Peng Peng
To the classroom: Episode 18
September 18, 2023
My guest today is Dr. Peng Peng, co-author of a recently-published meta-analysis that examined the role of strategy instruction with struggling readers in grades 3-12. The analysis sought to understand which strategies, and which strategy combinations, are most important to prioritize in a time-crunched intervention setting. Later, I’m joined by my colleague Elisha Li for a conversation about practical takeaways for the classroom.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I am so excited to welcome today Dr. Peng Peng. Thank you so much for joining me.
Peng Peng:
Thank you for inviting me.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So we're here today to talk about your newly published paper, "The Active Ingredient in Reading Comprehension Strategy Intervention for Struggling Readers." Let's start off with your definition, and I guess the definition of the studies in this meta-analysis, of the word strategy.
Peng Peng:
Sure. So strategy is a cognitive or behavioral action during reading with the goal of improving reading comprehension. In other words, strategy are specific procedures that guide students to become aware of how well they're comprehending as they attempt to read.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I think of strategies as procedures as well. I think about talking to kids about a step-by-step how to, but when I see strategy used in the literature, it often is a single word like monitoring or a phrase like monitoring comprehension or summarizing.
Peng Peng:
Yeah, there's definitely more than that. Yes, I agree. That's why in our metaanalysis we try to study different types of strategies rather than just monitoring comprehension, to show “strategy” is umbrella term for many step-by-step actions students can use during the reading comprehension process.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So do you find that when teachers ask, when you're teaching kids to summarize for example, that teachers are actually teaching them steps to follow in order to do the summarization? They're not just telling the kids you need to summarize now. Is that right?
Peng Peng:
Yes, I agree. Actually in our field we emphasize explicit instruction. We try to break complicated strategy or skills into small steps and model each step with the kids to learn so the kids can easily learn those things and always know strategy is a very complicated process. So doing the step by step explicit instruction way, kids can definitely learn that better and faster.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's really helpful, thank you. So you spoke about this a little bit already, but why are strategies important for reading development and specifically for comprehension?
Peng Peng:
So reading comprehension, as we all know, is a rather complicated process, right? It's the ultimate outcome of reading and because it's really complicated, it taxes working memory heavily and reading comprehension strategy can help readers better allocate working memory resources during reading. For example. With reading comprehension strategies, readers can better activate relevant background knowledge and integrate all those important information from the text with background knowledge to achieve successful reading comprehension. So strategy kind of serves as a bridge between the knowledge of the readers and the information extracted from the text.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh, I love that analogy of a bridge. Yeah. Well, yes, there seems to be this debate brewing about whether to teach strategies or to teach knowledge, and I think you're pretty clear, as am I, that this is a both and not an either or situation. And we're going to be focusing our discussion on the strategy part, but of course we both know there's no denying that knowledge supports comprehension as well. So did you want to say anything about that before we move into the discussion of strategies?
Peng Peng:
Yes, I agree with you. Teaching both strategies and knowledge are important for reading comprehension. This is because using strategies and searching for or activating background knowledge both require working memory. So fluent use of strategies and quick accurate activation of background knowledge facilitate the use of working memory in reading comprehension. So the work together strategy and background knowledge work together to facilitate the working memory in reading comprehension.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. So based on some of the theoretical frameworks you mentioned in your paper such as Kintch's construction integration model, in what ways can strategies support working memory load or cognitive load?
Peng Peng:
So the Construction Integration Model proposed by Kintsch, 1988, emphasized the important role of an interactive combination of top-down and bottom-up process of reading comprehension. Top-down means knowledge driven: students use knowledge to understand the text. Bottom-up means text based or text driven—information extracted from the text. But we know readers often have a limited working memory capacity. Therefore reading comprehension strategy can serve as a bridge, as I mentioned, between the top down and the bottom up processes to reduce the working memory load during reading comprehension. For example, inferencing and the prediction strategies help readers better link what they already know about the topic of the text and integrate this knowledge with what they learned from the text during reading. Dr. King in 2017 proposed a similar model she called the direct and indirect effects model of reading. So this model emphasized that many skills are important for reading comprehension, including word reading, language comprehension, knowledge, working memory, and strategies. So in this model word reading and a language comprehension are the upper level skills making direct contributions to reading comprehension. In contrast, working memory is the lower but foundational skill and can only indirectly influence reading comprehension through reading comprehension, strategy use and background knowledge. So in other words, both model King’s model and Dr. Kintsch’s model emphasized that strategy is the bridge between working memory and reading comprehension.
