Teach Effectively!

In an article entitled “The Relation Between the Type and Amount of Instruction and Growth in Children’s Reading Competencies” that is slated to appear in American Educational Research Journal, Susan Sonnenschein and colleagues reported that kindergartners who enter school with relatively higher competence in literacy benefit more from instruction that emphasizes extracting meaning from what they read but their counterparts who enter kindergarten with lower literacy competence benefit more from instruction that emphasizes decoding. As children progress through the elementary grades, however, the effects of different instructional emphases lessen.

Although this difference obtained even after the research team took into account other factors (child ethnicity, parents’ education levels), these other factors affect have clear effects on children’s literacy development. African-American children, even those who were reading above average at the end of kindergarten, lost ground compared to their White, non-Hispanic peers in the third and fifth grades. Also, although there were not direct effects for the educational backgrounds of the teachers (number of reading courses teachers reported having taken), third-grade teachers’ background in reading influenced the amount of time they spent on reading.

Sonnenschein and colleagues examined data for over 6000 children, making these findings relatively solid. They argue that their results indicate that teachers may not adapt instruction to fit learners’ level of literacy competence.

However, these results will probably come as little or no surprise to many people. First, we already had a plenty of evidence that (a) high-performers are likely to continue to outperform low-performers over time (“thems that’s gots gets”) and (b) ethnicity matters in reading outcomes. Because we hope that educators adapt instruction to learners’ levels of development, the conclusion that teachers may not be doing so should be moot; however, such a judgment is based on educators’ hopes, and those can easily be dashed.

A latent growth model was used to investigate the longer term efficacy of phonics and integrated language arts instruction as well as amount of such instruction on children’s reading development, using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data set (kindergarten through fifth grade). Type and amount of instruction were derived from teachers’ ratings. Children’s entry-level skills and ethnicity were predictors of children’s reading scores at the end of kindergarten. Ethnicity and parents’ education level predicted rate of growth. Type and amount of reading instruction predicted children’s reading scores. However, effects for type of instruction were time-sensitive, occurring only in kindergarten and first grade. Although children benefit from instruction in decoding and comprehension skills, instruction may not be optimally tailored to children most at risk.

Sonnenschein, S., Stapleton, L. M., & Benson, A. (2009). The relation between the type and amount of instruction and growth in children’s reading competencies. American Educational Research Journal. Advance online publication. doi: 10.3102/0002831209349215