Sucheta Kamath: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal, exposing the mysteries of executive function. I'm your host, Sucheta Kamath, and thank you for joining me each week to discuss and listen to and participate in this idea of executive function skills matter. Our understanding is changing and improving, and so is the science. But most importantly, the needs haven't changed. We have urgent need to improve lives of our children while they go through K-12 education, and also, as we become very engaged citizens, an executive function is, how do I persist to achieve my goals? How do I manage my thoughts, emotions and actions during hurdles, obstacles or failures? And most importantly, how do I continue to define goals that align with my future self. So with that said, one of the interesting topics that is the all the rage is literacy, which is very broad topic when you know, Laurie fortino says that literacy is the jump off point from which all life's Success takes flight. I love that definition, but it's very opaque. What is literacy? And more importantly, you have heard several episodes I have launched with experts about literacy, but one expert that is going to join the conversation is going to unveil the importance of reading comprehension. And one of the reasons this is my favorite guest is because he also is in the field of speech language pathology. So today, with great joy, I introduce you to Dr. Hugh Catts. He's a professor in the Florida State University School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and which is affiliate, and he is affiliated with the Florida Center for Reading Research, as the author of dozens of peer reviewed articles and editor of several books, Dr. Catts has been engaged in research on language and literacy development for over four decades, and much of his work focuses on Early identification and prevention of language based reading disabilities and on reading comprehension assessment and intervention, and he himself will has experienced some learning challenges as a child, and dyslexia is also another his wheelhouse. So with great joy, welcome to the podcast. How are you Hugh? 

Hugh Catts: Thank you. It's great to be here. Nice to have a conversation with you. 

Sucheta Kamath: Well, you now, preparing for this episode was not easy. You're a prolific writer and a thinker and a reflector, so my job was very hard. So before we jump off into your topic of expertise, tell us a little bit about your own learning journey as a child. When I talk about executive function in childhood or K to 12, it is the becoming aware of you as a learner, as a thinker, and having agency over your own learning and success. And that is such a discovery process, and lot of this is left to a personal discovery, and rarely we support and promote that, taking responsibility for your own learning as a skillset, so curious how your journey was.

Hugh Catts: Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate your comments about that, because it's so true that over life, we do begin to appreciate, you know, the what we have available to us, to to acquire information, interact with other people, and so forth. But you're right. I have a family history of dyslexia. I have a brother who has dyslexia, and when I was a young boy and in early elementary school, I had a lot of trouble learning to read, and for several years, went to reading instruction after after school. And thankfully, I learned to read a bit better than my brother. I think it had to do with with good instruction. And I think was a bit more interested in learning to read. I was determined to do it. I thought it was kind of interesting. I loved reading books and learning from from school where my my brother didn't have that, that perseverance that I had had with it. But as I went through school, you know, I had quite a. Bit of academic difficulties so forth. I was really an average student, but always knew that I wanted to work in in the sciences. Discovered the field of speech language and hearing like yourself, became a speech language pathologist, mostly studying the science behind it. So we did studies in infancy perception and when I first got out. I did work in in acoustics of young children's speech production, but I came across a paper that was written by people at Haskins lab that explained the problem that I had.  

Sucheta Kamath: Oh, wow. 

Hugh Catts: It was about difficulties in phonological coding. That is being able to to to store and retrieve and think about the sound structure of language, which, if you have any difficulties there, makes it hard to learn a writing system that's based upon a phonological the the the phonology of the of the language. So I basically changed my line of research about three or four years into my first position, and changed another university could act so I could actually teach in in that particular area. And it's, it's been an interesting journey finding out about, you know, individual differences related to to reading. I got interested in comprehension along the way, because the kids that we followed in our longitudinal studies, they got older and, and although some of them still had problems with word reading, they were having some of the heavy difficulties with comprehension. So that took me in that particular line. And you know, I still, I still do reflect on what it is that I'm good at, what I'm what I struggle with. I still concern that the field doesn't quite appreciate the breadth of some of the individual differences that people have, and are hyper focused on certain aspects of it, and define the constructs in terms of those aspects, but don't think about the full experience of a individual that has those differences. That was a long and winded self-awareness. 