Jennifer Serravallo:
In what cases is reading comprehension strategy instruction cognitively demanding and overtaxing to working memory, because you talked a little bit about this in your paper as well.
Peng Peng:
Yeah. So working memory refers to the ability to simultaneously process and remember information. The use of reading comprehension strategy often takes working memory. For example, to apply the main idea summarization strategy, students need to remember the main ideas from passages they just read, right? And integrate these main ideas with the main ideas from the rest of the passages to achieve a coherent summary of the text. To use an inference strategy for another example, students need to remember the information from the text, activate relevant information from their background knowledge and integrate all those information together to make the inference. And moreover, there are many strategies students can use during reading comprehension. So sometimes it may become cognitively demanding and challenging for students to even choose the appropriate strategy for the text. Sometimes students also use many different strategies in different places of the text reading. So switching between different strategies can also text working memory. And we know students with reading problems often have a smaller working memory capacity and their background knowledge activation and the retrieval process is not as efficient as those among typical developing students. So strategy use may in particular seem more cognitively demanding for this group of students.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I've heard some people argue that because it's cognitively demanding, we shouldn't teach kids to do it at all. What would you say about that?
Peng Peng:
So I think practice makes it perfect, right? We know research suggests that good readers often have a good mastery of strategies and they use strategies to achieve better reading comprehension. So we know the strategy is complicated and demanding, but we need to teach the students first and then have them practice those, right? So when they become fluent, they can take advantage of those strategy in the reading conversation process. So you have to teach them, have them practice the strategy to make use of it, right?
Jennifer Serravallo:
Because as you practice it, it becomes more automatic, so you're not having to through it anymore, therefore it's less taxing. Is that true?
Peng Peng:
Exactly, yes.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. So you write in your paper that reading comprehension strategies are helpful when used alone, but are considered to be more effective when used together. Can you share what research had shown prior to your meta-analysis in that regard?
Peng Peng:
Yeah, sure. So previous reviews on strategy use recommend the combinations of reading strategies in natural learning situations. For example, the report from National Reading Panel in 2000 presented some evidence on effectiveness of multi-strategy intervention. This report also highlighted that multi-strategy is the most promising for use in classroom instruction where teachers and readers interact over text. Furthermore, multi-strategy instruction can provide some flexibility as to which strategies are used and when they're taught over the course of a reading session. In another review by Gersten at 2001, the authors suggested that the potential effects of even single strategy on improving reading comprehension, but emphasize that the need to explicitly teach multiple strategies together with background knowledge. However, before our study, no empirical studies we reviewed systematically explored if there is the most important strategy, why certain strategies should go together, or if the more strategy we teach the better reading cooperation outcomes we can expect. Our studies show that for interventions with limited time among students with reading problems, different combination of strategies may produce different effects on reading comprehension. It is not the more we teach the better outcomes to expect based on our findings.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Your study focused on looking at struggling readers in grades three through 12, which I think is an important context for the purpose of your meta-analysis. What classification did a reader need to have to be considered struggling or you also use the word reading difficulties, having reading difficulties, what's kind of the threshold there? So we understand the population of students that were part of the study.
Peng Peng:
We don't have a specific criterion for the identification of struggling readers. In this meta-analysis, we included studies that described their participants as struggling readers or students with reading difficulties in grades three through 12. And doing this, we were able to include more studies to increase the power of analysis, but hopefully to make our results more generalizable.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Okay, that's helpful. Yeah, I was just curious about that because I wondered if it was based on state testing because these are kids that get tested on standardized assessments or if they're teacher reported struggling readers, but we really don't know is what you're saying. Okay. So from your review of the National Reading Panel that you mentioned already in 2000, there are findings as well as a study by Gersten et al, that show different effect sizes for different strategies. There's quite a range from 0.32 to 1.15. Your study also seeks to discover what strategy or combination of strategies is most effective, just like you just said. But what I'm wondering is if the strategies in any of the studies you analyzed were taught to the study subjects at random or was there a pre-assessment and they were taught responsively, for example, the participants were screened and figured out these students really needed help with sequencing, so we're going to teach them summarizing strategies, or these students really needed help with going beyond the literal information in the text, so we're going to teach them inference strategies. Was there any sort of matching of the strategy to the need of the student, or is it sort of all at random?
