Teach Effectively!

Those readers from the UK are almost surely familiar with the “Rose Report,” but readers in other parts of the world may not know about it. Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties: An independent report from Sir Jim Rose to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families was published in June 2009 and is available for free.

Overall, this the Rose Report presents a clear, sensible, and valuable understanding of reading problems and dyslexia, including many valuable recommendations for instruction. It is not perfect, to be sure. For example, there is a strong endorsement of Reading Recovery, which I find unwarrented given its record and costs. Still, a well-informed reader will find much to like in this document.
Continue reading ‘Read the Rose Report on reading’

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’

Over on CDL there’s a brief explanation about why round-robin reading and silent reading are not effective methods for improving fluency in reading. It’s a summary by Jan Hasbrouck, a consultant who has done a fair bit of work in the area of special education, assessment (e.g., progress monitoring measures), reading, and related aspects of education. The PDF has been available for a while, but it’s worth snagging if you’ve not already found it.

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

The The Central Ohio Branch of the International Dyslexia Association will hold a conference 16 October 2009 under the theme, “Imagine, Every Child Reading,” according to Mary Damer, a member of the organization’s board. She told me about some of the highlights of the conference:

Keynote Speaker in the Morning is Louisa Moats “Science, Language, and Imagination in Teaching Students at Risk for Reading Failure”

The unique properties of English; the inability of many readers to intuit language structure; and the insufficiencies of many instructional programs and practices, all point to the critical role of informed, skilled, flexible teachers who base their instruction on content knowledge and reliable scientific research .
Continue reading ‘Ohio IDA: “Imagine, Every Child Reading!”’

Over on Ed News, Kerry Hempenstall has a paper examining the phonics-vs-whole-language question that vexed educators for many years in the late 1900s. With his typical appreciation of irony, Professor Hempenstall recounts in one place many of the disparate factors that affected that “great debate.” Here’s his abstract:

Over the past twenty years, there has been considerable controversy over the competing emphases to beginning reading known as Whole Language and phonics. To provide a context for the debate, this paper examines the history of disputes about reading instruction, particularly as it applies to at-risk students. It commences with a brief discussion of the advantages and challenges of our English alphabetic writing system, and of the literacy issues associated with it. Identification of the major attempts to deal with the complexity of our writing system is followed by a history of the search for the most efficacious means of evincing reading development. An examination of early research efforts, such as The Great Debate, The USOE Study, Follow Through, and Becoming a Nation of Readers helps illuminate the current debate by highlighting which issues are novel, and which are from the past but as yet unresolved. A thread throughout the paper involves the role of educational research in influencing practice in beginning reading instruction.

Hempenstall, K. R. (2009). The whole language-phonics controversy: A historical perspective. Education News. Retrieved 30 July 2009 from http://ednews.org/articles/the-whole-language-phonics-controversy-a-historical-perspective.html.

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.