National Reading Panel Report Research Articles

Reevaluating and Restructuring Comprehension Strategy Instruction

AbstractIn the face of arguments that knowledge is the key to reading comprehension, we examined the evidence for comprehension strategies instruction. Since the National Reading Panel Report, a number of researchers have reaffirmed the value of including comprehension strategy instruction in the elementary and middle school curriculum. The latest reviews and meta‐analyses indicate that teaching comprehension strategies improves children's and adolescents’ reading comprehension. We outline what strategies should be taught, when, how, and how much. Differentiation of instruction is vital because students who struggle to comprehend benefit more from comprehension strategy instruction than students who are already expert readers.

Trends in the Selection of Primary Grade (K-3) Reading Programs and Assessments in the United States

ABSTRACT It has been more than twenty years since the National Reading Panel Report (2000) provided recommendations for the teaching of reading based on a meta-analysis of suitable research. The report was commissioned at the end of the 1990s, just as the “whole language” reading movement that advocated for analytic phonics instruction and having students spend much of their time silently reading at their “independent” levels was common. The report recommended the explicit teaching of the “Big Five” components of reading instruction, phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, fluency and vocabulary, along with scaffolded reading instruction with challenging text. In the same year, another study concluded that elementary teachers had students reading silently 71% of the time and providing phonics instruction strategies associated with “whole language” such as contextual analysis. In this study, a survey was distributed to school superintendents across the country; 293 completed the survey resulting in a 72% response rate. Respondents indicated a clear and increasing preference for basal programs; a result that we believe reveals the impact of the NRP. Even so, about a quarter of the respondents indicated a preference for programs, and more than half were using assessments, more aligned with “whole language” approaches.

Phonological Awareness Materials in Utah Kindergartens: A Case Study in the Science of Reading

ABSTRACTSince well before the release of the National Reading Panel report in 2000, phonemic awareness has been an important topic for reading researchers. However, it is unclear the extent to which commercial materials for phonemic awareness instruction are consistent with that report and subsequent research. In the current study, we investigated the use of commercial kindergarten materials for such instruction in one state and suggest that the most widely used materials have areas of inconsistency with the science of reading. Notably, the commercial materials reviewed here did not take orthographic development into sufficient account. Additionally, the materials did not use letters and did not limit focus to one or two skills. Implications for classroom instruction, teacher education, commercial materials development, and future research are identified.

Are Child Cognitive Characteristics Strong Predictors of Responses to Intervention? A Meta-Analysis.

We conducted a meta-analysis of 28 studies comprising 39 samples to ask the question, "What is the magnitude of the association between various baseline child cognitive characteristics and response to reading intervention?" Studies were located via literature searches, contact with researchers in the field, and review of references from the National Reading Panel Report. Eligible participant populations included at-risk elementary school children enrolled in the third grade or below. Effects were analyzed using a shifting unit of analysis approach within three statistical models: cognitive characteristics predicting growth curve slope (Model 1, mean r = .31), gain (Model 2, mean r = .21), or postintervention reading controlling for preintervention reading (Model 3, mean r = .15). Effects were homogeneous within each model when effects were aggregated within study. The small size of the effects calls into question the practical significance and utility of using cognitive characteristics for prediction of response when baseline reading is available.

The Sixth Pillar of Reading Instruction

AbstractThe National Reading Panel (NRP) identified five pillars, or essential components, of reading instruction that lead to the highest chance of reading success—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. A decade after the NRP's report, the majority of US states adopted the Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts & Literacy (CCSS/ELA). One of the most significant changes of the CCSS/ELA is a focus on knowledge development as part of literacy development and focus on the acquisition of literacy skills specific to different disciplines. In highlighting these connections between ELA and knowledge as part of literacy, the CCSS/ELA provide an opportunity for teachers to emphasize what research has validated for decades: that knowledge is a critical component of the reading process. In this column, we describe why knowledge development should be viewed as the sixth pillar of reading instruction and how teachers can increase their students’ knowledge building through reading.

