In this episode, Susan Lambert talks to Gina Cervetti, Ph.D., about literacy development, knowledge building, vocabulary expansion—and the deep connections between all three. Gina explains why she sees knowledge and vocabulary as two sides of the same coin. She also attempts to expand the listener's understanding of what knowledge really is; it’s not just subject-area knowledge, it’s also cultural knowledge. In this process, she introduces the idea of conceptual coherence, the benefits of this approach to knowledge building, and avenues for implementing it in the classroom. Lastly, Gina offers strategies for how teachers can effectively build students’ vocabulary without relying on a vocabulary list which she notes is not backed by the research.
Show notes:
Quotes:
“Above all other things in education, literacy is a gateway to so many of the things that are essential for human flourishing and human choice.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“I like to think about vocabulary, not as individual words, right, but as a set of labels for ideas that we want kids to be able to read about and talk about and write about.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“It's really hard to teach individual words in ways where that learning is durable…Because it's not connected to something.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“When you can see yourself or connect to the experiences you bring to a text it’s great for your comprehension.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“Knowledge is so complex that it actually offers a number of different benefits. And different kinds of knowledge actually benefit literacy development in different ways.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
In this episode, Susan Lambert talks to Gina Cervetti, Ph.D., about literacy development, knowledge building, vocabulary expansion—and the deep connections between all three. Gina explains why she sees knowledge and vocabulary as two sides of the same coin. She also attempts to expand the listener's understanding of what knowledge really is; it’s not just subject-area knowledge, it’s also cultural knowledge. In this process, she introduces the idea of conceptual coherence, the benefits of this approach to knowledge building, and avenues for implementing it in the classroom. Lastly, Gina offers strategies for how teachers can effectively build students’ vocabulary without relying on a vocabulary list which she notes is not backed by the research.
Show notes:
Quotes:
“Above all other things in education, literacy is a gateway to so many of the things that are essential for human flourishing and human choice.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“I like to think about vocabulary, not as individual words, right, but as a set of labels for ideas that we want kids to be able to read about and talk about and write about.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“It's really hard to teach individual words in ways where that learning is durable…Because it's not connected to something.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“When you can see yourself or connect to the experiences you bring to a text it’s great for your comprehension.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
“Knowledge is so complex that it actually offers a number of different benefits. And different kinds of knowledge actually benefit literacy development in different ways.” —Dr. Gina Cervetti
I was working on a plumbing project this weekend.
Susan Lambert:Oh my gosh, <laugh>.
Gina Cervetti:And I was reading the directions, and I was so unmotivated. I was so frustrated. I was so confused. And, I had this moment of thinking, "What if it were like this every time I picked up a text?" I think that what knowledge does is it allows readers to build this kind of momentum.
Susan Lambert:This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. We're now on Episode 3 of our new season, all about knowledge and its critical role in literacy development. Last time, we went deep into the research on read-alouds, exploring how they can be used most effectively to support students. This time, I'm thrilled to be talking with Dr. Gina Cervetti , professor of education at the University of Michigan. Dr. Cervetti was one of the first guests we wanted for a season about knowledge, as she has done seminal work and research on integrating science and literacy instruction. On this episode, we talk all about that. But we also delve into a bunch of other critical topics, like taking a conceptually coherent approach to knowledge-building, building substantial and durable vocabulary knowledge, thinking about knowledge-building beyond disciplinary knowledge, and bringing students' cultural knowledge into the classroom. Seriously, we covered a lot of great stuff! I think you'll learn a lot from this conversation with Dr. Gina Cervetti. Dr. Cervetti, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode!
Gina Cervetti:I'm so happy to be here. Thank you!
Susan Lambert:Well, before we jump in and get started, I would love if you would introduce yourself to our listeners. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and particularly, how you got into the world of literacy.
