Teach Effectively!

So, what’s your view? What is the best book for understanding how to teach reading to children? (O.K., if you’re into adult literacy, list your favorite, too.) Earlier I opted for the book by D. Carnine and colleagues. I’d say it’s got to have an empirical basis. I’m sure that some of my academic peers would disagree, but what do you think? Post a comment here, then jump over to Liz Ditz’s discussion of the canon; she’s soliciting a reading list.

Such a promising concept, no? Well, it’s sort of a mixed bag. There are descriptions of some education interventions that have been analyzed extensively with some that have had one or a few studies. There are some well-documented methods that are not included.

Anyway, here’s the list for education. Watch for the switch to the categories “Small/no effect,” “Ineffective,” “No effects/adverse effects” late in the list (I’ve highlighted them).

Good Behavior Game (A 1st-2nd grade classroom management strategy for decreasing disruptive/aggressive behavior): Randomized controlled trials show major reductions in students’ subsequent substance abuse, and behavioral and mental health disorders.

SMART – Start Making a Reader Today (Volunteer reading tutoring program for at-risk readers in early elementary school): Randomized controlled trial shows this low-cost intervention has sizable positive impact on students’ reading ability.

Tutoring with the Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing reading curriculum (An intervention for at-risk readers in grades K-2): Randomized controlled trial shows sizable positive impacts on reading ability for students with poor phonological processing (e.g., letter naming, and awareness of the sounds within words).

Career Academies (Small learning communities within low-income high schools that combine traditional academic courses with technical/occupational courses): Randomized controlled trial shows sizable positive impact on earnings of many participants four years after high school graduation.

Teach for America (Program to recruit and train teachers to be placed in low-income schools): Randomized controlled trial shows moderate positive impact on elementary school student math scores.

Small/no effect: New York City Voucher Experiment (Program offering vouchers to low income K-4 students in public schools, to enable them to transfer to private schools): Randomized controlled trial shows no overall impact on students’ math/reading achievement, but possibly a small positive impact on the subgroup of African-Americans.

Ineffective: Fast ForWord (Popular computerized reading intervention for at-risk readers in grades K-12): Randomized controlled trials show no significant effect on students’ reading achievement.

No effects/adverse effects: 21st Century Community Learning Centers (Federal program that funds after-school academic/recreational programs for K-8 students in mostly high-poverty schools): Randomized controlled trial of elementary (as opposed to middle) school Centers shows no improvement in academic achievement and adverse effects on student behavior. The Centers’ after-school programs vary in content, however, so this overall finding does not necessarily apply to each Center.

Link for the site.

I am way weary of the disrespect by educators for practice. I was reminded recently of my weariness when reading an article in the NY Times by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt with the title “A Star Is Made: The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly.” (Alert readers may recognize Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt as the authors of the currently popular book, “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.”) In this article, Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt use an odd fact—high-achvieving soccer players are more likely to have been born in the early months of a calendar year—to illustrate the benefits of practice.

To make their point, Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt depend on research by Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, who found that people can learn to encode unusually long strings of digits (similar to the familiar digit span task used in some tests).

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person “encodes” the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt do not contend that practice is a complete explanation for superior competence; they also discuss the importance of doing things that one finds rewarding. This is, of course, a corrolary; if one finds something rewarding, she’s more like to do it over and over again!

It’s really nice to have this reminder of the importance of practice. Next time someone bemons having students practice something, using phrases such as “drill and kill” or talks about experts’ natural grasp of great competence, I may simply refer her or him to this article.

Link to the article by Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt and link the Freakonomics Web site. Also a link to an article by Professor Ericsson and Walter Kintsch on long-term memory (html) and another paper on expert performance (downloadable PDF) by Professor Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. (Google Scholar search for Professor Ericsson.)

I was working on another task today when I reviewed this quote:

Since I started to work with Johnny, I have looked into this whole reading buisness. I worked my way through a mountain of books and articles on the subject, I talked to dozens of people, and I spent many hours in classrooms, watching what was going on.

What I found is abolutely fantatstic. The teaching of reading—all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks—is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense. Johnny couldn’t read until half a year ago for the simple reason that nobody ever showed him how. Johnny’s only problem was that he was unfortunately exposed to an ordiinary American school.

I think I first read this quote 30-some years ago. It’s hyperbolic now, to be sure, and I remember thinking that it was probably hyperbolic then. But I wonder how exaggerated it was when it was published in 1955.

By the way, the quote is from pages 1 and 2 of Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can do about It, written by Rudolf Flesch and published ini 1955 in New York by Harper & Brothers.