Sucheta Kamath: No, I so appreciate that. Honestly. I, you know, I learned n my mother tongue from K to 10, and then switched to English, but English physics, physics in English, physics in biology and English in 11th grade, and it was a huge taxing process to my brain. I was I almost behaved like a person with disabilities. I did not have any disability, but reading comprehension rate slowed down my processing. There was so much competition in my working memory to understand individual word like this. I mean, you know, like the suffixes and prefixes that change the meaning present and present and I mean, it's just a hot mess. English is very complicated. So I was talking to my brother, to your point, about self-awareness. My father worked for a chemical company in a government. And every Diwali, which is like Festival of Lights, just like Christmas, the companies that he did business with would give a gift of a calendar. It could be a wall calendar or like a planner, and with the emblem of that company, it was like a gift given to the, you know, people you transacted with. And so my father would get, like, 10 planners. And I was talking to my brother, and my brother was telling me the story of how he remembers to do lists. He says he keeps it in his head. And I was blown away, because we grew up in the same house, and I started using a planner since sixth grade. I created it for myself, like I started using reminders to plan out my future, which is like six months, all in writing, and I would take notes, there would be an inspirational quote. And I was talking to my brother last week, and he had never in his life done that. And I said, we grew up in the same house. We had these free calendars. Why didn't you not use it? So anyways, I think to your point, he had didn't see the need, did not kind of have any concern, or just didn't have aptitude for it, like your brother. I was deeply motivated by that, and I was also, then became a therapist, and then I understood the value of it. So now talking about your wheelhouse, let's begin with this. Your expertise is in reading comprehension, and so can we have you define reading comprehension? Is that too lame exercise to do? 

Hugh Catts: Yeah, I mean, I could give you a general definition of it. It's, it's, can. Constructing a coherent meaning fits together understanding of a text based upon what's in the text and what the reader has available to them, right? So it's an active process that involves both the text and the reader.

Sucheta Kamath: Brilliant. So is it fair to say even listening comprehension as the same model, without the text, but using language?

Hugh Catts: Perfectly so. So if you'd asked me about comprehension, I would have given you the same difference, the same definition, that it's a construction of a understanding based upon what you received and what you have available to you, because you basically build that understanding. It's very active process. And what you come to to understand that the particular text, but on the basis of what you already know.

Sucheta Kamath: I love that emphasis on very active. And it's not doing to you. It is you have to do with it. One of the interesting things about and because of my field, is executive function, I wanted to take a moment to connect to what you were just saying, because this coherence making meaning. We do that with experiences too. So if you have never had experience like I found this very funny first time I rode the plane, and if, even if you use the toilet on the plane, you have to spend at least 10-15, minutes to figure out what the toilet paper is or how to flush things. 

Hugh Catts: I mean, that's the organization I'm talking about, all right. That's what a coherent understanding is. It's just how the pieces of of, whatever it is that you're trying to understand, fit together into this organized body of knowledge, or your case experience with some aspect of life.

Sucheta Kamath: And one of the benefits of reading comprehension is we can actually understand the world. Like Paulo Freiresaid, read the word to read the world. We can have an understanding. So would you say that that coherence is the meaning making machinery. That's what at the heart of reading comprehension is, correct?

Hugh Catts: Yeah, and I would take it further to listening as well, right? So it's the way that we gather information about the world, right? Either listening, interacting with other people, or through texts that we might come in contact with. The reading comprehension allows you to do this at somewhat of an independent fashion, so that you can do it without interaction with other people. It also brings the world into you, because you're not able to often find people that know about the particular topics that you want to read, want to learn about in in gain some enjoyment from so it it's opens you to knowledge of the world that you wouldn't have access to in your daily life.

Sucheta Kamath: And I'll give you this example. Um, I was doing a presentation to whole group of educators, special ed educators, close to 400 and I pulled up one sentence, or maybe two sentence poetry, and it says, baby shoes for sale, period, never used period. And I was blown away because I had, when I presented that slide, my meaning was, the baby died in childbirth, right? And 50% of the people did not get that. They so they, not a never worn. Sorry, did I say that? Yeah, so baby shoes were never worn. And it was so interesting to me, like where your mind goes. So I see executive function playing an important role, that you need to have flexibility of mind, that it can have multiple meanings, not just one way of thinking about it. So talk us about how has our understanding changed? And you have contributed a lot in theorizing how we should really think about reading comprehension. So how would you explain the journey of reading comprehension work? 

