Because I conduct research about reading, parents often ask me the same question: “What can I do to help my child become a better reader?”

I always give them the same advice: “Read with your children. Enjoy books together, and whatever you do, don’t worry about teaching them to read. Leave the teaching to the teachers.”

This reply draws on my research regarding the literacy practices of high-performing teachers, as well as my experiences as a parent, teacher and literacy specialist. Ample evidence indicates that a solid foundation of reading, writing, talking and playing with words fosters a love for books at an early age and leads to later success as a reader.

But what happens when children do not learn to read, or when they struggle with reading? That problem is all too prevalent. Only about a third of all eighth-graders can read at or above grade level.

Successful teachers

I have studied how successful teachers at multiple high-performing urban schools in New York, Ohio, Missouri and Maryland are helping struggling readers dramatically improve their reading fluency. Many are getting children to read passages multiple times.

Teachers and researchers have found that doing this almost always leads to improvements for struggling readers between second grade and the end of high school.

For kids, this strategy is a lot like learning a new song by reading lyrics while singing along with a music video. When children practice reading this way, they listen to and echo a more experienced reader while tracking the print with their eyes and touching the phrases of the book as they read and reread the book together.

By activating the senses of hearing, seeing and touch, this approach makes recognizing familiar words easier and faster, increasing fluency. The strategy works best when it’s repeated regularly – ideally 10-15 minutes per day. Considering the millions of children who don’t read at grade level, it’s very important.

Digging deeper

Psychologist Robert G. Heckelman first identified this method of repeated reading in the 1960s. He encountered an adolescent whose reading level increased by three grades after being tutored using this system. Heckelman repeated the method with 24 middle and high school students who were struggling with reading.

After just 7.5 hours of instruction in what he called Neurological Impress Method, students advanced by an average of two grade levels.

Those findings were later replicated with greater numbers of children, leading to a study published in 2016. In that study, the literacy researchers Chase Young, Timothy Rasinski, and Kathleen Mohr called the method “Read Two Impress.”

This new name reflected a change in the method: Kids had to read each page aloud after their tutors finished reading it to them. In addition to making kids better readers, Read Two Impress also helps them become more confident and spend more time reading.

Empowering families

Yet the Read Two Impress method, until now, has never formally involved a child’s family. Additionally, no studies of this strategy have investigated the impact of using books that reflect student culture and language.

To see if his strategy would be effective as a tool for families to use to improve their children’s reading, I partnered with co-researchers, Joshua Michael and Kris'tina Ackerman. Together, we conducted a study over 10 weeks at a school in a large Northeastern city.

There were some hurdles. For example, the grandmother of a thoughtful and inquisitive child expressed anxiety about her lack of confidence and perceived ability to read. “I’m not much of a reader myself,” she told us during the first training. “I don’t know if I can help my grandchild with reading.”

She, along with 25 second-graders and some of their relatives, participated in five training sessions.

In the final one, the adult participants described how they were teaching this strategy to others. They told us they believed similar opportunities should be broadly available. This in turn prompted us to host an open training for the whole school and a group of teachers-in-training.

This time, the grandmother, once apprehensive, helped facilitate the training. She had gained confidence in her ability to teach this learning strategy to others.

We also found that when families read books that reflected their culture and language, they enjoyed reading together more. In particular, we learned through surveys and focus groups that parents and other guardians took pride in playing a role in helping their kids become better readers.

We will publish the results of the more expansive approach to the strategy, which we call “Read Two Impress Plus,” in an academic journal.

UMBC doctoral students Joshua Michael and Kris'tina Ackerman contributed to the study of Read Two Impress and this article.

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Kindel Turner Nash, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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Just next door, cosmologically speaking, is a planet almost exactly like Earth. It’s about the same size, is made of about the same stuff and formed around the same star.

To an alien astronomer light years away, observing the solar system through a telescope, it would be virtually indistinguishable from our own planet. But to know the surface conditions of Venus – the temperature of a self-cleaning oven, and an atmosphere saturated with carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid clouds – is to know that it’s anything but Earth-like.

