Dr. Kelly Cartwright: Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension

The science of reading has made real progress in how schools think about decoding and language comprehension. But for a significant number of struggling readers, those two buckets don’t explain what’s getting in the way.

Dr. Kelly Cartwright, Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at UNC Charlotte, has spent her career mapping the territory other reading models leave out — specifically, the role executive functions play in coordinating what skilled readers do.

In this conversation, Dr. Cartwright explains what executive functions (EF) actually are, why they matter for every reader and not just students with ADHD, and what her research reveals about the kind of EF interventions that actually move the needle on reading outcomes. She also makes the case that the field’s tendency toward dichotomous thinking — decoding over here, comprehension over there — may be leaving a large group of students without the support they need.

Check out the video recording of this conversation below, available to full subscribers. Join the community today!

Show Notes

Research and Articles

(links embedded in title)

* Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25–S44.

* Cartwright, K. B., & Palian, S. R. (2024). Considering Roles of Executive Functions in the Science of Reading: A Meta-Analysis Highlighting Promises and Challenges of Reading-Specific Executive Functions. Educational Psychologist, 59(4), 263–290.

* Wagner, R. K., et al. (2021). A Model-Based Meta-Analytic Examination of Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit. Annals of Dyslexia, 71(2), 260–281.

* Austin, C. R., Vaughn, S., Clemens, N. H., Pustejovsky, J. E., & Boucher, A. N. (2022). The relative effects of instruction linking word reading and word meaning compared to word reading instruction alone on the accuracy, fluency, and word meaning knowledge of 4th-5th grade students with dyslexia. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(3), 204-222.

* Chi, M. T. H. (1978). Knowledge structures and memory development. In R. S. Siegler (Ed.), Children’s thinking: What develops? (pp. 73–96). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Assessments Mentioned

* Graphophonological Semantic Flexibility (GSF) Assessment — freely accessible; measures cognitive flexibility in managing letter-sound and meaning features of words simultaneously (from Chapter 4 of Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension - see below)

Books Mentioned

(embedded Bookshop links are an affiliate account)

* Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. (Bookshop) (Guilford Press - download flyer for 25% discount)

* Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. MIT Press. (Bookshop)

* Page, L. This Book Made Me Think of You (Bookshop) — recommended by Kelly Cartwright

* Weir, A. Project Hail Mary (Bookshop) — recommended by Matt Renwick

* Richtel, M. How We Grow Up (Bookshop) — recommended by Debra Crouch

Model Referenced

* The Active View of Reading (Duke & Cartwright, 2021) — diagram available via the Reading Research Quarterly article linked above (and below).

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick

Hi, I’m Matt. Welcome to Read by Example, where teachers are leaders, and leaders know literacy. I am excited to have someone that I’ve been reading about in a pretty specific, but I think important subject area. I’m joined by Kelly Cartwright. Dr. Cartwright is the Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is the author of Executive Skills, Reading and Reading Comprehension, second edition through Guilford. Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly Cartwright

Thank you. I’m so excited to be here with you today.

Matt Renwick

And Debra Crouch, author and co-author of Made for Learning with Brian Camborne, is also here. Excited to see Debra again. Are you in the classroom still, Debra?

Debra Crouch

No, not right now. I’m actually supervising a couple of student teachers right now. That’s what I’m up to.

Matt Renwick

Alright, but you were teaching second grade, right?

Debra Crouch

Yes, second and third grade. Both grades.

Kelly Cartwright

And technically, you’re in classrooms, so…

Debra Crouch

Yes, always in classrooms.

Matt Renwick

Same here. Whenever I can get in, it’s a treat. So, Kelly, I want to start with curiosity. Executive functions have not been a prominent part of the conversation around reading instruction. What made you think they should be? What about this field captured your interest and focus for your research?