Heterogeneity or Homogeneity

The confluence of No Child Left Behind and the National Reading Panel report on the five essential components of reading instruction forged a path for struggling adolescent readers that supports a narrow curriculum designed to address gaps in constrained skills. Adolescents from a large school district in the state of Tennessee who failed state assessments in reading ( N = 94) were assessed using measures of phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, orthography, vocabulary, and comprehension. Factor and cluster analysis of the assessment data revealed a heterogeneous population of students. Based on three factors (meaning, rate, and word knowledge), four clusters emerged representing varying abilities.

Revisiting Pink Vanilla

Revisiting Pink Vanilla

A response to recent reanalyses of the National Reading Panel report: Effects of systematic phonics instruction are practically significant.

The authors examine the reassessments of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) by G. Camilli, S. Vargas, and M. Yurecko (2003); G. Camilli, P. M. Wolfe, and M. L. Smith (2006); and D. D. Hammill and H. L. Swanson (2006) that disagreed with the NRP on the magnitude of the effect of systematic phonics instruction. Using the coding of the NRP studies by Camilli et al. (2003, 2006), multilevel regression analyses show that their findings do not contradict the NRP findings of effect sizes in the small to moderate range favoring systematic phonics. Extending Camilli et al. (2003, 2006), the largest effects are associated with reading instruction enhanced with components that increase comprehensiveness and intensity. In contrast to Hammill and Swanson, binomial effect size displays show that effect sizes of the magnitude found for systematic phonics by the NRP are meaningful and could result in significant improvement for many students depending on the base rate of struggling readers and the size of the effect. Camilli et al. (2003, 2006) and Hammill and Swanson do not contradict the NRP report, concurring in supporting comprehensive approaches to reading instruction.

Research and the Reading Wars

HOW DO researchers resolve scientific controversies in the area of early reading instruction? Leafing through a 2005 Kappan special section on reading research, one might conclude pessimistically that even distinguished scholars are unable to agree on the scientific consensus about best practices in beginning reading instruction. Indeed, I was struck by the continued scholarly debate about the implications of the National Reading Panel Report of 2000 nearly five years after its publication and by the heated exchange between researchers about the efficacy of using decodable texts, sustained silent reading, and other instructional strategies for improving children's reading skills. A cursory reading of these articles might suggest that the reading wars are alive and well in the 21st century. However, I recently reached a more optimistic conclusion. In reviewing major research syntheses on reading since the publication of Jeanne Chall's 1967 classic, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, I concluded that a broad consensus about effective reading instruction has evolved slowly over four decades. In this article, I describe how researchers have historically addressed controversies about reading instruction and explain why good research seems to have a delayed and limited impact on reading policy and practice. To conclude, I offer ideas for accelerating the communication of research to practitioners and empowering teachers to establish norms of excellent practice. RESEARCH AND EARLY READING INSTRUCTION In Learning to Read: The Great Debate, Jeanne Chall captured the essence of the reading wars. She noted that the many controversies about reading instruction in first grade boiled down to one question: Do children learn better with a beginning method that stresses meaning or with one that stresses learning the code? (1) In her synthesis of experimental studies conducted during the 20th century, Chall found that an early code emphasis produced better outcomes in word recognition in the early grades and helped children read with better comprehension up to fourth grade than did instructional practices in which children were taught to read whole words and whole sentences. Following the publication of Chall's findings, Kenneth Goodman argued that reading was a guessing game. (2) In other words, good readers used context clues and background knowledge to predict, confirm, and guess at the identification of new words. Reading scholars Timothy Shanahan and Susan Neuman noted that Goodman's study on oral reading miscues shaped the whole-language movement. Eventually, Goodman and his colleagues also influenced practice by challenging drills, word lists, and other skills-based approaches that take words out of context. (3) In the 1970s and 1980s, the novel psycholinguistic theory of reading sparked the interest of cognitive psychologists seeking to understand the processes underlying skillful and fluent reading. Some researchers used eye movement technology to see if children skipped letters and words while reading text; others began to conduct experiments to understand whether context facilitated or impeded word recognition. (4) Cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich points out that the accumulation of research findings from the 1970s to the 1990s led to a Grand Synthesis of the processes underlying skillful reading. (5) In Toward a Literacy Society, a 1975 publication sponsored by the National Institute of Education (NIE), Chall argued that neither phonics nor sight-word approaches were sufficient to help children become skilled readers. Instead, she reminded educators and the general public that an inflexible approach may fail with a child if in the long run it plays down either of these aspects of learning to read. What is important is a proper balance between them. (6) A second NIE publication in 1985, Becoming a Nation of Readers, encouraged researchers to undertake multidisciplinary studies of reading, to examine the efficacy of diverse approaches to instruction, and to extend inquiry beyond decoding and early literacy instruction. …

