Zinc Learning Labs
The Science of Reading
December 2023
Table of Contents
Overview
The Science of Reading (SoR) represents a groundbreaking shift in educational methods. At its core, SoR advocates for an approach to reading instruction grounded in research into how children’s brains learn to read. The Scarborough Reading Rope illustrates and organizes this science-based approach as two complementary “strands,” word recognition and language comprehension, that together lead to skilled reading. The model also details the essential sub-skills that make up each strand. While SoR reforms have largely concentrated on early elementary education, emphasizing phonics and decoding skills, there has been a gap in support for older students. In middle and high school, many still need guidance and instruction in word recognition, while all students need instruction on the five sub-skills of language comprehension: background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. Yet, all too often, integrative approaches to teaching these crucial evidence-based language sub-skills to middle and high school students remain outside of the Science of Reading conversation.
Zinc's platform fills the Science of Reading gap for older students with evidence-based reading programs: Ignition and Lift Off. Designed as a holistic solution, Ignition specifically targets the language comprehension strand’s subskills. With a systematic approach to close reading instruction, it provides a structured, differentiated, scaffolded, and choice-based route to reading proficiency. Similarly, Lift Off, a companion reading program to Ignition, builds students’ independent reading success and enjoyment by combining multiple reading tools to create meaningful, differentiated, and choice-based reading and vocabulary practice across the language comprehension strand. Zinc's reading programs and teaching methodology empower students to reach the final goal of skilled reading.
Here’s how Zinc addresses the core components of the language comprehension strand of the Science of Reading.
Background Knowledge
Background knowledge refers to everything a student already knows — facts, ideas, and personal experiences — that they bring to the table when they read. The more topics students are exposed to and gain a working knowledge of, the better readers they become. To become skilled readers, however, students must be explicitly taught to link what they already know to new texts and concepts.
Zinc Ignition teaches students to connect the dots between what they know and the words they’re reading. Ignition’s Use Your Senses (UYS), Key Images, and Make it Real (MIR) skills guide students step-by-step on how to apply their background knowledge to every text, and as a result, both comprehend what they are reading and grow their knowledge base.
Use Your Senses teaches students to turn the words and phrases on the page into images, experiences, and meaning in their minds. Students engage their five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) and look for the words that make images they can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear in their minds. These sensory images help students connect to and follow what’s happening in the text. Along the way, students encounter Key Images, the more impactful images in a text, and they explore what feelings and ideas these images bring up in their minds. Working with key images connects a reader to what the writer is directing the reader to think and feel. Strong readers automatically connect images in a text to this most basic level of background knowledge — familiar sensory impressions, feelings, and ideas. Zinc helps all students read more successfully by modeling and teaching this skill.
While many texts have images, they also have language that’s more abstract and difficult to imagine. Teaching students to actively recall and apply their background knowledge is crucial for comprehension. Ignition’s Make It Real skills show students how to tackle abstract concepts and complicated imagery by connecting relevant examples from their lives and background knowledge, allowing them to access what they already know and relate it to new information. This enables them to meaningfully understand the text and add new information to their knowledge bank. As texts increase in complexity, they include more abstract language and fewer simple, easy-to-access concrete images. MIR is an essential skill for tackling advanced texts and without explicit instruction in it, many students struggle to progress from elementary to advanced reading. Zinc's MIR skill is an evidence-backed approach to bridging that gap and helping all students become more comfortable with the complex texts they will encounter in high school and college.
Additionally, Ignition and Lift Off introduce students to a wide variety of topics and subject areas in Zinc Articles and CREs, using real-world, culturally diverse texts and original pieces to engage and enrich their background knowledge.
Research Base Highlights:
Explicit instruction: In a 2023 study, Harvard professor James Kim found that there are limits to “how far kids could transfer the knowledge that they learned” without “explicit connections to the words and concepts they’d learned” (Schwartz 2023).
Open-ended questions: “Discussing open-ended questions before, during, and after reading can help students think through” a text and “make connections between new and existing knowledge” (Great Minds 2022).
Activating prior knowledge: Having students reflect on previous experiences helps establish “a set of conceptual ‘hooks’ on which students can ‘hang’ new learning” (Ferlazzo 2020).
Sensory associations: “To transfer basic information like the name of a novel animal from a picture book, children need to activate a representation of the animal in the book and remember details about its appearance to correctly apply the label to the real-world animal” (Strouse 2018).
Autobiographical prompts: Instruction that intentionally cultivates empathy equips students to make sense of texts on a deeper level. “Providing autobiographical prompts” helps put students “in the thematic driver’s seat” (Ferlazzo 2020).
Culturally relevant material: Students “comprehend and remember best the texts that are most culturally familiar and that have characters that are most like them” (Drucker 2003).