Hugh Catts: Well, I mean, it's, it's really kind of two pieces to it. There's a whole discipline of cognitive science that have been interested in in comprehension and how we make sense out of out of language, and that's moved along and over the last 50-100 years, and in a way, to where we have some a degree of understanding of how this happens, then we can think, then we can also talk about what's happened in education with instructing kids to have better comprehension. Yes, difference between the two is that the educational system has treated it more as comprehension, more as a skill than. That once you can acquired it, you're able to apply it to any number of disciplines, topics and so forth. The cognitive field recognized many years ago that that how well you understand something that you're listening to or talking to depends upon what you already know about it. Knowing something about it allows you to begin with a somewhat coherent model of the particular topic, and when you encounter the text, you can use that model to understand what's within the text. You blend together what you know with the topic in that in the text. And that doesn't mean you can't learn something completely new, right? If you don't have a model of the topic you're reading about, you can build that model, but that takes considerable time to do it, because there's only so much we can do in terms of organizing new information within our working memory to begin to add that coherence to the to the language, to build that mental model, right? So the fields been have recognized the importance of of sometimes called background knowledge, what you know about the particular topic for for many years, and that hasn't been recognized for the most part in education. Education is taught comprehension, more like we teach kids to recognize words right strategy that you use to to help you gain meaning out of a text. Now those strategies, I'm not saying they're not important, right? But they have limited value if you don't already have some degree of understanding of that particular topic. And so when I go around talking about comprehension, I'm talking about improving what you know about the world so that you've got knowledge that you can bring to task when you're asked to understand a text, or when you independently want to go and read and understand that text.

Sucheta Kamath: And I know this is kind of a you probably talk about this all the time, but do you mind sharing with our listeners the baseball study that was such a telling of this?

Hugh Catts: Yeah, it's really interesting that you know that that science has gone along with these wonderful studies over, over the years, and they're stuck on one, just, just, really, just some brilliant people in the field of comprehension that have created kind of an understanding of of the mind and how it works and when you interact with text. But a relatively simple story, a study was done in which they took relatively good readers and relatively poor readers. So if you gave a general test of reading, we got poor and we had good readers, and we had them, had them read passages, a passage about baseball, and they, as they after they read it, they had to move little players around on the board corresponding what the passage was, and they divided it into those who had knowledge of baseball versus those who didn't have knowledge of baseball, right? And what they found was it was actually poor readers who had knowledge that did better than good readers that didn't have much knowledge about the so amazing topic, indicating that it was topic knowledge that was most critical. You have to be able to read the words and have some degree of fluency. So these poor readers did have that, but they weren't as fluent readers, and generally weren't, perhaps as competent with comprehension as a good readers. But given the topic, they did well. 

Sucheta Kamath: Another interesting thing you mentioned one of the presentations I was lucky enough to hear you recently was the why in K to 12 education, when we go to test kids understanding of what they have learned, which is the only way to do it is through testing them. And these tests are so become like high stakes tests, because the score somehow captures all of the learning, which may not be true, and you talk a lot about the sensitivity of the passages that we are asking kids to read. So can you shed some light about this idea of distal, proximal versus distal learning? 

Hugh Catts: Yeah, I mean the high stakes tests, the tests that are given at the state level or at the national level, like the NAEP, have gained quite a bit of significance in evaluating education. So they're used to determine how well schools are educating children, how well. All teachers are are educating the students within within the class, there is considerable attention to trying to gain growth in those scores separate gaps between advantage disadvantage English language learners versus non English language learners in those particular scores, problem is they've chosen a metric which isn't easy to change, so that the tests that are used to measure reading are rather general, right? Because we don't know what kids might know about so we give them a very general test that tests has to read passages about a whole range of different topics, and kids read those passages, answer questions, look at figures, for example, and interpret figures so forth. And that's called a reading test, right? Of course, it's not a reading test. It's a reading test, to a certain extent, because you have to be able to read the words and read them frequently, but if you don't have the background knowledge that allows you to build coherence around the passages, you're not going to do as well, and to gain the background knowledge that would allow you to cover all those different topics at a level that would allow a child that's been disadvantaged in terms of language or information that's on those tests, it's going to take years to overcome, right? So we're we're expecting the efforts that we can offer within education to try to change those and it's very difficult to change. Some people often compare it to an IQ test, right? That those tests might be better thought of as like IQ tests. We can raise kids IQ because it's measured by most tests, by what you know about the world and how quickly you can can make sense of problems related to to the world, and that's kind of what these reading tests tests are, right? So it's a it's an unfair metric for evaluating reading performance. And some people have gone to say that they're really knowledge tests in disguise. You call them reading but it's really not a reading test.