Gina Cervetti:I am Gina Cervetti . I am a professor of education at the University of Michigan, where I teach classes on literacy for future teachers, and also future educational researchers and future curriculum designers. And, in terms of how I got into literacy, in the 1990s, I was working in Washington, D. C. as a research assistant, and I was working on a variety of different programs related to education. One of the programs I was working on was a program to provide educational opportunities and professional opportunities for migrant and seasonal farm workers and their families. And it was heavily focused on developing English literacy skills for the adults and early literacy skills for their children. I really loved that work! There were other projects as well, but I really loved that work. And I had become really excited about the power of research to help us understand and address complex educational issues. I had sort of reached the limit of what I could do in that role without stronger research skills. And, at the same time, I was volunteering as a literacy tutor for adult women who had not developed conventional literacy skills. And many of these women were formerly incarcerated. And they were adults who could typically read some words, but they had difficulty reading larger stretches of text. And they had great difficulty understanding what they read. I really saw how this shaped their life opportunities. It shaped their access to education. It shaped their access to work. They talked about not being able to read with their children. They talked about having difficulty navigating the transportation system in Washington, D.C. and difficulty moving around in the world as someone who didn't have conventional literacy skills. And, for me, that really crystallized, above all other things in education, that literacy is a gateway to so many of the things that are essential for human flourishing and human choice. So, I wanted to develop my research skills. And I really had developed a passion for reading. I wanted to ensure that no one ever reached adulthood without having the literacy skills that they needed to flourish and to make choices about the trajectories of their lives. So I went back to graduate school. And I was really lucky I had the opportunity to go to Michigan State University. I'm now at University of Michigan, but I was down the road .
Susan Lambert:Go green! I mean, I'm a Sparty too <laugh> .
Gina Cervetti:I feel like I have a little bit of both in me. But, for some reason, Michigan keeps calling me back, even though I'm actually from California. But I was really lucky because P. David Pearson was there at the time. And getting to work with him was one of the great good fortunes of my life. Also, it just so happened that at the time, Michigan State and University of Michigan, and several other institutions, had CIERA, which was the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement. It was a really great place. And I got really lucky, because my main job as a graduate student was to drive around <laugh>, first the state of Michigan and then later Northern California, and visit summer reading programs, and watch what was happening in literacy instruction in those programs. And to visit conventional classrooms at the elementary level, and document what was happening around literacy. We were really trying to understand what are the kinds of instruction and instructional interventions that make enduring gains for children's literacy development. This just solidified my interest in early literacy development and it really launched me more deeply on this path.
Susan Lambert:That's interesting. So you were directly observing this translation or potential translation of research to practice sitting in a really interesting space.
Gina Cervetti:Yeah! Every day and driving all over the place, and seeing so many different classrooms at different grade levels. And really trying to understand, what were the active ingredients here that were making a difference for kids. And we were using very detailed observational tools. And documenting every aspect of what was going on and then trying to see how that was associated with kids' growth over the course of a school year, or growth after having attended a summer reading program. Did they make gains? And then, did they continue to make gains? So we were trying to really understand that.
Susan Lambert:I'm just super curious about this. Was a piece of that your actual dissertation?
Gina Cervetti:Actually, no <laugh>. I actually became much more interested in other aspects of literacy and content area literacy also, which leads into the next phase of my life.
Susan Lambert:Okay. We're gonna unpack that a little bit, but I know that you also spent time at The Lawrence Hall of Science. And did some work there, which I would love for you to just explain a little bit about what The Lawrence Hall of Science is, for our listeners that don't understand or don't know. And then the work that you did there.