Kelly Cartwright

That’s a great question. I started out in psychology, but I was interested in how reading works — how reading works in the brain, how our cognitive processes support our ability to read. I was learning about executive functions, learning about the fact that kids, when they are young, are learning to be flexible in thinking about things. It occurred to me that reading is super complex, and it requires that we think about words in lots of ways. I was reading Marilyn Adams’ book, Beginning to Read, while in graduate school, and learning about all of these wonderful executive functions, and realizing that kids have to manage a ton. Grown-ups have to manage a ton of things in their heads, and I wondered about this connection. So, I started off my work in the area of looking at cognitive flexibility specific to reading — flexibility in thinking about words, sounds, and meanings — because kids have to think about words in a lot of ways to learn to be good readers, and we do it without thinking about it. Lots of people are looking at it now and realizing that being able to manage your thinking and manage your reading processes is a really important part of being a good reader.

Matt Renwick

Are you seeing more interest in this due to the world we currently live in, with constant connection and distraction? Do you see that contributing to this interest?

Kelly Cartwright

Maybe. I think that people are aware of executive functions in the context of special education, or when a child has ADHD in your classroom and the school psychologist has done assessments and says, “This child has a working memory problem,” or, “This child has an inhibition problem.” We’ve seen more and more diagnoses of executive skill difficulties, like ADHD, over the past few years. Is it connected to technology? I don’t have data on that. But I think the piece that we don’t always think about is that for a child who has executive skill difficulties, we see evidence that there’s a problem — but when everything’s going well, and your working memory and flexibility are supporting your reading processes, it’s invisible. We don’t see them. We see evidence for difficulty, not evidence for success. But being a successful reader means that you have those things in place.

Matt Renwick

ADHD has been referred to as an invisible disability — or difference, however you want to term it — and that resonates with me, because kids don’t always demonstrate it. It’s often an internal kind of thing.

Kelly Cartwright

Exactly.

Matt Renwick

You mentioned executive functions, and I think when people hear that, they sometimes just resort to ADHD as a rule of thumb. But they’re different. How would you describe executive functions in a way that’s separate from a diagnosis like ADHD, and connects it to what every reader is trying to do?

Kelly Cartwright

Executive functions, when you have difficulties with them, people see evidence of those things when you have a child who can’t focus, or can’t inhibit attention to all the things that are so interesting. But we recruit executive functions in all of our daily activities. Think about going to the supermarket. You need to keep your list of needed items in mind — you don’t want to get home without the noodles for the spaghetti — and that’s working memory, having to hold all that stuff in your head. You might make a list, but that kind of offloads the thinking onto a piece of paper. And you’re still going to have to use it in a flexible way: you’re looking at the shelf, you’re looking at the list, maybe they don’t have the brand you usually buy, or they’re out of the fruit you were going to buy, and you have to flex the week’s menu. You’re also having to use that list to inhibit your attention to the shiny Oreos on the end cap, and not buy the things that are not on the list. That working memory, that cognitive flexibility, that inhibition — they play out in everything we do.

In reading, we’re building a mental model of text meaning in our head. As I make my way through a text and learn about a new event, or a character does something unexpected, I’m updating my mental model of the text’s meaning as I go, while still hanging on to the things I’ve learned before. That’s working memory. While we’re doing that, we’re also decoding — shifting between word reading and meaning-making constantly. Even as adults, we process all the letters and sounds. If we come upon a multisyllabic word we haven’t seen, we’re totally using our decoding processes, but we’re doing those things under the level of conscious awareness and switching between them, and that takes flexibility. Or coming upon a word like “wind” — W-I-N-D — if you’re reading about a mechanical toy, it becomes “wind,” but if you’re reading about weather patterns, it’s “wind,” and knowing how to flex that vowel pronunciation is another instance of cognitive flexibility specific to reading.

Inhibition plays out in reading when you encounter words with multiple meanings, like “jam” and “traffic jam.” You can’t think about the sticky stuff you put on toast — you have to only think about the congested traffic. All of those things are happening for skilled readers automatically. We don’t notice them. But when children don’t have the working memory capacity, they’re not able to hold in mind the text pieces they need and supply their prior knowledge in order to make an inference. We can support that kind of thinking — put it on paper, use a graphic organizer like an inference map — but as skilled readers, we often expect kids to have the ability to do the things that we can do. Making inferences is so obvious to us, but it’s not obvious when you don’t have the ability to hold all the relevant pieces in your mind.