Peng Peng:
Yeah, this is a really good point and a question. So among the reviewed studies, few individualized their strategies instruction based on students' need, right? Interesting. Yeah, I know our findings suggest that different combinations of strategies may produce different effects on reading comprehension, and this finding remains relatively stable for different age groups, different text types, different reading difficulty status, different reading comprehension assessment type, and different intervention dosage. So this finding is kind consistent in different situations. But that said, we're unable to investigate how students’ prior strategy knowledge or their working memory capacity level may influence the effectiveness of the strategy instruction. Maybe for some kids with already no summarization, already no inference making, they may not need the instruction of those two. So we think it's necessary to consider such an individualized approach in the future empirical studies or meta-analysis that has data to answer this question. But definitely I agree it should be individualized.
Jennifer Serravallo:
If you're interested in working with anybody on that, that is what I do. So you can reach out to me and we can find some schools and we can try this out because I think it's from my experiences as a teacher and I work in schools around the country and throughout Canada, kids are just really different thinkers. Some kids are universal thinkers and they have no problem reading an informational text and saying, well, this was mostly about, and they can come up with a main idea or a brief summary statement, and you ask them the details and they have a really hard time coming up with the details. And then there's other kids who will go on and on and on about details, but have a very hard time synthesizing or putting it together. So if I taught those two different kids one same strategy and looked at the effectiveness, it's hard to know, and this is my logic, you can tell me if I'm wrong from a statistical or research perspective, but it's hard to know if the strategy really had the effect because they needed it or didn't need it or if they already were able to do it. Right. If I teach a summarizing strategy to someone who can already summarize, that's not their weakness, that's not what they need. I would love to see more of that in the research. And if you need a volunteer, I'm happy to help collaborate.
Peng Peng:
Yeah, so actually Northfield, and some researchers already started to investigate this more systematically. They call this “aptitude by treatment interaction.” In other words, treatment should be adjusted to the students' characteristics to make the treatment more effective. So if the kids or students already know, like I said, summarization, so you may not need to emphasize that much during your strategy instruction, whereas in contrast, you can just provide other strategy the student may not know. So yeah,
Jennifer Serravallo:
That makes sense. All right. Well let's get back to your study then and dream of other studies. But back to your study, what did you find were generally the most effective strategies or combinations of strategies?
Peng Peng:
So based on our findings, based on our data we have here, we found that main idea, text structure and retell when learned and applied together as the primary strategies produce the biggest effects on reading comprehension outcomes among struggling readers. I think one explanation is that many idea and retell may serve as umbrella strategies that often tap the function of many other strategies, right? For example, the application of retell often includes their use of prediction and the graphic organizers. To summarize the main idea or retell readers often need to apply inference strategy and self-monitoring to check the coherence of the main idea and retell and the use of text structure can help readers better plan and organize their reading comprehension strategy ahead of time so they can more efficiently use their cognitive or working memory resources during reading comprehension. However, we also found that background knowledge was a significant moderator. And in other words, for interventions without background knowledge instruction, we did not find any strategy or strategy combination as effective in improving reading comprehension. In contrast, more strategies or strategy combination were significantly effective when by going knowledge instruction was included in the interventions. This finding suggested that by going knowledge is the foundation for reading comprehension strategy instruction, the effects of strategy instruction can be greatly enhanced when background knowledge instruction is included. One explanation is that fluent background knowledge activation and retrieval during reading comprehension can save working memory resources, which can be used to facilitate the use of strategies.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So practically speaking, I'm thinking if I'm an intervention teacher and I'm supporting students who need help with their reading comprehension, I should probably plan a text set that's around a common topic, maybe even a text set that's connected in some way to what we're studying in science or social studies. Maybe give them a little bit of support with the kinds of vocabulary or topics that they're going to learn about and then teach the strategies and ask them to practice the strategies within that text set. Is that a fair application of the research?