Gina Cervetti:The Lawrence Hall of Science is a really special place. It is situated on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. It has many functions, but it is a children's science museum on the top floors, and then down on the bottom floors, there's a whole host of research and curriculum design work going on. They're running school programs and summer programs. Many amazing programs happen up there. And I was lucky enough to have an opportunity ... So, P. David Pearson was at Michigan State. But he moved to University of California, Berkeley, to serve as the dean there. And I was writing my dissertation, so I went along and started working. I started to work on a project up at The Lawrence Hall of Science called, Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading. A group of really extraordinary science educators up at The Lawrence Hall of Science had just been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to take all of the long-standing work they had done in inquiry-based science and infuse it with literacy. These were dedicated science folks, who actually had some skepticism of literacy and what literacy often meant for the existence of science instruction in schools . So, they brought on a team of literacy educators, including myself and P. David Pearson, and wonderful people like Marco Bravo and Freddy Hiebert. And we were there to help them think about how to integrate literacy into science in ways that would support students' involvement in scientific inquiry, rather than replace scientific inquiry with reading. But would also support students' informational reading, and writing, and talk. And so we worked on a model of science literacy integration and then we developed a series of units, and we implemented those units in classrooms, and we studied what happened. At the time, the work was in grades two through five, and that has since expanded much beyond that. But that was the initial kernel, those two through five grades.
Susan Lambert:We did an episode, I think it was our very first season, with Jacquey Barber before she retired, and just talked with her about how, I can't remember how she frames it, but she says something about how she was a science educator in search of literacy and P. David Pearson was a literacy educator in search of content. And so the two sort of came together to form the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading. Is that similar to what you remember?
Gina Cervetti:I think that's exactly right. Jackie is amazing! And the whole team up there were amazing. They were rightfully skeptical of reading and its role in science. But they were looking for a way to see more science taught in schools. And I think Jacquey, being wise, also thought maybe there are ways to do this that can honor both domains and support both domains. And the context of science really offered me a lot of opportunities to think about and explore some of the issues that I had been working on as I had been working on the projects on CIERA, in coming to understand what was really important for kids' literacy development.
Susan Lambert:What were some of those things you were thinking about when you were with CIERA? And I'm not familiar with CIERA, actually. I'm assuming they're still not around or ...
Gina Cervetti:No, but there are legacy archives online of really amazing studies and classroom materials and so forth that you can look for.
Susan Lambert:Oh, that's great!
Gina Cervetti:It was a really beautiful center . But, for example, one of the things that I had come to understand, from visiting all these classrooms and trying to associate what I was observing with students' literacy, was that children really needed to be engaged in higher-order thinking and activity, like talk about the things that they were reading. But, often, the things that they were reading didn't actually offer a lot of grist, a lot of material for that kind of higher-level talking and thinking. Also, often, they were talking about and reading about new things every day. Which, again, doesn't really provide a lot of material for having really big thoughts about phenomena, or engaging in really rich discussions and writing. And then, at the time, in the late '90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of recognition growing that kids were not doing enough informational reading and writing in schools. They needed to be, but they were reading a lot of stories. And that we were thinking about ways to increase the amount of time that students were spending with informational texts. So it seemed to me, that content area learning and science specifically, was an opportunity to support these different priorities. How to get kids engaged.
Susan Lambert:That makes a lot of sense. And that disciplinary work is a lot about knowledge-building and vocabulary. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that knowledge-building and vocabulary?
