There's Research for That

Your K-5 Literacy Instruction Questions Answered

Heidi Anne Mesmer, Ph.D., Heidi Anne Mesmer, Katie Hilden-Clouse

• Publisher: Shell Education
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765971758
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

A clear and actionable guide to making sense of and implementing the Science of Reading

There's Research for That answers common questions about teaching literacy, such as how many letters to teach per week and the benefits of teaching handwriting in a digital world. The Science of Reading directly affects how K–5 teachers do their jobs. It's hard to keep up with all of the findings, and teachers need guidance on how to apply research in practice. This book offers a solution, giving you accessible explanations, examples, and strategies for helping your students build literacy skills.

Each chapter covers a single question, making it easy to find what you're looking for when you need it. The authors discuss the question, describe the history behind current practices, and unlike other books, There's Research For That actually walks you through the "what" of the research and the "why," showing how research connects to everyday teaching. Woven throughout are pointers on how best instructional practices can be applied or adapted for students across academic levels, and from all cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

This resource:

• Explains research on literacy education in a handy Q&A format
• Describes teaching best practices and the reasons behind them
• Shows you how to update what you're already doing to reflect new evidence
• Can be used with various literacy curriculums and reading programs

This comprehensive and user-friendly breakdown of the Science of Reading will help ensure that you're doing what works to help develop students' literacy skills.

Table of contents

• A
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Table of Contents Cont.
• Introduction 1
• Question 1: I know that “letter of the week” is not the way to go, but how many letters should I tea
• Question 2: Should I teach letter names or letter sounds? 23
• Question 3: What are print concepts, and should they be given instructional attention? Don’t student
• Question 4: Which phonological awareness skills are most important to teach, and how should I teach
• Question 5: What does the research say about sound walls and teaching mouth moves? 49
• Question 6: What does the research say about how decodable texts impact readers? How should I use de
• Question 7: How many times does a reader need to decode a word in order to really learn it? 63
• Question 8: How should I teach high-frequency sight words? Should students just memorize them visual
• Question 9: Is invented spelling supported by research? Is it damaging to children’s later reading a
• do they really need to be taught handwriting? 89
• Question 11: For oral reading practice, should students read the same text repeatedly or read differ
• Question 12: What types of texts should we use when working on reading with expression? 105
• Question 13: What are key components of effective instructional routines for vocabulary? 113
• Question 14: Should I teach comprehension strategies one at a time by week? 123
• Question 15: Which comprehension strategies are most important to teach, and how many should I teach
• Question 16: How can I effectively teach expository text structures, and when should this instructio
• Question 17: Is explicit instruction of sentence comprehension necessary, and if so, what should it
• Question 18: How do executive skills and cognitive flexibility impact students’ reading comprehensio
• Question 19: How do I support my students’ developing oral language? 161
• Question 20: Should I match students to books by reading level? If so, how? 169
• References 177
• Index 195
• Acknowledgments 201
• About the Authors 202
• B