Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert (born 1948) is an educational researcher whose work examines literacy, learning, early childhood development, teacher development, writing and children's literature. The main thrust of her work addresses literacy learning among at-risk youth in American classrooms. Currently, she is the CEO and president of TextProject, Inc., an agency that is dedicated to bringing beginning and struggling readers to high levels of literacy through a variety of strategies and tools, particularly through using science and social studies texts, used for reading instruction.
Elfrieda "Freddy" H. Hiebert received her B.A.. in history from Fresno Pacific College, her M.Ed. in Elementary Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She started her career as a classroom teacher for the Clovis (CA) Unified School District before entering graduate school. From 1979 to 1985, she was on the faculty of the University of Kentucky. During her tenure at the University of Kentucky, she spent a year as a visiting associate professor at the Center for the Study of Reading [ permanent dead link ] at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1984) where she served as the director of staff for Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading which, in 1985, was published under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Reading Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine and the National Academy of Education. In 1987, she assumed a professorship at the University of Colorado Boulder and, in 1994, moved to the University of Michigan. From 1997 to 1999, she directed the Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) at the University of Michigan that included researchers Susan B. Neuman and Nell K. Duke as well as others from Michigan State University, University of Virginia, University of Southern California, and the University of Minnesota. From 2005 to 2010, she was an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In January 2011, she founded and became CEO/president of TextProject, Inc.
Among the awards that Hiebert has received in recognition of her contributions as a researcher and educator are the School of Education Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2000), William S. Gray Citation of Merit award for outstanding contributions to the field of reading from the International Reading Association (2008), election to the Reading Hall of Fame (2008), and selection as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (2011).
Hiebert has authored or edited 11 books, including the influential report, Becoming a Nation of Readers, and published over 150 articles in archival journals or chapters in academic volumes. The primary focus of her work has been on identifying text features that support reading development among beginning and struggling readers. She has also contributed to related literatures, particularly on how knowledge of vocabulary influences students' learning from text. Hiebert has recently addressed the issues of how words should be selected for explicit instruction in reading and how word selection differs for narrative compared to informational texts.
A strand of Hiebert's recent work explores students' facility in applying word recognition skills while reading texts silently. As a result, Hiebert has suggested that "comprehension-based silent reading rate" (or CBSRR) is a critical concept requiring attention from both researchers and instructors.
The main focus of Hiebert's research is identifying appropriate texts for struggling and beginning readers. Beginning with Becoming a Nation of Readers, Hiebert has been a proponent of alternative models of text difficulty. She has advocated alternatives to conventional readability formulas as well as current updated versions such as lexiles. Hiebert has written extensively about the failure of typical procedures for establishing text difficulty to recognize how the decodability of a word can inflate a text's difficulty. Similarly, she has noted that conventional readability formulas penalize texts that have sufficient repetition for readers to develop automaticity in word recognition and pronunciation.
As an alternative to current procedures for establishing text difficulty, Hiebert has proposed the Text Elements by Task (TExT) Model . This model evaluates text difficulty by examining two text features that research has shown to have an influence on word recognition among beginning and struggling readers. The features are: (a) the linguistic content of the words in the text (i.e., the letter-sound patterns within the words and the relative frequency of the words in written English), and (b) the cognitive load placed on the reader in processing the linguistic content.
Hiebert has sustained a career-long commitment to furthering strong and evidence-based reading instruction. In Becoming a Nation of Readers, Hiebert and her coauthors (Richard C. Anderson, Judith A. Scott and Ian A.G. Wilkerson) found a wide audience and had a substantial effect on national policy and practice. As director of CIERA, she was responsible for Every child a reader, a summary of research on effective beginning reading practices. TextProject, Inc.supports struggling and beginning readers by providing (a) books and book lists that are indexed by reading level, (b) lessons for teachers and tutors to use with their students, and (c) analytical reports for teacher educators, school board members, and other decision-makers on the research underlying reading programs and policies.
Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.
Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code. It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching Chinese people to read and write Chinese characters, which are not alphabetic, using pinyin, which is.
Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. The concept exists in both in natural language and programming languages though in different forms. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its content and its presentation. In programming, things such as programmer comments, choice of loop structure, and choice of names can determine the ease with which humans can read computer program code.
Reading for special needs has become an area of interest as the understanding of reading has improved. Teaching children with special needs how to read was not historically pursued due to perspectives of a Reading Readiness model. This model assumes that a reader must learn to read in a hierarchical manner such that one skill must be mastered before learning the next skill. This approach often led to teaching sub-skills of reading in a decontextualized manner. This style of teaching made it difficult for children to master these early skills, and as a result, did not advance to more advanced literacy instruction and often continued to receive age-inappropriate instruction.