Matt Renwick

If I’m reading a novel and trying to keep track of all these characters, I’m not going to pull out a character map — maybe I might, if it’s a complex novel. But you’re right, we don’t reverse ourselves back to when we were learning to read when we teach. That’s where these external tools can be really helpful to support that cognition.

I personally have a hard time remembering all these different systems — it’s hard to visualize. When you teach this, do you use some kind of mental model, metaphor, or imagery to help teachers hold that idea in mind?

Kelly Cartwright

You’ve identified something the field probably needs. Models of reading are starting to incorporate executive functions. Nell Duke and I proposed the Active View of Reading — for those of you listening, maybe we can link this in the show notes. There’s a green bubble off to the left that has your executive function and self-regulation abilities, and they are helping drive your ability to recognize words, that word recognition piece, and that language comprehension piece, and your ability to put it all together in service of reading comprehension. That visual heuristic helps teachers to think about the fact that these invisible things actually undergird and support the processes we know readers need. But if I continue to try to teach inference-making in all the typical ways to a child who has working memory difficulties, without thinking about how working memory shows up within reading or how I can support and strengthen those reading-specific working memory skills, then the child may not make the progress I need them to.

For kids with ADHD, or adults with ADHD, all of these executive functions show up as difficulties in organization and planning. The child who comes with a backpack that isn’t as organized as we’d like — with an executive function difficulty, the organization isn’t there, and they may not be able to make that mental model of a text’s meaning without concrete support, or a story map, or explicit text structure instruction, so that they can use that heuristic — putting that thinking on the table — to support the working memory where they can’t do it all in their head.

Matt Renwick

I’ve used the Active View in presentations for school leaders on what they need to know about the science of reading. I’ll start with the Simple View, and then go to your Active View, just to show how complex reading really is. And I like where you positioned executive function — before word recognition and language comprehension. I assume that’s intentional. If you need executive functioning, you need strategic use of strategies. You can’t just teach phonics.

Kelly Cartwright

You have to know what to do with the phonics. The Simple View is amazing. It’s elegant. It’s 40 years old now, which is remarkable, and it has longevity in the field because it provides an amazing heuristic to help teachers understand that reading is more than just loving books. It came out at the height of the whole language movement, when phonics was not favored, and the Simple View does an excellent job of demonstrating that if our phonics knowledge — our ability to recognize words using that phonics knowledge systematically — if it’s not there, we are not going to understand what we read. You can’t understand what you read if you don’t pull the words off the page. But likewise, if you can’t understand what people say to you, you’re not going to understand what you read.

The Simple View does an excellent job with that. It’s a great place for teachers to begin to see how that complexity works. But what I’ve seen in practice is phonics instruction happening over here in this part of the day, and instruction in language comprehension happening over there in that other part of the day, and never the twain shall meet. But when I’m a skilled reader, I’m doing these at the same time, and I’m having to put it all together. The Simple View — and the rope model is similar — shows these two buckets of skills. The rope goes further to say we do weave them together, but it doesn’t say how. I think that’s where executive functions come in. Executive functions and self-regulation help you to strategically deploy that word recognition knowledge and that language comprehension knowledge and weave them together in service of comprehension — which is a piece that’s over and above each of those alone.

I like to use the analogy of that old pat-your-head, rub-your-tummy thing we used to do as kids. I can pat my head by itself, just like I can decode — when assessed independently I do well. I can rub my tummy, and I can do well when assessed on language comprehension independently. But if I have to put them together, it requires some third coordination ability that’s over and above the individual skills. That bridging or integration is represented in the Active View but isn’t represented in the Simple View. The Simple View initially alluded to this idea that kids decode and then comprehend — like a sequential thing — but it’s not. It’s very much an all-at-the-same-time kind of thing.