Sucheta Kamath: And then also, I think, to your point, so many decisions are made by those scores. So if you have poor scores, you get less funding, not like it's raising any flag that you should get more. Or the kids may be getting poor score because they come from underexposed parts of the world or their own universe, or because of poverty or because of lack of access, or it could be rural part of the country. So, yeah, that's such a high stakes. In so many ways.

Hugh Catts: You can do things raise it. I mean, states have put into place good fundamental reading skills and and good instruction, general instruction directed toward comprehension. I've seen the scores rise. Mississippi is a very good example, yes, of a state that's raised in in their scores, but they aren't achieving at the level that they might expect they would have, because of the fact that those tests are measuring knowledge that hasn't necessarily been within the curriculum, that are being presented to kids over the years, right? So you asked about proximal versus distal term we use in science. It's unfortunate, distal just means a measure that's far removed from what it is that you instructed and what I've argued for that if we really wanted to evaluate a child's ability to read and to write about what they what they're able to read and want to talk about write about. What we need to do is do it within a discipline that they know something about, and to do that, what we would have was would be content aligned assessments, so the child would have a year's worth of instruction in social studies or science with a particular curriculum, and there would be an assessment that actually assessed what kids learned there, but they would Read those passages, might write about those passages, but they would have had the opportunity to have learned more about those passages. You can see right away that that an assessment like that has a greater educational value, because the teacher now knows what's going to be on the exam. I didn't mention that, but the state exams and the national exams, you can't find out what subject matters are on the exams, what what those subject matters were a few years before, because you won't be able to find it out then. So it's you know, imagine this, that you're a third grade teacher, your kids are going to take an exam, and you. Cannot tell them what's on it, what you end up doing is you end up teaching them how to take the test rather than how to comprehend the text that they're going to read. Right? So the movement toward using more content aligned assessments of reading is a more proximal and more educationally valued way of assessing reading and writing, if you want to take it to to also include that. 

Sucheta Kamath: And you know, Dr. Daniel Willingham has been on this podcast, who is an expert in science of learning. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, and one of the things you're talking about is this testing. So learning is not knowing, and then we need to know how much you know by testing. So but testing can actually like it's a self fulfilling prophecy, because you want to test how much you have retained your knowledge and learning, then it becomes very directly connected. So this prox distal learning, I mean, extrapolation, making idea is a good idea, but it's executed very poorly, because if it's too disconnected, then you need background knowledge to understand how to make apply that understanding to larger context. 

Hugh Catts: Yeah, yeah. I mean, Dan Willingham, one of my favorite scientists, is a brilliant person. I've listened to all his podcasts, and he's so fun. I know him a bit in person. We've met and talking and if sometimes communicated over emails, share some of our thinking about different aspects of comprehension. But that's your your your point there about extrapolating from what My understanding is, is the you us is a bit of an outlier in the way that it measures school performance, right? That in many countries will actually measure direct one to one about a particular topic like science or social studies, right? And, and we do that to certain extent here, but much more isolated then, then the the requirement that Department of Education have for schools to measure reading and math, but math is a discipline that that you can actually teach to to wear a reading Test. You're very limited in what you can teach beyond the fundamental reading skills and how well how you go about taking a particular test.

Sucheta Kamath: So, so true.

Hugh Catts: Really problematic. The other thing you mentioned there is, is that testing, testing can be learning as well, right? That that it's there's some motivation there, if you're going to be tested on it, there is motivation to try to understand the topic that you're going to be tested on. And these, these content aligned assessments provide some of that motivation, right? The teacher teaches what's going to be on that test, not the passages so forth, but the body of knowledge. Body of Knowledge, yeah, kids, right from the beginning, have some idea that we're going to need to learn these particular topics to do well on the state reading test. All right, this is the new state reading test, and there's been states that have that have attempted to do that at a very restricted manner. For example, Louisiana introduced this idea of content aligned assessments in a number of districts that are very limited in scope and and had some success. It was done during the pandemic, really hard to do but, but it met with challenges that are real. And how do you get this to, you know, to to go statewide or district wide How do you choose the topic center that you're going to align your assessments to? So the articles to do this are pretty large, but at some point we have to begin to appreciate that our target of that distal measure is not a useful one for assessing progress of our students or progress of our or effectiveness of our teachers.