Peng Peng:
I think so, yeah. Actually many intervention studies I know are doing that. Before you dig into, dive into the comprehension strategy, practitioners or researchers always review vocabulary, review the topics relevant to the text, so in the hope to activate the background knowledge of the learners so they can have the background knowledge there, ready whenever the kids want to use it. So have that ready knowledge already in your mind can definitely save the working memory resources. Because think about it, if the kids do not know any information about the text, the kids have to use working memory and strategy to figure out every single piece of information from the text that is really demanding. And we know struggling readers always have small working memory and that just made it even more difficult for them to comprehend the text. So background knowledge kind of serves as a foundation if you know that you can retrieve it quickly without even thinking about it and then apply strategy on top of it. Just make reading comprehension process more fluent, less cognitively demanding.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm also thinking another potential practical application is to find out what your kids are really into already. Their own interests, their own background, not like school-based topics, but they could be really into Star Wars or they could be really into dinosaurs or they could be and then say, I'm going to find the texts that already align to what they know rather than trying to teach them new content and new strategies. Would you say that might be a good idea too?
Peng Peng:
I think that's a great idea because find something the kids are interested in about, actually motivate them, makes them more likely to search or activate their background knowledge that actually save their working memory capacity, which can be used for strategy practice and learning. That's a definitely good way to help them utilize their background knowledge to facilitate the use of a strategy.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I have one other idea too, which is we talked about topic-based sets, but I'm also thinking this might be why series books are so supportive, especially for maybe that third through eighth grade range. If I'm reading in a series, the series books help support my background knowledge because I already know the characters at the early levels. Sometimes the plots have a predictable structure to them. Like in the Magic Tree House books where Jack and Annie always go in the tree house and then they go back in time and then they come back to the tree house. So if I know to expect that it frees me up to be able to try some of these new strategies, right, series books.
Peng Peng:
Yeah, exactly. I mean the fun to me, the rationale is that you try to build a bag of knowledge along the way, but also have the kids activate those bag of knowledge along the way while they're doing the reading comprehension. So doing this, definitely free up their working memory resources, which they can use to practice strategy.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Alright, so my last question for you and then if there's anything else you want to share, of course you can. But in the title of your paper you have what is it, “active ingredient” is in the title, and I wanted to just kind of talk about that term so that we can understand it. Can you explain your “active ingredient versus ingredient interaction” hypothesis? And then first of all, what does that even mean? And then what did your analysis show?
Peng Peng:
Sure. So given the multi-component nature of most reading interventions or programs nowadays reading researchers often emphasize or tend to implicate an active ingredient framework. That is interventions focusing on or including a specific reading skill may increase the effects compared to the ones that without such skill. So we call the active ingredient, right? In contrast, ingredient interaction model emphasized the interactions among skills in the intervention from a conceptual cognitive load and a practice time perspective. Conceptual speaking, it is likely that a certain skill exerts its biggest effects on a reading outcome only when taught with other skills. Our studies kind of support this claim by showing that certain combination of strategies seem to produce different effects on reading comprehension. From a perspective of cognitive load of instruction, the more skills or strategy you packed in the time limited intervention or program, the bigger cognitive load there will be for students to learn and master those skills. And moreover, the practice time of different skills in a multi-component intervention may differ depending upon how many skills or strategy you packed in intervention. The more you packed in intervention, the relatively less time would there be for the practice and the learning of each skill. We're talking about in the intervention setting where time is kind of limited. So in other words, the active ingredient framework emphasizes an additive relation among different skills in intervention, like one plus one equals two, right? Whereas ingredient interaction framework highlights different combinations of skills produced different effects, it's now one plus one equals two. It may be one plus one larger than two, or it may be one plus one smaller than two. So I think that is the difference between those two models we present in this paper and our results actually support it. The ingredient interaction hypothesis, maybe certain strategy work best together. And it is not, the more you include the better outcome you expect because of cognitive loads coming with the number of skills strategy and maybe just by including certain number of strategy can optimize the practice and learning time of those strategy rather than put everything in the intervention that students do not have enough time to practice to become fluent of those strategy. Back to our first, what we talked about, if the strategy is complicated is working memory taxing. If the students do not have enough practice on the strategy, it'll become a challenge or even impede their reading comprehension process. So you want to ensure that they have enough time to practice and master those strategy in the intervention setting.
Jennifer Serravallo:
But I think what you were talking about before with looking at something like retelling in order to retell, well, it's like an umbrella because you have to also determine what are the most important events you have to sequence. You have to say things briefly and understand how to not talk about every single detail, but just talk about the most important ones. You might predict what's going to happen. You have a knowledge of plot structure and how stories go. So there is a way in which some of the strategies like you're theorizing are more impactful because in order to teach your way to that particular skill, you have to teach them a lot of different steps along the way and a lot of different parts to that larger.
