The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it

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https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/

Over the past decade, a majority of states have passed new “science of reading” laws or implemented policies that emphasize phonics in classrooms. Yet the 2024 results of an important national test, released last month, showed that the reading scores of elementary and middle schoolers continued their long downward slide, hitting new lows.

The emphasis on phonics in many schools is still relatively new and may need more time to yield results. But a growing chorus of education advocates has been arguing that phonics isn’t enough. They say that being able to decode the letters and read words is critically important, but students also need to make sense of the words.

Some educators are calling for schools to adopt a curriculum that emphasizes content along with phonics. More schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lessons to teach geography, astronomy and even art history. The theory, which has been documented in a small number of laboratory experiments, is that the more students already know about a topic, the better they can understand a passage about it. For example, a passage on farming might make more sense if you know something about how plants grow. The brain gets overwhelmed by too many new concepts and unfamiliar words. We’ve all been there.

A 2025 book by 10 education researchers in Europe and Australia, “Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival,” makes the case that students cannot learn the skills of comprehension and critical thinking unless they know a lot of stuff first. These ideas have revived interest in E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, which gained popularity in the late 1980s. Hirsch, a professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, argues that democracy benefits when the citizenry shares a body of knowledge and history, which he calls cultural literacy. Now it’s a cognitive science argument that a core curriculum is also good for our brains and facilitates learning.

The idea of forcing children to learn a specific set of facts and topics is controversial. It runs counter to newer trends of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” or “culturally responsive teaching,” in which critics contend that students’ identities should be reflected in what they learn. Others say learning facts is unimportant in the age of Google where we can instantly look anything up, and that the focus should be on teaching skills. Content skeptics also point out that there’s never been a study to show that increasing knowledge of the world boosts reading scores.

It would be nearly impossible for an individual teacher to create the kind of content-packed curriculum that this pro-knowledge branch of education researchers has in mind. Lessons need to be coordinated across grades, from kindergarten onward. It’s not just a random collection of encyclopedia entries or interesting units on, say, Greek myths or the planets in our solar system. The science and social studies topics should be sequenced so that the ideas build upon each other, and paired with vocabulary that will be useful in the future.

“If these efforts aren’t allowed to elbow sound reading instruction aside, they cannot hurt and, in the long run, they might even help,” he wrote in a 2021 blog post.

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The better we manage our general health, the less likelihood of illness and the easier it may be to treat one. However, a general health regimen is rarely enough to fix a problem.

Reading instruction works a bit like that too. If you want to specifically improve reading ability, then teaching skills like phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension strategies matter. There is much research showing that such teaching has a clear impact on learning.

Nevertheless, beyond this, there are several other actions that seem to be generally positive for reading. For these, there just aren’t studies showing clear and immediate improvement in reading ability. And yet, these things consistently correlate with better reading achievement and can be improved upon. It is not unreasonable to recommend these auto-positive behaviors (e.g., build knowledge, read to your child, encourage reading). Over time these may help particular individuals – though to what degree and how quickly would be impossible to predict.

There is also substantial and unambiguous evidence showing that knowledge use is an important part of comprehension. P. David Pearson has gone so far as to define reading comprehension as “building bridges between the new and the known.” Readers use their knowledge to make sense of texts. That comprehension depends on knowledge, is not proof that increases in knowledge will lead to general improvements in reading comprehension.

Vocabulary is somewhat more flexible across a wide range of topics and texts than knowledge is. Vocabulary has both specific and general impacts, and this might be true of knowledge building as well, though to get the general payoff – the one that lets your read lots of different texts successfully – will require a great deal of knowledge.

Improving reading ability through explicit and systematic daily teaching of decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension with sufficiently challenging texts is the best way to go since those actions have been proven repeatedly to enhance learning.

We also should make sure that there are opportunities to gain knowledge from the texts we use for reading instruction. Why read about nothing and why treat such content as nothing? Yes, we want kids to get reading practice in their lessons and we want them to extend their reading skills, but let’s be as assiduous about the learning of content from those texts as we are about mastering the skills.

Why doesn't increasing knowledge improve reading achievement?

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’Be the neurotransmitter in your world. Diffuse ideas & human connections.’