So how is it that two planets so similar in position, formation and composition can end up so different? That’s a question that preoccupies an ever-growing number of planetary scientists, and motivates numerous proposed Venus exploration efforts. If scientists can understand why Venus turned out the way it did, we’ll have a better understanding of whether an Earth-like planet is the rule – or the exception.

I’m a planetary scientist, and I’m fascinated by how other worlds came to be. I’m particularly interested in Venus, because it offers us a glimpse of a world that once might not have been so different from our own.

A once-blue Venus?

The current scientific view of Venus holds that, at some point in the past, the planet had much more water than its bone-dry atmosphere suggests today – perhaps even oceans. But as the Sun grew hotter and brighter (a natural consequence of aging), surface temperatures rose on Venus, eventually vaporizing any oceans and seas.

With ever more water vapor in the atmosphere, the planet entered a runaway greenhouse condition from which it couldn’t recover. Whether Earth-style plate tectonics (where the outer layer of the planet is broken into large, mobile pieces) ever operated on Venus is unknown. Water is critical for plate tectonics to operate, and a runaway greenhouse effect would effectively shut down that process had it operated there.

But the ending of plate tectonics wouldn’t have spelled the end of geological activity: The planet’s considerable internal heat continued to produce magma, which poured out as voluminous lava flows and resurfaced most of the planet. Indeed, the average surface age of Venus is around 700 million years – very old, certainly, but much younger than the multi-billion-year-old surfaces of Mars, Mercury or the Moon.

The exploration of Planet 2

The Venus-as-a-wet-world view is just a hypothesis: Planetary scientists don’t know what caused Venus to differ so much from Earth, nor even if the two planets really did start off with the same conditions. Humans know less about Venus than we do about the other inner solar system planets, largely because the planet poses several unique challenges to its exploration.

For example, radar is needed to pierce the opaque, sulfuric acid clouds and see the surface. That’s a lot trickier than the readily visible surfaces of the Moon or Mercury. And the high surface temperature – 470 degrees Celsius (880 degrees Fahrenheit) – means that conventional electronics don’t last more than a few hours. That’s a far cry from Mars, where rovers can operate for more than a decade. In part because of the heat, acidity and obscured surface, then, Venus hasn’t enjoyed a sustained program of exploration over the past couple of decades.

That said, there have been two dedicated Venus missions in the 21st century: the European Space Agency’s Venus Express, which operated from 2006 to 2014, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Akatsuki spacecraft currently in orbit .

Humans haven’t always ignored Venus. It was once the darling of planetary exploration: between the 1960s and 1980s, some 35 missions were dispatched to the second planet. The NASA Mariner 2 mission was the first spacecraft to successfully carry out a planetary encounter when it flew past Venus in 1962. The first images returned from the surface of another world were sent from the Soviet Venera 9 lander after it touched down in 1975. And the Venera 13 lander was the first spacecraft to return sounds from the surface of another world. But the last mission NASA launched to Venus was Magellan in 1989. That spacecraft imaged almost the entire surface with radar before its planned demise in the planet’s atmosphere in 1994.

Back to Venus?

In the last few years, several NASA Venus missions have been proposed. The most recent planetary mission that NASA chose is a nuclear-powered craft called Dragonfly, destined for Saturn’s moon Titan. However, one proposal to measure the composition of the Venus surface was selected for further technology development.

Other missions being considered include one by the ESA to map the surface at high resolution, and a Russian plan to build on its legacy as the only country to successfully put a lander on Venus’ surface.

Some 30 years after NASA set course for our hellish neighbor, the future of Venus exploration looks promising. But a single mission – a radar orbiter or even a long-lived lander – won’t solve all the outstanding mysteries.

Rather, a sustained program of exploration is needed to bring our knowledge of Venus to where we understand it as well as Mars or the Moon. That will take time and money, but I believe it’s worth it. If we can understand why and when Venus came to be the way it is, we’ll have a better grasp of how an Earth-size world can evolve when it’s close to its star. And, under an ever-brightening Sun, Venus may even help us understand the fate of Earth itself.

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Paul K. Byrne, Assistant Professor of Planetary Geology, North Carolina State University

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