25 Best Internet Sources for Teaching Reading

Reading instruction and reading outcomes have become a top priority in the United States, partly because of the emphasis placed on them by the federal government. Of paramount concern is poor reading achievement among large numbers of children. This article article encourages teachers to use technology to accomplish the goals of effective reading instruction. It is a compilation of websites that introduce practical activities aligned with the “five pillars” of effective instruction identified by the U.S. National Reading Panel (NRP). Each website description includes an explanation of how the activities featured on the site fit with the principles of the NRP report.

The National Reading Curriculum's Oobleck

PUBLIC elementary school teachers are in the fourth year of a mandated national reading A group of federally appointed experimental research scientists, known as the National Reading Panel (NRP), created a report, which is now the cornerstone for the Reading First document and a crucial underpinning of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). All of these federal actions have placed undue pressure on schools by channeling them into a reading curriculum based on systematic and explicit phonics instruction. These mandates have resulted in the creation of commercial commercial programs that claim to use evidence-based reading methodologies that will close the achievement gap and end America's reading problems. Confident of their findings, many of those involved in the NRP believe they have put an end to the 30-year debate over how best to instruct children. In school districts across the country, however, the reading battle rages on, and most teachers are not buying the findings of the NRP. As I read Dr. Seuss' Bartholomew and the Oobleck to a group of third-graders on Read Across America Day, I was struck by the parallels between the magicians in the book and the research scientists responsible for the federal intrusion into the reading curriculum. In the book, King Derwin of Didd is not satisfied with the fog, the snow, the rain, and the sunshine. He orders his magicians to create something new to come from the sky. The magicians happily comply, ignoring the warnings of pageboy Bartholomew Cubbins. Green, gooey oobleck then falls from the sky, wreaking havoc upon the kingdom. The bells cannot ring, the trumpets will not blow, the Captain of the Guards cannot speak, and the farmers cannot do their chores. The king, now stuck to his royal throne by oobleck and realizing the error of his ways, summons Bartholomew and calls for the return of his magicians to end the crisis. But, I can't fetch them, Your Majesty. Their cave on Mountain Neeka-tave is buried deep in oobleck, Bartholomew reports. The magicians are totally un-JAMES W. VENABLE is a reading teacher at Washington Elementary School, Alameda, Calif. aware of the disaster they have inadvertently created. After warnings from numerous Bartholomews, the NRP's oobleck continues to fall from the sky, preventing classroom teachers from making wise instructional decisions. Perhaps because I am a classroom teacher and have experienced firsthand the effect that experimental scientists who adhere to a discrete-skills model of reading have on classrooms, I look upon the results of the NRP with disdain. Safely ensconced in their cave, these magicians fail to see how their generalized findings from studies of atypical children in specialized settings do not transfer to average children. The NRP scientists fail to understand that reading words in isolation is not reading. They are totally unaware that their research, transferred into the hands of policy makers, can be disastrous for children. Their oobleck permeates every aspect of our role as teachers. Many of us see this oobleck as stemming from misinterpretation and misuse, if not outright misinformation. That is, the entire premise of Reading First rests upon a crumbling foundation because the initial analysis was flawed. We know that studies were omitted and misreported. We know that the panel came to faulty conclusions. We are aware of the NRP minority report submitted by panel member Joanne Yatvin. We have read the countervailing research of dissenting scientists in the field of reading and language acquisition. Nevertheless, the oobleck keeps falling upon us and has a huge impact on our professional development and on the ways in which we are mandated to teach and assess language learners. The NRP report did not answer the critical question of how teachers can be educated to teach reading effectively, but the policy makers assume that it did. One state-approved professional developer provides hours of indoctrination on the five major components of reading, taught as if they should be delivered to students as isolated skills that will come together as reading--around fifth grade. …

50 years ago in the journal of pediatrics: Why Johnny can’t read: Fact or fallacy

50 years ago in the journal of pediatrics: Why Johnny can’t read: Fact or fallacy

But Does it Really Matter?