While I was reviewing Liz Ditz’s post on the National Council on Teacher Quality report on the mis-preparation of preservice teachers of reading, I remembered that I hadn’t seen my favorite textbook for reading instruction on the list of texts that were reviewed in that study.
For people who want to learn how to teach reading effectively, the book called “Direct Instruction Reading by Doug Carnine, Jerry Silbert, Ed Kame’enui, and Sara Tarver is the one to get.

Likely voters in the US believe that the US Congress is failing to fund education programs and believe that Congress should honor its commitment to schoolchildren, according to poll results released by the National School Boards Association. A wide majority, even including Repblicans, support full funding of the US No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Heartening as one might find this news, encouragement must be tempered by the fact that those polled apparently are poorly informed about the extent of federal spending on education. The electorate appears to believe that far more funding is going to education than is actually going to it.

There is a significant disconnect between the current federal investment in education funding and what voters think is spent and want spent. On average, voters believe that 20 percent of the federal budget is currently spent on K-12 education, but they want 37 percent of the budget spent on it. Both are a far cry from the 1.5 percent actually spent on K-12 education. Even Republican voters want 33 percent of the federal budget spent on education.

Shoot, if education actually received what funding the public thinks is going to education, that would be good. However, if we could get what goes there—regardless of the amount—spent on effective educational practices, and procedures, that would be even better, no?

Link to the press release for the NSBA poll or to the full report.

In a distressing report of a study of the syllabi for classes on the teaching of reading, Kate Walsh, Deborah Glaser, and Danielle Dunne Wilcox of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report that people who are likely to be teaching reading in the future are not being taught about the scientific bases for reading instruction.

Walsh et al. studied reading instruction classes of 72 schools of education, with those schools representing five different levels of selectivity in admissions and being about 5% of all schools of education; the sample appears slightly tilted in favor of public institutions and institutions accredited by the most common professional organization in teacher education. They obtained syllabi and textbooks used in 222 classes from those 72 schools and rated the syllabi and texts on the extent to which they reflected the five areas of reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension).

Based on their analysis of syllabi, Walsh et al. reported that (a) few schools of education are teaching prospective teachers about the scientific basis of reading; (b) most individual courses only cover one or a few of the five areas of reading; (c) coverage of the important features of reading is not related to national accreditation; (d) only 16% of classes taught about phonics and fewer than 5% taught about both phonemic awareness and fluency; (e) students are given misinformation such as the superiority of child-centered, discovery learning of reading; (f) most students are taught that alternative methods of teaching reading are of equal value, none better than another; and (g) class activities emphasize entertainment more than rigor. A table shows which schools’ classes met their standards.

Based on their analysis of text books used, Walsh et al. reported that (a) the books provided too little information about the scientific basis of reading and too much misleading and inaccurate information and (b) there is no agreement about the best texts. They list the books by author, title, and date, should a reader want to check them.

Critics of the scientific view of reading will find this report distressing, but for different reasons than I find it distressing. They will say that the criteria for evaluating courses and texts were flawed, that there are unique examples of very good programs that were not included in the sample, and (of course) that the study is the work of a politically motivated group.

In some ways, I shouldn’t find it distressing. It basically confirms my bias that what passes as teacher preparation is mostly pablum. There’s little rigor and even less science in it. In fact, I find it more discouraging than distressing…woe are we. We may never learn to teach effectively.

Download links for (a) the summary, (b) the full report by Walsh et al. or, (c) directly to the NCTQ. Link for more about the NCTQ.

In that same story in the Washington Post by Lori Montgomery about which I wrote in a previous entry, there was an alarming account of mal-eduction. If it’s true, the story deserves much greater play. Here’s the segment of the story that alarmed me:

This spring, Deanwood community activist John Frye pulled his 12-year-old stepdaughter out of Kelly Miller Middle School, which opened in 2004 in Northeast Washington. Frye noticed that the seventh-grader wasn’t doing homework. She said her class didn’t have books.
Frye complained to Principal Robert W. Gill Sr., then went to Kelly Miller to check things out. What he saw appalled him, he said. The teachers were at a training session, leaving children to run wild in the halls.
“It brought tears to my eyes,” Frye said, “to see a whole generation of young black people out of control like that. No supervision. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
Gill called the incident unfortunate. “It’s like when you invite somebody over to your house, and the lights go out,” he said, adding that school system administrators quickly agreed to modify the teacher training schedule.

Could there be something missing in this account? Apparently there was no emergency that caused the principal to summon everyone at once, else why would administrators modify the schedule. Since when is it good administrative practice to pull teachers from classrooms for what sounds like in-service without assigning other supervising adults? Was this common practice in DC schools?

Link to Ms. Montgomery’s article.