Gina Cervetti:So, we know a lot, actually, about the role of knowledge-building and vocabulary. I like to think about them, actually, as two sides of the same coin. So I like to think of words as the labels that we use to think and talk about ideas. But, most of the knowledge-building literacy instruction that has been studied formally has been through some sort of integration with literacy and content area learning. Mostly science, but also sometimes social studies. And there have been a lot of examples of these kinds of programs. So, my own work on Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading, where we actually found quite powerful effects for this integrated approach on both literacy outcomes but also science outcomes, but many others as well. So, for example, there's the concept-oriented reading instruction, which is from John Guthrie and colleagues, where they found that when you had content goals and also experiences, students were actually engaging with phenomena. That was the context for reading instruction. It had positive impacts on students' reading comprehension and their reading motivation among other things. And then there was the Science IDEAS program, which was Nancy Romance and Michael Vitale. They found that integrating literacy into science actually had impacts on state standardized assessments of reading and science. There are many others. There's the MORE program, which is James Kim and colleagues. And there's the CALI program from Carol Connor and colleagues. And if you look at all of these programs, what's really interesting is that many of them often shown positive impacts on not just the things that were directly taught in these programs, right? So, the content, the particular concepts that students were learning, or even students reading of texts that are on related topics, but they were also seeing effects on standardized general measures of kids' reading comprehension. And it's understandable that kids would learn the things that you teach in the context of the intervention or that they would do better when reading about texts where you've taught them some concepts around those texts. But why would knowledge have an impact on comprehension in general? It's a really compelling question. And I think the way that I've come to think about this is ... I'm gonna borrow a phrase from David Pearson, he lets me borrow his phrases sometimes <laugh> . He calls this "a virtuous cycle of learning" as opposed to a vicious cycle, a virtuous cycle <laugh> . And the idea here is that knowledge-building makes reading more accessible, because when you know something about the topic of a text, you understand that text better pretty much all the time. And then it makes it more meaningful. And then when reading is more accessible and more meaningful, students read more and they also learn more about the world. They acquire more knowledge. And they also get higher quality practice with reading. And then that leads to more meaningful reading. And the cycle starts all over again. I mean, there's a lot of sort of technical things to say, but I know that when I'm reading things that aren't very meaningful and don't make sense to me, I don't really like it. I don't really like to struggle when I'm reading. I'm actually, I'm a household DIYer. I'm always fixing things around my house <laugh> .
Susan Lambert:Wow! Nice!
Gina Cervetti:I know. This is how I spend my free time. Anyway, I was working on a plumbing project this weekend.
Susan Lambert:Oh my gosh, <laugh>.
Gina Cervetti:Yeah, and I was reading the directions, and I was so unmotivated. I was so frustrated. I was so confused. And, I had this moment of thinking, "What if it were like this every time I picked up a text?" I wouldn't be very motivated to read. I would avoid it at all costs. But, imagine I actually really knew something about what I was doing. And I wasn't a first timer. And all of this terminology made sense to me or I had some understanding about plumbing systems. Imagine how much more accessible, pleasurable, satisfying it would be to be engaging with this challenging text. And so, I think that what knowledge does is it allows readers to build this kind of momentum, right? It makes reading easier. It makes comprehension easier. It has all of the sort of virtuous-cycle effect. But I think it also frees up some attention, right ? So you're not so focused on the text. You can actually notice other things. I did a study a few years ago, where we looked at, if kids built knowledge of some concepts through reading, did they also learn more words incidentally while they were reading? And the answer was that they did. Did they learn more knowledge from reading? Yes, of course they did. Did they then have better comprehension of the text that they were reading? Yes! All of those things! So , having knowledge as a platform for reading and learning seems to really enable lots of other really positive things to happen in the course of reading.
Susan Lambert:That's very nicely put. And, before I ask you the very next question I'm interested in, I'm really interested to know how the plumbing project went <laugh> .
Gina Cervetti:<laugh. Well , ultimately, it went just fine . But there was significant frustration and several trips to the hardware store, if I'm being honest. <laugh> .
Susan Lambert:Congratulations! It's pretty impressive that you take on a plumbing project with limited background knowledge. So I'm gonna give you that. That's pretty cool! So, you talked a little bit about when kids read things, sometimes they read it one day and they move on to something else. The concept of coherency, or day-after-day learning, is really important, isn't it? Can you talk a little bit about what that means, both for instruction but also for student learning?
Gina Cervetti:Yeah. Well, coherence, in particular, conceptual coherence is a term that Tanya Wright and I developed to describe how we were thinking about knowledge-building in terms of some research that we were engaged in, including the study I just talked about, trying to figure out if kids learn words more easily. Often what we see in schools, when there is any kind of focus to the reading that kids are doing in English language arts instruction, it's often a fairly broad or loose focus. So it might be a topic or theme like water, or maybe plants and animals. While I think that this is useful, and I think it undoubtedly offers some benefits for students to be reading even around fairly broad themes or topics, I think it probably helps them encounter vocabulary words repeatedly, it probably helps them make connections between the texts that they're reading. So it's a good thing, but as we actually looked at some of the programs of research that I was talking about earlier, the programs that focused on knowledge development that had impacts on students reading comprehension, they weren't just using broad themes or broad topics, where there was some kind of connection but not a very close connection. Instead they were using question or phenomenon-driven conceptual learning with reading and around reading. But it was a much tighter connection among the ideas. And then when we looked to theoretical models of reading comprehension, this also pointed us to these benefits of having these more tightly woven together ideas. This idea that when you have well-elaborated understandings about something that that might provide some special benefits in terms of reading.