Sucheta Kamath: And also, I think the last piece that you mentioned that the effectiveness of teacher is. Yeah, I mean, a poor test score is not indicative there's so many problems could be wrong that not just the teacher failed to teach students having learning disability that's not diagnosable. They could have, you know, attentional regulation problem. They could have motivational mismatch, like, I don't care. So, so it's really kind of, we are using one test to I don't even know. We are not identifying anything. We are just declaring, you make it or you You're out. 

Hugh Catts: The other thing that we've calling our colleague and I have written about is, is it at least, if nothing else, you have to divide those up into two different broad notions about reading. The term reading is, is a rather global term that gets used to refer to a number of different cognitive activities, right, and, and, and that causes problems in doing the assessment of it right, that that an important part of reading is being able to decode the words fluently. That is to be able to see that print and turn it into language quickly, right? That's a component of those exams that we that I'm talking about. The other component of that is making meaning out of that language that you've now decoded the first step in in trying to come up with better assessments is making sure that we're assessing those somewhat separately, right? That we're measuring kids ability to to read words and read words fluently, independent of their ability to understand what understand what they read. So wordless, oral reading fluency, even oral reading fluency has a component of comprehension in there, because one way you get better at reading passages is knowing something about that passage to begin with. But, but we, we argued probably 15 years ago, that we might be better off if you had a narrow definition of reading. And reading was simply recognizing words fluently. Everything else was comprehension. That broad view of comprehension then allows us to think about how we use our language, how we use our executive function that you're talking about, our attentional resources and our our background knowledge to make sense out of the text that we're reading.

Sucheta Kamath: Brilliant. I mean, I think the every time I listen to you, I'm just realizing how complex everything is, and we are trying to simplify everything, and that's never going to happen, and most of the work is in nuance and and nuance requires time. It requires specialized eye or specialty, you know, to decipher. And most importantly, it needs creative thinking to do something different. And I feel all those things require time. And who's got time, Hugh?

Hugh Catts: Yeah, I don't know that it should keep us from doing the right thing at the moment. You know, reading and and reading instruction, it can it can be take advantage of what we know from science in the same way that medicine is taking advantage of what we know about health. Taking care of health issues has got huge numbers of nuances. I mean, as many, if not more than education, but it doesn't stop us from good health practice. So we have some basic things that we want to do to keep people healthy. Those things are available to us to keep to educate kids so that they have good reading and writing skills. We know what works to a certain extent. We know that you need to provide systematic, structured instruction related to how the alphabet works and practice in becoming more fluent at that. And we know that you need to have knowledge to help you understand what you read. We know that you have to have certain aspects of language, and even if we don't add into that all the complexities, we can do a better job than we're doing now with educating educating our readers, we will learn as we go along. There are a lot of new nuances, how of how you get some of the ideas that I have, or some of the other ideas into practice. How those get meld together with what's possible in school, researchers don't have the answers. We have some part of the answer, and it's it's going to. Be an interaction between education and research that helps figure out, you know, what's what, what we're able to do at this moment in time that is providing kids with the best opportunity to acquire reading and writing skills.

Sucheta Kamath: You know, you're this. Just reminded me the healthcare analogy that you gave that in order, when we say I have a trusted surgeon, the surgeon actually has practiced on a cadaver, cadaver and then actual real patients, right? So I think this piece is a little bit missing in education that getting a chance to cut up many dead bodies to practice your cutting up skills. Yeah, I mean, and then having supervision of a surgeon who watches you perform surgery, and then you watch a video of your own surgery. I think that piece again, the educational training of teachers, where they get to do some I think our field, Speech and Language Pathology field does a really good job. We have similar simu cases now, simulated cases, we actually have to write a very detailed report of what we potentially could do differently. But that's the kind of time needs to go into education too.

Hugh Catts: Yeah. I mean, it's happening to a certain extent. I mean, some educational programs do have opportunities for for, you know, they don't work with cadavers, but they actually work with kids and and have some guidance or a mentor to help them during the training program, we get a lot more of that in in our speech path programs, like 400 hours of clinical work prior to to getting certified. 

