Tata Consultancy Services and NTNU Enter Strategic Partnership to Collaborate on Manufacturing, Advancement and Lifecycle Administration of Sustainable Battery Technologies
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OSLO, February 14, 2023: Tata Consultancy Solutions (TCS) (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS) has entered into a strategic educational partnership with Norwegian College of Science and Engineering (NTNU), a single of the largest and most prestigious universities in Norway, to collaborate on the advancement of highly developed battery mobile systems and expedite the world transition to sustainable electrical power.
TCS will get the job done intently with NTNU’s Department of Energy and Method Engineering (EPT) on the design and style, improvement, and digital screening of sustainable electricity options. TCS will offer technologies consultancy and electronic innovation across every phase of the battery benefit chain, which includes fabrication, lifecycle management, mobile assembly and testing, and digital twins for solid point out and lithium-ion batteries.
The partnership will see TCS provide committed guidance to the EPT in the kind of technologies collaboration, expertise exchange, digital innovation, and startup engagement, for acquiring sustainable strength methods that consider wellness, weather variations and readily available methods into thought. TCS will be liable for building and tests a ‘sustainable by design’ platform for the close-to-finish battery manufacturing course of action.
This significant academic collaboration will provide NTNU with accessibility to TCS’ intercontinental ecosystem of technologists and organization partners to assist scale generation and meet the expanding world wide desire for sustainable batteries. By forging an alliance of company and academia and establishing a obvious route-to-sector, TCS and NTNU will accelerate the journey to electrification and a internet zero upcoming.
“In strengthening our investigate and instructional relevance within just Battery generation and methods knowing, developing collaborations with essential field actors like TCS, is of terrific value. This shared understanding permits us to speed up scientific, engineering and academic development in an business and technologically domain of exponential development and with monumental desires for competence more than the up coming yrs” stated Odne Stokke Burheim, Professor at NTNU– Department of Electricity and Process Engineering.
“Innovation in battery technologies is vital for the reason that of their function in electrifying transportation and balancing electrical power-grids, both of those of which have a significant job to participate in in reaching international net-zero aims. We are delighted to spouse with 1 of Norway’s most highly regarded universities in this initiative and work with a shared feeling of intent to develop a far more sustainable long run for every person,” commented Rajan Maheshwari, Region Head, TCS Norway.
TCS has a wide portfolio of alternatives to restructure the world wide vitality sector and assistance organizations on their journeys to internet-zero. For a lot more data remember to check out: Energizing a sustainable long run
Last year, health officials in Seattle decided to stop requiring bicyclists to wear helmets. Independent research found that nearly half of Seattle’s helmet tickets in recent years went to unhoused people, while Black and Native American cyclists in the city were four times and two times more likely, respectively, than white cyclists to be cited.
Whether people should wear helmets was not the motivation behind the repeal, King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said at the time. “The question is whether a helmet law that is enforced by police, on balance, produces results that outweigh the harms the law creates.” For lawmakers, the answer was clear: The potential benefits of a helmet mandate were not worth the harms it did to marginalized Seattle residents.
But some local bike advocates argued that there was a second advantage: Repealing the law could make riding more safe. Helmet mandates intimidate potential riders, they argued, by framing cycling as an activity so dangerous it necessitates body armor. That, in turn, can suppress ridership, and take away the safety benefits of riding in numbers. The more bicyclists take up space on the road, the more visible they become to drivers. And as cars more regularly contend with bikes, the more consideration bikes will get in conversations about transit safety and road infrastructure.
Other jurisdictions have done away with their helmet mandates too: In 2020 Tacoma, Washington, repealed its requirement; in 2014 Dallas did the same for adults. These repeals push back at the notion that bike safety starts and ends with helmets and suggest that helmet laws might actually pose a risk to cyclists. Now some avid cyclists are going so far as to loudly proclaim forgoing helmets on principle.
I feel unsafe, always, on my bicycle—and for soundreason.
I have been a bike commuter in every city I’ve lived in as an adult, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Columbus, and New York City. I travel on two wheels for the exercise and fresh air, for environmental reasons, and for independent, efficient mobility.
In exchange, I feel unsafe, always, on my bicycle—and for sound reason. I’ve gotten doored in Times Square. I’m forced to weave in and out of bike lanes to avoid the vehicles that constantly park and loiter there. I hold my breath when a passing truck leaves only a few inches between my shivery flesh and its metal flanks.
I do what I can to protect myself. I use front and rear lights. I gravitate toward roads with designated bike lanes. I signal turns with my arms and ding my handlebar bells to attract the attention of inattentive drivers. And I never, ever leave home without my neon yellow helmet.
But as with many cyclists and lawmakers, I’ve increasingly found myself wondering: How much does my helmet help me, really? Are there costs to our single-minded devotion to it?
In the past 50 years, as helmet designs have become more sophisticated, adult cycling deaths in the United States have not declined—they’ve quadrupled. As I dug into the history of these humble foam-and-plastic shells, I learned that helmets have a far more complicated relationship to bike safety than many seem ready to admit.
