover this other one, 'cause it's, this has more relevance.
Susan Lambert:So what does that entail once you decide, okay, this is the one that I'm going to dive into? Well, wait a minute. Before I, before you answer that, I have to say something to our listeners. Because when you talked about the article that you did in the July, and you said, "Oh, it was such a cool design." You know you're a true scientist when your eyes light up when you talk about the design of a study. So that's an aside.
Neena Saha:That's true.
Susan Lambert:Once you decide, what's the process you actually go through then to dig into [ and] really understand the article?
Neena Saha:Yeah, it's a great question. So I read it multiple times and some, you know, Googling if I don't understand stuff.I think people think that once you have your Ph.D. you know everything, no, you realize how much you don't know! And so, and you want to be right. Like there's this burden, if you're like a research broker, knowledge broker in this field, you have, and I've had people comment back on stuff and you feel horrible, but it's like, it's part of the process in learning and you can't know everything and you do your best and you do your due diligence. So reading it multiple times, lots of highlighting, emailing the author if I have questions, things I don't understand. And then trying to just pull out the core story, right? Like, why this, what was missing? I don't go into the methods a whole lot. I know I geeked out about the design of that last one. But usually I don't because I don't think one study, and I should be very clear about this, one study should not change your whole practice. Science is very much about the body of research. And I try and reiterate that and when it , this is crucial to translation, when it comes to the implication part or the classroom takeaways, I use hedging words because science is about, you know, Claude said this, too, in his, I just listened to it. So I keep referencing that one . He's about skepticism, which is true. You need to be skeptical. And I use those hedging words that the researchers use in their paper. You know, these results suggest, these are initial results . And I try and use quotes directly from the paper instead of putting my own interpretation sometimes.
Susan Lambert:That's, I think that's really important, what you call the hedging words. And this idea that one study doesn't prove something, right?
Neena Saha:Exactly.
Susan Lambert:And we have to be careful about the body of evidence, more and more and more learning about it.
Neena Saha:Yeah. On social media you'll see people, is there any research on that? Someone will post a link to a paper, great. But what do the other five papers on it say? Right? Like, what do we know and how do we synthesize across a body of research where maybe there's two RCTs and they found different results.
Susan Lambert:Right.
Neena Saha:We don't really have a good mechanism for that in education, I would argue. Whereas in, I've been reading a lot about in medicine, my sister's a doctor and she's shown me different resources, nonprofit ones such as associations, but also commercial programs where they have a whole system, "Okay, what do you do when two things disagree, what do we say ?" Because you still have to practice, you still have to treat people . You can't just kind of leave it unanswered.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. There's something else too that I'd like to highlight because I feel this responsibility as well. And that is those of us that are trying to understand and translate this for teachers and practitioners that are trying to do the work every single day. It's really important for us to be precise and as accurate as possible. And it's a real responsibility, isn't it?
Neena Saha:Yes. It, yes, it can wear on you. 'Cause you'll have those middle-of-the-night thoughts, "Oh my gosh, I overstated something, and someone's gonna ...". But I, you know, it's just part of, you created and built this audience. Like it comes with the territory and people, some people have to do it. You have to do it. We have to give, there's no good solution out there right now. And so we just have to keep going on with it .
Susan Lambert:What kind of feedback have you received on yours? Both like, maybe two different kinds, right? Like, so there's the folks that are like, "Thank you so much for helping us do this." And I would imagine there's the, "Hmm, I think you got that wrong" kind of feedback.
Neena Saha:Yeah. And actually there's been very little of the latter . But I appreciate it. So I kind of stepped out of my comfort zone and covered a paper on bilingual students and I used the wrong wording and someone pointed that out and I was glad they did, 'cause I learned about it and we corrected it. But you're right, like most of it's very positive, "Thank you for what you're doing." But I always, you know, when people are overly effusive, it's like, you almost wish they were more skeptical! And that they could critique because you know, I'm not right all the time! And I think this really should be more of a group effort. I would love it if, you know, researchers joined in and piled on with their thoughts or their take on it. 'Cause it just makes it that much better.
Susan Lambert:Yeah.