Vocabulary
Students need to know a wide range of words to understand what they are reading. While they can learn some new words by using context clues and making personal and real-world connections as they read, they also need explicit vocabulary instruction. In the Science of Reading, vocabulary encompasses three key aspects: breadth, precision, and links. Breadth refers to the range or number of words a student knows. Precision involves the accuracy with which a student understands and uses a word. Links pertain to the connections between words, such as synonyms, antonyms, and words with similar roots.
In Zinc’s Reading Ignition, every passage includes definitions for potentially unfamiliar words, explicitly teaching words in context. Level Placements also use this feature to ensure that reading comprehension is meaningfully measured as a compound skill rather than a test of vocabulary alone. Zinc’s Lift Off reading program incorporates two types of vocabulary acquisition: 1. in-text definitions during Close Reading experiences; 2. a vocabulary game that pre-teaches challenging words that a student will encounter as they read an article or text. Zinc vocabulary tools expand the breadth of students’ vocabulary base, provide opportunities for students to improve accuracy and precision, and explicitly teach links between words.
Research Base Highlights:
Explicit instruction: Simply reading texts with new vocabulary words is immensely valuable, but this learning can be enhanced “with direct vocabulary instruction of words that appear in or directly relate to students’ classroom reading” (National Reading Panel 2000).
Breadth, precision, and links: “To be a skilled reader, one must know, understand, and be able to retrieve from memory facts and concepts associated with an infinite number of topics. Skilled readers also have breadth and depth of vocabulary, a vast personal dictionary of words they understand and can use correctly in context, identify multiple meanings of, and link to other known words” (Gehrls 2021).
Language Structures
Reading comprehension relies on subtleties of language structures. These structures include syntax, grammar, and semantics. Students must be able to track pronouns, punctuation, and other elements of speech both within a sentence and throughout an entire text to understand the intended meaning.
Within Ignition, students learn and practice Zinc’s Tracking skill, which teaches Pronouns and Navigators and guides students to connect ideas across a text by understanding punctuation, tracking pronouns to their antecedents, and paying attention to transition words. It also prompts students to use their knowledge of language structures to summarize and connect claims to their supporting evidence.
Additionally, Lift Off’s Article quizzes include language structure questions, directing students to notice how pieces of information connect across a text; sequence questions on the ordering of information; and argument questions that ask students to connect claims to supporting evidence. CREs in Lift Off further reinforce Tracking skills, such as understanding to whom a pronoun is referring or what a well-placed comma indicates.
Research Base Highlights:
Explicit instruction: Traditionally, instruction on language structure was rule-based and not integrated with texts. Within SoR, students are helped by “explicit teaching of how sentences and words work together to create meaning” (Surrey Schools 2023). This instruction builds “knowledge of language structures by guiding students to analyze the language of complex texts and apply that learning to their own writing” (Fearn and Farnan 2007).
Punctuation: Readers need strong knowledge of how transition words, pronouns, and punctuation, including comma placement, semi-colons, dashes, and so on, adjust and refine the meaning of texts (Shanahan 2021).
Tracking: “Knowledge of language structures helps readers track information within a sentence or across a text. A skilled reader uses their knowledge of language structures to accurately summarize and make logical inferences. Without understanding how to refer to a noun used in a previous sentence, for instance, students quickly lose the ability to make meaning of challenging texts” (Great Minds 2022).
Verbal Reasoning
Verbal reasoning refers to a student’s ability to understand when language is literal and figurative, and to infer meaning based on limited information. It involves metaphors, idioms, inferences, and analogies, as well as interpreting abstract language. This skill is essential for deep comprehension of texts, enabling readers to grasp the nuances and underlying messages of a text.
Zinc Ignition starts with three core “Zinc-ing” skills — Use Your Senses (UYS), Key Images, and Make It Real (MIR) — that teach students how to turn the words on a page into images and ideas. Through these skills, students learn to imagine literal and figurative images and make sense of abstract language so they can follow what’s happening while they read, connect to the deeper levels of the writer’s meaning, and confidently engage with more challenging texts.
Students also need to track information as they read, a more cognitively challenging ability that often blocks advanced comprehension. Zinc Ignition empowers students to follow and link information across a text by mastering two Tracking skills: Pronouns and Navigators. In Pronouns, students learn to identify increasingly complex pronouns and track them back to their antecedents. They also learn to spot Navigators — elements like punctuation, transition words, and evidence that show how ideas fit together across a text. Through mastering overt and more subtle textual links, students’ comprehension and inference skills grow and they are able to read more challenging material.
In Lift Off, students are offered scaffolded levels of verbal reasoning practice. CREs offer productive struggle by teaching and modeling close reading strategies. Articles give students a chance to put together all of their skills in a gamified question-and-answer format. In both, they learn to find deeper meaning in passages and excerpts drawn from diverse literature, poetry, and nonfiction works.
Research Base Highlights:
Interpreting abstract language: “In Scarborough’s Rope, the Verbal Reasoning strand refers to a reader’s ability to think about a text and infer meaning from what is explicitly and implicitly stated. To do so, readers must engage in cognitive and metacognitive processes such as making logical inferences, integrating ideas within and across texts, and interpreting abstract language” (Great Minds 2022).