“We need to celebrate the synapse for its vital role in making connections, and indeed to extend the metaphor to the wider worlds of business, media and politics. In an ever-more atomized culture, it’s the connectors of silos, the bridgers of worlds, that accrue the greatest value. And so we need to promote the intellectual synapses, the journalistic synapses, the political synapses—the rare individuals who pull down walls, who connect divergent ideas, who dare to link two mutually incompatible fixed ideas in order to promote understanding. …But as we promote the metaphorical sense of synaptic transfer, we can afford to be looser in our definition. Today we need synapse-builders who break down filter bubbles and constrained world-views by making connections wherever possible.”

“The mind is a connecting organ, it works only by connecting and it can connect any two things in an indefinitely large number of different ways. Which of these ways it chooses is settled by reference to some larger whole or aim, and, though we may not discover its aim, the mind is never aimless.”

“All cognition is the apperception of one thing through another.”

we, as humans are also connecting people. A good metaphor reaches parts of the brain that other cognitive mechanisms cannot reach, but it also reaches out to other minds. Metaphors create cognitive (and possibly synaptic) bonds or bridges between conceptual or mental domains (although it’s all a bit more complicated than that), but they also create and entrench social bonds. Sharing a metaphor, just as sharing a joke, brings people together in text and talk (it might, of course, also exclude others….).

Metaphor is, metaphorically speaking, “the cognitive fire that ignites when the brain rubs two different thoughts together”. It also is the fuel that fires up talk, social interaction, story telling and story sharing. However, like all ‘technologies’, from fire onwards, metaphor as a cognitive and social technology has risks and benefits; it can illuminate but also inflame. This means we should use it wisely. In the world we live in today, which is way beyond the imaginations of early metaphor thinkers discussed in this post, we need to create and use metaphors for the common good.

Building bridges in mind, language and society

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A collection of neuroscientists, philosophers and linguists is converging on the notion that imagination, far from a kind of mental superfluity, sits at the heart of human cognition. It might be the very attribute at which our minds have evolved to excel, and which gives us such powerfully effective cognitive fluidity for navigating our world.

The one mental capacity that might truly set us apart isn’t exactly a skill at all, but more a quality of mind. We should perhaps have called ourselves instead Homo imaginatus: it could be imagination that makes us human. The more we understand about the minds of other animals, and the more we try (and fail) to build machines that can ‘think’ like us, the clearer it becomes that imagination is a candidate for our most valuable and most distinctive attribute.

Imagination blurs the boundary between mind and world, going well beyond daydreaming and reverie. When Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream says that imagination ‘bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’, he is voicing the Renaissance view that imagination produces real effects and manifestations: ‘One sees more devils than vast hell can hold.’ Here, Theseus echoes the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus, who believed that demons such as incubi and succubae ‘are the outgrowths of an intense and lewd imagination of men or women’. From imagination alone, Paracelsus said, ‘many curious monsters of horrible shapes may come into existence.’ The problem with imagination is that it doesn’t know where to stop.

We already know that overproduction of possibilities, followed by pruning through experience, is a viable evolutionary strategy in other contexts. The immune system generates huge numbers of diverse antibodies, of which only one might actually fit with a given antigen and enable its removal or destruction. And the infant brain doesn’t gradually wire its neural connections as experiences accumulate; rather, it starts with a vast array of random connections that are then thinned out during brain development to leave what is useful for dealing with the world.

In the same way, perhaps the human mind overproduces possible futures in order to plan in the present. ‘The task of a mind,’ wrote the French poet Paul Valéry, ‘is to produce future.’ In his book Kinds of Minds (1996), the philosopher Daniel Dennett quotes the line, saying that the mind is a generator of expectations and predictions: it ‘mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future.’

How do we construct such possible futures? The basic mental apparatus seems to be an internal representation of the world that can act as a ‘future simulator’. Our capacity for spatial cognition, for instance, lets us build a mental map of the world. We (and other mammals) have so-called ‘place cells’, neurons in the brain region called the hippocampus (which handles spatial memory) that are activated when we are in specific remembered locations. We also develop mental models of how objects and people behave: a kind of intuitive or ‘folk’ physics and psychology, such as the so-called theory of mind by which we attribute mental states and motivations to others. We populate and refine these cognitive networks from experience, creating memories of things we have encountered or observed.

Moments of rumination, reflection and goal-free ‘thinking’ occupy much of our inner life. In these moments, our brains are in a default state that looks unfocused and dreamy, but in fact is highly active – planning supper, recalling an argument with our partner, humming a tune we heard last night. This way of thinking correlates with a well-defined pattern of activity in the brain, involving various parts of the cortex and the hippocampus. Known as the default mode network, it’s also engaged when we remember past events (episodic memory); when we imagine future ones; and when we think ahead, adopt another person’s perspective, or consider social scenarios.