Susan Lambert:So if we were talking to a teacher and you were thinking about explaining this and he or she was looking and saying, "Well, am I doing broad themes? Or am I doing this tight, conceptual coherence?" like you're talking about. What kind of examples would help us understand that tight conceptual coherence?
Gina Cervetti:The way that we think about it , and the way that we've done it across several studies now, is to think about, what is the phenomenon or the question that I'm trying to understand, or even the topic as a starting point that I'm trying to understand. So, for example, we've done studies where birds was the thing that kids were learning about or where the ocean was the thing that they were learning about. But then we wanted to think about, what are some important and substantial and interconnected ideas. So what are the ideas that would appear on a concept map, about that thing, right? So it would be things like for the ocean, for example, we might think about, although we often talk about different oceans and seas, these are connected. They're actually connected so that many scientists think of the earth as having just one ocean. And that becomes really helpful for understanding life in the ocean. understanding currents in the ocean. And then once we have this kind of concept map of these ideas that we think are really important for understanding this phenomenon, then we think about, how we can create sets of texts or cultivate? Often we're just curating them from existing texts, sets of texts where students are both encountering those ideas repeatedly but also seeing lots of examples of those ideas. Or seeing lots of elaborations of those ideas. Thinking about what might appear on a concept map I think is a really concrete way of thinking about what would be a more conceptually coherent approach to thinking about knowledge-building.
Susan Lambert:That's really helpful. And then, along with that, I would assume that on this concept map, there's some sort of associated vocabulary that goes with it, right? So your idea of two sides of the same coin, it's sort of key concepts, or whatever, but also key vocabulary that helps kids engage in this content. Is that right?
Gina Cervetti:That is absolutely right. I like to think about vocabulary not as individual words, right? But as a set of labels for ideas that we want kids to be able to read about, and talk about, and write about. And what's so lovely about thinking about conceptual coherence is that very often the vocabulary naturally reappear in the text that kids encounter. And they begin to use those words, because in any discussion about those concepts, those words are gonna be useful. There's some degree of direct instruction of the vocabulary, but, for the most part, the vocabulary takes a free ride on the concepts that kids are learning and engaging with <laugh> .
Susan Lambert:Yeah. I like how you explain that. I usually say to teachers or educators that when you think about background knowledge and vocabulary like you do, I don't often say two sides of the same coin, but they're often very related. Or not even often, they are related. And you actually can't know something about the content without having the associated vocabulary. They just go hand-in-hand together.
Gina Cervetti:I think in the best of worlds, that is definitely the case. I think when we got up to The Lawrence Hall of Science at the very beginning of that program, there was a sense that, among the science educators there, the vocabulary could be alienating to the kids. That using the real scientific language could be challenging and alienating to the kids. And I think what we came to see by introducing different kinds of literacy, both activities and texts alongside the firsthand investigations, is that kids actually relish the language . They actually love using the language. That they get such joy over being able to have command over these big scientific words.
Susan Lambert:That's great! And it's true, right? When we think about teaching kids topics or vocabulary words, they like to feel like they're talking about something important.
Gina Cervetti:Yeah! They like to be knowers. It's really fun.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. That's a good way to say it. So you are sort of not in the world that, "Hey, there's a list of vocabulary words all kids should know and we should be explicitly teaching them."
Gina Cervetti:Right. So , honestly, I wish there was such a list <laugh>.
Susan Lambert:It'd make things easier, wouldn't it?