Productive struggle: Instructors should model thinking and guide students in practice, while also prompting students to independently apply strategies. Education researcher Nell Duke and colleagues recommend “a gradual release of responsibility” for students to apply strategies in the texts they read on their own” (Duke et al 2011).
Figurative language: “Understanding figurative language, including metaphors and idioms, also requires Verbal Reasoning skills. Children who can understand figurative language are able to understand the full meaning of text, particularly when the intended meaning is different from the literal meaning (e.g., the idiom "hold your tongue" means to remain silent, not to literally hold your tongue)” (Digital Promise).
Connecting ideas: “The Arkansas Department of Education defines Verbal reasoning as “the ability to understand what you read or hear. It includes drawing conclusions from limited information and developing an understanding of how new ideas connect to what you already know” (Jackson 2022).
Inference: Inference and metaphor “require a reader to think beyond the words they are reading to truly understand the meaning the author is attempting to convey” (Jackson 2022).
Literacy Knowledge
Literacy knowledge refers to a student’s familiarity with different text types, such as distinguishing between a novel, a news article, and a poem, and grasping conventions such as narrative structure. It encompasses recognizing the purposes, features, and norms of various genres and writing styles.
In Ignition, students encounter a diverse array of carefully selected passages from poetry to nonfiction essays to science fiction, and more. The program prompts users to choose short passages that interest them and offers multiple “incidental learning” moments through exposure to a large variety of diverse texts. The program's targeted questions guide students to analyze genre-specific conventions and the narrative choices of authors.
Similarly, Lift Off introduces students to a broad spectrum of authentic texts across multiple genres. By empowering students to choose what they want to read, Lift Off raises students’ metacognitive awareness of their reading preferences and exposes them to a wide variety of genres, styles, and reading levels. By writing predictions (in Articles) and short answers (in CREs and Ignition), students gain a deeper appreciation of how texts are crafted to convey ideas.
Research Base Highlights:
Wide variety: “By providing students opportunities to purposefully read a wide variety of genres with attention to text features, educators can help students develop internal frameworks for how texts work, strengthening students’ literacy knowledge and facility with different genres” (Great Minds 2022).
Explicit instruction: Students build literacy knowledge when they can recognize how authors have organized a text. Research shows that explicit text structure instruction improves expository reading comprehension (Herbert et al. 2016)
Read with a purpose: Students should read texts with a purpose, such as to answer a question of interest. Simply teaching students about a genre’s features is less effective than engaging with the texts themselves for authentic purposes (Duke and Roberts 2010).
Short passages: Shorter passages give students more varied opportunities to demonstrate what they know and can do and to encounter information, ideas, and perspectives they find interesting and relevant (Assessment Framework for the Digital SAT Suite).
References
“Assessment Framework for the Digital SAT Suite.” College Board, 2022.
Buccella, Alyssa. “The Science of Reading: What is Prior Knowledge And Why Is It Important.” GreatMinds.org, 2022.
“Chapter 4: Comprehension; Part 1: Vocabulary Instruction.” National Reading Panel, 2000.
Drucker, J. “What reading teachers should know about ESL learners.”The Reading Teacher, 2003.
Duke, Nell et al. “Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension.” What Research has to Say About Reading Instruction, 2011.
“Examining Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Language Structures.” GreatMinds.org, 2022.
“Examining Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Verbal Reasoning.” GreatMinds.org, 2022.
“Examining Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Literacy Knowledge.” GreatMinds.org, 2022.
Fearn, Leif & Farnan, Nancy. “When Is a Verb? Using Functional Grammar to Teach Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing, 2007.
Ferlazzo, Larry. “The Whys and Hows of Activating Students’ Background Knowledge.” EdWeek.org, 2020.
Gehrls, Alicia. “A Closer Look at Skilled Reading: The Importance of Vocabulary and Background Knowledge.” The Center for Literacy & Learning. 2021.
Michael, Hebert, et al. “The Effects of Text Structure Instruction on Expository Reading Comprehension: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 2016.
Jackson, Rob. “The Science of Reading: Verbal Reasoning - What EdLeaders Need To Know.” drrobjackson.blogspot.com, 2022.
“Language Structures: Reading Comprehension.” Surrey Schools One, 2023.
Schwartz, Sarah. “What is Background Knowledge, and How Does It Fit Into the Science of Reading.” EdWeek.org, 2023.
Shanahan, Eileen. “From Finding Error to Finding Wonder: A Shift in Grammar Instruction.” National Council of Teachers of English, 2021.
Strouse, Gabrielle et al. “The Role of Book Features in Young Children’s Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Context.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2018.
“Verbal Reasoning.” lvp.digitalpromiseglobal.org
Wyse, Dominic. “The Routledge International Handbook of English, Language, and Literacy Teaching.” Taylor & Francis, 2010.