Mr. Shanahan's main concern with criticisms of the NRP report is that -- whether they are legitimate or not -- they distract us from the essential work of giving children the most effective reading instruction possible. I WAS surprised to learn that Elaine Garan and Steven Krashen had written yet two more critiques of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report. Each already has more NRP-related publications than any member of the panel, and both have been issuing their complaints over a longer period than the panel worked on the eight studies that make up the report. I was also surprised that the Kappan was publishing these critiques, given that, for the most part, no new points are made here. Most of these claims have been refuted, with no discernible effect on the critics. Of greater concern was my trepidation about entering once more into this unfortunate arena. Critical exchanges of this type can be unpleasant, unproductive, and -- more worrisome -- misleading. Since the NRP report was completed, I became a district administrator in Chicago, where we successfully applied the NRP findings to improving student achievement. Our district invested heavily in professional development to ensure that our teachers knew how to teach what research had repeatedly found to benefit children, with great results. As a novice administrator, I had to learn to distinguish what mattered from what did not. I found that there was no time to pick over bones of contention for the sake of academic argument. Instead, I had to focus my attention on what mattered to the success of the students. Wide Acceptance of the NRP Report And it's the importance of the success of students that leads me to fear that some critics may be trying to render the NRP's helpful findings into something controversial in order to dissuade administrators from using them. That could be why Garan seems so peeved that I noted the great imbalance between the relatively small amount of criticism the report has received and the many positive uses of the NRP findings. Her opinion seems to be that the report has generated only negative responses. However, an examination of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) belies that view. Researchers commonly judge the value of a study by how often it is used by other scientists. The NRP report and the reports of its subgroups, according to SSCI, have been cited more than 250 times over the past four years, and the vast majority of those citations have been positive, an indication of the general acceptance of the report in the scientific community. Another indicator of respect is the publication of parts of the report in high-ranking, rigorously reviewed scientific journals. The findings of two of the subgroup reports (phonemic awareness and phonics) have been published in such journals, one in the International Reading Association's Reading Research Quarterly and the other in the American Educational Research Association's Review of Educational Research. These studies were judged to be meritorious by the independent reviewers for these journals. In addition, the structure and findings of the NRP have been used in the development of several consensus panels (for example, the National Early Literacy Panel and the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth) and cited in reports published by the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences1 and by the RAND Study Group.2 Would It Matter If the Critics Were Correct? But no matter how sound a report or how widely accepted, Garan is right that it should not be above professional criticism. However, from the critiques offered by Garan and Krashen in this issue, one cannot discern the point of my chapter in The Voice of Evidence.3 While I refuted many specific criticisms of the NRP report, I came to think that the critiques, by their very nature, were irrelevant to the question of whether the report should be used by schools. …

Is In-School Free Reading Good for Children? Why the National Reading Panel Report is (Still) Wrong