In 1883 the League of American Wheelmen paraded in Manhattan to celebrate the group’s third anniversary.
At the time, the penny-farthing’s supersized front wheel offered more cycling efficiency than its predecessor, the velocipede—and also threatened taller falls for riders. Face-dives were a common hazard. A significant-enough number of American Wheelmen took “headers” during their Fifth Avenue procession for the New York Times to notice: “Twenty bicycles were broken in this process but no one suffered anything worse than a good shaking,” the paper remarked.
As mass production made bicycles cheaper and more commonplace, the need for head protection grew increasingly obvious. Cyclists’ earliest choice was a single-use, plant-based pith helmet (basically, a safari hat) that broke upon impact. Next up, a leather halo padded with wool or cotton—referred to as a “hairnet”—did little more than protect a cyclist’s ears and face “from dragging the ground when sliding across pavement,” as the product review website Gearist put it.
It wasn’t until 1975 that the first modern bike helmet, the “Bell Biker,” emerged, with an expanded polystyrene liner and stiff plastic shell. The modern helmet, unlike its predecessors, was designed to cushion collision impacts, absorbing shock so the human head didn’t. This made it potentially lifesaving in slow-speed crashes—for example, if a biker hit a pothole and flew off the handles. “The primary way they protect your head is by their own self-destruction,” said David Halstead, a biomechanical engineer at the University of Tennessee and founder of the Southern Impact Research Center, a private testing company. “I would never ride without one.”
The “bicycle boom” was underway, with an estimated 60 million bikes in use by 1972—a trend kindled by an increase in environmental consciousness, a national energy crisis, and the growing popularity of physical fitness. Though helmets had not yet emerged as bike safety’s primary symbol, their design evolved. They became lighter, thanks to polyethylene terephthalate (or PET, as in a soda bottle or clamshell plastic) and other novel, thin-but-strong plastics. New nylon straps and plastic buckles helped keep everything in place.
Not long after, fueled by concern about head injuries among bike-riding children, jurisdictions around the country began implementing the first mandatory helmet laws for minors. By the 1980s, as scholars have chronicled, cycling advocates, news outlets, and medical literature alike encouraged widespread helmet use. “I am alive today because I was wearing a helmet,” New York state’s bicycle coordinator told the New York Times in 1986 about his collision with a taxicab years prior. In 1999 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission voted unanimously to create mandatory federal safety standards for bike helmets.
Those standards require that helmet manufacturers evaluate their product’s safety performance by dropping a helmeted dummy head made of magnesium about 6.5 feet onto a variety of steel anvils. Accelerometers and gyroscopes inside the dummy measure the impact’s kinetics. The drop test lasts less than two seconds total; the impact itself happens in a third of the time it takes to blink.
You can’t predict a bicycle accident the way you can expect collisions in a footballgame.
This test, while crude, partially captures the dangers to an unprotected head, which can suffer a life-threatening skull or intracranial fracture after falling from a height of just 18 inches. “The energy’s got to go somewhere—it can be your head, or your helmet,” said Steve Rowson, a biomechanical engineer and director of Virginia Tech’s Helmet Lab, which aims to decrease the incidence of injuries, and in particular concussions, in everything from sports to military contexts.
But lab tests of helmeted dummies in vertical free fall do not capture how most people hit their heads while bicycling.
Studying “real world”–like bike crashes in an artificial setting is itself a scientific challenge. You can’t predict a bicycle crash the way you can expect collisions in a football game, for example; there are simply more variables on the road than on a playing field. (To get around this, Rowson’s lab reverse-engineers the dynamic by acquiring helmets from real bike crashes, CT scanning them to create 3D models of the damage, and replicating crash conditions such as velocity, angle of impact, and surface conditions by plastering the drop-test anvil with adhesive sandpaper and other materials to imitate asphalt or gravel roads.)
Lab tests also fail to capture a whole body in motion, which some experts argue underestimates impact forces. It’s rare in the real world for someone to fall directly onto the top of their head; hitting the ground somewhere between a 30-degree and 60-degree angle is far more typical.
And standard drop tests, critically, don’t factor in the rotational forces at play as a rider falls not only down but forward. These forces—which are akin to bouncing a bobblehead—have been long associated with life-threatening or disabling traumatic brain injury. Among sports-related concussions, including contact sports, “cycling’s normally near the top of the list,” Rowson said. In recent years, helmet manufacturers have developed new “anti-concussion” technologies to reduce rotational forces’ impact on the head; experts are divided about the extent of this extra protection.
Outside the lab, researchers struggle to study the population-level protection conferred by bicycle helmets.
“The data around bicyclist crashes is very limited,” said Elise Omaki, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy. It’s also often incomplete or biased.
Most crash data come from traffic-safety monitoring systems that happen to catch motor-vehicle-related bike injuries and fatalities. Medical records from bike-crash victims focus on diagnosis, treatment, and outcome, while typically leaving out details of the circumstances of the crash itself; they also fail to capture people who cycle without ever needing medical attention. Insurance claims and police reports catalog some bicycle crashes, but miss plenty: One study by San Francisco’s public health department found that 39 percent of bicyclists who required ambulance transport were not documented in police records. The United States can’t even accurately tally overall bike helmet use.
