The Science of Reading and the Broader Science of Learning
By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark
Education is shifting from tradition and intuition toward evidence-based practice. Research from education, neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology is increasingly shaping how we teach. One area that has received growing attention is the science of reading, which uses brain and learning research to inform effective reading instruction.
Modern research explains how reading develops in the brain and identifies five essential components of reading instruction:
- Phonemic awareness
- Phonics
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
Although those elements may sound familiar, the current emphasis centers on phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate the meaningful sounds of language) and phonics (explicit instruction in the relationships between letters and sounds). This focus aligns with neuroscience findings about the neural pathways that support decoding and word recognition.
The science of reading highlights an important reality: humans evolved for spoken language, not for reading. Reading requires the brain to build new connections—linking visual recognition areas with language-processing regions—so most learners need explicit instruction to develop fluent reading. High-quality, science-based reading instruction greatly increases the likelihood of success, yet many students still lag: national data show a large share of fourth graders do not read at grade level.
However, the science of reading should be understood as part of the larger science of learning. Reading depends not only on the five components above but also on more fundamental cognitive processes that enable the intake, comprehension, storage, retrieval, and application of information. These cognitive skills—such as attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility—are essential contributors to reading ability.
Key cognitive skills relevant to reading include:
Sustained attention: The capacity to maintain focus on a task over time. Weak sustained attention can cause students to lose their place while decoding words or reading sentences, resulting in incomplete comprehension or repeated re-reading.
Visual span: The ability to process multiple visual elements in a single glance. Students who can take in only one letter or one word at a time will struggle to build fluency, while those who process groups of words or full lines of text are better positioned to grasp meaning and read efficiently.
Sequential processing: The skill of perceiving and remembering information in order. Reading requires precise sequence processing—letters and words must be perceived in their correct order. Difficulties here can produce errors in decoding and in understanding text structure.
Visualization: The ability to form and manipulate mental images. Strong readers often create mental pictures of scenes and events to support comprehension and recall. Students with less developed visualization skills may find it harder to understand or remember what they read.
Working memory: The capacity to hold and manipulate information temporarily. Working memory lets readers keep earlier parts of a sentence in mind while processing the rest, compare new information with prior knowledge, and monitor comprehension. Research links working memory capacity closely with reading comprehension.
Inhibitory control: The ability to suppress competing responses or irrelevant thoughts. Effective reading requires the mental control to reject incorrect word candidates or distracting impulses. Poor inhibitory control can lead to premature guessing or loss of focus while reading aloud or silently.
Cognitive flexibility: The ability to shift between different mental strategies or perspectives. Reading uses multiple brain processes—sounding out unfamiliar words and recognizing familiar words by sight—and skilled readers switch between these strategies fluidly. Cognitive flexibility also supports interpreting characters’ points of view and revising initial understandings when new information appears.
While the science of reading establishes essential instructional practices—especially structured literacy and explicit phonics—it does not fully explain why some students continue to struggle despite strong, evidence-based teaching. That gap points to the need for the science of learning, which examines learners’ cognitive capacities and how those capacities can be developed and strengthened.
The science of learning emphasizes that cognitive skills can be improved through targeted training. Strengthening attention, working memory, sequential processing and other core skills enhances a student’s ability to acquire and apply reading, math, and other academic skills. Cognitive training complements classroom instruction by increasing the learner’s capacity to benefit from teaching.
Practical advances in technology make it possible to deliver integrated cognitive skills training at scale. Training can be supervised by paraprofessionals, older students who have completed training, or teachers, expanding the workforce able to support learners. Compared to ongoing professional development for every grade level, many cognitive training programs are a one-time intervention of limited duration (for example, several weeks to a few months) that yield lasting improvements in cognitive capacity.
As schools invest in improving reading outcomes, both high-quality, research-based reading instruction and attention to underlying cognitive skills are vital. Teacher professional development to implement structured literacy remains essential, but pairing that instruction with focused cognitive skill development offers a complementary path to raise reading achievement and to strengthen learners’ overall academic potential.
Embracing the science of reading and expanding that focus through the science of learning provides a comprehensive strategy: align instruction with how the brain learns and invest in the learner’s cognitive capacity so every student can better access, understand, and apply what they are taught.
About the authors
Betsy Hill is President of BrainWare Learning Company, which develops programs that apply neuroscience to improve learning capacity. An experienced educator, she has studied the connections between neuroscience and education and has served on academic boards and taught strategic thinking at the graduate level. She holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and an MBA from Northwestern University.
Roger Stark is Co-founder and CEO of BrainWare Learning Company. He has led efforts to make comprehensive cognitive literacy training widely available and helped develop BrainWare SAFARI, an integrated online cognitive training program. His work focuses on building effective, accessible tools grounded in decades of clinical research and educational practice.