The US Institute for Education Sciences released an important report about the effects of Reading First program at the end of April. In the report, “Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report,” Beth C. Gamse and colleagues describe the methods and findings of a study mandated by law to examine the effects of the RF program on instruction in classrooms and outcomes for children attending those schools where it it is implemented.
For those of us who think RF methods represent an improvement over garden-variety reading instruction, the results are disappointing. Although teachers were found to be devoting more time to phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, students were not experiencing significant improvements in their reading outcomes.
One of the folks at the Access Center wrote to me a while ago to promote its Web presence. There are some free resources available, and some readers might find them instructive.
The Access Center: Improving Outcomes for All Students k-8 (www.k8accesscenter.org), [is] a federally funded national technical assistance center. I am taking this time to introduce you to our free resources. Our resources focus on core content areas - language arts, math, and science - as well as on instructional and learning strategies to provide students with disabilities access to rigorous academic content. We have a series of professional development modules and information briefs that are available on our Web site as well as on a CD-ROM, if requested.
The Division for Research of the Council for Exceptional Children (DR-CEC) awarded Michael Coyne, of the University of Connecticut, its 2008 award for distinguished achievement in research about special education. This prestigious award recognizes Professor Coyne’s substantial contribution to understanding individuals with disabilities and the provision of services to those individuals. According DR-CEC, Continue reading ‘Coyne receives early career award’
Former “reading czar” G. Reid Lyon has responded to questions posed by Michael F. Shaughnessy about the U.S. Reading First program. As those who have been paying attention know, the federal foray into guiding schools to use scientifically based reading instruction ran into rocky allegations of malfeasance, allegations that at least one reporter has questioned strongly. Mr. Lyon describes his disagreement with some of those allegations, and you can read why he does. Continue reading ‘Lyon on Reading First’
This past week, while I was attending a meeting about the US Federal initiative to improve early literacy instruction, Sol Stern published an analysis of that same program. In his extended article entitled “Too Good to Last: The True Story of Reading First,” Mr. Stern presents his account of how Reading First came into being with a foundation on rigorous scientific evidence, was watered down, became the focus of a frenzy based on “sloppy media coverage,” was abandoned by its initial patron, and finally was eviscerated for political reasons. He calls it a “cautionary tale,” but his treatment makes it read more like a tragedy.
Link to Mr. Stern’s article. Mr. Stern, who usually writes for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, presents a view that is consonant with the position advocated by Garrison Keillor to which I referred in an earlier post on Teach Effectively; here’s a link to the earlier post on Reading First by Mr. Keillor.
Obligatory disclosure: I am a member of the Reading First advisory committee, but my statements are my own. I am not speaking on behalf of the committee nor of my colleagues on the committee.
I dropped an entry into LD Blog about reading fluency that one or two (of the two or three) readers here might find worthwhile. It’s essentially an incomplete catalog of resources about fluency, along with some editorial comments.
The National Center for Education Evaluation released a report yesterday (28 January 2008) describing preliminary findings from an evaluation of the effects of two supplemental literacy programs focused on improving reading comprehension and school performance of ninth-grade students who have achievement problems. The report, “Enhanced Reading Opportunities: Early Impact and Implementation Findings,” describes the effects of Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy and Xtreme Reading on a group of students who begin high school reading two to five years below grade level. Continue reading ‘Enhanced Reading Opportunities I’
Everyone’s talking about it, but not everyone’s convinced that response to intervention will prove as helpful as we hope. In “‘Response to Intervention’ Sparks Interest, Questions: Critics say approach depends on too many complex factors,” Christina A. Samuels of Ed Week presents some of these concerns. In a news piece that is unusual in its balance (Ed Week does better with balance in education issues than its popular siblings, in my view), Ms. Samuels starts with the usual anecdote—the Tigard-Tualatin (OR, US) local education agency has a program that has attracted many visitors—and quickly goes to the controversy.
As educators in Tigard-Tualatin and elsewhere are learning, a lot of people want to see what they are doing. Response to intervention—an educational framework that promises to raise achievement through modification of lesson plans based on frequent “progress monitoring”—is one of the most-discussed education topics today.
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