In this absence, several meta-analyses have pooled together existing studies to gauge the protective effect of bike helmets.
One—a roundup of 55 studies between 1989 and 2017—found that helmet use reduced serious head injury by 60 percent, mild head injury and traumatic brain injury by about 50 percent, and the total number of seriously injured or killed cyclists by 34 percent. But its author, Alena Høye, a traffic-safety researcher at the Institute of Transport Economics in Norway, had some major caveats. For one, Høye pointed out, helmets offer more injury protection in single-bicycle crashes. “Bicycle helmets have only limited potential to protect from serious head injury in high energy impacts or when a cyclist is overrun by a motor vehicle,” she wrote. Høye also noted that many studies concluding that people who wear helmets are less likely to suffer a head injury don’t account for the simple fact that helmet-wearers may be more generally cautious. (The opposite is true too: Non-helmeted cyclists are more often under the influence of alcohol or riding without light in the dark, and are more likely to be involved in single bicycle crashes.)
Epidemiologists who have studied mandatory helmet laws have drawn mixed conclusions, with some showing a reduction in overall head injury rates and others suggesting that those trends may be better explained by improvements to cycling infrastructure, as well as educational safety campaigns that provide free helmets or teach defensive-biking techniques.
More than a decade ago, Ian Walker, an environmental psychologist at Swansea University in the U.K., set out to study the effect of helmets on drivers.
His experimentalseries involved riding around in a variety of cycling outfits, including a “long feminine wig” meant to stand in for female riders, a stereotypical spandex cyclist suit, and a vest embossed with “Novice Cyclist.” In each, Walker measured how much space passing cars afforded each rider “type.”
Walker—who was struck by buses and trucks alike during his research—found that traffic passed significantly closer when he rode farther from the road’s edge, and that it gave more space to “female” riders (again, Walker in a wig). Notably, Walker discovered, motorists and commercial truck drivers in particular afforded less space—not more—to helmeted cyclists. In his second experiment, the only outfit that widened the average passing distance granted by motorists was a vest that prominently featured the word “Police” and warned that the rider was video-recording their journey.
Helmets, we know at the very least, are not an adequate safeguard for protecting riders from the most dangerous threat they’ll encounter on the road.
Cyclists are statistically more likely to die in urban areas, if alcohol is involved, and if they are male. In 2020 two-thirds of bicyclist deaths in the United States occurred in motor-vehicle traffic crashes, according to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data. That year, 938 cyclists were killed in traffic crashes, up almost 100 deaths from the year before; in 5 out of every 6 crashes with a single vehicle, the car, truck, or bus first hit the cyclist from behind—likely without spotting the rider until it was too late.
“Looking at helmets as a solution is very shortsighted,” said Alison Dewey, the League of American Bicyclists’ education director. “It’s like a tertiary, or even farther down of a level, to keep you safe.”
After a drunk driver going 60 mph in his 3,500-pound BMW hit and killed cyclist Eric Ng, the New York Times pointed out that he had been helmetless. “Mentioning whether or not Eric wore a helmet is akin to blaming an egg for cracking against a pan,” wrote Ng’s friend and journalist Jessie Singer in their 2022 book There Are No Accidents. Cycling advocates have long argued that finger-wagging over helmet use unfairly shifts blame onto the most vulnerable people on the road instead of targeting risks at their source.
“What’s really kind of lurking over everything is that you are exposed to danger from private motor vehicles,” said Robert Davis, chair of the U.K.-based cycling advocacy group Road Danger Reduction Forum. “You go out there and it’s your job to watch out. It’s your job to grab hold of some product.”
From a zoomed-out perspective, helmets are simply not the road-safety panacea we want them to be. Several analyses suggest that U.S. riders are more likely to wear helmets compared with cyclists in other countries—all while suffering the highest fatality rate per distance traveled. Research shows that among a 14-country cohort, the Netherlands enjoyed the lowest bicyclist fatality rate per mile traveled. The Dutch also largely eschew the helmet: 73 percent of adults and 84 percent of children in the Netherlands report they never wear a helmet while bicycling. There’s a simple reason for that. Surveys show that Dutch residents feel safe biking, and attribute that sense of security to the country’s long-standing cycling culture and network of dedicated cycling lanes.
“We have this unquestioned idea that the roads are there forcars.”
— Robert Davis
“They made it safe so that people don’t feel the need to wear helmets,” Davis said. “They think of cycling as a normal activity,” not as one that is inherently dangerous. This Dutch helmet paradox demonstrates the scale—cultural and infrastructural—of problem-solving required to address traffic safety.
But in cultures where transit prioritizes convenience for motorists, that’s a hard sell. “Our roads and systems were really designed around car users,” Omaki said. Davis agreed from his side of the Atlantic. “We have this unquestioned idea that the roads are there for cars,” he said.