Gina Cervetti:It certainly would make things easier, right? Because we know that vocabulary knowledge is extremely important. Knowledge of word meanings is extremely important. It's important not only for reading comprehension, but really for academic success in general. And we've known this for a really long time. And so, I think it's not surprising that we have thought, "Well, if we could just find the right set of words, if vocabulary knowledge is so important, let's just teach a lot of words," right? And even better yet, let's teach a lot of words that happen to appear often in school texts, right? And this will help students be successful. And I think it would be really wonderful if that were workable, but there are many reasons that it's not workable. There are just so many words, <laugh> that kids need to know. We could probably teach a few hundred words a year, realistically, but they need to know tens of thousands of words, in order to really understand the lexicon of school, right? And the level of investment that's required for the kind of rich vocabulary instruction, that makes it possible, not only for kids to recognize the definition of a word on an assessment, but actually use that word in their own talk and writing is so high. Even when we do that kind of work, retention is actually not that great. It's really hard to teach individual words in ways where that learning is durable. And I think you can imagine why, right? Because it's not connected to something. Like, if we think about the mind as having webs of understanding, and those webs as being able to catch new words or new ideas, in the absence of that, it's just a piece of information without a home, you know? And so it just doesn't work all that well, I think, to think about vocabulary in that way. And I think a much better way to think about it is in terms of what are the things that kids are learning about , and what are the words that they need to read, write, and talk about those things.
Susan Lambert:That's interesting. It takes me back to my days prepping for college entrance exams, and knowing that my vocabulary was not as great as my brother's vocabulary, who scored very high. So I spent a whole bunch of time trying to memorize words. It didn't help me at all <laugh>.
Gina Cervetti:And I'll tell you, if I showed you those words today, you would swear that you had never laid eyes on them before.
Susan Lambert:<laugh> This is probably true. But yet, often that's how we think about teaching kids vocabulary, isn't it? It's just, "Here's your vocabulary words for the week." And even at that, you're saying that it's just not the most efficient way to do that.
Gina Cervetti:I don't think the evidence bears out that that is a way to build substantial and durable vocabulary knowledge. Even though I really understand why that approach is appealing. Thinking about what are things that kids are learning about, and what are the words they need, and then also really thinking about, how I can help kids become problem-solvers, word wizards, interested in words, and excited to figure out the new words that they encounter. I think those are probably, in the end , approaches that are more worthy of the instructional time.
Susan Lambert:That makes sense. Well, I do know that you mentioned that your thinking around knowledge is really evolving, beyond just disciplinary knowledge-building. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that, and how you're extending those thoughts about knowledge-building.
Gina Cervetti:There are so many reasons to think about the knowledge and experiences that kids bring to school as a resource for their literacy learning. There are many reasons to do that. First, I think it's really important to say that there's nothing special about academic or disciplinary knowledge other than it's the stuff of school, right? But in terms of its impact on comprehension, it is not unique. And, in fact, many of the early studies that helped us to understand the relationship between knowledge and comprehension weren't conducted using academic knowledge, they were actually using what I think of as out-of-school experiential knowledge. So a lot of those studies were on things like sports, like soccer or baseball knowledge, and how that impacted kids' understanding of texts that they were reading. So it wasn't really academic knowledge at all. And in recent years, there have been several studies that unsurprisingly have also shown us that when students read culturally familiar texts, they have better recall and comprehension than when they're reading culturally unfamiliar texts. So, this shouldn't be surprising. So, in terms of understanding a particular text, academic knowledge is not special. So we should think about all of the knowledge and experiences that students bring to school. But also, there's some evidence that cultural knowledge is a significant resource, not just for understanding a particular text but also for kids' literacy learning. So, young children, it seems -- the research is early but it seems young children tend to learn new literacy skills better when instruction uses texts that are connected to their knowledge and experiences. So, for example, there was a study done by Clark in 2017, where they were doing an after-school program for African-American children in grades one through five and the instruction that the students received was like reading texts and retelling texts and doing some word study and writing in response to texts. But the texts that they were using were either entirely culturally relevant texts or entirely non-culturally relevant texts. And the children who used the culturally relevant texts made greater growth than their peers on their word reading and on their reading comprehension. So having a connection to the text that we read, having a platform of understanding based on our knowledge and experience, turns out to be beneficial, not just for comprehension of a particular text but also as a basis for literacy instruction.