Neena Saha:And I'm thinking of next steps, like how do we do this? And I keep coming back to this idea of a better platform where researchers can pipe in and give their opinion, but yet we have some core principles we agree on. So still thinking through all of that, but the initial response, going back to your question, I kind of knew I was onto something 'cause when I created that SubStack, you know, three years ago now within, I think I did one post about it in the Science of Reading Facebook group. And I checked my phone and like hundreds of signups within an hour and then hundreds more. It's like, wow.
Susan Lambert:Wow.
Neena Saha:And I was like, this is amazing. And then it grew, you know , within I think a year to about like 4,000. I had different tiers at that time. I was, one was paid, one wasn't. But it grew on its own. There was definitely interest.
Susan Lambert:So it was sort of like when we started the podcast, too, "We think this is a good idea, we're not sure, let's try it and see what happens." And there was such an appetite in the field for understanding the research and from the researchers themselves. So that says something about our education community, doesn't it?
Neena Saha:Oh it does. Well what I love also about your podcast, hearing the people behind it couching it in a story, too , is so wonderful. I love that the format of this podcast accomplishes something that I think that the Recap doesn't quite, it's very technical, clinical almost. But like the videos of me now talking about it, I kind of put in some interpretation, but I love it. But I wanna bring up one thing. I have this, I'm showing it , on the screen, but we can also put it in the show notes. I just read this survey of evidence in Education for Schools. It's this descriptive report. And one of the big things, it was a bunch of researchers out of the Center for Research Use in Education, which is a partnership between University of Delaware, it looks like University of Minnesota, and University of Pennsylvania. But one of the key things is it's all about how teachers and administrators use research in schools.
Susan Lambert:Okay.
Neena Saha:It's fascinating. You will love it as a research broker, you know, disseminator of knowledge, there's so many interesting takeaways, but teachers really wanna connect with researchers, was one of the key takeaways, they want, and some of what they end up translating is knowledge that they know through that research. Like they have some sort of connection. So professional development was a huge one. But also I just thought it was really interesting that there's this really big need on the behalf of teachers and admin that they, they want this, but there's just not a good mechanism yet.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . That's interesting. We will look forward to putting that in the show notes and me reading it myself. So thank you for introducing us today .
Neena Saha:Yeah, of course .
Susan Lambert:Yeah. You know, you talked about the differences a little bit between dissemination and translation. How do you see those two things different, and you sort of landed a little bit more on dissemination I think.
Neena Saha:Yeah. I would, technically speaking, the Recap, I like to think of it more as dissemination. Translation is very hard to do I think as an individual, you really need like an institution or a group of researchers in my opinion to arrive at that. And then you also need this , which is what this report shows, local people on the scene, sort of a local context for translation, 'cause there's translation broadly speaking, but then it's like, well how do you suit it to your local population with the resources you have, the funds available for PD? So I think dissemination and translation are very different. And like I said earlier, I try and use the language in the paper. Most papers have an Implications for Classroom section. And I use the language from that, which is written by, you know, the authors and the researchers. And so it is very kind of skeptical and hedging, which is appropriate, right? Because once you've done a study, the next thing you want to do is replicate it, you know, maybe in a larger sample or scale it up. You know, the IES has these different grants for scaling up something in a classroom and making sure that it works across, that it can generalize to different students. And there's this whole, there's also implementation science, which is this whole area or discipline of science, if you wanna call it, that takes these results and tries to get them to work in the school. You know, " How can we can get something in a small intervention with a researcher who does it, and we get these results, but then when we try and scale it up to school, it doesn't work?" Right? And that talks about the different levels, the administration, the school level, and like, how do we actually implement it? And that's related to translation. I think that's something that is necessary. But I've also been talking with a lot of researchers lately and having this exchange between the, this sort of gold standard of randomized controlled experiments. And I'm, I have to say, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm slightly changing my views on it. And there's this book that I recommend to everyone called The Book of Why , and it talks about causal inference, which is how do we know things are due to a certain cause, right ? Cause and effect. And there are several scientific disciplines that have never used a randomized control trial. And one of the great examples in the book is smoking and lung cancer. There was never a randomized control trial on that, if I'm correct. But we know from other evidence, right? And so I don't want to confuse teachers in this time because I feel like we're finally kind of understanding the importance of being a critical consumer of research and we want to see those RCTs and we, we're asking for certain things, but, I still say that's great, but at the same time, let's not devalue all this theory, the role of theory in getting to that RCT. And if we can't do an RCT, we still have a lot of theory that we can rely on.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . It is a really good point and about this idea of translation and implementation because, just because somebody says this is the thing that you should do with your students doesn't mean it's just that easy to do that thing with your students, right?
