By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark
From my heart and from my hand
Why don’t people understand my intentions?
Education is shifting rapidly from folklore and tradition toward approaches grounded in scientific evidence. That movement includes not only decades of education research but also insights from neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology. One of the most prominent developments in recent years has been the growing adoption of the Science of Reading.
Research now offers a clear picture of how reading develops in the brain. Educators and policymakers have distilled these findings into five essential components of effective reading instruction:
- Phonemic awareness
- Phonics
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
Although those five elements may look familiar, the current emphasis is different. The Science of Reading places renewed attention on phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and manipulate the distinct sounds in language—and on systematic phonics instruction, which teaches the relationship between letters and sounds explicitly. This emphasis aligns with neuroscience evidence about the brain pathways that support accurate decoding and word recognition.
It’s important to remember that humans evolved for language, not for reading. Reading is a learned skill that requires deliberate instruction. Many students acquire reading fluency with less effort, but for countless learners reading demands structured support. Instruction guided by the Science of Reading can make a large difference, yet even excellent, research-based teaching does not always guarantee success for every student.
To understand why, we need to broaden our view from the Science of Reading to the Science of Learning. The Science of Reading focuses on the content and methods of reading instruction, but it doesn’t fully address more fundamental mental processes that enable learning. These foundational abilities—often called cognitive skills—determine how well a learner can take in, organize, store, retrieve and reason about information. Examples include sustained attention, visual span, sequential processing, visualization, working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility.
Each of these cognitive skills plays a distinct role in reading development:
Sustained attention: The capacity to stay focused on a task over time. Students with weaker sustained attention may lose focus in the middle of decoding a word or reading a sentence, producing gaps in comprehension and requiring frequent re-reading.
Visual span: The amount of visual information processed at a glance. Readers with a narrow visual span may see letters or single words at a time, making accurate decoding and fluent reading difficult. Readers with a wider visual span can process groups of words or full lines, which supports both speed and understanding.
Sequential processing: The ability to perceive and remember items in order. In reading, the sequence of letters and words matters: reversed or jumbled order changes meaning. Sequential processing also affects math and other skills that depend on order and structure.
Visualization: The capacity to form and manipulate mental images. Strong readers often create vivid mental pictures of what they read, which helps with comprehension and recall. Students who struggle to visualize may have difficulty understanding or remembering passages.
Working memory: The ability to hold and manipulate information in mind for short periods. Working memory allows readers to keep the beginning of a sentence active while reading to the end, to compare new information to prior knowledge, and to monitor their own comprehension as they read.
Inhibitory control: The skill of suppressing impulses or irrelevant responses. When reading, inhibitory control helps a student resist guessing a word prematurely or blurting out responses. Weak inhibitory control can undermine accuracy and strategic reading behavior.
Cognitive flexibility: The ability to shift between mental processes and adapt to new rules or perspectives. Effective readers move between sounding out unfamiliar words and recognizing familiar words automatically; they also revise interpretations when new information changes the meaning of a passage.
The Science of Reading provides necessary guidance about what effective reading instruction should include. But the Science of Learning teaches us that the learner’s cognitive capacity—the strength of individual cognitive skills and how well they work together—is also essential. Some students struggle despite strong, evidence-based instruction because their cognitive skills need development in order to fully benefit from the teaching they receive.
Crucially, cognitive capacity can be improved. Research and practice show that we can strengthen the brain processes that support attention, memory, sequencing and flexibility. When educators combine science-based reading instruction with attention to cognitive skill development, they create a more complete approach to building reading proficiency and overall learning capacity.
As neuroscience continues to inform how we understand learning, educators should embrace the Science of Reading while expanding toward the Science of Learning. Integrating instructional methods that teach decoding, fluency and comprehension with strategies that build underlying cognitive skills offers the best path to help more students become confident, capable readers.
About the author
Betsy Hill is President of BrainWare Learning Company, an organization that applies neuroscience to build learning capacity. An experienced educator, she has studied the connection between neuroscience and education with experts including Dr. Patricia Wolfe. She is a former chair of the board of trustees at Chicago State University and teaches strategic thinking in the MBA program at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, where she received a Contribution to Learning Excellence Award. She holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and an MBA from Northwestern University and is co-author of the book “Your Child Learns Differently, Now What?”
Roger Stark is Co‑founder and CEO of BrainWare Learning Company. He led efforts to make comprehensive cognitive literacy skills training and assessment broadly accessible, focusing on what neuroscience reveals about the brain. He spearheaded the development of BrainWare SAFARI, a comprehensive, integrated cognitive literacy training tool delivered online. Roger is co‑author of the book “Your Child Learns Differently, Now What?”
This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub focused on providing context for the shift in education to digital curriculum.