What We Talk About When We Talk About the #scienceofreading

• In Event: AERA Research-in-Progress Roundtable Session 1
  In Invited Roundtable: Research Insights into Literacy, Literature, and Media: Information-Seeking, Linguistics, and Data Use (Table 11)

Abstract

This descriptive qualitative case study leverages distributional semantics and Maddox’s (2023) framework of knowledge influencers to determine frequent topics and co-occurrences associated with the #scienceofreading by content produced by TikTok content creators. The data corpus consisted of metadata from 4,483 TikTok captions using #scienceofreading posted by 12 individual content creators. The findings indicate phonics, structured literacy, learn(ing) to read, blending , spelling, and phonemic awareness were frequent with audience terms primarily dedicated to elementary teachers and homeschooling parents. A co-occurrence network analysis revealed four modularity classes indicating a high degree of interconnectedness of terms. This study underscores the need for educators to critically navigate social media platforms and contributes to a growing body of research on the science of reading.

Author

• Zachary Tyler Milford, University of Kentucky