Prompted by Timothy Shanahan's and Steven Stahl's responses to his previous Kappan article, Mr. revisits his criticisms of the National Reading Panel report. N AN EARLIER Kappan article I reviewed the section of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report that dealt with fluency.1 I argued that the panel's review of the research on free in school missed a number of studies and made serious errors in reporting the studies it did include. I noted that of the studies showed between readers and that comparisons involved students who were already advanced and had already established a habit. I pointed out that the NRP did include long-term studies, which I found to be more supportive of silent (SSR) than short-term studies. Moreover, the NRP also included one study in which students were highly constrained in what they could The case for free reading, I argued, rests on more than experimental studies; case histories also provide compelling evidence for the power of reading. Contrary to the panel's findings, I concluded that the evidence in support of free in school was strong. Timothy Shanahan and the late Steven Stahl, both members of the NRP, attempted to respond to my criticisms in The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research.2 However, their chapters contain misrepresentations of my position, as well as inaccuracies in reporting the literature. I wish to set the record straight. Just letting kids Shanahan states my position as follows: Krashen (2001) argued that letting kids is better than (p. 245). This description is simply accurate. I discussed sustained silent reading and other in-school free programs. These programs include more than just letting kids read. They set aside time to make sure children have a chance to read, they provide access to good books, and they do things that encourage reading. I strongly suspect that just letting kids read is better than many kinds of instruction, but SSR does more than that. Did I say that free is better than instruction? I actually concluded that it was at least as good as and often better than instruction, the instruction provided to comparison groups in the studies, which is generally instruction based on skill-building. Shanahan's presentation of my position can be interpreted to mean that I am opposed to all instruction, and that, of course, is false. Similarly, according to Shanahan, I claim that prefer having students instead of teaching them (p. 246). I did say that; I said that teachers prefer free to what usually goes on in language arts and classes, that is, regular instruction.3 Shanahan refers to the comparison groups in the studies of free as utilizing some impoverished form of teaching, e.g., assigning random worksheets (p. 246). I think that it is highly likely that skill-building was involved in the comparison groups, but there is evidence that the classes with the worst instruction were selected to serve as comparisons in these studies. What no difference means. Many studies comparing in-school to regular instruction show between the two groups in gains in comprehension. For Shanahan, a finding of no significant differences between in-school free programs and comparison groups is not very informative (p. 246), because the failure to find a could be the result of factors other than the efficacy of one of the treatments -- poor application, enough of a treatment, and so on. While I agree that such factors can play a role, I view these results as an invitation to closer analysis. What is interesting is that studies that do show a consistently show the same results. This is true in my analysis, in which I found negative results (in- school free fared worse than regular instruction) in only three comparisons out of 53, and in the NRP report, which found studies in which SSR students performed less well than controls. …

Murder Your Darlings: A Scientific Response to The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research

Ms. Garan maintains that Timothy Shanahan has misrepresented not only her own arguments but the findings of the National Reading Panel. WRITERS KNOW how easy it is to be seduced by their own cleverness. Words and ideas have a way of turning our heads as they take on lives of their own. However, the time comes when good writers must harden their hearts, sharpen the axe, and murder their darlings.1 The same must be said of good scientists. Even more so than with writing, ethical scientists must approach their work with humility and discipline and resist the temptation to indulge their own pet notions at the expense of the truth and in defiance of the evidence. Ultimately, scientists must accept the evidence and, when the time comes, they must be the first to pick up the axe and murder their own darlings. It is this fundamental precept that defenders of the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) have not faced. As a result, instead of an evidence-based guide that can inform practice in reading instruction, we are faced with a biased report characterized by misreported, overgeneralized findings that do not inform but rather mandate education policy -- ironically -- in the name of science. Since the NRP cannot find it in its heart to murder its own darlings, I will invoke my right as a consumer and victim of that research and do it for them. To those outside the field of reading, the never-ending Reading Wars must appear to be much ado about nothing: an annoying philosophical quarrel indulged in by professionals who have planted themselves on opposing sides of the phonics versus whole-language fence. What I hope readers will take away from this article is that the field of reading is only the first stop in the federal takeover of public education. It is important that Kappan readers realize that the tactics used to control reading instruction are directed at all fields of education and that we are all vulnerable to the scientific revolution of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Therefore, we all need to understand the mentality and the tactics of those who are promoting scientific research as the cure-all for what ails the schools. The ethical and procedural imperatives of good science are now particularly relevant to all areas of education. A Brief History of the NRP At the request of Congress, a National Reading Panel was established in consultation with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the U.S. Department of Education. The panel's mission was to conduct a comprehensive review of the research related to reading in order to find a convergence of evidence and thus determine the most effective methods for teaching beginning reading.2 At the outset, the panel circumscribed its comprehensive review of reading research by restricting the studies it included in its report to those that employed the standards of psychological and medical research conducted to determine the effectiveness of based interventions, medications, or medical procedures proposed for use in the fostering of robust health and psychological development and the prevention or treatment of disease.3 Thus the NRP imposed the model of medical research on a complex, behaviorally based discipline -- a choice that now permeates all areas of NCLB legislation. Predictably, the release of the NRP report in April 2000 generated a barrage of criticism that ranged from the philosophical unbalance in the makeup of the panel, to the misreporting of the findings in the panel's summary, to flawed research procedures, to the philosophical/political stance the panel advocated under the guise of science and objectivity.4 Perhaps because of growing resistance to NCLB and to the NRP report, key players in the federal research and publication arena have written a book to convince and compel doubters. Because the book is nearly 500 pages in length and because it is a series of chapters, each dealing with a different facet of reading research, it is difficult to respond to each segment individually. …