Putting the responsibility of safety solely on individual shoulders all but guarantees failure, said Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who has studied bike helmet and sports injuries. “It’s an enormous burden,” she said. Asking individuals to spend money on helmets, lights, and reflective gear without investing in better transit culture ignores the fact that the real danger to cyclists comes from behind the wheel, not from behind handlebars.
“We can talk about bike helmets because it’s something we can blame for individual decision-making,” said Alison Bateman-House, an ethicist and medical historian at New York University who has studied mandatory helmet laws.
In 2019 the National Transportation Safety Board released a report analyzing bicyclist safety—something it hadn’t done for 47 years. It targeted many recommendations at changing driver behavior and road infrastructure.
The fear that I feel biking in cities isn’t actually a fear of biking; it’s a fear ofcars.
For one, the NTSB suggested reducing traffic speeds, pointing to data that show that bicyclist crashes at locations with speed limits of at least 50 mph were more than five times as likely to result in fatal or serious injuries than were crashes in speed-limit zones of 25 mph or less. The safety board also encouraged federal motor-vehicle standards to require evaluating headlights in real-world settings, and for the auto industry to modify collision avoidance systems to detect bicycles. It encouraged municipalities to invest in bicycle-compatible drainage grates and maintenance-hole covers, as well as to repurpose traffic lanes into separate travel lanes for cyclists, more pedestrian space, or additional street parking.
Increases in cycling transit—prodded by bike-share programs and the growing adoption of tricycles as well as recumbent, tandem, and foldable bikes—could also transform our car-centric culture into one that is safer for all road users, Dewey said. “To many motorists, it’s often forgotten that that’s a person,” she said. “The more we can open that tent and bring people in, the more, I think, empathetic that person will be as a motorist.”
When it comes to the dangers threatening cyclists, wearing a helmet is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. America’s top-selling vehicle model, the Ford F-Series, weighs up to 7,500 pounds. Its hood stands 4.5 feet tall—at the height of my chin. The fear that I feel biking in cities isn’t actually a fear of biking; it’s a fear of cars. Only a suite of infrastructure changes can combat the deadliest risk to cyclists. Not helmets alone. As a spokesperson for helmet-maker Giro told a cycling trade magazine in 2020: “There are many misconceptions about helmets, unfortunately,” adding: “We do not design helmets specifically to reduce chances or severity of injury when impacts involve a car.”
Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one. “Every time I see someone on a bike in New York City without a helmet, it makes me sick to my stomach,” said Bateman-House. (For my part, I agree.) It may not save you from a car crash, but in a slow-moving fall, “it can be the difference between life and death,” said Rowson, who runs the Helmet Lab.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public-health experts popularized the “Swiss cheese” harm-reduction model: the notion that imperfect protection stacked together can provide more safety than any single layer could on its own.
For infectious diseases, this ideally means combining individual measures such as mask-wearing and hand-washing with broader policies such as paid sick leave, widespread remote work, and universal access to tests, treatments, and vaccines. For bike safety, this would mean a combination of personal behaviors, like wearing helmets and using bike lights, and infrastructure, like protected bike lanes and reduced speed limits.
During the pandemic, much of the U.S. showed resistance to this kind of profound social and structural change, which would have saved lives but would have also required money, sacrifice, and consensus. “We chose not to do that,” Bateman-House said. We’re approaching bike safety, for the time being, with the same attitude. And those of us waiting for a safer ride are left to don our plastic shells and hope for the best.
The Russian scientific group has constrained entry to equipment and consumables, thanks to the US-led sanctions.
Russia’s scientific group not only grapples with isolation from its friends all around the entire world but also with the flight of gifted experts and the freezing of big global initiatives.
Scientific ties involving Russia and other countries commenced to crack in the course of the first times of Moscow’s military services procedure in Ukraine. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, the Australian College, and the European Affiliation of Universities, which unites 850 universities, introduced the comprehensive cessation of all interaction with Russian organisations.
Finland, Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Norway have refused joint exploration and instruction plans. At very best, scientific contacts in between the West and Russia have been “frozen” indefinitely.
“This is very disturbing,” Alexander Sergeev, the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently reported.
“Soon after all, science has prolonged been global, and if for some purpose it is in a manner of serious isolation, it has just about no prospect of currently being amid the leaders,” he extra.
“Wholly destroyed”
“Russian science, which was currently in a terribly shabby point out, has been completely ruined,” a physics and arithmetic scholar and assistant professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Know-how (MIPT), who wished to stay unnamed, stated in an job interview with The Insider.
Talking of the separation of Russia, the put up-doctoral scholar stated that meaningful scientific investigation is probable only in an intercontinental context.
“If any one thinks that we will do every little thing ourselves without the need of cooperation with international nations around the world and that we will be ready to retain up with earth science, to put it mildly, they are extremely naive,” Alexander Sergeev echoed a comparable see.
“And, of system, we require to pay out distinctive awareness to the scientific staff outflow,” he reported.
Russia however has a prospect to cooperate with the nations around the world that possibly supported its actions in Ukraine or abstained from voting versus Moscow at the UN.
So it is China, Central Asia, India, and various international locations in Africa and Latin America that can enable Russia overcome the isolation in the subject of science, states Russian instruction skilled Dara Melnik.
