Pouring old wine into new bottles? Constrained Vs unconstrained skills in reading success

 

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About three years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was asked to review an academic paper that was concerned with children’s acquisition of so-called unconstrained skills with respect to reading success in early years classrooms.

The idea of constrained Vs unconstrained skills in early reading instruction was not one I had encountered before, so I found myself tracking down citations in the reference list, which is a sure way to make the process of reviewing someone else’s work a much longer, though ultimately more satisfying, task. Because this was during the unpredictable days of COVID-19 and its associated lock-downs, and I was distracted with other matters, I did not come back to this construct straight away but have been giving it more thought in the last 12 months.

The manuscript I was reviewing made reference to this 2016 paper by Catherine Snow (no relation) and Timothy Matthews. Subsequently, during an exchange on “X” (formerly Twitter), I was introduced by Matthew Writer to this earlier (2004) paper by Scott Paris that was not referenced by Snow and Matthews. Some further digging also revealed, among others, this 2011 paper by Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl. There are other papers on this construct as well, but I will draw on these three publications to pull together some thoughts here on the notion of constrained Vs unconstrained skills and why this idea could be useful for teachers and teacher educators. I also want to draw attention to what I see as some potential pitfalls with this construct.

Snow and Matthews (2016) conceptualised the relationship between constrained and unconstrained skills as being categorical:

Snow, C. E., & Matthews, T. J. (2018). The role of background knowledge in reading comprehension: A critical review. The Future of Children, 42(3), 214–240. (p. 59)

Dougherty Stahl (2011) presented the relationship between the skill-sets as a continuum: 

Dougherty Stahl, K. A. (2011). Applying new visions of reading development in today's classrooms. The Reading Teacher, 65(1), 52-56. (p. 53).

What does it mean to say a reading-related skill is “constrained”?

Let’s back up a little first. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with frameworks such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR) and also Scarborough’s Reading Rope. Both of these frameworks provide ways of organising our thinking about the skills that children, as reading novices, need to both further develop, and in some cases, acquire from scratch, in order to become skilled readers. Both frameworks have strong empirical support and are useful conversation starters with teachers, school leaders, and policy-makers interested in transforming reading instruction. While there does not seem to be major disagreement on the merit and relevance of these frameworks, debate continues to rage as to the how of supporting skill development on both sides of their ledgers. These sides can be broadly thought of as word identification and its subskills and language comprehension and its subskills. Many workers have noted that weaknesses on one side of these models cannot be “propped up” by strengths on the other side. Strong oral language skills do not compensate for poor word identification skills and strong word identification skills do not do the work for weak oral language skills. Students need high levels of proficiency on both sides.

When workers such as Paris (2004), Dougherty Stahl (2011), and Snow and Matthews (2016) talk about constrained skills, they are referring to skills related to word-identification that are finite with respect to their scope. In the case of teaching reading in English-speaking countries, these include:

• Basic print concepts (directionality of text; book orientation; spaces between written words as word boundaries).
• Knowing the names of the 26 letters in the English alphabet.
• Knowing that speech sounds (phonemes) map to written letters and letter combinations (graphemes) in rule-governed ways, albeit with varying levels of orthographic transparency.
• Being able to blend sounds to decode unfamiliar words.

All of the authors referred to above describe these constrained skills as “easy to teach” and “easy to assess”. There is also a hint, in all of them, however, that because of these characteristics, constrained skills have been over-emphasised in policy and practice. I agree with the assertions regarding the relative ease with which they can be taught and assessed, but would caution that this does not necessarily mean they are taught and assessed well, to the level of mastery and automaticity that supports the all-important process of orthographic mapping, as described by Linnea Ehri. Their emphasis by science of reading researchers and reading policy reformers reflects the fact that balanced literacy prevails in many English-speaking jurisdictions and so by definition, constrained skills have not received rigorous and systematic focus in enough classrooms (see here for further on problems with balanced literacy).

Everyone seems to agree, to at least some extent, that mastery of the so-called “basics” (constrained skills) in early reading is critical, though many don’t even draw breath before then diminishing their importance with a “but” statement. This but statement normally contains one or more of the following elements:

• There’s more to reading than phonics;
• An over-emphasis on phonics will be harmful;
• Decoding skills are only important in the early stages of reading;
• Phonics should be taught in context.
  
