Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013;9(4):331-360.
doi: 10.1080/15475441.2013.812017.

The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications

Mark S Seidenberg  1
Affiliations

The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications

Mark S Seidenberg. Lang Learn Dev. 2013.

Abstract

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I mainly focus on the United States, which fares poorly on cross-national comparisons of literacy, with about 25-30% of the population exhibiting literacy skills that are low by standard metrics. I consider three possible contributing factors, all of which turn on issues concerning the relationships between written and spoken language. They are: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the Black-White "achievement gap". I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language, but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of times the phrase “sputnik moment” was uttered on CNN, an American cable news network over a two year period. The Larege spike followed the release of results from the 2009 PISA assessment and coincided with President Obama's 2011 State of the Union address.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Adams M. Beginning to read. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1990.
    1. Allington RL. Big brother and the national reading curriculum: how ideology trumped evidence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; 2002.
    1. Allington RL, Woodside-Jiron H. The politics of literacy teaching: How “research” shaped educational policy. Educational Researcher. 1999;28:4–13.
    1. Aro M, Wimmer H. Learning to read: English compared to six more regular orthographies. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2003;24:621–635.
    1. Association Of Masters Of The Boston Public Schools. Remarks on the seventh annual report of the Hon Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Boston, MA: Charles C. Little and James Brown; 1844.

LinkOut - more resources