literacy

It is hardly a secret that student literacy is tied to higher academic achievement across all subjects. And yet, unlike spoken language, humans are not neurologically primed to decipher the written word.  The "reading brain" has to create its own circuits, cobbling together preexisting parts related to vision, language, affect, and cognition. Direct instruction is needed to build this complex circuitry, and unsurprisingly, a large number of students experience reading difficulties. Over the last few decades, the educational community has begun embracing empirically-derived teaching methods, or the "science of reading,"…