But these cooperation, he included, will no extended be on equivalent conditions but on forced situations.
“We do not see a mass personnel outflow, as some media say, and this is a good craze. Thoughts have subsided, and everybody is responsibly evaluating the latest circumstance,” Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko reported in early April.
Chernyshenko certain that the Russian govt would continue on the programme of “mega grants” with million-worth funding and modernise the subject.
Some of the government’s policies have previously led to the opening of much more than 270 new laboratories that carry out scientific investigation in 20 parts in the state.
Additional than 6 thousand posts have been released in scientific journals, about fifteen hundred patents for innovations and scientific discoveries have been registered, and a lot more than a person thousand educational courses have been created or modernised.
Nevertheless, experts are nevertheless concerned, both equally for their exploration and their own effectively-remaining. How, for case in point, can they publish in foreign journals beneath sanctions? In other words: how can they notify the earth about Russian breakthroughs?
Academics also anxiety an enhance in anti-scientific theories, which will be promoted by “patriotically-minded scientists.”
‘Provincialising Science’
The inability to invest in overseas machines will seriously undermine Russian science, and “all these who are tied to the superior-tech system will certainly go through quite severely,” the researchers believe.
It is no coincidence that even Deputy Key Minister Chernyshenko emphasised that Russia, now a lot more than ever, requirements certain scientific effects that can be used in domestic marketplace. But to minimise threats to the technological sphere, remarkable actions on the component of the authorities are essential.
“Usually, Russia will lag behind in the large-tech sphere endlessly,” Sergeev warned.
Sergeev desires the Russian government to develop measures and help the IT industry, whose staff members have “fled” the region in significant figures.
Sergeev additional that the government’s guidance ought to also be extended at minimum to superior-tech scientific institutes simply because the US and EU sanctions are related exactly with substantial technological innovation.
“If earlier we admitted that we were lagging powering the primary countries in several positions, now we have to say instantly that we are slipping into technological isolation,” Sergeev explained.
“Given the present-day rate of scientific advancement in the world, three to five many years may perhaps be a important interval, during which Russia will fall out of the cohort of leaders in a lot of scientific fields,” 1 of Russia’s top schooling consultants, Yegor Yablokov, a short while ago said.
For other industry experts, if the situation lasts a lengthy time and the Russian government does not find a swift resolution to this problem, “it will guide to provincialising of Russian science.”
‘Contacts on a particular level’
In accordance to science journalist Alexandra Borisova-Sale, the spine of the scientific group actively operating in Russia will maintain international contacts on a individual degree.
But most probably, “this sort of people will face criticism from the two sides,” claims Borisova-Sale, adding that all experts in Russia will face a constraining circumstance no matter of their political place.
“All problems regarding the lack of funding, slow deliveries owing to customs rules, hard obtain to global scientific literature will be multiplied by the ruble’s drop, and all sorts of sanctions and limits,” she added.
But not every single expert agrees with Borisova-Sale’s assertion. In 2018, Vitaly Sergeev, vice-rector for scientific perform at Peter the Terrific St. Petersburg Polytechnic College, stated:
“Sanctions stimulate the generation of domestic expertise-intense systems and the enhancement of industries and places that are completely international to us.”
Even with all the pessimism, lots of lecturers now believe that that the time period of sanctions and severance of scientific relations need to provide as an incentive for homegrown technological innovation.
Alexander Sergeev, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claimed whilst the condition is “quite complex,” one particular ought to also try to remember that numerous a long time ago, Russia created the atomic bomb in in close proximity to-international isolation.
“And 16 years immediately after the war (WWII), it despatched the 1st gentleman into area. More than when, Russia has observed by itself in seemingly hopeless situations but has generally discovered a way out,” Sergeev additional.
A slow but significant change has been taking place in the early reading world over the past year, loosening the grip that some long-used, but unproven, instructional techniques have held over the field for decades.
Big names—like Lucy Calkins, of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and author and literacy specialist Jennifer Serravallo—have recently released updates to their published materials or announced impending rewrites that change how they instruct students to decipher words.
Reading researchers say they find these industry moves encouraging. “The fact that there’s an awareness … that’s a step in the right direction,” said Claude Goldenberg, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who studies early literacy development in English-language learners.
But they also cautioned that this narrow change in materials won’t necessarily lead to large shifts in instructional practice, and that more needs to be done to support teachers of the youngest learners in developing kids’ early reading skills—especially after several years of disrupted, pandemic-era schooling.
The shifts curriculum providers are making mainly have to do with how teachers instruct students in word-level reading—that is, decoding the words on the page into spoken language.
Much of teacher training and many classroom materials adhere to the theory that children should use multiple sources of information, or cues—the letters in a word, but also the pictures on the page or the flow of the sentence—to make a prediction about what the word is.
But evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience research has long shown that good readers attend to the letters in the words to identify what words say. Research has demonstrated that instructing students on how to crack the code of written language is one of the most effective ways to get them reading words.