Peng Peng:
That’s right. Yes, that's right. And also want to emphasize this point for this paper, although we find optimal combination of strategies, right? Main idea, retell, and text structure as the most effective one for improved reading comprehension. We do not say only teach those strategies. We just emphasize that if you have a limited time, you want to choose strategies to teach and for the students to practice on. Maybe these three could be the candidates to teach together if the students do not know, like you said, some strategy within those umbrella strategy, inference, making prediction, if the students do not know those strategy, you have to teach them those strategies. We just emphasize that these main idea, text structure and retell could be the umbrella strategy or the go-to strategy. Teachers can choose to teach with limited time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think it's important to emphasize that point too. For those that are listening who are classroom teachers who have their students all day are teaching English language arts, science, social studies, where they could be teaching strategies across the day, it's a different message. I think because they're not so constrained by time that they can be incorporating many more strategies, different combinations of strategies, of course not all at once, because we want to be aware of cognitive load and of course while supporting background knowledge that we know that that's important. But you, you're, you're really focused on the very time limited intervention setting for struggling readers.
Peng Peng:
That's correct. After all the strategies we studied or including this meta-analysis are already shown to be evidence-based effective strategies, right? From prior studies. We just want to find out the optimal one under limited time intervention setting. Yeah.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, Dr. Peng Peng, I really enjoyed this conversation and I enjoyed your paper. I'll link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today and for your scholarship.
Peng Peng:
Thank you so much.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleague Elisha Li. Let's talk about strategies.
Elisha Li:
I really appreciated how clearly the study was laid out and how clearly Dr. Peng Peng explained his study. What really stuck out to me was one of the things that stuck out to me is the idea that his metaphor of the bridge that kind of really put, I'm such a visual learner, I just have that in my head. That strategies can be the bridge between the reader and the text, and it kind of serves this important interaction. I feel like that's going to stay with me.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, it made me think about the Active View of Reading Model and this idea that readers are approaching a text actively trying to make that connection between the text and themselves and problem solving and troubleshooting along the way. I think one thing I'm just really curious about and I want to learn more about is what he referred to as the "aptitude by treatment interaction". Fancy word for basically assessment-based strategy instruction, so we know what the kids need and then we're going to teach based on what they need.
Elisha Li:
Yeah. When you mentioned that I think in the study, the effect sizes, there was such a range
Jennifer Serravallo:
A huge range. Yeah.
Elisha Li:
I wonder if that range could be explained by, I guess what we would call assessment based intervention or instruction. What did you think about the three strategies that he sort of named, I guess, as being most effective if used together in intervention time? It was like main idea, retell, and text structure. I've been thinking a lot about that because obviously as I use the Reading Strategies Book more and more, those are the ones that do come up a lot, and I do feel like, for example, tech structure, it's in The Reading Strategies book 2.0. A lot of those strategies are actually inside the Main Idea chapter.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yes, they are
Elisha Li:
As a way to help kids or students, I guess come up with the main idea. So I think those three strategies, main idea, retail, text structure, they kind of all interact. They all kind of go together. I think if you can do one, you can do the other well, in a way, because main idea in fiction, to me that's sort of finding the theme or the purpose of that text. So yeah, I could see it going either way.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. It's interesting to think about my hierarchy of goals. On the narrative side. I've got plot and setting first, and on the information or expository reading side, I've got main idea first. And like you said, included in that are those text structure, and I think about that is you've got to know how the story or the informational piece is built in order to figure out what's it about, what's most important, what am I going to take away, which is essentially, what do I understand from the text? That's the comprehension, right? So yeah, in the plot and setting chapter, there's a ton of strategies to break down. How do I retell this text like the uh oh uh oh phew and thinking about that story mountain or thinking about what's the problem in the story, and then anchoring your retelling on that problem. It's a way to make explicit, how do I know what's most important to retell? So there's a lot of narrative structure stuff in that plot and setting chapter. And then for main idea, I've got, there's a problem solution. There's a cause and effect. If I know those different structures, then as a reader, I can then pick out what's most important. For example, if I know that the piece is set up as a, let's say I'm reading about climate change and the author has written about the many different causes of climate change, and then I have the many effects that climate change has on people, on animals, on plants, on our whole ecosystem, then I can see what are the direct connections between the two. And I can use that to craft a main idea statement that captures both cause and effect. But if I'm not aware of the cause and effect, then my main idea might be really simple and just say something like, this is about climate change, but there's a lot of things about climate change. What makes this particular text unique is in some ways related to the structure of the text that the author set up, which then also, of course relates to what are the specific details that back up those main ideas. So I've got to say I'm not surprised that it's important to teach kids about it, and I really appreciated his discussion about how it's likely that those are kind of umbrella strategies with a lot of teaching that needs to go underneath it to be able to help kids to really retail well, to really name the main idea well, to really understand the text structure well. Yeah, that was interesting.