Matt Renwick

You’re multitasking in some ways. It’s why reading is so difficult for some kids.

Kelly Cartwright

And for grown-ups when we are tired.

Matt Renwick

Right — I’ve hit many mental roadblocks, and I’m like, I need a break, I need to go walk the dog. Movement helps me reset my thinking.

We see new resources that are still referring to the Simple View, still framing things as decoding over here, language comprehension over there. Why has this binary been so sticky? Why has the field not progressed to what you’re describing?

Kelly Cartwright

This is what happens in fields all over the place — it’s not just education. We like to group things. Cognitively, we like to sort things into groups. There’s the old nature-nurture debate from human development: is a particular trait caused by nature, or is it caused by nurture? People tend to think about that in a really dichotomous way, when the truth is very much intertwined. Even reading disabilities are a great example. Reading disabilities have a heritable component, but environment plays a role too. If you get explicit, systematic phonics instruction, that’s going to move the needle in a way that an environmental factor — not getting that instruction — won’t.

Another example: kids with lower socioeconomic resources tend to have more difficulty with reading, and with executive functions. Experience plays a role; heredity plays a role. It’s not a simple either-or. But when we’re thinking about doing something super complicated — Louisa Moats characterized teaching reading as rocket science — not only are we having to do all of those things at once as readers, but as an educator, you are having to help little people who have never understood how letters make words. You’ve got to help them decode, know what the words mean, know how to weave them into phrases and sentences and paragraphs, make mental pictures, make the inferences, deal with syntax and morphology. That’s a lot. And so, to be able to group the things that I need to do as an educator into two buckets simplifies things and helps us organize our day. But it may not always be beneficial for students, because we know that multi-component interventions help students learn to do that integration.

Matt Renwick

I wish we would pay teachers like rocket scientists.

Kelly Cartwright

Hear, hear. I agree.

Matt Renwick

In your meta-analysis, you were looking at executive function interventions isolated from reading instruction and then asking: what’s the effect? And you found that for EF interventions to be effective, they need to be embedded in reading instruction. You can’t do executive functioning interventions in isolation and then expect them to generalize into reading. Why is that, and why does that matter for educators?

Kelly Cartwright

There’s a super basic study in cognitive psychology called the chess study. What they did was compare children who were chess experts with adults who were chess novices on two tasks: memory for chessboard arrangements, and memory for strings of numbers. Both are memory tasks, but one is specific to an area the kids have experience with and the adults do not. What they found — and this was a big deal at the time — is that the children outperformed the adults on chessboard arrangements. Children are not supposed to have better memory than adults, but they did on chess-specific memory. And on memory for letter strings, the adults outperformed the kids, as we would expect. That illustrates this idea of domain-specific or task-specific cognition: the thinking within that task gets better. Over time, playing chess helped those kids get better and better at remembering chessboard arrangements. That doesn’t really relate to reading — I’m not saying go out and have people play chess — but within reading, it’s requiring you to do a lot of mental work, a lot of mental gymnastics. Being flexible about pronunciations of words — there’s something called “set for variability” — or being able to shift between thinking about words’ sounds and words’ meanings, or being able to hold aspects of text in mind and update them as you continue to make your way through. That’s reading-specific working memory.

So, if I’m doing an intervention that helps to strengthen the kinds of reading-specific executive skills, or the way executive skills show up within reading, that’s going to help the child’s reading — and also their executive skills within reading. But if I put a child over here on a working memory task that looks kind of like that Simon game we used to play as kids, where you’re pushing buttons to remember sequences of tones — that’s not going to help reading. It might help them remember sequences of colored buttons, but it’s not going to transfer. The field went for a while, when executive functions and reading were shown to be related, toward: let’s do executive function interventions, have them do computerized tasks, and it will transfer to reading. But we’re not seeing that happen, because the work was being done in separate areas. When educators can identify the ways that working memory shows up within reading — like inference-making, or the flexibility we’ve talked about, or inhibiting inappropriate word meanings for context — and then intervene in those things to strengthen both the executive skills and the reading skills, then both improve.