And while it’s important to teach young kids about story structure and syntax, and to have rich conversations about illustrations in picture books, children shouldn’t rely on those sources of information to guess at what the words on the page say, said Goldenberg.
“There’s a very subtle, nuanced, delicate dance in sequencing,” he said. “It’s that kind of delicate balance that I see completely missing from programs that try to do everything all at once.”
Now, some publishers are trying to make a shift in how they integrate, sequence, and attend to foundational skills instruction. But there are open questions about how these changes in materials will change practice in classrooms.
“We see ourselves at a hinge moment,” said Maryanne Wolf, the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, and the author of several seminal books about how the brain learns to read. “The separation of two doors on reading has been not just unfortunate, but even tragic, leaving behind children who have needed desperately a different form of instruction.”
A public conversation about reading science led to materials changes
The research motivating these changes isn’t new.
In 2000, a panel of experts was convened by the federal government to evaluate the evidence on reading instruction. One of the takeaways from the National Reading Panel’s report was that explicitly teaching about the sounds in words, and how those sounds matched up to written letters, would help children learn to read. This finding drove policy changes in the early 2000s, most notably the introduction of Reading First, a federally funded program that emphasized phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.
The program had mixed results, leading to some improvements in children’s word-reading ability, but not in their reading comprehension. In its wake, many schools and teacher education programs adopted a model called balanced literacy—aiming to balance foundational skills instruction with more focus on stories, comprehension, and developing a love of reading.
But in 2018, reporter Emily Hanford of APM Reports brought to light that in many balanced literacy classrooms, students were not receiving systematic, explicit instruction in phonics—how written letters match up to spoken sounds—and were being encouraged to use other strategies to guess at words. Without this foundational instruction, many students never figure out how to decode the printed words on the page.
Hanford’s documentaries—as well as a slew of coverage from Education Week and other outlets—ignited a firestorm of controversy, with some teachers outraged that they had never learned how to teach phonics in their teacher preparation programs, and others pushing back with a defense of their teaching methods. In the several years that followed, more states started to mandate teacher training in, and classroom attention to, foundational skills instruction in an effort to adhere to what came to be referred to as the “science of reading.”
But these word-guessing strategies are also deeply embedded in much of early reading curricula, as Education Week reporting has shown. Many programs and teacher guides encourage prompting students to rely on a story’s meaning and structure, as well as the letters on the page, to predict what words will say—a strategy known as three-cueing or MSV (for meaning, structure, and visual). And while most curricula incorporate phonics instruction, it’s often “competing for teachers’ and children’s attention and time,” said Goldenberg.
Now, some influential publishers are starting to make changes.
This summer, Serravallo released an update to part of her popular The Reading Strategies Book, revising strategies for word-level reading to emphasize decoding and abandoning techniques that encourage students to guess at words. Early this year, literacy consultants Jan Burkins and Kari Yates released a new book, Shifting the Balance, that offers “ways to bring the science of reading into the balanced literacy classroom.”
And Calkins, of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, has announced upcoming revisions to her popular Units of Study for Teaching Reading program. The changes, Calkins said, will incorporate more explicit instruction in phonics and remove some prompts that ask students to look to pictures or context for word identification.
I think teachers want to learn, and … I can model that it’s OK to say, ‘There were a few things I think I got wrong, and I’m learning about them.’
Lucy Calkins, director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project
At the same time, several more states have passed laws mandating that schools teach the “science of reading”—laws that would affect curricula and materials.
Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies reading, said the publishers’ changes are a response to these new policy priorities. But he worries that the revisions will be surface level, only shifting instruction enough to “satisfy the stipulations in those laws,” he said.
“They can’t change their materials too much, because they’ll lose their followers,” Seidenberg said. “What’s going to come out of this? Minimal changes that are enough to satisfy [these] states.”
Wiley Blevins, an educational consultant and author of several books on phonics teaching, understands the critiques, and the skepticism, that some experts are expressing about these changes: “I get the anger, because we’re talking about kids’ lives. We’re talking about their futures.” But he sees more reason for optimism, in teachers who may now have more guidance to “do better for their students.”
Lucy Calkins outlines upcoming changes to Units of Study
In some cases, this guidance for teachers is still forthcoming. Calkins’ Reading and Writing Project, a workshop-based program that publishes a reading curriculum used by about 16 percent of early elementary and special education teachers, according to data gathered by Education Week, is planning to release updated materials in summer 2022. (The timeline has been pushed back due to COVID-related production delays, Calkins said.)
The planned update reflects a shift in approach for the group. In November 2019, Calkins released a statement pushing back on those whom she described as “the phonics-centric people who are calling themselves ‘the science of reading.’” About a year later, in fall 2020, TCRWP put out a new position statement, calling for attention to phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, and emphasizing that sounding out words is the best strategy for kids to use to figure out what those words say.
“[P]oring over the work of contemporary reading researchers has led us to believe that aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing,’” the document read.
The revised units will offer different guidance on reading “superpowers,” or reading strategies, Calkins said. Instead of being taught “picture power”—to look at the pictures to figure out words—students will be taught “slider power,” that they should “slide” over the word to blend the letter sounds together. Early units will also teach a progression of letter sounds and explicitly address how to decode short, phonetically regular words, Calkins said.