Elisha Li:
Yeah, the idea of an umbrella strategy is pretty powerful. The idea that yes, you're teaching retell or summarizing, but there's a lot of stuff in there. So in one of your strategies, the one I always talk about this one because my favorite one, the one about when you summarize a narrative text, think about the character's problem and their uh ohs and how they resolve it. To do that, students need basic knowledge about who are the characters, what's the plot, what's the setting, what's the problem, and be able to use that language fluidly. I'm just thinking, especially for our youngest learners, and there's a lot there to be able to retell. Well, really, and yeah, I think same with main idea.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. And what you're saying is making me think about how this study looked at studies or it was a meta-analysis of studies in grades 3 through 12, and if we think about how texts get more complex across those grade levels, we could think about how text structure, because the structure gets more complex, is essential to know. Like you talked about the uh oh phew strategy, which is a great strategy for a simple problem solution plot structure, which kids might encounter in third grade, but by the time they're in sixth grade or seventh grade, you might have stories with alternating narrators, right? Where they're switching back and forth in time where each chapter goes back to the beginning of that same scene is told from the perspective of a different character. You could have two parallel plots where the plots are developed back and forth across the story. You could have not chronological plots where there's flashback or there's foreshadowing or there's moments of dreams happening in the middle, which are not really moving forward through time. So talk about knowledge. Readers need to know, they need to understand and to be able to look for those different structures and narrative. And if we think about expository text structures when we're dealing with third graders, a lot of times the text they're reading would be pretty straightforward what Freddie Hiebert would call a "considerate text," where the main ideas pretty much clearly stated for you maybe in a title or in a topic sentence or in the first paragraph or an introduction. And then you've got some details that elaborate on that main idea, and then it kind of wraps it up nicely for you. So it's really kind of straightforward structure. But by fourth and fifth grade, I think that's one of the reasons we start teaching a lot of those different structures is they're encountering problem, solution, cause and effect. The structures just get more complicated. The texts become longer. So if you're not aware of how is this text built, what are the things I need to be looking for? How do I organize the information and make sense of it? Yeah. It's no surprise to me that that's critical for supporting students' comprehension.
Elisha Li:
And then just the idea of, I think he spoke about teaching the skills together, and while it's valuable to help kids see how a skill might work in isolation, I think it's really important that if you are working on strategies, they're not doing it in isolation, but they're able to apply it to relevant grade level, hopefully grade level or just interesting text. And I think that also goes back to, I think you kind of said it in the interview, but I just remembered it. I think it's so important to think about the text sets and the text complexity. I love the idea of the series books you mentioned that that would help the demand of working memory, especially for the students who might have trouble with working memory.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that this might be a shift for some teachers listening is to just really, I know it is, even for me, I'll admit in the last few years and talking to these researchers, thinking about just being much more careful about what texts we're selecting, not just based on the text complexity, but based on what topics, what knowledge is required. And I want to say there's knowledge, and I've said this before, but there's knowledge in fiction as well, not just historical fiction in the setting. That's of course historical knowledge. I'm talking about knowledge of people, how people act, the kinds of things we should be expecting of people remembering back to the active view and the research around theory of mind, for example, that counts as knowledge too. So I just want to kind of put a point in that when we think about knowledge building and when we think about creating knowledge-based tech sets and we think about supporting knowledge, I think it's important to not just consider content areas, but to also think about what kinds of knowledge is supporting fiction reading and to not get rid of fiction reading. I think it absolutely has a place in our classroom and in our knowledge building agenda as well. So yeah, just a careful consideration of text sets I think is something that we can all take away from this conversation in addition to the helpful tips about strategy instruction. Well, maybe we should stop there for today. Elisha, thank you so much for your time and for joining me in conversation.
Elisha Li:
Okay, thank you.