Neena Saha:Agree.
Susan Lambert:Implementation is hard.
Neena Saha:Yeah. I remember as a teacher being trained and you know, you can do everything right and it still doesn't work.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. And to just sort of bring this back to, what does this mean for teachers? Hey, teachers or educators out there right now, when you're feeling overwhelmed and you can't figure out how to find the evidence or some evidence, guess what, we're affirming for you. There's no easy way to do it. And we have to figure out how to solve that for them.
Neena Saha:A hundred percent, it's not on them. This is, I feel like, more of a systemic problem. It's not the teachers who should be doing this. But yes, no, they should not feel like, everyone's overwhelmed with this problem, I think.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. And then maybe a shout-out to those folks that are listening that are researchers or have some kind of larger role in the system of education, help us, help us solve, help Neena and I solve this problem!
Neena Saha:Yes. We need to create our association or whatever you wanna call it, like this band of research. And we don't have to agree on everything, but I think it's really important to point out what we do agree on and then have, you know, here's what we're not sure of. And then an individual, they can weigh in on why I don't agree with this part. You know, it's like the Supreme Court when they have their memos where it's like, some dissent and the dissenting argument. Like, let's just arrange and group the knowledge in a way that's more digestible for teachers.
Susan Lambert:That makes sense. So while we're on the topic, what kind of tips do you have for listeners then to either find, first, be able to find some information like this, and then be able to evaluate that information? Any tips?
Neena Saha:It's hard, given what I've said before. But I mean, if you are, there are some great practitioner journals, you know, focused journals, like the Reading Teacher and the Reading League has a great practitioner-focused where they kind of do the synthesis in concert with the researchers. You know, they take that full kind of perspective. And I think that's a great example. Obviously the Recap, if you don't want to sign up for those journal alerts, but maybe you don't want to wait until the month when it come , you know, the day that comes out for that month. So you can feel free to go through those journals, sign up for some of those alerts. You don't have to do all of them. But I think, you know, just even getting a steady stream, you kind of know what researchers, you start to learn about it just through exposure, I should say. You don't have to read every article in detail to start getting an awareness. Let's see, other tips and tricks. You know, I feel strongly that teacher prep programs should have a short course, maybe not a full semester, ideally a full semester on causal inference, the scientific method, how to evaluate research. Because I do think this is one of the few areas where the end consumer, teachers or people putting this in practice, like in medicine, doctors are trained in this and we don't, we're just still struggling to get the research-based information, like the content, not how to evaluate research, into teacher prep programs. So I think we're still far from this. I've been thinking about this a lot though, Susan and I'm trying to run some ideas by researchers to come up with like, it's kind of like a smell test. Like, what are the core things that a teacher could look for without knowing about stats or methods from a paper? Right? Like, first check the population. If the population's completely different, this paper probably doesn't apply, but if there's other that have that population that matches your local one, okay. You know, I'm trying to come up with that, but it's hard. I don't know if it's gonna work out. I'm trying some things right now, so we'll see.
Susan Lambert:Well , that's awesome. We love that you're thinking hard about this. Do you have any vision for the future? Like if you could look five years from now, what would your vision look like for that ?
Neena Saha:Yeah, I do. I always have that. Like, that's my problem, though. I think it's too , I've been, you know, kind of like, go, go go in this field and I'm really impatient, too. It's a problem of mine. I wanna see this. But I would love, you know, if there's researchers out there, I'm gonna , and you hear this, like, I'm gonna call on them. I would love to create, so Medicine has this app called UpToDate and my sister told me about it. And it's basically, it's started by a doctor. He was a nephrologist, so studied the kidneys, and he put his textbook on a CD-rom. This is like, I don't know , 30 years ago, people thought he was crazy. Right? But then it slowly gained traction. They added different sub-disciplines and it became this , it's an app that answers clinical questions. So it has like, standards of care, and my sister uses it several times a day to check things. Right? They do the hard work, they sit around, they have like eight reviewers for a certain thing, and they , it got acquired by a Dutch company. I'm gonna butcher the pronunciation but like Wolters Kluwer or something. But people should really look up, there's this short four-minute YouTube video about it and its origin story. And my vision is, even if I'm not involved, I would love to see something like that for education, right? Like people I think will pay for a good product that's maintained. You need that, you need some , nothing exorbitant, but to pay the researchers for their time and their involvement. And back to the editing process, sorry, the one thing I didn't say is sometimes they'll argue, you know, eight hours just on a single sentence, "How do we get this so it's right?" Talk, going back to, you know, that burden of like, "We wanna make sure we give the right information for teachers." So that's my vision. I would love, I'm not sure if I'm gonna work on that immediately, but I'm gonna keep talking to researchers and see if they'll get on board with an idea like that. And, you know, also nitpick it, figure out the flaws and what might make it not work. But I think we need something. There's still a huge gap.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. So essentially an app that a teacher could get on and say, "I'm having this issue. What should I do about it?" Wouldn't that be powerful?