• Decoding is not reading.
  

It's easy to see how easily these can morph into another version of “everything is in the eclectic mix in a balanced literacy classroom”. To take the final point in particular, no, decoding is not reading, but it is not possible to understand text that cannot be decoded. Efficient decoding is a necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for reading comprehension to occur.

What are the skills that are “unconstrained”?

Here we move our focus to the language comprehension side of the SVR and the upper stands of the Reading Rope. This means we are now thinking about “skills without borders", such as:

• vocabulary knowledge – understanding of both denotative and connotative meanings of words and the ability to deal with the polysemous* nature of many Tier 1 words in English. Acquisition of “higher-order” literate language (Tier 2 words) is also important. See this link for more on tiers of vocabulary.
• the ability to draw inferences from idiomatic, non-literal language, such as metaphor, irony, and sarcasm and to understand the use of language for humorous purposes, e.g., in puns and other jokes.
• the ability to deal with a range of syntactic structures and the meaning they support (e.g., active Vs passive voice; subordinate clauses; fronted adverbial clauses; apposition). Knowing how punctuation supports meaning in written text is also important.
• background knowledge – the ability to bring prior knowledge to both fiction and non-fiction genres, and to apply and modify this, based on the reading of new texts. Reading comprehension both supports and is supported by, ongoing acquisition of background knowledge, across a wide range of subject areas.
  *Polysemous words have multiple meanings, while their spelling and pronunciation do not change. Consider for example, the multiple meanings attached to the Tier 1 word "bank".
  

The authors mentioned above have all noted that these skills are harder to teach and also harder to assess than constrained skills. If you are not familiar with Nancy Lewis Hennessy’s 2021 text The Reading Comprehension Blueprint, I recommend it as a great source on the complex integrated processes involved in reading comprehension and the need for high-quality curriculum materials and monitoring processes to support the work of teachers. Importantly, though, Hennessy includes constrained skills that support word identification, as being key to the comprehension process.

Why might a distinction between constrained and unconstrained skills be important?

I think the idea of constrained Vs unconstrained skills is a valuable one in conceptualising the reading process and understanding the challenges faced both by students and teachers in the journey from novice to proficient. It reminds us that there is a finite nature to the skills involved in “getting words off the page” aspect of reading and ensuring that literally thousands of words are efficiently orthographically mapped – stored in long-term memory with a meaning, a pronunciation, and correct spelling glued together for ease of access. Ease of access promotes reading fluency (accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression), and as noted by Jan Hasbrouck, fluency is a strong contributor to reading comprehension. It has been described by Tim Rasinksi as the bridge between decoding and comprehension. This suggests that the relationship between constrained and unconstrained skills is more a continuum than a dichotomy. Importantly, it is not a hierarchy, in which some skills, by virtue of their greater range and complexity, assume higher importance over other “lower order” skills.

Consider, for example, the plight of the Year 10 science student who needs to read text like the example below, concerning balancing oxidation-reduction equations, but brings only partially developed constrained skills to the table in the sense that she is unable to decode through unfamiliar polysyllabic/multi-morphemic words – the types of Greco-Latin (Tier 3) words that turn up with great frequency in subject-specific texts in the secondary years:

Neutral Conditions

The first step to balance any redox reaction is to separate the reaction into half-reactions. The substance being reduced will have electrons as reactants, and the oxidized substance will have electrons as products. (Usually all reactions are written as reduction reactions in half-reaction tables. To switch to oxidation, the whole equation is reversed and the voltage is multiplied by -1.) Sometimes it is necessary to determine which half-reaction will be oxidized and which will be reduced. In this case, whichever half-reaction has a higher reduction potential will by reduced and the other oxidized (source).

It is obvious that skilled reading for comprehension here will require the student to draw on well developed constrained and unconstrained skills, and has been noted previously, lack of skills on one side of the ledger cannot be compensated for by the presence of skills on the other.

We need to check our assumptions when we buy into the argument that things that are "easy" to teach are ipso facto taught well. As I have noted previously on this blog in relation to South Australia:

“……following the 2016 trial of the Phonics Screening Check in SA, it was reported that "For many teachers and leaders, the PSC was an eye-opener with some expressing surprise and disappointment about the results - particularly for students they identified as strong readers" (p.18)”.

