Interview with Neena Saha
All About Neena Saha:
Neena earned her master’s degree in educational neuroscience from Columbia and has a PhD in special education from Vanderbilt.
Her doctoral work on decoding resulted in a patent and her research can be found in journals like The Journal for Learning Disabilities and The Reading and Writing Interdisciplinary Journal.
Upon graduating, Neena founded Elemeno, which helps bridge the research practice gap in early literacy.
Meta Metrics acquired Elemeno and Neena joined their team to help build out early literacy products, tools, and services.
Neena also continued the Reading Research Recap, which is a newsletter aimed at translating recent research into useful information for teachers.
Currently, she’s exploring better ways of translating research for all.
Can you speak to what you’re currently doing in the science of reading world?
Right now, I’m consulting with a lot of companies on science of reading initiatives. I’m also consulting for some start-ups. There is so much need out there that even I’m still figuring out how to meet all of those needs.
We presented at Unlocking SOR together and I felt like I was in the presence of a research genius because you’re just so knowledgeable and present it in a way people understand.
It can be hard! I always like to give the caveat that I pick one research study a month. It’s not necessarily a broad synthesis of the state of a certain literary element - it’s usually just one study, and I like to tell people that.
Can you share your educational background and how you found this calling?
My route is not a straight line! My majors were biology and international affairs and upon graduating, I quickly had to find a job. I ended up working as a social work assistant and I shuttled kids around the city who were removed from their homes. I took kids to their appointments and helped the case managers with their loads. Eventually, I became a foster care social worker working in adoptions. Through this experience, I learned so much about children that helped me as I later on became a teacher.
And speaking of how I got there, eventually I drove across the country and got to LA on the eve of the late financial crisis. I tried so hard to get a job in social work, but just couldn't. After three months and no more savings, I got a call back from a woman and told me that they needed a special education teaching assistant. So that’s how I got into education! I received my credentials and started teaching.
I loved teaching and got trained in the Wilson program teaching 9th and 10th graders. I did a lot of decoding and word work with these older kids, which was a unique challenge. As you can imagine, it was difficult tailoring some of these elementary-level lessons for older kids.
As some of these kids did well and others didn’t, it led me to go back to school to get masters in educational neuroscience as well as my PhD.
I’ve heard you talk about how reading experts need to work more closely together. What are some hurdles that are preventing this and how can we get past this so that everyone can work together?
It’s so much less about people not wanting to work together - I don’t think it’s intentional. Moreso, I think it’s the incentives not being aligned. We have so many different industries - education, research, product development, etc. They all have different incentives. For example, much of the professional development is put on by companies who are trying to sell their product. Instead, there should be high-quality PD training.
And speaking of, another question is how do we stay up to date after these teachers leave the trainings? We don’t necessarily train them in how to research or how to analyze it. Of course, the researchers are researching it, but they aren’t necessarily trained in how to use social media, so there’s no unified platform. The researchers don’t have much incentive to get their articles out there either. What I mean by this is that there’s some basic research that’s being done that isn’t translatable but still informs the stuff that is practical.
Publishers have to make the money on the research and there isn’t always open access. But UFLI is researcher-developed and evidence-based. They took it to market and it’s very affordable with online support. That’s a huge success. So many publishers come in and encourage you to buy their stuff but then leave you with no support.
Can you tell us about your research and some key discoveries that changed the way you think about reading and how you teach teachers to think about reading?
My research at Vanderbilt focused on decoding and text analysis and individual differences in students acquiring decoding ability. We have lots of readability formulas but there didn’t seem to be anything that measured sound spellings or letter sounds (grapheme-phoneme correspondences).
So, we ran some studies where we analyzed word reading errors. We developed a measure that we were trying to validate. We saw how well that measure measured the words with a numerical score depending on the difficulty of the word.
Vanderbilt ended up filing a patent on that measure even though we tried finding different ways of commercializing it. And that was something I was interested in and showed me that I didn’t want to stay in academia. How do you take research out of the lab and make a product? That was something that was really interesting to me.
So I took an entrepreneurship class where I could learn to productize this measure. It turned out people didn’t want a single number for words or passage or book. Instead, they wanted to know the letter sounds in the words in the book to match their scope and sequence. So that changed what I was originally working on.
And speaking of, we also need more research as to when to transition kids off of decodables and into authentic texts. We need to treat it as a bridge to grade-level texts and think intentionally about the transition.
Where do you think reading research is headed in the next ten years? Are there any trends or technologies that you’re excited about?
I’m hoping that programs like UFLI will come to the forefront. I’d love to see more practical, teacher questions answered with research. When I began the Reading Research Blog, I tried to find studies that had direct classroom implications and it was difficult. But now, there’s about 3-5 great studies with practical teacher implications. So I think researchers have seen what’s happened and of course they want to be the one that answers some amazing teacher questions.
I think that we’ll also see researchers develop programs themselves instead of selling it to a huge company that will develop it and then monetize it.
As for technologies, I think AI is interesting, but I’m a bit hesitant. I believe teachers want to hear their own kids read aloud instead of having a system that analyzes the errors, etc. Teachers want to be involved. This method is so intuitive - you get to hear your student read a benchmark book and actually be the one who writes down their errors. I hope we see a better version of Fountas and Panel, who had a great model, but just lacked certain elements. I’d love for teachers to be asked what they’d like AI to do for them and how it can help them in their classrooms rather than inventing something others merely think will be helpful for teachers.
For teachers that want to know the research but are feeling overwhelmed, what are some pieces of advice that will help them access it so it can be manageable and easy for them to understand?
Always give yourself grace - research is hard to decipher and even I still get confused. Research is complex, even for people who are reading it daily.
Don’t feel like you need to know all of the stats. Reading the background portion of a research paper is a great way to start.
Stick to practitioner-focused journals like The Reading League and The Reading Teacher.
Just know you don’t need to know every single thing inside of a paper.
Check Out Neena Saha:
LinkedIn: Neena Saha
YouTube - Reading Research Recap
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Other Resources:
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