The science of reading, explained

The science of reading is the body of research on how people learn to read words and understand text. It comes from cognitive psychology, linguistics and decades of classroom studies. Its main finding for teaching is plain: most students learn to read faster when they are taught how letters map to sounds, directly and in a planned order.

That sounds obvious, but for about thirty years many US classrooms taught something else. Students were told to guess unknown words from the picture or the first letter. Phonics was taught only when a word came up in a book. The research did not support that, and the articles here explain why, in plain terms.

Start with the overview. Then read about the two models teachers cite most often: the Simple View of Reading, which says understanding a text depends on decoding multiplied by language comprehension, and Scarborough's reading rope, which splits those two parts into strands. Orthographic mapping explains how a decoded word becomes a word the student knows on sight. The comparison with balanced literacy covers what changes in a real lesson.

Every article names its sources, and the sources list links to the studies and reports themselves, so you can check a claim before you repeat it at a staff meeting.