The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications

Abstract

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I mainly focus on the United States, which fares poorly on cross-national comparisons of literacy, with about 25–30% of the population exhibiting literacy skills that are low by standard metrics. I consider three possible contributing factors, all of which turn on issues concerning the relationships between written and spoken language: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the Black-White “achievement gap.” I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

Notes

¹See the PISA summary document available at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/pisa2009keyfindings.htm

²See, for example, the summary report for the 2011 reading assessment available at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2011/2012457.asp

³Basic facts about Finnish elementary education are available at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdf

⁴Is Hebrew the outlier writing system? Seemingly contrary to my analysis, it is morphologically complex but also orthographically deep in the default, unpointed form. Note, however, that children learn to read using the shallow form in which vowels are indicated by diacritics (niqqud). Learning to read using the unpointed form would be vastly more difficult (though perhaps it was achieved by the ancient scribal elite prior to the development of the diacritic system).

⁵The Mann quote (which I first encountered in Adams, 1990) is from an 1844 report he prepared as secretary (head) of the Massachusetts Board of Education in which he was highly critical of the local schools, comparing them unfavorably to the classrooms he had observed in Prussia and Scotland (shades our modern-day envy of educational practices in Finland and Shanghai!). Greatly offended, schoolmasters from the Boston public schools published a rejoinder in which they remarked that “our dissent from [Mann's] views arises from an honest conviction that, if adopted, they would retard the progress of sound learning.” Mann was advocating what later became known as the whole-word or “look and say” method, which involves memorizing words as patterns, without regard to the functions of the component letters. The Boston educators favored a “phonetic” teaching method. Their take-down of Mann's “new method” was thorough and incisive but settled nothing. The arguments on both sides will be easily recognizable to anyone familiar with the “Reading Wars” of the past 30 years. All the documents (the sides went back and forth a few times) are available as ebooks on Google Play and highly recommended.

⁶See Allington and Woodside-Jiron (1999), who believe that many of the research findings that contradict their own views were the product of research funded by Reid Lyon, an official at NICHD, as part of an anti-education political agenda. The founding document for this political movement, they claim, is Grossen (1997), an obscure 22-page review of 30 years of reading research funded by NICHD. Allington and Woodside-Jiron's paranoia is so keenly focused on NICHD that they ignore the mass of similar findings from research conducted in many other countries. The same conclusions about learning to read are found in both American reports such as the NRP (2000) and the British Rose Report (Rose, 2006). It would be easier to dismiss Allington's campaign against reading science (see also Allington, 2002) were he not a leading figure in reading education, former president of the International Reading Association, former president of the National Reading Conference, and a member of the “Reading Hall of Fame” (http://www.readinghalloffame.org).

⁷In the current climate, everyone has to favor a “balanced” approach to reading instruction, acknowledging the importance of both skills and literacy. Having seen and comprehended the writing on the wall, organizations that had gone to the mat in support of “literacy” approaches such as Whole Language have turned out guidelines for “balanced literacy” instruction (see, e.g., Cowen, 2003, for an example, and Moats, 2007, for a critique of such efforts).

⁸Basic data on achievement gaps in reading, as measured on the National Assessment of Academic Progress (NAEP), can be found in the Executive Summary of the 2011 results, pp. 15 and 44 (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2011/2012457.asp).

⁹As exemplified by then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers' conjectures about possible sex-linked genetic differences in mathematical aptitude (http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php). I believe that an article in a journal such as this one provides an appropriate context.

¹⁰These data give the lie to a cherished belief. Then: "Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery" (Mann, 1848). And now: "In America, education is still the great equalizer" (Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011) (http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/remarks-us-secretary-education-arne-duncan-he-education-trust-conference). We should also be considering whether education, as it occurs in American schools and as it is funded, exacerbates differences between groups.

¹¹NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, http://www.nichd.nih.gov/research/supported/Pages/seccyd.aspx; Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 survey, http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy79.htm

¹²I owe this observation to Julie Washington, who made the point with great clarity and impact. The finish line may be in the same location, but paths to getting there are not of equal length or difficulty.