Susan Lambert:I'm gonna distill this to something very simple, but that's a little bit of the mirrors and the windows conversation we've been having, right? This idea that when you can see yourself or connect to the experiences you bring to a text, it's great for your comprehension. How does that tension come into play when we're saying, "Oh, we also need to learn new things, because academic knowledge is important for later academic careers, for us later in schooling, and opens up our worlds to things we would've never maybe known about had people not introduced them." So how do these two things sort of interact?
Gina Cervetti:I mean, both have to be true, right? Because what I'm learning is that knowledge is so complex that it actually offers a number of different benefits. And different kinds of knowledge actually benefit literacy development in different ways. And so it makes sense to think about helping students develop the academic knowledge that's going to help them understand the natural world and the social world better. But it also makes sense to capitalize on the knowledge that students bring, both as a platform for their literacy learning but also to further develop it, so that they're also understanding the context of their lives and their communities and their families. This is an important academic issue. It's also an important equity issue.
Susan Lambert:I love how you said that . We talk a lot about this in biliterate education, right? As honoring the home language. And so this maybe is an extension even further than just honoring the home language, it's honoring the home experiences, because we know that's all part of what we bring to the language comprehension process.
Gina Cervetti:And it also helps students feel more connected to reading, more connected to their classrooms, to cultivate feelings of belonging. There are so many ingredients to a successful learning experience for students.
Susan Lambert:How can educators think about this in terms of what they're doing day-to-day in the classroom? To sort of bring more of this cultural knowledge and the cultural knowledge the kids come to school with, to bring that more into the classroom?
Gina Cervetti:I think that, increasingly, there are a wide array of literacy resources, texts and so forth, so that once we get to know our children, we understand them and their lives and their experiences, and also their interests, we have better access I think than we have in the past to resources that are gonna connect with each of our individual learners. I think we can also use students' experiences as part of what we seek to understand better. So that we're not only learning about our own experiences, but that we're drawing on the resources of the classroom to understand each other.
Susan Lambert:Yeah, community building is so important! And feeling like you are seen and heard and part of the experience in school is really great. It takes me back to what you said at the beginning of the podcast, your early experiences in Washington, D.C., with that wide range of people that you worked with. Does that feel like a little bit of a through line in your work?
Gina Cervetti:Yes. I mean, I was working with people for whom school hadn't worked, for whatever reason. And I wish I could go back now and talk to them a little bit more with some of the things that I've learned in the intervening decades. But our commitment to making sure that no one reaches adulthood without having the literacy skills that they need to flourish has to be more than just equipping them with academic knowledge, or even literacy skills.
Susan Lambert:That makes a lot of sense. So you are just finishing up a study, I think, on knowledge-building as well . Would you like to talk a little bit about what that study is and what you found?
Gina Cervetti:Yeah! We're just in the process of finishing up the paper. So my colleague Tanya Wright and I have been working on trying to better understand how knowledge works in reading comprehension, and language development, and literacy development. We're trying to think about other potential benefits. So not just, how does knowing something more about a text help you to understand that text better, but do other potential benefits accrue ? So we did a study where we looked, for example, at the incidental learning of vocabulary words if students were bringing knowledge. In this study, we worked with fourth graders. The fourth graders either read a set of conceptually coherent texts about the ocean or they read a wide variety of informational texts about a whole bunch of different topics. They did some activities while they were reading, obviously. But then afterwards we did think-alouds with them. So we had them read additional texts about ocean-related concepts to see whether having had the experience of building knowledge through reading impacted the ways that they were making sense of the new text. So we were actually trying to capture their processing, because we know that higher-level processing while reading, doing things like making inferences or monitoring, understanding, or making predictions, that that's a hallmark of strong reading comprehension. It's really important that kids have opportunities to process texts in those ways. And we were wondering if reading in a conceptually coherent way would actually facilitate their engagement in that kind of processing. And so it looks like it did. The students not only had better recall of the new text that they read about the ocean than students who had read about a whole bunch of different things, but they also were engaging in more of these higher-level processes while they were reading.