Students will still learn “picture power” later, she added, but as a comprehension strategy for understanding the meaning of the story, rather than as a strategy to identify words.
TCRWP will also release new decodable books that include sound-spelling patterns that children learn, so that students can practice applying their phonics knowledge to texts. (Studies have shown that using decodable books can encourage students to try to sound out words while they’re reading.) The group will recommend that teachers integrate these alongside their predictable books, which have repetitive sentence structures and pictures that give clues as to the words on the page. The earliest kindergarten units, which Calkins calls “pre-reading units,” still use predictable books to teach concepts of print and high-frequency words.
Though Calkins says that these changes are “not small,” she also maintains that much of reading workshop will remain the same. “There’s a trademark to our schools that are working with us. There’s a trademark tone to the classrooms. Kids collaborating deeply, passionate about books, talking all the time about their ideas about books, writing up a storm,” she said.
“I don’t think the teachers will find [these changes] jarring,” she continued. ”I think teachers want to learn, and … I can model that it’s OK to say, ‘There were a few things I think I got wrong, and I’m learning about them.’”
Goldenberg, who was one of the researchers who participated in an external review of the Units of Study in Reading published in early 2020, said that many of the lessons in the current curriculum are well done, but that they’re “sitting on a flimsy foundation.”
Layering on more attention to the foundations of reading could strengthen the program, but only if this focus is deeply and purposefully embedded, he said.
New teacher guides rethink old practices
Other authors have already released updates into the marketplace, like Burkins and Yates, who have written teacher guides on reading coaching, balanced literacy, and guided reading.
When Hanford’s work first came out, Burkins said, her colleagues in the field were on the defensive—and she and Yates, were, too.
“I’m going to own that I had defensiveness, dismissiveness, uncertainty about why some of these claims seemed outlandish or wrong,” Yates said.
While Burkins had read the work of a few cognitive psychologists in her training, much of the body of research that Hanford drew from was unfamiliar to her. “If you’re an educator, your information inputs have not been from the cognitive [research] side,” she said. Even in her doctoral program, where she completed a dissertation on phonemic awareness research, research courses were limited and she felt that she received mixed messages about evidence-based practice.
Burkins approached Yates about exploring the research together. “Jan really said, ‘Kari, we’ve got to take a deep dive into this because, look—we’ve built careers around supporting early literacy. And we have coached teachers on many of the practices that are being criticized,’” Yates said. “And so I think part of it, for us, was: We know we owe it to the people we’re trying to serve—who are not just children, they’re teachers—to figure out what’s amiss here.”
The book outlines six “shifts” in thinking for the balanced literacy classroom: rethinking how comprehension begins, committing to phonemic awareness instruction, reimagining phonics teaching, revising instruction on high-frequency words, rethinking MSV, and reconsidering which texts beginning readers should read.
The focus, Burkins and Yates said, was on making the research that has appeared in journals accessible and actionable for teachers. They also tried to highlight where practices that many teachers already use align with evidence-based best practice—like engaging students in rich read-alouds, or using text sets of books that approach one topic from different angles to build knowledge.
“When you come in with the approach of, shut all this down and start fresh, you’re going to lose teachers. Energy is our most precious resource,” said Yates. “This work is as much about the reading science as it is about the science of understanding how to support human and organizational change.”
Like Burkins and Yates, Serravallo, the author of The Reading Strategies Book, also noted the inaccessibility of paywalled journals. More recently published books, like Seidenberg’s Language at the Speed of Sight, Daniel Willingham’s The Reading Mind, and Wolf’s Reader, Come Home “make it easier for people to find the information,” she said.
Serravallo worked with several reading researchers, including Wolf, on the updates to her book. Wolf, who met Serravallo while they were recording a podcast together for Serravallo’s publisher Heinemann, said that they were able to find common ground in a shared vision of what reading instruction should ultimately do.
“She knew that my particular goal, my ultimate goal … is deep reading,” Wolf said. “Deep reading is when the brain has gone well beyond that first decoding brain, and into a place where all the parts are working automatically enough and connected to each other so that time can be allocated to critical thinking, inference, empathy, reflection. All of these are the real goals for a society.”
Strong instruction in foundational skills is just one piece, but a fundamental piece, of achieving that vision, Wolf said.
This work is as much about the reading science as it is about the science of understanding how to support human and organizational change.
Kari Yates, co-author of ‘Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom’
Serravallo’s revision is an overhaul of chapter 3 of The Reading Strategies Book (the book is designed to help teachers work with students, but it’s not a curriculum). The chapter focuses on strategies for deciphering words. The old version starts, “In order to construct accurate meaning from a text, children need to read words correctly, integrating three sources of information: meaning, syntax, and visual.”
The new version takes an entirely different approach, explaining the different ways a child can decode a word, and noting that the goal of orthographic mapping—”gluing” the spelling and the sound together in memory, so the word can be retrieved automatically.
