Teach Effectively!

Isabel Sawhill and Jon Baron published an editorial in Education Week calling for a new approach to the venerable Head Start program, one founded on evidence about effectiveness. They argue that in the wake of the discouraging Head Start Impact Study reported by US Department of Health & Human Services, it’s time to bring research into the nation’s play pre-schools.

A new approach is needed. One that has been suggested—defunding these programs—would amount to giving up the fight against major social problems such as educational failure and poverty that damage millions of American lives. A far better alternative is to use rigorous evidence about “what works” to evolve Head Start and other federal efforts into truly effective programs over time, and to use sophisticated models to trace their longer-term effects on children’s life prospects.

Continue reading ‘Evidence-based education in Head Start?’

Robert Slavin and colleagues reported that reading programs that provide extensive professional development on instructional strategies which promote student participation, strengthen phonics competence, and explicitly teach comprehension strategies are the best bets for improving reading achievement. The clearest examples of the programs that led to the highest achievement were Direct Instruction and Success for All.

Writing in the December 2009 issue of the Review of Educational Research, Professor Slavin and colleagues reported the results of their examination of 142 studies. They wanted to determine whether curricula, technology, instructional processes, or combinations of curricula and processes produce greater reading achievement. The curriculum group included core reading programs, such as Reading Street and Open Court Reading. The technology group included programs that employ computers or similar methods such as computer-assisted instruction, multimedia (e.g., Reading Reels, or Writing to Read). The instructional process group included approaches that provide teachers effective strategies for teaching reading, such as Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) and Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC). The combined curriculum-and-instructional-process group included programs that function as core curricula and also provide detailed professional development about using instructional strategies, such as Direct Instruction and Success for All. The researchers separated the studies into two groups: those with outcomes at the (a) beginning reading level vs. upper elementary level.
Continue reading ‘Go for DI and SFA’

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

According to a report from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), a study examining the benefits of providing pre-kindergarten programs in New Mexico (US) revealed that there were significant and important benefits for children. Jason Hustedt and colleagues found that there were significant improvements in children’s language, literacy, and math competence associated with attending pre-k programs.

[Their] results show that New Mexico PreK produces consistent benefits for children who
participated in PreK, compared to those who did not, across all three years of the study. Positive impacts of PreK were found in each of three content areas important to early academic success – language, literacy, and math. Findings in literacy and mathematics were statistically significant in analyses for each school year of New Mexico PreK. Findings specific to our measure of early language were statistically significant for the first two years of the study, and using a combined, multi‐year data set.

I had to wonder what curriculum the New Mexico pre-k programs followed. It appears that about half of the sites do not report the curriculum they use. However, one uses Bank Street, nine use High Scope, and the remaining 60-some use Creative Curriculum. Imagine what kind of effects these pre-k programs could achieve if they used more effective curricula!

Hustedt, J. T., Barnett, W. S., Jung, K., & Goetze, L. D. (2009). The New Mexico preK evaluation: Results from the initial four years of a new state preschool initiative. New Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research.

The report is available for free. See the Website for the New Mexico PreK program.

Zig Engelmann, progenitor of Direct Instruction (DI), has posted a video of a talk he gave earlier this month. The presentation is an explication of the underlying principles of DI, “Theory of Direct Instruction.”

In the presentation (video below the jump), Mr. Engelmann shows some of his chops from his undergraduate degree in philosophy. He starts with philosophers’ fundamental arguments and shows how those correspond (or don’t) with learning and teaching concepts. For example, as he works through John Stuart Mills’ five methods of induction from A System of Logic, he makes clear how each would apply to teaching. I suspect that this particular sequence will show many people why DI instruction (the examples used in the scripts, not the teaching behavior) is structured the way it is.
Continue reading ‘Engelmann explains’

In a paper to appear in Education and Urban Society, Joy Valenti and Diana Tracey report that preschool experience contributes to subsequent reading achievement. Here’s the abstract.

This study examined the relationships between students’ attendance at fullday, half-day, or no preschool and first grade reading achievement. 214 urban, low SES public first grade students of mixed ethnicities were studied. Using the students’ Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA2) scores (Beaver, 2006), results indicated that by the middle of first grade students who completed one year of full-day preschool significantly outperformed students who did not attend preschool. Students who completed one year of full-day preschool also outperformed students who completed half-day preschool, although not to a significant degree. Additionally, students who completed half-day preschool outperformed students who did not attend preschool, although not to a significant degree. The results further showed that significant differences between the groups were not apparent at the start of first grade, demonstrating that preschool attendance may not show immediate, positive benefits.

Valenti, J. E., & Tracey, D. H. (2009). Full-day, half-day, and no preschool effects on urban children’s first-grade reading achievement. Education and Urban Society (online first: doi:10.1177/0013124509336060).

Link to the journal home. I doubt that this link will be of much use except to those working from computers at institutions that subscribe to the journal.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to the National Education Association today, calling on its members to work with him toward the goal of ensuring that “every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes.”

That’s a noble goal. In my view, it requires that educators shed their allegiance to theory and adopt effective teaching practices. That’s what it takes.

To be sure, there is a lot of emphasis on high-stakes testing. Mr. Duncan even discussed it as one of the four features of his plan for reforming education. The effective teacher idea is another of the four. High-stakes tests (which need reform of their own, in my view—that’s another post) are only part of the game. Another is using evidence to guide instruction.

But even in the absence of results on high-stakes tests and from pristine research projects, educators can ascertain whether they’re using effective methods. That is, we can devise our own means of ascertaining whether teaching practices are effective at a more micro level. In a lot of ways, the process is relatively simple:

1. Identify goals and objectives in objectively measurable terms. How will we know if the students have learned X?
2. Identify the skills and knowledge that students will need to demonstrate mastery of those goals and objectives. What is required to show that a student can competently and independently do X?
3. Devise teaching algorithms for leading students to acquire the skills and knowledge identified in (ii).
   • Model: Demonstrate the skills for the students or tell them the knowledge;
   • Test: Have the students perform the skill or state the knowledge;
   • Coach: Reinforce and correct their performance;
   • Practice to mastery: Have them perform the skill or repeat the knowledge until they are facile with it and can do it under different, increasingly more challenging conditions.
4. Assess students’ competence according to the goals and objectives specified in (i).

Sure, I’ve simplified it here. Sure, the goals and objectives would need to be integrated in a fashion consistent with an epistemology of various subject areas. And, you’ll have to cut me a little slack about my use of words such as “tell” and “correct”; telling would need to include providing materials to read, for example. But the idea is just about as simple as I’ve sketched it here.

The area of early reading has been mapped according to this perspective on teaching. We can say how we would recognize a competent reader (i), what the component skills are (ii), and how to teach those skills. But the to-be-learned material doesn’t have to be elementary level reading. If the area is chemistry and the objectives were conducting an experiment using electrophoresis, I think we could perform a similar analysis.

Of course, the real trick will be to get people on board with such thinking. Mr. Duncan seems to want to do something like that, but he’s talking about things at a much grander scale.

Remarks of Arne Duncan to the National Education Association—Partners in Reform

In Child Development Jo Ann Farver and colleagues reported that young children who speak Spanish can learn English early literacy skills better when they receive instruction in English. That finding’s not particularly surprising, but there’s more: There’s a comparison of English-only and “transitional” methods. Children who received instruction in English-only or Spanish with transition to English (both using the Literacy Express Preschool Curriculum) had higher pre-literacy outcomes than peers who had been randomly assigned to receive the High/Scope Curriculum.
Continue reading ‘English intervention improves Spanish-speakers’ early literacy outcomes’