Public Discourse on the Science of Reading (SoR)

Our goal in this research brief is to examine and document the state of the public discourse on Twitter around the SoR before and after Emily Hanford’s first reporting in 2018. Using data science and natural language processing techniques, we found that the intensity (i.e., the how much), nature (i.e., the what), and the sentiment (i.e., the feelings) of the discussion changed after the reporting. We discuss the implications of the results in relation to reading education as well as science communication around reading.