Sucheta Kamath: And ongoing 70 hours of training over three years. That's huge.

Hugh Catts: Yeah, it's a huge, huge amount. But, I mean, that's, that's the what, what we decided within our field, it results in a competent speech language pathologist. You know, it's, it's, it's hard to do within the US, we've got a huge educational system, you know, making changes, not easy. It's expensive, right?

Sucheta Kamath: It is very expensive. And also, in fairness to the process of educating children we didn't know. We literally opened a school building that was like a barn and called it a school, and said, All we got to do is different age kids put in one room and, you know, keep the windows open. You could see cows and you could hear bells, you know. And we thought, yeah, that's college. So our understanding of what education is also changed. So I completely believe that that's the evolution of culture. Culture is changing. Our understanding is growing, but the nuance in research is telling us what doesn't work. So we should quit. I think that requires a little bit of courage. 

Hugh Catts: Yeah, not quite, but just, just modify, 

Sucheta Kamath: Or modify or do something different, yeah,

Hugh Catts: Yeah. I would say modify, because it's not that the things that we're doing wrong with comprehension are absolutely wrong. They just need to have.

Sucheta Kamath: Can you give a few examples of what might be?

Hugh Catts: The way that in reading instructions, typically reading comprehension is typically taught in the schools, is, is as a skill, acquiring certain ways of thinking about texts that helps you understand that text. So looking for the main idea, learning how to make an inference, learning how to summarize the text. And what happens is, traditionally, is that we've taught kids how to do that with various tasks, various texts, and we've done it over and over and over again, thinking that practice makes perfect with that that strategy, if you will. But there's nothing wrong with that particular strategy. It's that thinking about a text in particular ways is a is a good way to approach the text, but it doesn't transfer to a new topic. If you don't know anything about the topic...

Sucheta Kamath: You need knowledge.  

Hugh Catts: We want to educate kids about the topic and let them use their strategies initial which may be pretty general right to be to to think about the particular topic that you're that they're reading. And then, as we move into a discipline, the type of thinking that you might do with with a text from that discipline is going to be more sophisticated than the type of thinking you would do with another, with a with another text. So I don't want to get rid of the notion of strategies. What strategies do is they ask kids to think about what they're reading and and reading. As some people have talked about, is thinking with a book in your hand.

Sucheta Kamath: I love that definition.

Hugh Catts: Because it really is a higher level of cognitive activity to where you are thinking. But you have that book to aid your thinking. You have information within the within the text or the passage to cause you to think in a particular way. But you have to. You have to do the thinking you you can't just read the words. We've all had that experience with reading through a text, and we get to the end, we don't remember a thing about that text. It's because we haven't thought about it. Well, one of my favorite comments from uh, Willingham. And Willingham is, is memory, is the residue of thought. I love that remember something you have to think about. So reading strategies help kids think about what it is that they're reading, not in a very sophisticated fashion that comes with knowing something about the discipline, right? So if you know something about science, then your then your ways of thinking about that scientific topic is going to be different than the way you think about a history text or about a narrative. Text, narrative, text. You're trying to figure out who the characters are and what their motivations are and why that happened, what's going to happen next, so forth. You don't do that in science, you know, a little prediction, but often you're not saying, All right, what's this science writer going to tell me next?

Sucheta Kamath: No, there's no mystery you have to understand.

Hugh Catts: So the prediction there is not as quite, as as strong as what we might do for a narrative text. And so that part of instruction is good. We just need to to meld the thinking with the with the knowledge to be able to to acquire information that is in memory, right? Because then, once it's in memory, we have the opportunity to use that information to learn more, to explain things to people, to interact in the world, so forth. But it's that memory trace that organized body of knowledge earlier. You called it a schema that's that's a understanding of a particular topic that's so critical for for being able to interact in the world, read the newspaper, you know, go out on the streets, whatever it might be. 

Sucheta Kamath: You know, two thoughts come to mind. One is, I think, before we launched our recording, we were talking about this. But you know, knowledge is communicated in different disciplines in specific ways. So you know, chemistry has a particular lingo than biology versus history versus literature or even math, for example. And various disciplines, of course, involve different different language and literacy demands. So there's a move, and I would love to see what you think of that. But you know the McConachie and Petrosky they these are two researchers who who write this disciplinary literacy definition. They say, the use of reading, reasoning, investigating, speaking and writing to learn and form complex content knowledge appropriate to a particular discipline. 