Matt Renwick

When you talk about that, what comes up for me is “neurons that fire together wire together.” Is that why we see that?

Kelly Cartwright

I don’t have all the data we need yet, but we know that reading interventions strengthen connectivity in the reading network. And we know that executive function networks help to connect up the hubs in the reading network in the brain. In a sense, yes, you’re having them fire together — just like an intervention for a child with dyslexia. They need more explicit, systematic phonics instruction to get that letter-word form area in the visual cortex — that part of the brain we repurposed to become reading brain — to build up. When we give them more practice, it improves the connections and the processing. Interventions change brains, yes. But we do need more work to really say definitively, here’s study after study. We don’t have all of that yet.

Matt Renwick

I’m thinking about kids who have gone through a very isolated phonics intervention and come out as good word callers, but their comprehension hasn’t kept up. It seems like a similar issue — we want the bridging processes, we want to bridge these activities so that kids are fully growing as readers.

Kelly Cartwright

That brings up something for me, just thinking about reading difficulties. Dyslexia is one — those kids have word-reading difficulties. But the kids we typically call “word callers,” where they sound like great readers and fly under the radar because they sound awesome — the teacher hears them and thinks everything’s going well, and then the end-of-grade assessment comes and they can’t comprehend, and you’re like, what’s going on? Those children are children where executive skills show up as a difficulty. Kids with dyslexia also have executive skill difficulties, in different ways.

A recent meta-analysis by Rick Wagner and colleagues at the Florida Center for Reading Research looked at kids with great word-reading ability but surprisingly poor comprehension. Using the Simple View framework, they examined how much word recognition and language comprehension contribute to reading comprehension for these kids. Those two buckets of skills explain about half of the variance in reading comprehension, and what they concluded was: there’s got to be something else. We know that these students have executive skill difficulties — study after study shows it. This work matters for educators because, historically, we haven’t known what to do with those children. You know what to do when they can’t read the words. But when they can read the words and comprehension just isn’t happening — executive skill-infused instruction helps these kids in ways that typical instruction sometimes does not.

Matt Renwick

And this is an equity issue. You mentioned that low socioeconomic status has an influence on executive functioning as well. I mean, I’m thinking about schools and their intervention banks — they’re almost 100% either language comprehension or word recognition interventions. We are really potentially missing a lot of kids if we’re not thinking about executive functioning.

Kelly Cartwright

And you said “either-or,” and that points to some new work that’s coming out. I’ll point to one particular study — Austin and colleagues out of University of Texas at Austin. They did an intervention study with 4th and 5th graders with dyslexia. One condition had 45-minute intensive phonics lessons — a series of lessons with multisyllabic words — and students learned to decode those words to fluency. The other group, randomly assigned, had 25 minutes of explicit phonics instruction for the same series of lessons, but also 20 minutes of meaning-focused instruction — so they learned what the words meant and were working with the meanings as well as the decoding. And as you might expect, the students with the multi-component intervention — dealing with both the sounds and the meanings of the words — actually outperformed their peers who received phonics alone. It’s important to give kids the opportunities to deal with both at the same time.

Matt Renwick

What steps could an interventionist, or a classroom teacher, take to start redesigning core instruction and interventions with executive functions in mind? What might be a first good step or two?

Kelly Cartwright

One way that we approach instruction is to put an anchor chart on the board or have an organizational tool for the child on the desk. There are certain graphic organizers that can help take cognitive load for students, and using them in that way — helping kids put the thinking on the table — really supports kids with working memory difficulties.

You can also assess cognitive flexibility. I have an assessment — a Graphophonological Semantic Flexibility Assessment — that measures flexibility in thinking about letter sounds and meanings. It shows how well someone can shift back and forth between the word recognition piece and the meaning-focused piece. Kids and adults who are more flexible in considering both sounds and meanings of words are better comprehenders. Word-calling types of kids, kids with dyslexia, are not good at managing both. It’s freely accessible, so that’s another thing to think about.