I also think most teachers would contest the claim that teaching constrained skills efficiently, systematically, and well is "easy". Many were not adequately prepared to do so by their pre-service teacher education programs (see references on this page) and have had to invest considerable time and financial resources into upskilling in this domain.

So – it is important to remember that while the constrained Vs unconstrained framework can certainly be useful in early reading instruction, it can also potentially be weaponised to diminish the importance of constrained skills and to overlook the interconnectedness between the two sets of skills. This was a key take-away for me from the paper by Paris (2005, p.192) who observed that:

"Researchers have analyzed reading skills as if they are independent when many are required as precursors or enabling skills for others". Paris observed that different skills are closely connected at some stages and not at others, describing what he saw as  "...developmentally co-dependent constraints on the skills". 

Paris also argued that where constrained skills are taught to mastery, low variability will exist between readers, but even competent readers will vary widely with respect to the extent of their unconstrained skill development.

We should not assume that just because constrained skills can be taught with a scope and sequence and assessed using rigorous curriculum-based materials, that all children are being exposed to instruction that ensures that this occurs. Where it does, there is a better chance that constrained skills form a strong foundation for students’ lifelong acquisition and refinement of unconstrained skills. We should also not assume that older struggling readers need attention only to unconstrained skills.

If, after three years of schooling, students cannot efficiently and automatically lift words off the page, they will not be in a position to maximise working memory and other executive function systems, activate background knowledge, or employ comprehension monitoring processes and inferencing skills to understand what they are reading. That then imposes serious constraints of another kind, on academic success and psychological wellbeing.

Perhaps rather than a constrained Vs unconstrained dichotomy or even a continuum, what we are actually looking at here is a kind of conceptual double-helix, with the strength of the connecting bonds being an under-recognised point of difference between stronger and weaker readers. Students do not stop using constrained skills over time; these skills simply become an invisible force for good in ensuring that most of a reader's cognitive and linguistic effort can be channelled to demands placed on unconstrained skills when they are reading increasingly challenging texts.

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(C) Pamela Snow (2024)

School leaders and reading instruction: Time to demand LESS rather than more autonomy

 

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It is difficult to think of an outcome from seven years in primary school that is more fundamental and more life-changing than emerging as a proficient reader, writer, and speller. This was broadcast in plain language earlier this week, with the publication of an open letter to all Australian ministers of Education, signed by 45 reading scientists and practitioners. The letter could well have had school leaders as the addressees, as responsibility for how reading is taught is (bizarrely) devolved to individual schools in many Australian jurisdictions, and elsewhere as well.

This post is for leaders in primary / elementary schools, whether principals, deputy principals (school administrators in North America) or literacy leads. It will not have escaped your notice that there is a growing discussion and debate about how reading should be taught in the early years of school and how ongoing literacy (reading, writing, and spelling) skills are developed across the school years to simultaneously ensure academic achievement and promote student wellbeing.  

Every corner of academic achievement hinges on at least proficiency, if not strength in reading, writing, and spelling. In secondary school, learning across subjects as diverse as English, sciences, history, geography, and yes, even mathematics, assumes the ability to effortlessly derive meaning from increasingly complex texts, whether fiction or non-fiction. The ability to write in a range of genres across the curriculum is equally important, and equally challenging. These are skills that need to be taught by classroom teachers; they should not be by “caught”, hook or by crook by some lucky students and missed by more unfortunate others. This is not a trivial fairground game.  

If you buy the line that “there is no such thing as the science of reading” then you also have to sign up for related flat-earth ideas: that there’s no such thing as science of perception; or a science of memory; or a science of cognition. I am sure no school leaders would fall for those. Scientific evidence in any field is imperfect and evolving. It might be tempting, in the face of what looks like so much debate about reading instruction, for leaders to conclude that “Well, the experts don’t agree on which approaches are best, so we school leaders can continue to make our own call on this”.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As school leaders, you are responsible for ensuring that approaches to preventing and managing anaphylaxis are based on the best available evidence, even if physiologists and pharmacologists are engaged in ongoing academic debates in the background about ways of further improving such care. You do this by applying well-developed, evidence-based procedures provided by sector leaders. As the evidence changes, the policies and guidelines you are provided with will change. You are responsible for ensuring that children in your school are kept safe from predatory adults, which means ensuring that appropriate police checks are carried out on staff – even though better approaches to doing so may be available in the future. You are responsible for applying the law as it applies to all aspects of workplace safety and ensuring that children and staff do not experience bullying in your school. You do this by applying the best available policies and frameworks provided by sector leaders. As the evidence changes, the policies and guidelines you are provided with will change. I'm sure you can see the pattern here.