Hugh Catts: Yeah, most definitely. It's interesting that disciplinary literacy was a topic that you heard about frequently, maybe 10 years ago, and and, you know, I know the work that you're talking about, but it that topic kind of seemed to be left behind to certainly, really, yeah, I think so as the field it, you know, if you, if you read what people were talking About related to education, you read some of the educational you know, Ed Week or Ed news, oh yeah, you don't tend to hear as much about disciplinary literacy. What you hear about you don't hear that term, but you hear the topic people are talking about, the need to think about what helps people understand what they read and what they listen to within different disciplines, and that's now being talked about within the realm of content rich literacy programs. These are programs that teach kids to learn to read within a discipline or within multiple disciplines. They're most often, at the moment, done within English language arts classes as part of the reading block, where there'll be extended readings on a particular topic, and within that. The curriculum teaches kids about that topic and how to read and understand that topic, and that's very close to disciplinary literacy. That's where we ought to focus more on the concept of disciplinary literacy, and bring all the work that's been done there into the current, I guess fad, if you will, of content rich literacy programs.

Sucheta Kamath: And the second point I was going to make about your analogy of, or rather, you often describe this like the swimming analogy. That means the role of com reading comprehension is to really not to get good at reading comprehension, but to understand meaning. So it's like learning how to swim, but it's the different body of water that you need to develop relationship. I just thought that was such a profound insight, if and I would love for you to explain that, and I'm gonna give you a real life example. So I'm not an athlete, but I'm very enthusiastic to try new things. So one time, I signed up for a triathlon, a mini triathlon, and I did lot of training. I'm not a runner, but I love to swim and I love to bike. Well, note to self, I did not know you will have to get out of water and then get on a bike in wetsuit. So no practice was done with a wetsuit. But the bigger embarrassing thing for me, I mean, was when I did my swimming practice, I did it in like a vast pool. Nobody interfering. I'm swimming at peace. And I did lots of like, you know, miles and miles of swimming. Well, on the day of the race, there were two people in one lane, and everybody was doing freestyle except me. I was doing breaststroke, so I was almost hit in the face. I was obstructed. So to your point, like, as a skill, I could swim, but the minute, I was thrown in lanes with multiple people, and, you know, having to contend with, like, very choppy waters with other people. I was not prepared. So can you speak about this idea that don't look it as a pure skill? It is like transferable abilities, so that you can learn anything. It's learning how to learn, right?

Hugh Catts: The difference there is, if you go back to the components of reading, being able to read the words in a text fluently is a skill. We learn the parts to it, we practice that in the more we do it, the better we get at it. And I can take that skill that I've acquired with the fundamentals of recognizing words and recognizing fluency, and apply that to different texts. But soon as I jump into that text, I don't know anything about it. It's kind of if I'm in a rough water, yes, you have learned to swim in a pool now having to swim in the ocean with waves. It's even more removed from that, right? Because it's, it's no longer swimming, if you will, trying to understand that science text or whatever, whatever it is, wow, yes, you're trying to, trying to do. 

Sucheta Kamath: Well you're doing scuba while you're rowing a boat, while you're trying to catch fish.

Hugh Catts: That's why I wanted to find that part of reading as comprehension of a particular subject matter, right? That's a broader view of comprehension. Reading is a skill that allows us to to accurately and fluently decode words and turn it in the language comprehension is making sense of those words in a wow, yeah, in the context that we're trying to make sense of, it is very dependent upon the content that we're or the domain that We're in. So we should think about there being reading of words and reading of science, reading of social studies, reading of narratives, reading of, you know, math problems, whatever. And with each one of those different disciplines, there's sub disciplines. So you might, you might have, you know, the science of meteorology. But that doesn't make you, you know, know a lot about zoology. So each one of them is a new reading terrain, yeah, so in it that doesn't necessarily make things more complex to. It just tells us that if we want to make people better readers, we have to do that within the context of the content. We want them to be better readers in. We want to give them practice reading and writing in each of these particular disciplines. You know, it's not as if you won't learn something you could transfer to it another discipline, I mean, a part of learning how to be a good reader is recognizing Well, I have to pay attention. I have to work really hard to make meaning out of this. I've got to ask myself, Am I understanding this? Those are rather general things that you can do any particular subject matter, but, but there's, there's so much more that you need to be able to do to build an understanding of zoology than the idea that you have to think about the text. 