Reading comprehension is the ability to process written text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Reading comprehension relies on two abilities that are connected to each other: word reading and language comprehension. Comprehension specifically is a "creative, multifaceted process" that is dependent upon four language skills: phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.
Richard C. Anderson is an American educational psychologist who has published influential research on children's reading, vocabulary growth, and story discussions that promote thinking. He is the director of the Center for the Study of Reading and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Anderson is a past president of the American Educational Research Association.
Guided reading is "small-group reading instruction designed to provide differentiated teaching that supports students in developing reading proficiency". The small group model allows students to be taught in a way that is intended to be more focused on their specific needs, accelerating their progress.
High frequency sight words are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode. Sight words were introduced after whole language fell out of favor with the education establishment.
Grace Maxwell Fernald was an educational psychologist and influential figure in early twentieth century literacy education. Fernald established "the first clinic for remedial instruction in 1921 at the University of California, Los Angeles". Tracing tactile learning tendencies back to Quintilian, Séguin, and Montessori, Fernald's kinesthetic spelling and reading method prompted struggling students to trace words. Years of research culminated in 1943 with her classic work, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects. The popular kinesthetic method anchors modern instruction in the areas of special education and remedial reading. Kinesthetic learning is also included as one of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences. Fernald's notion of incorporating the physical with the auditory, verbal, and visual elements of reading instruction, now known as "VAKT", multimodal learning, or multisensory imagery, continues to guide educators today.
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
Jeanne Sternlicht Chall, a Harvard Graduate School of Education psychologist, writer, and literacy researcher for over 50 years, believed in the importance of direct, systematic instruction in reading in spite of other reading trends throughout her career.
Extensive reading (ER) is the process of reading longer, easier texts for an extended period of time without a breakdown of comprehension, feeling overwhelmed, or the need to take breaks. It stands in contrast to intensive or academic reading, which is focused on a close reading of dense, shorter texts, typically not read for pleasure. Though used as a teaching strategy to promote second-language development, ER also applies to free voluntary reading and recreational reading both in and out of the classroom. ER is based on the assumption that we learn to read by reading.
Susan Neuman is an educator, researcher, and education policy-maker in early childhood and literacy development. In 2013, she became Professor of Early Childhood and Literacy Education, and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Nell K. Duke is a contemporary educator and literacy researcher with an interest in informational text, early literacy development, and reading comprehension instruction, with an emphasis on children living in poverty. She is currently a professor of language, literacy, and culture and a faculty associate in the combined program in education and psychology at the University of Michigan.
The Lexile Framework for Reading is an educational tool that uses a measure called a Lexile to match readers with books, articles and other leveled reading resources. Readers and books are assigned a score on the Lexile scale, in which lower scores reflect easier readability for books and lower reading ability for readers. The Lexile framework uses quantitative methods, based on individual words and sentence lengths, rather than qualitative analysis of content to produce scores. Accordingly, the scores for texts do not reflect factors such as multiple levels of meaning or maturity of themes. Hence, the United States Common Core State Standards recommend the use of alternative, qualitative methods for selecting books for students at grade 6 and over. In the US, Lexile measures are reported from reading programs and assessments annually. Thus, about half of U.S. students in grades 3rd through 12th receive a Lexile measure each year. In addition to being used in schools in all 50 states, Lexile measures are also used outside of the United States.
Emergent literacy is a term that is used to explain a child's knowledge of reading and writing skills before they learn how to read and write words. It signals a belief that, in literate society, young children—even one- and two-year-olds—are in the process of becoming literate. Through the support of parents, caregivers, and educators, a child can successfully progress from emergent to conventional reading.
Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) was developed in 1993 by Dr. John T. Guthrie with a team of elementary teachers and graduate students. The project designed and implemented a framework of conceptually oriented reading instruction to improve students' amount and breadth of reading, intrinsic motivations for reading, and strategies of search and comprehension. The framework emphasized five phases of reading instruction in a content domain: observing and personalizing, searching and retrieving, comprehending and integrating, communicating to others, and interacting with peers to construct meaning. CORI instruction was contrasted to experience-based teaching and strategy instruction in terms of its support for motivational and cognitive development.
Linnea Carlson Ehri is an American educational psychologist and expert on the development of reading. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Ehri is known for her theory of orthographic mapping, which describes the process of forming "letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory" that underlies fluent reading. As a consequence of orthographic mapping, written words are tightly linked with their pronunciations and meanings in memory and can be recognized by sight.
Jane Oakhill is a British cognitive psychologist and expert on the development of reading comprehension. She holds the position of Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex.