Pearson and Cervetti: Explanation of and Implications for the Four Resources Model

In their chapter "Fifty Years of Reading Comprehension and Research" in Research-Based Practices for Teaching Common Core Literacy (2015), Gina Cervetti and David Pearson provide a detailed history of research into the topic of reading comprehension and include important insights into the Four Resources Model. The full text of the chapter is available online. The chapter comes from the following book:

Also, here is a link to a seminal lecture presented by David Pearson at Harvard University in October 2015, which includes a discussion of the Four Resources Model.

What I have done below is excerpted key elements of the Four Resources Model from "Fifty Years of Reading Comprehension and Research." All the words in bold and green are those of Pearson and Cervetti.

In their model, Freebody and Luke (1990) assert that readers assume four very different roles or stances as they read—the code breaker, meaning-maker, text user, and text critic—and that each role emphasizes a particular resource—the reader, the text, the task environment, or the sociocultural context (hence, the label: Four Resources). Luke and Freebody (1999) analyze each of these resources (or roles, as they sometimes label them) as “descriptions of the normative goals of classroom literacy programs.” In enacting these four roles, readers:

• Break the code of written texts by recognizing and using fundamental features and architecture, including alphabet, sounds in words, spelling, and structural conventions and patterns

• Participate in understanding and composing meaningful written, visual, and spoken texts, taking into account each text’s interior meaning systems in relation to the reader’s available knowledge and experience of other cultural discourses, texts, and meaning systems

• Use texts functionally by traversing and negotiating the labor and social relations around them—that is, by knowing about and acting on the different cultural and social functions that various texts perform inside and outside school and understanding that these functions shape the texts’ structure, tone, degree of formality, and sequence of components

• Critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically neutral—that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people’s ideas—and that text designs and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways.

Pearson, P. D. & Cervetti, G. (2015). Fifty years of reading comprehension and research. In Research-based practices for teaching common core literacy.

Pearson and Cervetti describe how readers might use the different resources at moments in the reading process.

We think the power of the Four Resources Model is in its implication that it is not only unnecessary, but also unwise, to make a choice among the resources that are available to readers as they try to make sense of text. Our view is that when readers approach a text, they bring all four stances, all four resources, to the task. And within a given text, there will be stretches where one reads as if code-breaking matters most, especially when the text is dense, the words unfamiliar, and the graphemic patterns obscure. In other stretches, readers will put most if not all of their cognitive energies into making connections with whatever knowledge bases they carry in their long-term memory. In those instances, understanding what’s new in terms of what they already know—and then asking themselves what they learned to enhance their current knowledge base—will be what really matters. There will also be other stretches when readers emphasize the uses and functions of text to try to see how authors do their magic of persuading readers to take their messages seriously. In such cases, the reader emphasizes both function (What is the author trying to say?) and form (What tools of the craft is the author using to achieve her ends?). Finally, in other stretches, readers will focus almost entirely on critique, evaluation, and subtext, and will ask: What is the author’s ulterior motive? What assumptions does she make? And how can the reader talk back to those assumptions? Each of the four resources is necessary, but not sufficient, to contend with the reading demands of schooling and citizenship.

Pearson, P. D. & Cervetti, G. (2015). Fifty years of reading comprehension and research. In Research-based practices for teaching common core literacy.

Pearson and Cervetti suggest consequences for learners if educators do not support the development of a variety of stances for all readers.

All of these resources, along with the stances they bring with them, are part of what it means to be a complete reader. Until and unless educators realize this, they are likely to be doomed to a lifelong cycle of repeating each of these models in serial fashion. Each of the resources deserves pedagogical emphasis in classrooms, but ultimately they all need to be brought together for learners into a coordinated meaning-making process. What the literacy education profession should begin to do is to build pedagogy and curriculum that emphasizes flexible, nimble approaches to reading that encourage students to view texts from different stances, depending on their purposes and on how they read the opportunities and obstacles all around them.

Pearson, P. D. & Cervetti, G. (2015). Fifty years of reading comprehension and research. In Research-based practices for teaching common core literacy.

Pearson and Cervetti conclude with implications for the classroom.

Clearly, we are committed to the multiperspective view that comes with accepting the Four Resources Model. But the question for educators at the district, school, and classroom level is whether acceptance of a model like this will affect and, we hope, improve the ways in which they facilitate and teach comprehension. We think it will; in fact, we would not have written this chapter if we didn’t think so. The question is, how?

First and foremost, reading comprehension instruction, when implemented with the Four Resources Model as the driving force, demands that students use all of the available resources to make sense of text and learn to take more than one stance toward text, if not in a single lesson then definitely across lessons. There is no one right way to understand either a single text or text in general; all of the stances in the Four Resources Model have a place in making meaning during reading and, therefore, in the curriculum designed to help students make sense of texts. Which stance a teacher emphasizes on a particular day or in a given moment will depend on the teacher’s purpose for the students in the precise situation.

The Four Resources Model suggests that there is more than one stance from which to make sense of a text. If this is true, then it follows that for any given question, task, or practice, there is always more than one right answer, or at least more than one plausible answer. Interestingly, this implication that questions always have more than one right answer can be derived as easily from a perspective that suggests that text-based, reader-based, and context-based conceptualizations of comprehension all have something to offer the classroom teacher in terms of helping students negotiate the meaning of texts they encounter. Thus, classroom discussions of text must be open to multiple interpretations of a text—and even multiple interpretations of a question asked about a character’s motives or the real purpose behind an author’s point of view.

One final point: If we as a profession accept the Four Resources Model—and along with it, a commitment to examine reading from the perspectives of the text, reader, and context—then we must find a way to engage all readers, not just our most able readers, in traversing all four of the resources every day and every week. We must avoid the trap of assuming that there is a hierarchy or an order of acquisition to the resources—that students must first master the code breaker stance before they get opportunities to engage text as a meaning-maker, a text user, or a text critic. It would be easy, and even appealing, to assume that each resource was logically a prerequisite to its successor. If we fell into that trap, we would end up implementing a kind of basic skills conspiracy of good intentions. The conspiracy goes like this: First, you have to get the words right and the facts straight before you can do the what if ’s, I wonder what’s, and the says who’s of text understanding.

The problem with the basic skills conspiracy is that students on the low end of the performance continuum will end up spending most of their school careers getting the words right and the facts straight—and they’ll never get to the what if ’s, I wonder what’s, and the says who’s. Putting an end to this inequitable conspiracy would be an important step toward bringing opportunities for richer engagement with text to all students. This is our challenge.

Pearson, P. D. & Cervetti, G. (2015). Fifty years of reading comprehension and research. In Research-based practices for teaching common core literacy.

As Pearson and Cervetti propose, all students, regardless of their level of reading, are entitled to and benefit from taking all four stances of the Four Resources Model while reading texts at some point in each day. How we as educators ensure that students who arrive at high school not yet reading at a sixth grade level continue to advance in their reading development and simultaneously have these opportunities is "our challenge," as Cervetti and Pearson conclude.

How to Access P. David Pearson's Work:

The following link is an open source document with access to many of P. David Pearson's presentations.

The following is a link to David Pearson's description about rich talk about text.