Gone are the recommendations that children guess at the word based on the pictures or the rest of the sentence; in their place are suggestions for helping students apply their phonics knowledge to word reading. The new version also cites different sources, from a body of research in developmental psychology and cognitive science that wasn’t referenced in the original.
“The common practice that I used, and that my colleagues used, back when I wrote that [original] chapter relied on a certain type of text that scaffolds kids’ early reading by providing a lot of exposure to high-frequency words, some decoding, and some use of meaning to decipher the words on the page,” said Serravallo.
For some children, she said, the combination was enough to get them started on a path to fluent reading. “For other kids, it is a problem,” she said.
Reading community calls for more work translating research to practice
Seidenberg said the changes in Serravallo’s book, in particular, could prove a useful resource for classroom teachers. But he worries about a framework for reading instruction that is still oriented around “strategies,” focusing on how to respond to struggle.
For example, he said: “If the kid understands that there are digraphs, and has had enough relevant practice with them, you shouldn’t have to have a backup strategy [for recognizing digraphs].”
But Sandra Maddox, a literacy specialist with the South Carolina Department of Education, who consulted Serravallo on the revisions to her book, said that the classroom context isn’t always so predictable. Some students might be able to apply the new phonics skills they learn right away; others need more repetition and targeted reminders. “It’s not enough to just say, ‘sound it out,’” said Maddox, who specializes in working with children with dyslexia.
Reading researchers, publishers, and educators alike all voiced a need for more translational work—collaborations between cognitive psychologists and educators to implement reading science in ways that are effective and practical.
Understanding reading research is one thing; applying it is another, said Yates. “Knowing how the brain learns to read does not answer the question that a kindergarten teacher [asks], in those 4,000-plus decisions they make every day, about exactly how to proceed with this group of kids in front of them,” she said.
Wolf said that her team at UCLA is “busily building bridges.” They’re working within the school of education, teaching teachers about dyslexia, while also collaborating with neurologists at the University of California San Francisco. “We are really determined to pull neuroscience and education together, for the benefit of all,” she said.
Other researchers, too, are working on local efforts: In Madison, for example, Seidenberg sat on an early literacy task force with leaders from the Madison Metropolitan school district and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, with the goal of improving student reading outcomes and closing opportunity gaps.
This kind of work is happening slowly, Wolf said.
It’s hard to know, yet, what effect these publishing changes will have
Maddox has already seen some uptake of Serravallo’s new pages among the teachers she works with. “They’re downloading them, printing them out, and adding them to their book,” she said. “What I hope it does is make teachers more aware of the strategies for decoding, and make them more aware of phonemic awareness and phonics in general.”
This knowledge is more necessary this year than ever, said Blevins, who consults with school districts. Because of educational disruptions during the pandemic, he said, teachers in older elementary grades are seeing large numbers of students with foundational skills gaps—in some cases, for the first time.
“They don’t even know where to start. [The teachers have] never heard of blending,” he said. He’s started doing sessions with 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers in addition to the earlier elementary teachers he normally works with, teaching them a handful of key routines they can use and introducing them to a comprehensive phonics survey they can give kids to figure out what skills they need to focus on.
“I think that there’s a recognition that upper grade teachers need more knowledge of phonics,” said Calkins. “Third graders, the last time they had an uninterrupted year in school was kindergarten.”
But researchers say there are still barriers in schools to identifying student needs. “I do think the measurement groups have been slower to respond than some of the instructional ones,” Matthew Burns, a professor of special education in the University of Missouri’s College of Education and Human Development, said of common classroom tools used to take reading inventories, evaluating what students know and don’t know.
In a study on publisher Fountas and Pinnell’s reading inventory, Burns and his colleagues found that the results weren’t reliable: Students would receive different scores with different books that were supposedly both at their reading level. “We put too much stock in the score we get from these measures,” he said.
Fountas and Pinnell materials, which include reading curricula as well as assessment tools, use many of the word-guessing strategies that other publishers are starting to move away from. The group’s founders, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, declined to comment for this story through their publisher, Heinemann.
However, in a Sept. 8 opinion piece for Education Week, Fountas and Pinnell distanced themselves from the term “balanced literacy,” and characterized the ongoing conversation about reading practice as the “latest chapter in the reading wars.”
“We believe this round of conflict, like the previous ones, is harmful to our profession and has real potential for confusing children as well as teachers and administrators,” they wrote.
Fountas and Pinnell’s intervention materials, Leveled Literacy Intervention, hold a large share of the market—43 percent of early elementary and special education teachers said they used LLI in a 2019 Education Week survey.
Changes to materials would better support teachers, Blevins said. But he stressed that stamping a “science of reading” approved seal on a resource and putting it in teachers’ hands doesn’t necessarily give teachers the knowledge and understanding they need to change their instruction.
“Whenever you see these shifts happening, it’s always surface knowledge,” Blevins said. “What that has boiled down to is … on social media, teachers will name a program and say, ‘Is this science of reading?’”
The overwhelming interest in reading research presents an opportunity, and a caution, Blevins said. “It is a moment that if we did it right, we could take advantage of it and help millions of kids. But we need to go deeper.”