Neena Saha:Yeah. And almost like in a sort of a Wikipedia sense of here's what, you know, 99% of researchers agree on what we know about phonics. Here's what we're not sure of but promising, and here's what we still have no idea about. And I think the power behind it though is the social element. Like if you have all these researchers, yeah, there may be some who disagree, but we have to figure out what we agree on, 'cause right now, I don't know, there's not a consensus, and that's problematic.
Susan Lambert:Yeah, for sure. Well, any final thoughts for our listeners or any final, just general Nina thoughts?
Neena Saha:Oh man, you don't want to go there. Can start talking about a bunch of different things. I'll say one thing actually. So what's interesting, actually tying this back to Meghnad Saha , my great-grandfather, he was a great scientist, but he also was very much involved in disseminating science and translating it. So he started a journal, Science and Culture, and it's still in existence today. He also started, he was an institution builder. He [started] the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. He talked a lot with Nehru, you know, the Prime Minister, and people in government to try and get these things changed. And I didn't know this when I started the Recap, you know, I kind of feel like I'm in a small way following some of his, in his footsteps of like, it's not enough to do the science, you have to make sure that it gets out there, too. And I think I like that part better in a way. And he actually, it was an upset election, he got elected to Parliament, too, and tried to modernize India through science. Not all of his views were correct, you know, time has shown that some of his thoughts were wrong, but you know, he tried and he did his best. So that's what I'm gonna try and do, is follow in his footsteps.
Susan Lambert:Clearly you're doing that because , we just appreciate what you're attempting to do and sharing your vision with us. And like I said, we hope that there's folks out there right now that are going to call you and say, "Neena, I want to be with you in this work."
Neena Saha:I hope so. Well, thank you for letting me talk about this, Susan. And I'm, like I said earlier, a huge fan of your work. It's had a real impact in the field.
Susan Lambert:Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us, and we will get our listeners links to all those fun resources you shared with us. Thank you again for joining us.
Neena Saha:Of course. Bye.
Susan Lambert:Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Neena Saha , foundational reading expert and creator of the Reading Research Recap. Check out the show notes for links to follow her work and to access some of the items we've discussed. Let us know what you thought of Dr. Saha's vision in our Facebook group, Science of Reading: The Community Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. Be sure to catch all our new episodes by subscribing to Science of Reading: The Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please rate us and leave us a review. It'll help more people find the show. Next time, we've got another very special episode for you. We're going to be joined by Dr. Reid Lyon, acclaimed neuroscientist and specialist in learning disorders. Dr. Lyon spent years working at the highest levels of government on promoting literacy, and he joined us to talk about his career and his recent publication, Ten Maxims: What we've learned so far about how children learn to read
Reid Lyon:It was done in a way to, from my perspective, do two things. One is to provide a more user-friendly understanding of what's required in reading and why difficulties occur . And equally important is to help people develop a common language so that when they see children having difficulty, they can say, is it phonemic awareness? Is it word recognition? Is it because they're reading slowly? Is it because their semantic vocabulary background is limited? And talk to each other using that information in those terms.
Susan Lambert:Dr. Lyon also explains why, when it comes to the discourse around literacy instruction, he fears history may repeat itself.
Reid Lyon:You know, if we go down that same road of ideological emphasis rather than scientific evidence, we're no closer to a Science of Reading than if we just return to the sixties.
Susan Lambert:That's next time on another special episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Thank you again for listening.