Start here
Two minutes, and the rest of the page makes sense.
What is the Reading Engine? What reading actually requires, and why so many children who can read the words still fail the test that counts. Watch on YouTube ↗
- Reading success has two halves, and they multiply. Instructional effectiveness — what school does — times learning effectiveness, which is everything your child brings to the desk. Raise one as high as it will go and if the other is near zero, so is the result. The Science of Learning Model ↗
- This page is the second half. School works hard on the first and generally does it well. Almost nobody works on the other one — which is why reading scores have not moved in thirty years.
- Reading itself is not one thing either. Getting words off the page and understanding them are separate jobs, built at different times by different people.
- The page has four layers. Conditions at the bottom decide whether anything works. Above them, what builds a reader. Above that, the engine itself. At the top, reading.
- Where to look first: the bottom layer. Conditions are quick to check, common, and any one of them can hold back everything above it.
- Nothing here diagnoses anything. Each part tells you what to notice and what to do — at home, or in one sentence to your doctor.
- Every part links to something. Click any element for what it is, how it gets built, how you would know, and what to do — plus the guides, checks and tools that go with it.
Who is this for?
Click any part of the model below. Start at the bottom if you are not sure where to begin. Choosing an age above tailors what each part tells you.
Four questions
Nothing is stored. This just decides what to point you at.