cation. And she says that about 15 years ago, researchers like her started to look more closely at reading. They wanted to understand which behaviors exactly helped a child to learn and, in the process, they discovered something really surprising about the simple act of sitting down and reading through a story with a child.
MCGINTY: It mattered a lot less than we maybe thought it did.
SPIEGEL: It's not that reading wasn't helpful. It helped build vocabulary, for example, but it didn't necessarily improve a child's ability to read, per se. The question was why. So, researchers did more studies, specifically eye tracking studies.
Here's Shayne Piasta, a researcher from Ohio State University.
SHAYNE PIASTA: What they would do is they'd put a child on their parent's lap and then they would use some special equipment that allows them to pinpoint exactly where the children are looking at any given moment in time.
SPIEGEL: Turned out, when you simply read a book to kids, they tend to ignore the print on the page.
PIASTA: Over 90 percent of the time, the children are focusing on the pictures on the page or they're looking up at their parent or things of that nature.
SPIEGEL: So, here, went the theory, was the answer. Reading is an incremental process. First, you become familiar with letters, then with words, with the process of reading from left to right. And then, eventually, you learn to read. But if a child's attention isn't drawn to the printed word, then reading to a child won't necessarily make them more familiar with what it means to read, which raises this question. Anita McGinty.
MCGINTY: Can you change what they're looking at or thinking about during book reading?
SPIEGEL: And so, McGinty, along with Piasta and a researcher named Laura Justice designed a study, a study that made a very modest change in the way that teachers read to preschool kids, specifically very disadvantaged preschool kids who can end up having reading issues.
Essentially, they gave two groups of preschool teachers books for an entire year. They told one group to just read as they normally did and the other...
MCGINTY: We would give weekly cards that said, when you read the book we gave you, use this card.
SPIEGEL: On the card were instructions with questions that the teacher could ask. Really, just small phrases that might momentarily draw a child's attention to the print on the page. For example...
MCGINTY: Who can find the first word on this page?
GOLDSTEIN: Do you see these words?
MCGINTY: Who can find the last word on this page?
GOLDSTEIN: Who can find another letter B?
MCGINTY: Who can find the word, giraffe? The word, bus? The word, snake, pigeon, lion, bat, hippopotamus.
SPIEGEL: Now, altogether, these small phrases hardly added any extra time, maybe like 90 seconds a book. The teachers were asked to read the books four times a week and point at the print just a handful of times.
MCGINTY: Somewhere between four to eight times.
SPIEGEL: It is hard to imagine that such a small adjustment would make any difference. It was a series of moments, questions, gestures. How much could that do? Well, so far, these kids have been followed for two years. They are now in first grade and two years later...
PIASTA: These children who focused their attention on print - they had better literacy outcomes than children who did not.
SPIEGEL: How much better? Well, one way to think about this is in terms of the achievement gap. There is an achievement gap in this country between rich kids and poor kids. Poor kids do worse. But, according to McGinty, if the poor kids in this study are able to maintain their gains 'til fourth grade - and that is a pretty big if - but if they can...
MCGINTY: If the effects last to fourth grade, it would be essentially taking the gap and narrowing it by a third.
SPIEGEL: So, according to McGinty, the gains are real and, if they can be maintained, potentially significant. But how much should you trust that? Positive results from interventions like this often fade out over time. They are overwhelmed by the reality of bad schools and p