[CALIBK12] allergic to reading part 2

[Stephen Krashen]

Posted on the Education Week website,
May 6, 2009 
In response to "Reading programs found ineffective" (below)

The remarkable aspect of the report is the absence of interest in the amount of actual reading children did. Deep in the appendix, (table I.1), we are informed that children were observed doing silent reading an average of only .28 times per ten minute period, less than 3% of the time; the groups were not compared on this variable.  In addition, there was no mention of literature, no mention of discussion of the content of books (unless you call teacher asking questions about the text "literature"), the primary means of encouraging self-selected reading outside of school. Rather, for all groups the focus was on direct instruction of vocabulary and reading strategies. 

The report does not mention the extensive research showing that literature-based instruction, and instruction that includes time devoted to free reading in class, yields, in general, better results in terms of reading comprehension than "traditional" instruction, as well as other research that shows that reading itself is the crucial variable in reading studies for both first and second language development. 

Why are so many reading researchers allergic to reading?


Reading Programs Found Ineffective
By Mary Ann Zehr
May 5, 2009


A federal study intended to provide insight on the effectiveness of programs for reading comprehension has found that three such programs had no positive impact, while a fourth had a negative effect on student achievement.

In other words, the conclusion is that none of the four programs studied—Project CRISS, ReadAbout, Read for Real, and Reading for Knowledge—is effective.

The large-scale randomized control study involved 6,350 students, who were all in the 5th grade, and 268 teachers in 10 urban districts with large numbers of disadvantaged students. The 89 schools in the study were randomly assigned to either a group of schools using one of the reading curricula being studied or to a control group.

The researchers for the study­—conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc., of Princeton, N.J., for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences—used a general reading test called the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation, or GRADE, and reading-comprehension tests of science and social studies to measure student achievement. In addition, they factored in students’ composite scores for all tests.

They concluded that Project CRISS, developed by Creating Independence Through Student-Owned Strategies; Read About, produced by Scholastic Inc.; and Read for Real, created by Chapman University and Zaner-Bloser, had no effect on reading comprehension. In addition, they found that Reading for Knowledge, created by the Success for All Foundation, had a negative impact on the composite test scores and the science-comprehension test scores for students using that curriculum.
Conclusions Disputed

Robert E. Slavin, a researcher and the founder of the Success for All Foundation, dismissed the study’s conclusions and, in particular, the finding that Reading for Knowledge was ineffective. In an e-mail message, he contended that “IES-sponsored evaluations repeatedly evaluate programs by imposing them on teachers and school leaders who are not interested in them and are likely to implement them haphazardly, if at all, and then find, over and over again, that nothing works.”

Mr. Slavin also criticized the study for implementing the reading programs only in the 5th grade, which meant that teachers had little support from colleagues within their schools to carry them out, he said.

He added that he supports rigorous evaluation of educational programs and hopes that the Obama administration will change policies to support evaluations of “strong implementations of programs supported by teachers, principals, and district leaders.”