ACCELERATING STRUGGLING READERS' PROGRESS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EXPERT OPINION AND CURRENT RESEARCH RECOMMENDATIONS

In this article, we review the findings of Rona Flippo's (1998) “Expert Study” within the comparative context of recently published reading research reports such as the National Reading Panel report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) and Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Does expert opinion square with research recommendations for helping young, struggling readers? Instructional practices that the experts categorized as either “making learning to read difficult” or “facilitating learning to read” are distilled into summary form. Areas of convergence and divergence between “expert opinion” and recent reading research recommendations are identified and discussed. Finally, recommendations of the “Expert Study” and recommendations of recent reading research reports are synthesized into a single set of instructional recommendations for accelerating the progress of struggling readers.

Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel

From the choice of participants to serve on the National Reading Panel to the hasty release of an uncorrected, undeliberated, and unapproved subcommittee report, the procedure used by the NRP was flawed, Ms. Yatvin - a member of the panel - charges. Now government agencies at all levels are using the science of the NRP report to support their calls for changes in school instruction and teacher education. WHEN THEY heard that I had been appointed to the National Reading Panel (NRP), my friends predicted, They'll eat you alive. But it was never like that. When panelists began our journey to discover what says about the best methods for teaching children to read, were all searchers truth, each knowledgeable and respected in his or her professional domain and each dedicated to working together toward our joint goal. Along the trail, pressured by isolation, time limits, lack of support, and the political aims of others, lost our way - and our integrity.1 To begin with, Congress, which had commissioned our journey, was naive to believe that a panel of people, all employed full time elsewhere and working without a support staff, could in six months' time sift through a mountain of research studies and draw from them conclusions about the best ways of teaching reading. And the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), designated as our guide and provisioner on the journey, was irresponsible both in advising Congress that the task could be done in that way and in selecting the wrong combination of people to do it. In late 1997 Congress passed legislation authorizing the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to select the members of the panel from more than 300 nominations by individuals and organizations involved in reading education. The bill specified that the panel was to be made up of 15 individuals, who are not officers or employees of the Federal Government and include leading scientists in reading research, representatives of colleges of education, reading teachers, education administrators, and parents. NICHD stretched that definition to its limits by appointing 12 university professors. Eight of them were reading researchers, two were administrators without backgrounds in reading or teacher education, one was a teacher educator, and one was a medical doctor. Other categories were represented by one parent, one elementary school principal, and one middle school language arts teacher.2 There was no reading teacher in the sense I believe Congress intended. When, shortly the initial panel meeting, one of the university researchers resigned, I suggested that it made sense to replace him with a primary-level teacher of reading. A month later, at our second meeting, the panel chair announced that, after considerable discussion, concluded that at this stage in the game might just as well not replace him.3 The panel was not told who the we were. And since the work of the panel had scarcely begun, the explanation offered was scarcely credible. Why wouldn't NICHD officials want someone on the panel who actually taught young children how to read? The appointment of the medical doctor was also troubling. Although, technically, she was a reading researcher who worked in the controversial area of brain activity in reading, she had no knowledge or experience in reading instruction. What really made her an inappropriate choice, however, was her close professional association with NICHD. In a videotape later produced under the direction of NICHD, this doctor appears five times, hailing the breakthrough accomplishments of the panel, while other members who were far more involved in the panel's research appear once or not at all. At the first meeting of the panel in April 1998, another troubling fact about NICHD's appointments became apparent. …

More Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Fluency

At worst, the impact of free reading appears to be the same as that of traditional instruction, and it is often better, especially when studies are continued for more than an academic year, finding that the National Reading Panel has obscured by omitting important studies and by describing others incorrectly, Mr. Krashen charges. IN HER review of the report on phonics by the National Reading Panel (NRP), Elaine Garan concluded that the report involved a limited number of studies of narrow population.1 I will argue that this problem is not limited to the section on phonics: it also applies to the section of the report on fluency. It is only by omitting large number of relevant studies - and misinterpreting the ones that were included - that the NRP was able to reach the startling conclusion that there is no clear evidence that encouraging children to read more actually improves reading achievement.2 OMISSIONS The selection criteria used by the NRP to choose studies for its report were as follows: 1. The study had to be research study that appeared to consider the effect of encouraging students to read more on reading achievement. 2. The study had to focus on English reading education, conducted with children (K-12). 3. The study itself had to have appeared in refereed journal. 4. The study had to have been carried out with English language reading.3 The NRP claimed that it could find only 14 studies that met these criteria.4 Of these, 10 were studies of the impact of sustained silent reading (SSR) programs in which some class time is set aside for free reading with little or no accountability. Of these 10, three had positive results, with the students who were engaged in free voluntary reading outperforming comparison groups. Another study showed positive results for one condition but not for other conditions, and the rest of the studies showed no difference between groups or no gains. Table 1 summarizes these outcomes.5 In other sections of the NRP report, such as the sections on phonics and phonemic awareness, the NRP listed studies that were excluded from its analysis. This was not done for the section on fluency. We do not know, therefore, which excluded studies were simply missed and which were rejected, nor do we know the specific rationale for their rejection. In Table 2, I present an expanded set of SSR studies in which tests of reading comprehension were used. Many of the studies summarized in Table 2 meet the four criteria of the NRP and were apparently missed. But there were some vio-lations. A few were done with students slightly older than the age limit imposed by the NRP; in all such cases, the subjects were undergraduate college students. Subjects in some of the studies were students of English as second language.6 In several studies, students read in Spanish, not English; in these cases, the students were native speakers of Spanish. Finally, some studies were not published in refereed journals. Table 2 summarizes the results of these studies. It includes studies included by the NRP as well as those that the NRP did not include.7 In the studies in Table 2, SSR students did as well as or better than comparison students in 50 out of 53 comparisons. For longer-term studies (those longer than one year), SSR students were superior in eight of 10 studies, and there was no difference in the other two. Moreover, there are plausible reasons why the results were not even more positive. In one study by Isabel Schon, Kenneth Hopkins, and Carol Vojir, there was no difference between SSR students and comparison groups, but only five of the 11 SSR teachers actually carried out SSR conscientiously.8 The classes taught by these five achieved significantly better gains. In study by Ruth Cline and George Kretke, another study showing no difference, the subjects were junior high school students who were reading two years above grade level and probably had already established reading habit. …

Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: Putting Out the Fire

The National Reading Panel report reiterates what many teachers recognize: phonics instruction is one ingredient of a successful reading program. Why such a clear and obvious finding is so threatening to some people remains a puzzle to Ms. Ehri and Mr. Stahl. IN PROFESSIONAL sports, it is called trash talking. In community debates, it is called building a straw man. In politics, it is known as negative campaigning. Those who do it believe that victory comes from attacking the other side, from tearing down structures rather than making them sturdier. Faults are featured, and strengths are slighted or denied. In The Argument Culture, Deborah Tannen regards this trend as a big problem. She suggests that a culture of critique has replaced rational analysis. Critique has become synonymous with criticism, and it has become the dominant approach in responding to people or ideas. She writes: What I is the ubiquity, the knee-jerk nature, of approaching almost any issue, problem, or public person in an adversarial way. . . . What l is using opposition to accomplish every goal, even those that do not require fighting but might also (or better) be accomplished by other means, such as exploring, expanding, discussing, investigating, and the exchanging of ideas suggested by the word dialogue. l am questioning the assumption that everything is a matter of polarized opposites, the proverbial two sides to every question that we think embodies open-mindedness and expansive thinking.1 The article by Elaine Garan, Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics, which appeared in the March 2001 Phi Delta Kappan, exemplifies this tactic. Garan seems to be motivated more by a need to denigrate than by a desire to contribute a rational analysis of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report on phonics instruction and its effectiveness in helping children learn to read. Our purpose here is to examine the merits of Elaine Garan's criticisms and the adversarial quality that pervades her article. As we will document, her criticisms are highly selected, ill-founded, and overgeneralized. Moreover, her article does not represent the findings of the full NRP report. Garan begins her review with a plea for fairness in looking at the NRP report. Yet she finds only problems. Even a stopped watch is correct twice a day! Her unrelenting negative view reflects an unfortunate bias, one that we believe threatens to undermine rather than contribute to progress in our field. The National Reading Panel Report In April 2000, the NRP released its report, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. The NRP was convened by Congress for the purpose of examining what research says about the effectiveness of reading instruction. The resulting report was intended to move the nation forward in the process of helping teachers improve their reading instruction. The panel included distinguished literacy researchers from the U.S. and Canada. Not only phonics instruction but several other types of reading instruction were reviewed by the panel, including phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary learning, and comprehension strategy instruction. The report was distributed in print and electronic form. In preparing the review of phonics instruction, the NRP carefully and objectively analyzed the results of 38 independently conducted studies of phonics instruction that included more than 7,000 students. Multiple protections against bias and established meta-analytic procedures were employed. Attention was focused on controlled experiments, the strongest form of scientific evidence. The report found clear evidence indicating that phonics instruction should have a place in the reading curriculum in today's schools. * Systematic phonics instruction was found to be more effective than unsystematic phonics instruction or no phonics instruction in helping students learn to read. …

