Teach Effectively!

Reading Rockets, a Web site that I like a lot, is sponsoring a special day to promote reading. The DEAR Day, 12 April, is predicated on (sign) a widely-used-but-ineffective practice: encouragement of silent reading. DEAR stands for “drop everything and read.” It’s a means to encourage sustained silent reading.

The idea is nice, but it is based on faulty reasoning. The appeal of the idea stems from the correlation between the amount of time that children spend reading and the reading performance of those children. Children who spend more time reading actually read better. When combined with the whole-language belief that reading is natural and that children learn to read by reading, why, the resulting recommendation is obvious: We should dedicate time to doing nothing but reading. To make it individualized and interesting, we should allow children to pick their own books and then spend time reading them.

Of course, as just about anyone who’s had a basic statistics (or reasoning) course can recite, correlation does not permit one to infer cause. Unlike arithmetic where multiplying two negatives yeilds a positive, coupling this misunderstanding of correlation with this misunderstanding of learning to read does not yield an effective practice. In fact, the Reading Rockets folks even refer readers to the section of the report form the National Reading Panel stating that this is not an effective intervention.

To be sure, for students who are competent in the early stages of reading, basically those who can decode fluently and have most of vocabulary used in written materials, having them read for extended periods of time is probably valuable. But for those who haven’t acquired those fundamental reading skills, having them practice without guidance (e.g., correction and reinforcement) seems likely to entrench faulty decoding strategies, something we shouldn’t want to happen. (I say “seems” there not as a weaselword, but because I don’t think anyone has experimentally established that uncorrected practice induces faulty strategies; I doubt, in fact, that anyone wants to conduct that particular study and that few, if any, human subjects review teams would allow an investigator to mess up kids’ reading deliberately.)

So, DEAR is founded on weak reasoning and has no data to show that it helps kids’ reading, why would Reading Rockets champion it? What gives? I don’t get it. In my view, it’s a good time to DEFER (drop every faulty educational recommendation) to the evidence and say, “Ooops.”

Here’s the link.