Fluency is another area. The way we operationalize and measure fluency — we’re looking at rate. Rate just means they can decode automatically. Rate doesn’t tell us whether they’re also managing meaning at the same time. But prosody, or expressiveness, is harder to measure. We don’t always measure it, but that’s an indicator that they’re weaving meaning together with their decoding. The old school thinking is: you get more automatic with word recognition, and it makes mental space for comprehension. But that doesn’t mean you fill that space with comprehension if you don’t know how.

Matt Renwick

So oral reading fluency by itself may not be enough. It’s a screener, but we want to investigate further — especially for our right-to-read states where reading fluency is the primary measure.

Kelly Cartwright

There are options for examining prosody and expressiveness, but we don’t always do that because it’s just harder to assess. When I’m talking to students, I’ll talk about it as expressiveness, or using your “movie star voices” and putting the feeling in — but you have to know what the text means to put the feeling in the right way.

Matt Renwick

Let’s talk about a harder part of this conversation. You’ve expressed your position on the popular science of reading discourse. You note in the Active View of Reading article that popular SoR discourse, as currently practiced, may actually be masking complexity in ways that can hurt kids — particularly kids whose reading difficulties don’t fit the decoding-or-comprehension frame. The walls come up, egos get hurt, resistance arises. How do you communicate these critiques effectively, so that people are actually hearing them and are willing to be responsive?

Kelly Cartwright

It’s difficult, because educators have put so, so much time and effort into retooling and learning and understanding. But the science — just like any science — is ever-evolving, and we continue to learn more so we can meet the needs of all learners. If we all share that goal, then we just have to keep working toward figuring out why all learners aren’t growing the way we expect them to.

If we’re teaching word recognition over here and language comprehension over there in different parts of the school day, and not giving students the opportunity to put them together — to bridge them, as we know skilled readers need to do — then that doesn’t help them do what they need to do as skilled readers. We’re not equipping them in the same way. Like the Austin intervention study with 4th and 5th grade students with dyslexia: the ones who had the opportunity to deal with explicit, systematic phonics instruction and meaning did better on all of the outcome measures than the students who got the explicit systematic phonics instruction alone. If we look at word recognition and language comprehension, we’d say, “Oh, those kids need word recognition!” But the word recognition alone didn’t lift them up as much as helping them learn to do that alongside other things. We have to look at the data on the kids and what they need, and try to avoid compartmentalized thinking. We need more work on multi-component interventions.

Matt Renwick

Sharing the research and being a learner yourself. I’ve found similar results where I’ve shared a study, and the response is usually not defensive — it’s more like, “Okay, I’ll think about it,” and then they circle back around and I do see change in their practice. They may not admit that what they did in the past was not as effective, but I would agree: just share the research and be a learner. So, fun question to close things out. What are you reading right now?

Kelly Cartwright

I always have a fiction book on my bedside table — that’s my break at the end of the day. I may only read two sentences and fall asleep, as we do sometimes. A literacy professor friend recommended a book titled This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page. It’s great — I highly recommend it. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s a great book.

Matt Renwick

I’m writing that down. I am reading Project Hail Mary. It just came out as a movie — science fiction. It’s one of those “we gotta save the planet” kind of books. I always try to read the book before I see the movie, because once I see the movie, I picture that person as the character.

Kelly Cartwright

You want to develop your own visual imagery — yes.

Matt Renwick

Yes. Debra, what are you reading?

Debra Crouch

I am reading a book called How We Grow Up by Matt Richtel. It’s all about adolescence and all the science and research coming out now about the brain. He’s got some really interesting things to say, and he’s just a fabulous writer — it doesn’t matter what his topic is, I will always read him.

Matt Renwick

I’ll put them in the notes. Well, thank you, Kelly, for being here. This was really informative. You read what someone writes and studies, but to hear them explain it is super helpful. I’m imagining your students really appreciate your instruction. Thank you for being here.

Kelly Cartwright

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.