Susan Lambert:That's interesting. That's great! So that study just finished up, and you're publishing. Is that what you said?
Gina Cervetti:Soon. Hopefully <laugh>. Yeah . <laugh> , hopefully.
Susan Lambert:And you've been doing this work for quite a while, just on this idea of conceptual coherence. So, it's kind of fun to hear how it's continuing on.
Gina Cervetti:Yes.
Susan Lambert:Any other thoughts you'd like to leave listeners as you think about knowledge development, either cultural knowledge development or academic knowledge development?
Gina Cervetti:I think if I were to talk with teachers, I would say that there are a couple of really important takeaways. Really thinking about English language arts, not as a place where we only develop students' skills, literacy skills, right? But also where they're learning about something really important. And not only that, but to think about phenomenon-driven or question-driven concepts. How do animals adaptations help them survive in their habitats, you know? And even around literature, thinking about what is the stuff of literature? What are the concepts that are embedded in literature? What does it mean to be a good friend? And how could we read in a conceptually coherent way around an idea like that? So that, again, students are getting the benefit of developing knowledge and vocabulary, and then bringing that to their subsequent reading. Also, I would say protect time for content area instruction. Really protect it . It's really hard to fit in science and social studies and arts and so on right now, but think about that as another opportunity to develop kids' literacy skills and don't let it slip out of the school day.
Susan Lambert:Thank you for that. And it dawned on me that we've been talking about reading comprehension, but this very much relates to writing composition as well, doesn't it?
Gina Cervetti:Yes, it does! You can't write very well about something that you don't know much about <laugh>. Or talk very thoughtfully about things that you don't know much about. Knowledge becomes the grist for engaging in sophisticated versions of all the things that we care about kids learning to do in literacy.
Susan Lambert:What a great way to end. And thank you so much, again, for joining us on this episode! It's near and dear to my heart. And thank you for the work that you're doing!
Gina Cervetti:Thank you so much! I really appreciate your time and attention to this.
Susan Lambert:Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Gina Cervetti , professor of education at the University of Michigan. Don't forget to check out the show notes for links to more resources. 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. If you liked hearing Dr. Cervetti talk about vocabulary, then I've got some great news. Coming up soon this season, we'll spend more time diving into the research on vocabulary building. But first, next time on the show, education luminary, John Hattie, joins us to talk about the importance of studying expertise.
John Hattie:And so if anybody out there is listening, or wants to start a career, let me tell you right up front , study excellence. Study expertise. There's oodles of it out there. And we aren't very good at that. We are very, very good at finding problems and fixing them. But we're not as good and we've not had the courage to study expertise and scale it up. And that's my mission. Scale up the expertise we have.
Susan Lambert:That's next time. And throughout this season, as we explore the importance of knowledge-building, we want to hear from students about their favorite classroom topics. If you know a young person who'd like to share their perspective with us, we'd love to have them send us a voice memo. Find out more and submit a short audio message at amplify.com/student-testimonials. Finally, before we go, we want to tell you about a new podcast series that we think you might like. It's from our friends at Literacy Leadership, The Learning Ally podcast, who've been releasing a new miniseries featuring changemakers. Here's a little preview.
The Learning Ally podcast:So I do think that we have to move to have an informed conversation, and it's not gonna be as easy for us scientists to just hide in our labs and be siloed. I think the work to be done by research scientists moving forward is the work that we see from so many of us now.
Susan Lambert:Catch the full miniseries featuring co-hosts, Dr. Terrie Noland , Linda Diamond , Dr. Tim Odegard, and Dr. Tracy White Weeden by searching for Literacy Leadership,The Learning Ally podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe to this show, Science of Reading: The Podcast. Thank you again for listening.