In all cases, the evidence will evolve over time, but you are expected to apply the highest standards as they apply today – not to do you own thing until every possible research question has been resolved.

In the case of anaphylaxis, child safety and bullying, the guidelines are tight because the consequences of failure are immediate, visible, and potentially catastrophic.

The same logic and rigour need to apply to reading instruction.

Many education jurisdictions devolve responsibility to individual schools to decide how reading is taught, but when we hold this up to the light, several fatal cracks become immediately visible.

When students exit primary school with reading, writing, and spelling skills around a mid-primary level, as is unfortunately not uncommon, we are setting them up for a slippery slope of academic failure, behavioural dysregulation, poor school attendance, early school disengagement, possible youth justice involvement, and other emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. Their attitudes to school and learning are jaded at best, actively resentful at worst, and the adults in their world (teachers, school leaders, parents, and grandparents, allied health professionals, and tutors) despair of knowing how to find and afford the increasingly complex supports they end up needing.

Secondary schools then become de facto mental health-come-adolescent-life-skill services for many students, albeit inadequately resourced ones, and secondary teachers despair of being able to provide all students with opportunities to learn across the widest possible curriculum. Narrowed curriculum choices mean narrowed post-secondary training and education options, in the context of employment opportunities for unskilled workers diminishing, thanks to the march of artificial intelligence into roles that lend themselves to replacement by automation.

As primary / elementary school leaders, you do not necessarily see at first hand, the longterm consequences of ineffective reading instruction practices. You are protected from this by the slow burn of the widening academic gaps between students who have well-developed literacy skills and those who do not. Ask your secondary colleagues though, and you will hear about the cancerous impacts of poor reading and writing skills for a highly visible cohort of their incoming Year 7 students. Students do not go to secondary school to learn to read, write and spell, and nor are secondary settings equipped to teach these foundational skills. They are called primary or elementary skills as a clue to where they should be taught. Growing numbers of Australian primary school leaders are signing the Primary Reading Pledge as a signal to their communities that their students will exit Year 6 as proficient readers, writers, and spellers. It may strike some as odd that this even needs to be given a second thought, yet it does.

It is easy, but incorrect to believe that when students exit primary school without proficient reading, writing, and spelling skills that the reasons for this are located entirely within the child, or their family and should not give cause for reflection on the part of schools. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some students are unfortunately casualties of well-intended, but low-impact reading instruction approaches. It is the job of schools, not parents, to teach children how to read, and schools can do this successfully, even in disadvantaged communities, if they apply rigorous evidence in their approach to reading instruction.

By the same token, some primary schools “cruise” on the coat-tails of their post/zip codes, and do not extend their students’ abilities beyond what would be expected on the basis of family socio-economic status. Because there is a proportion of students who will succeed regardless of the instruction they receive, staff in such schools may mistakenly give themselves credit where it is not really due and be blinkered to the possibility that their students could be excelling, rather than just succeeding. This is a loss to our future human, social, and economic capital as a community.

Teachers and school leaders have been sold many stories about reading, including the idea that something called “Balanced Literacy” is the sensible mid-point between two polar extremes and provides an equilibrium of equally valid teaching approaches. Unfortunately, however, there is no research to support Balanced Literacy as a preferred initial reading instruction approach to ensure success for 95% plus of students. In fact, its corollary, Reading Recovery, has been discredited and New York’s Columbia University has recently dissolved its Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a longstanding pillar of Whole Language / Balanced Literacy-based instruction.

Let’s be honest. Balanced Literacy is an approach to reading instruction that works best for the adults. It does not place demands on teacher knowledge about the nature of the English writing system. This makes life so much easier for universities. It allows reading instruction to be out-sourced to large publishing houses, via sets of levelled readers and tick-box monitoring tools. This makes life so much easier for literacy leads and classroom teachers (and is not bad for the bottom line of those global publishing houses either). It is associated with a narrow majority of students succeeding (at least at essential levels), while a significant proportion will struggle. Hmm, now things are starting to become awkward, but let’s just say that “some kids take longer”, or “we have to find books this child is passionate about”, or “boys take longer”, or “writing and spelling are not really 21^st century skills anyway” any other number of uncomfortable mistruths that teachers and leaders have to fall back on when their approaches inevitably create a trail of casualties. A Victorian school principal wrote about this painful squirming in a guest post on this site in 2021.

Teaching reading explicitly and systematically requires significant shifts in teacher knowledge and classroom practice, over a three-to-five-year period. This requires staff to overcome some entrenched misconceptions and, in some cases, anxieties about gaps in their own knowledge and skills. These gaps were created by their initial teacher education and impose significant burdens and ultimately unease for teachers. Such anxieties are not easy to talk about, so it is understandable that teachers (and indeed leaders) will sometimes fall back on memes and catch-phrases like “phonics is already in the mix”; “phonics teaches children to bark at print” and “reading is all about meaning, so we can’t start with phonics”. All of these assertions topple when exposed to the slightest puff of research and practice evidence, and when they do, space is made for new conversations to take place. But don’t believe me. Talk to fellow leaders who have overseen such transformations in their schools and ask them what they have seen with respect to student data (academically and behaviourally), teacher feedback, and parent satisfaction. Look at the Canberra-Goulburn Catalyst Project, to see what happens when coordinated, sector wide change is led from the top. Further, I challenge you to find leadership colleagues who are strategically transforming practice in the other direction, away from structured explicit literacy teaching and towards Balanced Literacy. That’s just not a thing in 2023.

If your school is teaching reading in a way that is diametrically different from how a neighbouring school is doing so, then logic dictates that they cannot both be using “best practice” approaches. On what basis should we ask the community to tolerate high and often random variability in reading instruction and the inevitable unevenness in quality that ensues from this? The community is not asked to accept such high rates of variability on any other aspect of children’s wellbeing, such as their response to vaccinations or their safety in motor vehicles, but in reading instruction, high variability is somehow the accepted norm.

It would be one thing for us to lack good evidence about effective reading instruction. If that was the case, allowing schools to muddle through, as best they can, might be reasonable. Ironically though, we do know a great deal about the reading process and how best to teach it. A knowledge translation blockage has prevented best evidence from reaching the hands of school leaders and classroom teachers. This needs to be halted as a matter of priority.

For you as school leaders, it would be so much easier if the teaching of reading was “set and forget” but it is not. It is as complex and as high-stakes as prevention and management of anaphylaxis or ensuring child safety and should command the same levels of scientific rigour in schools. You are not asked to develop your own approaches to these aspects of your portfolio and nor should you be asked to “choose your own adventure” on reading instruction. I predict that in ten years time, it will be viewed as laughable that schools could once do their own thing with respect to reading instruction.

Part of being a leader is managing up as well as down. In the interests of your students’ academic success and wellbeing, your teachers’ professional self-esteem, and your parents’ satisfaction, one of the most powerful levers you can pull as a school leader is the one that demands policy makers to apply and provide the best current evidence on reading instruction in a bottom-down fashion, in the same way they do on other key elements of running a school. Schools should then be resourced accordingly, in terms of professional learning and materials, rather than islands of good practice popping up here and there. These islands join together over time to some extent but imagine how effective schools could be without the curse of high variability knocking high quality off its pedestal at every turn.

It may seem counter-intuitive to be advocating for less rather than more school autonomy on something core like reading instruction. But it is the very core nature of reading instruction that means it should be taught consistently, regardless of sector, location, or the composition, knowledge, and personal likes and dislikes of the school leadership team.

Leadership and professionalism are concerned with balancing autonomy and accountability.  School leaders will see stronger student outcomes for all when they advocate with one voice, for their leaders to lead by elevating reading instruction to the same standing as anaphylaxis and child safety: an everyday, high-stakes part of school life that should be guided by rigorous evidence, not by feel-good ideology, a mish-mash of approaches, personal beliefs and/or adult comfort-zones. 

(C) Pamela Snow (2023)