Sucheta Kamath: Yes. Oh my goodness. Well, I cannot believe we have been talking about such interesting, fascinating and time has passed very quickly as we come to a close, what are your what's, what is the contribution that you're proudest of? The kind of as you said, you're looking through your worldview from reading comprehension. What do you feel maybe one people need to really, really remember, and one thing that you have been able to you have made such wonderful contributions. What do you feel? 

Hugh Catts: Yeah, I don't know. That's a part of self-awareness that I haven't really engaged in very much. And I don't really think about my accomplishments, because they were always interesting problems I worked on. So I guess the thing that, that, you know, maybe I did was, you know, took problems and tried to solve them and, and that's what keeps me going and and doing what I do, you know, I'm very happy that it influences education, influences other people's thinking. I'm I'm happy with what happened in the field of Speech, Language Pathology, that it's moving. Yes, literacy more, but that was, that was never motivation. I'm a simple person who who's very interested in figuring out, you know, what we don't know, and trying to provide more knowledge about it. And and I was always interested in communicating that soon as I learned something new, I wanted to go home and tell my parents about, look what I learned at school, I guess that's still what I do after 40 years of doing it.

Sucheta Kamath: Well, I think my favorite contributions that you have made is, I think the real distinction between strategy use and returning to purpose of reading. I think that you, I haven't heard anybody describe it so eloquently and emphatically and consistently. You're like, people don't forget this.

Hugh Catts: I mean, I think the point you're referring to is when people do say the purpose of reading is comprehension, and you said, No, it's not. The purpose of reading is is to achieve the goal that you have in mind when you read that passage. Comprehension is part of that, but you always have some idea of why you're reading, preparing for a test, you know, enjoying the the book and and writing a paper, whatever, and that's where we need to put folks.

Sucheta Kamath: And by the way, that's what I feel about executive function. This is executive function. That means it's your ability to, um, activate your intent and strategize in order to achieve and persist to achieve your goals, and I think that's what you're referring to. So thank you for what you have done, and continue to do it has had immense impact. And honestly, don't mean to brag, but I do think speech language pathologists make amazing researchers, even though I'm not one, I'm attaching my my boat to your ship, and I'm going to sail well. Thank you so much. We always ask, as we come to an end, what are your favorite books that you have influenced your thought process or in or you have enjoyed you're reading comprehension researcher.

Hugh Catts: So I a couple of books that are at the academic books I love the work of Daniel Kahneman on Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. He's got another book on noise and talks about the human mind and the fallacies and thoughts. Yes, the other person that writes a lot about that is Keith Stanovich has a wonderful book, on, on, on, on, thinking, and I like those. And I'm always a fan of Daniel Willingham. I love reading whatever he's he has to say. Beatty Hirsch, I like a lot, so forth. I also like kind of detective novels I read every night. It's not always intellectual.  

Sucheta Kamath: So, any particular novel stands out or 

Hugh Catts: Michael Colony.

Sucheta Kamath: Oh, yes, of course. 

Hugh Catts: I also always grew up on Trevor McGee, John McDonald books, which were really simple little books, but great stories. 

Sucheta Kamath: So, so you're a big reader.

Hugh Catts: I read every night, often not long because I fell asleep.

Sucheta Kamath: But you know what? Another you know, the real, meaningful story to me is you were a child with learning challenges, and look at you, you are a researcher and in the field where you're solving other children's learning challenges, and that's such a wonderful motivate, I mean, inspiring story to tell, to tell our generation of kids that are coming up that, you know.

Hugh Catts: This takes a lot of hard work, but you know, they have to work at it. Well, wouldn't come easy. 

Sucheta Kamath: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, folks, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you again, Hugh, for being my guest. As you can see, folks, these are important conversations we are having with very knowledgeable and incredibly qualified and passionate experts. With their unique perspective, I am able to connect their work to the executive function domain, which itself is a little bit opaque and vast and implication of self control and insight and ability to self redirect is such a profound and meaningful ways we can make a difference in our own life. So I'm going to task your listeners, if you loved what you heard, please share with a friend, definitely you know, pass this episode along to a friend or colleague. If you have a moment, take a take a moment to send us a review or write a review, and finally, do subscribe to the our newsletter. And once again, thank you Hugh for being here with us until we meet again.