More Smoking Guns: A Response to Linnea Ehri and Steven Stahl

Her critique the National Reading Panel report did not uncover minor oversights or occasional errors, Ms. Garan responds. Rather, it documented a consistent pattern sloppy research and, what's worse, blatant and continuing misrepresentation findings. IN MY MARCH article, Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics, I used the data and words the National Reading Panel (NRP) to establish that its report was fatally flawed in terms the most fundamental research protocols, including validity, reliability, and generalizability. I established that, rather than living up to the highly publicized claims scientific accuracy, the report was riddled with errors. Furthermore, I documented a disturbing pattern fundamental contradictions between the findings in the lengthy Reports the Subgroups and the panel's reporting its own findings in the separately packaged, widely distributed Summary and publicity video. NRP member Joanne Yatvin concurred with my analysis. In her letter published in the June 2001 Kappan, Yatvin acknowledges the weaknesses and inconsistencies the NRP phonics report and attributes them, in part, to the panel's eagerness to embrace phonics as a cure-all. She also agrees that the NRP report is fundamentally lacking in validity and notes that the panel used all kinds of isolated skills, including the decoding pseudo-words, and called them But the terms and growth, as used by the NRP, are actually misnomers, not by my definition, but according to what the panel itself declared should be the legitimate outcome practice in phonics skills: the authentic application to text. I also documented that, while isolated phonics instruction resulted in statistically significant outcomes with regard to children's performance on isolated skills - such as reading pseudowords or word identification - these skills did not transfer to real-life textual application - such as conventional spelling or the comprehension authentic text - at a statistically significant level. Again, I did so using the panel's own data. Yatvin confirms one the most important points I made in my original article - that the results included in the NRP report have very little to do with true reading. Furthermore, she concurs that the panel misrepresented the findings the report, as the conclusions in the brief, widely distributed Summary are in direct contradiction to both the panel's data and its own findings and discussion in the lengthy Reports the Subgroups. Unfortunately, it is the errors that made headlines and were translated into national policy, while the facts remained obscured in pages tables and data. In fact, it is the loudly trumpeted - but fundamentally inaccurate - research the NRP that constitutes the the Bush Administration's education plan. Within the Bush plan, the science the NRP represents both the carrot and the stick. That is, the plan proposes that funds be distributed or withheld based on the compliance schools with the the report the NRP. Because its enormous political and financial clout, it is important that the research the NRP is indeed above reproach. Schizophrenic Science and Fuzzy Math Unfortunately, not only are the results reported by the NRP inconsistent even within its own pages, but the panel itself is unable to come to a consensus about the accuracy its science. Panel member Linnea Ehri and NRP contributor Steven Stahl disagree with fellow panel member Joanne Yatvin. Their rebuttal to my article is troubling in that it not only perpetuates but also demonstrably extends the inaccuracies the original NRP report. In their rebuttal, Ehri and Stahl state, As we will document, her [Garan's] criticisms are highly selected, ill-founded, and overgeneralized. I ask Kappan readers to note the use the word document. …