Can the science of reading contribute to improving educational practices, allowing more children to become skilled readers? Much has been learned about the behavioral and brain bases of reading, how children learn to read, and factors that contribute to low literacy. The potential to use research findings to improve literacy outcomes is substantial but remains largely unrealized. The lack of improvement in literacy levels, especially among children who face other challenges such as poverty, has led to new pressure to incorporate the “science of reading” in curricula, instructional practices, and teacher education. In the interest of promoting these efforts, we discuss three issues that could undermine them: the need for additional translational research linking reading science to classroom activities; the oversimplified way the science is sometimes represented in the educational context; the fact that theories of reading have become more complex and less intuitive as the field has progressed. Addressing these concerns may allow reading science to be used more effectively and achieve greater acceptance among educators.

We investigated how gender is represented in children's books using a 200,000 word corpus comprising 249 popular, contemporary books for young children (0-5 years). Using human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified the gender biases of words within the corpus and within individual books. We find that children's books contain large numbers of words that adults judge as more masculine or feminine. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicate that books instantiate gender stereotypes found in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading and boys at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and find that children tend to be exposed to gender stereotypes for their own gender. Together the data suggest that children's books may be an early source of gender stereotypes.