Winter 2024/2025 Newsletter
Welcome to Tell Me MORE
Happy New Year!
We’ve been talking about a newsletter for some time now, but today we finally launch our quarterly newsletter, Tell Me MORE.
In this quarter’s newsletter:
- Why students need more than a knowledge-building curriculum
- Lots of adults take dietary supplements, but does providing students with read aloud supplements improve student outcomes? Read more about READS Lab’s work on the effect of these supplements.
- This quarter’s teacher tip
- Congratulations to our first cohort of MORE Certified Trainers
We hope you all had a great winter break and are looking forward to a great 2025!
Why students need more than a knowledge-building curriculum
The Science of Reading tells us that background knowledge is critical for reading comprehension. In response, districts are turning to knowledge-building curricula. But there’s a problem: so many topics, so little time.
MORE is THE elementary science and social studies program that builds schemas to improve academic achievement.
Schemas help students organize knowledge. Schemas are key to reading comprehension because they enable students to transfer what they know about a studied topic to an unstudied but thematically related topic.
New in research: You’ve heard of dietary supplements but what about read aloud supplements?
In a recent study, Doug Mosher and Jimmy Kim of the Harvard READS Lab found that adding MORE “structured supplements” to a nonfiction read-aloud lesson improved students’ comprehension by increasing academic vocabulary and helping students connect “the known to the new.” Just one supplemented lesson showed positive effects, suggesting that these simple changes could have significant educational benefits over time.
Teacher tip: Play around with different ways to connect and categorize key vocabulary
Dig into almost any unit and you’ll find key vocabulary packaged as an alphabetized list. That’s one way to organize information, but it’s not the strategy our brain prefers.
In MORE, students work together to connect concept words and organize concepts into larger categories. “Concept mapping” helps students build lasting knowledge that they can access across the unit and, more importantly, across the years.
We recommend playing with this strategy when planning a new unit. Can you find ways to connect all of the words? Later, challenge students to make their own connections.
In the newsletter’s example, a team of educators prepare for a new social studies unit by exploring how the unit’s vocabulary words connect.
Congratulations to our first cohort of MORE Certified Trainers!
Charlotte educators Adrienne Ciccarello, Amber Pratt, Ginger Fitch, Justine Bishop, Kharma Edwards, Lisa Debo, and Tracey Street totally ROCKED their first MORE Teacher Leader Trainings! What a great example of transfer of ownership from the MORE Team to the district. We’re excited for Cohort 2!
We’re expanding our impact
In our most exciting study to date, we found large and persistent effects of MORE on students’ academic achievement, including literacy and math!
Does your school district serve more than 15K students? Are you interested in MORE? Sign up here to learn more.
Don’t be a stranger!
We LOVE to share our learning. You can find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and through our new website!