by Dr. William Kerns & Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2026
My name is Dr. Sam Bommarito. As regular readers of this blog know. I am a not-so-retired reading teacher/reading professor. Over the course of my 60-plus-year career in education, I have taught every grade from kindergarten through graduate school. I retired from full-time teaching in 2016. I began taking on a variety of activities, including tutoring, staff development, making presentations and, of course, writing this blog. For more information about me, see my blog of 07/30/26 LINK. This entry is the second in the series Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids by Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2026. Dr. William Kerns wrote the main section of this blog post. Bill and I have been working together for almost two decades. One of the first steps in writing is to identify your audience. Over the years, my audience has mainly been teachers and administrators in the literacy field. Bill’s audience has been researchers and folks at the district level charged with making sure districts’ programs have a good foundation in research. Bill is well published, including an article published in the Reading Research Quarterly. Over the years, this has proven to be a very productive partnership.
Bill and I have concluded that many educators (not all educators) have reached a consensus around best ways to teach literacy. It is what Bill calls a synergistic view of literacy research. We’ve noticed that many of the gurus on what I have dubbed the Social Media Version of Science of Reading have relied almost exclusively on empirical research. Looking through the bibliographies of what they have written, one searches in vain for evidence that qualitative research has been treated as co-equal with empirical research. Most often it has been ignored or worse yet, discounted and discredited. The social media form SOR has been challenged multiple times, saying that it only looks at a narrow range of research, ignoring, discounting or discrediting any research that does not fit their narrow views about reading. I’ve written about this in this blog, providing plenty of examples of when this is happening.
For the moment, let’s look at the work of Emily Hanford. First, please view this podcast from Thomas Ultican about Pearson and Tierney’s views of the SOR LINK. After that, download the PDF Fact-Checking the Science of Reading LINK.
In our first blog, we documented the problems created by the Social Media version of SOR LINK. Let me illustrate that point further. The 2000 NRP identified 5 ways to teach phonics LINK. Of the 5 ways, only one is allowed under the new laws being passed by multiple states. Even when districts get the best reading scores in the state, they are not allowed to use the methods that got them those results LINK. A simple fix for that problem is to change the criteria used for success to performance criteria. That is a topic for future development.
Please look now at what Dr. William Kerns has to say about our current position. Thanks for considering what he has to say.
A Synergistic View of Literacy Research
by Dr. William Kerns
An old metaphor maintains that “if you always use a hammer, you treat everything like a nail.” More than 25 years ago,the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) prioritized experimental research designs to shed light on what type of instruction has a causal relationship to literacy gains demonstrated by students. To this day, discourse around the type of instructional strategies that are supported under the umbrella of the “science of reading” is often based on what can be tested through experimental research design. But one may think of this form of research as a type of hammer. The analysis of trends in quantitative data such as test scores may be thought of as another type of hammer in a toolbox.
We encourage teachers to draw on diverse tools rather than relying solely on hammers. A foundational principle in basic research practices is to remember that the appropriate method of research depends on the questions being asked, and what it is that one is attempting to learn. If literacy scholars and practitioners only rely on a limited type of research methods, they will only gain answers to a limited set of questions.
Qualitive research is no less valuable to the field of literacy than quantitative or experimental design. For example, the pioneering ethnographic research by Shirley Brice Heath (1983) to this day provides a reminder of the importance of paying attention to a possible mismatch between language used within a community and the way language is used in a classroom setting.
This blog has long argued for a “radical middle” (Pearson, 2001) in literacy instruction, one that defies the limits of debates between structured literacy or balanced literacy. We agree wholeheartedly with the importance of addressing basic literacy skills. Teachers can gain a great deal from use of explicit and systematic instruction that builds toward increasingly difficult concepts. We also counter that reading instruction is richer, more complete when also considering factors such as motivation, self-efficacy, and social and cultural aspects as envisioned by Duke and Cartwright’s (2021) active view of reading.
In practice, this includes the use of literary response and writing workshops. We also advocate for the creative use of poetry to build decoding skills (Fresch & Harrison, 2026). Beyond this, we believe in the use of explicit strategy instruction combined with wide, diverse, readings (Scanlon & Anderson, 2020). These diverse readings should tap into approaches of culturally responsive instruction, drawing on the diversity of cultural and linguistic backgrounds students as strengths to enrich instruction. Qualitative methods of research provide tools for tracking the meaning-making of students when these approaches to instruction are used.
Our approach also finds common ground with the synergistic view of reading proposed by Kuhn and Stahl (2026). In this approach, components of literacy such as phonological awareness, decoding, and comprehension work together in interactive ways. Instruction, then, should flexibly reflect the interactive rather than isolated nature of the components of reading.
Drawing on this proposal, we would also like to suggest taking a synergistic view of literacy research one in which different methods of research are viewed as working together in interactive ways rather than as isolated components (see also Yaden et al., 2021). We advocate flexibility and dexterity in the use of research, sensitivity to the backgrounds of the students and the social contexts. Experimental and quantitative research methods are invaluable. But so too are qualitative methods.
References
Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44.
Fresch, M.J. & Harrison, D.L. (2026). The phonics handbook poetry collection: 101 decodable
poems for reinforcing sound letter patterns. Routledge.
Heath, S.B. (1983). Way with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms.
Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, M.R. & Stahl, K.A.D. (2026). A modest proposal for a synergistic view of reading.
Reading Research Quarterly, 61(3), e70133.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). (2000). Report of the
National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups (NIH Publication No. 00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved November 11, 2005, from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/ publications/nrp/report.htm
Pearson, P. D. (2001). Life in the radical middle: A personal apology for a balanced view of
reading. In R. Flippo (Ed.), Reading researchers in search of common ground (pp. 78-83). Newark DE: International Reading Association.
Scanlon, D.M., & Anderson, K.L. (2020). Using context as an assist in word solving: The
contributions of 25 years of research on the interactive strategies approach. Reading Research Quarterly, 55 (S1), S19-S34.
Yaden, D.B, Reinking, D., & Smagorinsky, P. (2021). The trouble with binaries: A perspective
on the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), 119-129.
https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.402
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This blog posted by
Dr. Sam
The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides
Coming up soon: Interviews with Nora Chabazi from EBLI, Laura Robb, and Rachel Gabriel.
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