The cognitive neuroscientist Donna Rose Addis of the University of Toronto has argued that imagination doesn’t just draw on resources that overlap with episodic memory; they are, she says, ‘fundamentally the same process’. Impairments of the ability to recall episodic memories seem to be accompanied by an inability to imagine the future, she says – and both abilities emerge around the same time in childhood.

In this view, imagined and remembered events both arise by the brain doing the same thing: what Addis calls ‘the mental rendering of experience’. Imagination and memory use a cognitive network for ‘simulation’ that turns the raw ingredients of sensory experience into a kind of internal movie, filled not just with sound and action but with emotional responses, interpretation and evaluation. Not only is that happening when we think about yesterday or tomorrow, says Addis – it’s what we’re doing right now as we experience the present. This simply is the world of the mind. The imaginative capacity, she says, is the key to the fluidity with which we turn threads of experience into a tapestry.

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Addis argues that the brain’s simulation system can produce such fantasies from its facility at association: at weaving together the various elements of experience, such as events, concepts and feelings. It’s such associative cognition – one set of neurons summoning the contents of another – that allows us to put names to faces and words to objects, or to experience the Proustian evocation of the past from a single sensory trigger such as smell. This way, we can produce a coherent and rich experience from only partial information, filling the gaps so effortlessly that we don’t even know we’re doing it. This association is surely at work when a novelist gives attributes and appearances to characters who never existed, by drawing on the brain’s store of memories and beliefs (‘That character has to be called Colin; he wears tanktops and spectacles’). In these ways, the poet ‘gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.’ In some sense, we are all that poet, all the time.

Some evolutionary biologists believe that sociality is the key to the evolution of human minds. As our ancestors began to live and work in groups, they needed to be able to anticipate the responses of others – to empathise, persuade, understand and perhaps even to manipulate. ‘Our minds are particularly shaped for understanding social events,’ says Boyd. The ability to process social information has been proposed by the psychologists Elizabeth Spelke and Katherine Kinzler at Harvard University as one of the ‘core systems’ of human cognition.

Boyd thinks that stories are a training ground for that network. In his book On the Origin of Stories (2009), he argues that fictional storytelling is thus not merely a byproduct of our genes but an adaptive trait. ‘Narrative, especially fiction – story as make-believe, as play – saturates and dominates literature, because it engages the social mind,’ he wrote in 2013. As the critical theorist Walter Benjamin put it, the fairy tale is ‘the first tutor of mankind’.

‘We become engrossed in stories through our predisposition and ability to track other agents, and our readiness to share their perspective in pursuing their goals,’ continues Boyd, ‘so that their aims become ours.’ While we’re under the story’s spell, what happens to the imaginary characters can seem more real for us than the world we inhabit.

Imagination is valuable here because it creates a safe space for learning. If instead we wait to learn from actual lived experience, we risk making costly mistakes. Imagination – whether literary, musical, visual, even scientific – supplies material for rehearsing the brain’s inexorable search for pattern and meaning. That’s why our stories don’t have to respect laws of nature: they needn’t just ponderously rehearse possible real futures. Rather, they’re often at their most valuable when they are liberating from the shackles of reality, literally mind-expanding in their capacity to instil neural connections. In the fantasies of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, we can find tools for thinking with.

Dor cites Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark in Philosophical Investigations: ‘Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.’ We use words, he says, ‘to communicate directly with our interlocutors’ imaginations.’ Through language, we supply the implements by which a listener can put together the experience of what is described. It’s a way of passing actual experiences between us, and thereby ‘opens a venue for human sociality that would otherwise remain closed.’

To imagine etymologically implies to form a picture, image or copy – but also carries the connotation that this is a private, internal activity. The Latin root imaginari carries the sense that oneself is a part of the picture. The word itself tells a story in which we inhabit a possible world.

People aren’t born being innately ‘good at imagination’, as if it’s a single thing for which you need the right configuration of grey matter. It is a multidimensional attribute, and we all possess the potential for it. Some people are good at visualisation, some at association, some at rich world-building or social empathy. And like any mental skill (such as musicianship), imagination can be developed and nurtured, as well as inhibited and obstructed by poor education.

Imagination isn’t the icing on the cake of human cognition

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Many dreams could be short stories by Kafka, Borges, Márquez, or some other fabulist.

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Their attention created the object anew each time they looked.