Teach Effectively!

What appears to be a home-grown approach to teaching early decoding has remarkable effects, according to Michael Crist of Daily Local News (Philadelphia, PA, US). There’s a feature to the method—sounding out words “from the inside out”—that I’m struggling to understand. Here’s Mr. Crist’s introduction:

While they might not be ready for the national spelling bee, the kindergarten class at Ss. Philip and James School may be on their way.

The students showed off their skills reading words like embellish, terminate, skeptical and indulgent.

They also read full sentences ranging from a first- to third-grade level.

The success of the students is credited to a system developed by Karen Truncellito, a former teacher who has tutored children over the past 25 years, called “Easy Steps to Reading.”

“It uses a multisensory approach and teaches children to sound out words from the inside out, instead of right to left,” Truncellito said.

In cases such as this it is important to remember the words of Og Lindsley to which I referred in an earlier entry in LD Blog here: “Show me your data!” Mr. Crist reported that Ms. Truncellito has assessed performance with DIBELS. That’s a plus, but we need to know more.

It would be important to understand the basis for claims that Easy Steps to Reading works. How was it tested? What are the characteristics of the students with whom it was tested and how were they selected for study and assigned to group? How many teachers participated in the studies and what are their characteristics? Against what alternative methods has it been compared? How was student performance assessed and how were the assessments conducted? Were the results replicated with other students, other teachers, other measures? If that sounds like a research project, it should.

Link to Mr. Crist’s story.