Perceptual/social aspects of learning to read: A transactional process

Abstract

For centuries philosophers and educators have tried to understand the nature and order of human learning. The current status of understanding of the educational process suggests that we need more effective inquiry procedures. We shall report here a series of studies based on a transactional perspective. Inquiry contributed by Maxwell, Dewey, Heisenberg, and Dewey and Bentley introduced transactional inquiry.1 The notion that people and things have constantly changing properties, that understanding of a child can be gained only through understanding within a context, and that people in a setting are interdependent and have mutual impact on each other, were espoused by Maxwell, Dewey and Bentley. Within the transactional perspective, we must set observations free of preconceived ideas about people and things, and recognize that one cannot study or observe a phenomenon without influencing the phenomenon and oneself in the process. While the uncertainty of human transactions does not allow one to promise that an approach will be effective, there might be ways to maximize the probability of effectiveness. Out of the transactional perspective, we can abstract several conditions under which educational research might be most useful: (1) ideas should evolve out of the setting, (2) prospective recipients should participate at all levels of planning, (3) research should be conducted within the natural setting, (4) a major purpose of the research should be description of what occurs under given conditions, and (5) research should be action-oriented.2 I will discuss a school-based project in order to describe a transactional approach to behavioral science research. The project is currently in its third year, with the first year a pilot study that was funded in part by the Tennessee State Department of Education. The subsequent two years and one year to come are being supported by a Title III grant. In a semi-rural Tennessee county, a vocal group of parents began to call attention to early