Reading, Testing and Intervention in Secondary Schools: Megan Dixon webinar notes

This is a write up of my notes from the brilliant webinar which Megan Dixon gave to The Literacy Community in October 2024. Apologies in advance for any inaccuracy or omission – I am so grateful that Megan agreed to speak to us (for free!) and share her expertise so generously. (Jenny Webb)

I have admired Megan Dixon’s work for years and, though she is a primary specialist, I think that much of her work on reading has special interest for secondary colleagues. I’ll admit to feeling a little stunned by Megan during her session – she is a woman of extraordinary intelligence, and I know that all those who were lucky enough to see her speaking live online will agree when I say that she conveyed some highly complex ideas with incredible clarity. We were left with a really concrete set of ideas and strategies to support weaker readers in secondary settings, and much of what Megan shared was transferable across other phases.

This blog isn’t intended to be a comprehensive overview of the talk: I’m not sure I could do it justice! I am, however, sharing some of the key takeaways which have stayed with me. You will also find the slides linked below, which Megan has kindly said we can share with the community.

The problems with research:

Research is really hard to translate into classroom practice. Megan argued that we need to be really cautious that we are reading things carefully and not simply relying on over-simplified summaries. (I think this can be applied to education research in general, not just to research related to literacy)

Megan added that the research into what reading is has moved on a great deal in the last 30-40 years, and rather than this increase in knowledge making things simple, it has actually made them much more complex.

Reading is everyone’s business:

The impact of low literacy levels on people’s lives is stark. Megan shared the fact that women who can’t read are more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health condition by the age of 30. It is beholden upon us to do the best that we can. Reading is everyone’s business. That doesn’t mean that EVERYONE has to understand all of its complexity, but it does mean that people need to understand what part they play – for classroom teachers, that means they need to have the knowledge and skills required to support children to read in the classroom, through the substantive curriculum.

Reading skills continue to develop over time:

Reading is never finished: children continue to be readers even when they have met a particular threshold for independent reading. It is a continual, ongoing sport. Megan argued that we need to keep approaching reading in the older years as something which we teach explicitly. What does this mean? We need to have consistent systems so that we can measure progress in reading over time, and ensure that pathways of support are in place to help students develop.

We have to focus on the hardest to reach children:

Megan warned that, often in schools, we help the ones who can get better, and we don’t always ‘buy in’ to the idea that we should be helping the ones who will take much more time and complex provision. (More on this later)

Some reading skills are easier to teach than others:

Megan’s own research suggests that teachers find retrieval of information quite easy to teach (e.g. find this in the text), but other, deeper reading skills are more elusive and teachers feel less confident handling them. It is much more challenging teaching students to: make inferences from complex information which is threaded through a text; make connections from sentence to sentence; make inferences which require connections with objects and ideas; make meaning created by sequences and/or causation (e.g. then, next, etc.). Megan said that, ‘Text complexity isn’t about having big words and big phrases – complexity can come from form and organisation…’ Students need knowledge of text structure and organisation, and specific skills in connection, prediction, inference, etc. in order to read with meaning. The challenge is that these things are difficult to teach, so teachers tend to focus more on vocabulary teaching and simple retrieval because they lack training and confidence to go further.

Self-regulation is important:

Megan described the importance of ‘active self-regulation’ and outlined some of the areas in this critical area of metacognitive practice: motivation and engagement, executive functioning; explicit teaching and practice of strategies for word recognition, comprehension, etc. Students need to be explicitly shown the parts of texts they should be paying attention to in order to make sense of things. She added that this kind of self-regulation is relatively easy to do in early reading because you can see clearly when students can’t do something, but the more complex language comprehension work in the later years is more challenging for teachers to monitor because it is less visible.

Reading pathways:

Megan argued that, for secondary literacy leaders, we should use diagnostic information from reading tests to decide where students most need support:

Phonics – Megan argued that most students who come to secondary probably don’t need phonics instruction, and that the likelihood is that they need comprehension and fluency intervention. I think it’s important to note here that this is rather a contentious point, especially where the experience of many secondary leaders is that many students do need intervention for significant phonics gaps, and that this picture appears to be increasing year on year.
Sentence completion – Megan said that students who score poorly on sentence completion (one of the measures on most reading tests – she used the example of the NGRT) should receive intervention focused on vocabulary and word recognition.
Passage comprehension – Megan advised that students who score low on passage completion would benefit significantly from intervention using reciprocal reading. She described it as “very well evidenced and delivered really easily,” but she cautioned that schools should invest properly in the official training for reciprocal reading, such as the FFT course, rather than using a watered down version.

Megan said that, if students struggle with BOTH sentence and passage completion, you should start with sentence level work before moving on to passage completion.

Clarification on some technical terms, and questions about ‘reading age’…

What is a ‘standardised score’ or ‘SAS’?

SAS means ‘of all the children who took this test when we did our standardisation sample, children scored this amount’

What is a ‘stanine’?

Staines are distribution scores which produce a bell curve. Students scores will range from 1-9, and the majority of students will be in stanines 4-6. Stanines allow us to identify sentence completion and passage completion, and can therefore support us in deciding on intervention pathways. Megan advised that students with very low stanines should be assessed by a specialist, and that their reading needs won’t likely be fixed by a class teacher.

What is reading age data good for? What is it NOT good for?

Megan said that reading age data is highly problematic – she wrote a great article on this topic here: https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/what-is-reading-age

The bottom line with reading data is that the majority of it is, to use Megan’s words, “a bit wonky and imperfect”, but it is what we DO with it that’s important. Reading ages can be a really useful way to track progress, but we must be extremely careful about how we use them, and we mustn’t put too much stock in their accuracy. They might tell us whether, across a cohort, reading ability is improving, but we can’t talk meaningfully about an individual child making, say, ‘four months of progress’, when the measure is so imperfect and four months is within the margin of error. We must ensure that we’re not asking reading age to support claims which it simply cannot support with any certainty.

What data should we share with students and parents?

It’s important to consider how we share reading data with students and parents or carers. Does a fifteen year old need to hear that they have a reading age of 6? Will that help them in their day-to-day life? Or would it be better to acknowledge with them that they are reading below their peers and that we are going to do X, Y and Z to support them to improve? In addition, I think people outside of schools might easily equate reading age with intelligence, and this is problematic. I have personally taught many children who are extremely able and intelligent who, for whatever reason, have arrived at secondary school unable to read fluently. There are reasons why this happens, and they aren’t always linked to someone’s intellect. A low reading age is a TEMPORARY barrier – there is no reason why it can’;t be overcome with the right support, so sharing reading age data with parents and carers might potentially do damage to people’s perception of that child, or the child’s own self-efficacy, which would hinder their progress in reading interventions moving forward.

In summary: don’t share data which is inherently ‘wonky’ and almost certainly misleading.

Final thoughts:

Megan ended by saying, if every teacher read with their students every lesson in every day, this would have a profound impact on reading progress in our schools. She urged school leaders to ask themselves: