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doranwenFrom a book I waded through on research into reading (and I do mean "waded through", it was a bit mind-numbing in points with all the analysis on studies and statistics and whatnot, but I've read several of the author's other books so I gave it a try):
Some Final Words on Reading Research
"Basic" research on reading, as distinct from "applied" research, constitutes the vast majority of studies in this field. Reviewing this literature in depth, one is struck by three things:
1. The research is so methodologically flawed that few studies are free of problems. These are not trivial methodological issues, but major blunders. The most common paradigm uses a research design (isolated groups) that leads to an uninterpretable outcome, because no statistical tests can be applied to it. This creates a vast amount of noise in the research literature. Properly conducted research is buried under an avalanche of meaningless studies, and here I refer exclusively to studies published in the peer-review journals. The fault may lie in poor training of students in the field, but the real culprits are the editors and editorial boards of the research journals who have failed to set standards and to insist on proper evaluations by informed reviewers. (The same criticism could be leveled at funding agencies.) As a result, instead of solving important problems in the field, many studies have only obscured and compounded these problems.
2. Inductive reasoning is virtually absent in this work. The research is driven by a hodgepodge of deductive theories conjured up via analogies, hunches, or beliefs that have no basis in fact. Few researchers attempt to disprove their theories, a critical omission in science. Taking reasonable steps to disprove one's theory is a fundamental platform of the scientific method, and has been ever since it was formally proposed by Francis Bacon.
Instead, researchers outline their particular deductive theory and set out to prove it. In the written report, other research is selectively cited to weave a framework (a story) for this proof. This research is often cited incorrectly, the author claiming an outcome that never occurred or that wasn't supported by the data. Citations of "commonly known studies" producing "commonly known results" have become mindless and formulaic. And, at the end of the day, if the author's own results (or someone else's) happen to contradict the deductive theory (evidence the theory is wrong), the theory is never changed to accommodate them. Conflicting data are explained away or ignored altogether.
3. Researchers don't build a solid body of knowledge from the ground up, and the field has never moved forward in a productive way. The important spadework in designing appropriate and reliable tests, in establishing norms, in carrying out large-scale correlational studies to identify what is important and what isn't, is rare to nonexistent. There are few meaningful, cumulative, or collaborative efforts in which groups of scientists are fully engaged on a coherent and well-focused problem. We have seen examples in this book of researchers who devote an entire career to a single in-house test that has never been verified as valid or reliable. For these reasons, all the deductive theories conjured up by reading researchers so far have collapsed when proper evidence was brought to bear on them.
This is not a description of science or the scientific method. It is a description of pseudoscience. And what is most startling about this body of work is that the most methodologically flawed research is often the best known and highly regarded.
[taken from Language Development and Learning to Read: The Scientific Study of How Language Development Affects Reading Skill (2005) - Diane McGuinness]
This would explain why the vast majority of teachers in the USA have no idea how to teach reading properly, and worse, don't know that they don't know. What they're taught is the faddish or hodgepodge methods (whole language and/or balanced literacy based) from those pseudoscientific studies, often by proponents of said methods who are emotionally committed to their methods and resist any logic that contradicts them. (And it would also be why I've been working on a program of my own.)
The basic question the book presented was that poor reading is attributable to one (or more) of three possibilities (but which?):
- incorrect reading instruction
- impaired speech perception
- delays/impairments in core language functions such as receptive/productive vocabulary, syntax, or semantics
The book showed (by examining those studies) that there's no proof for either of the latter two arguments (and in fact, the research essentially *disproves* them) - and other of the author's same books illustrate the illogicality of some reading instruction methods, and the ways children are confused or struggle with them. The next to last paragraph is:
Apart from a few studies that shine like diamonds in a heap of dross, giving us new ways to look at how reading is influenced by language development, the central message of this book is basically this: The research question "What's wrong with children who can't read?" is a bad question scientifically, logically, and pragmatically, and has been extremely unproductive.
(From what I can tell - in most cases, nothing is wrong with them except that they were mal-instructed. Keep in mind, children learn at varying rates too, so as long as they're on the right track, being slower at learning is not a disability except in school where the age-grade lockstep mentality assigns disabilities to anyone who doesn't march along at the same rate. A very small minority do have significant issues that will affect their overall reading ability, but given the right instruction, even children with severe mental impairments can learn to read at a basic level, and often decode decently well.)
Some Final Words on Reading Research
"Basic" research on reading, as distinct from "applied" research, constitutes the vast majority of studies in this field. Reviewing this literature in depth, one is struck by three things:
1. The research is so methodologically flawed that few studies are free of problems. These are not trivial methodological issues, but major blunders. The most common paradigm uses a research design (isolated groups) that leads to an uninterpretable outcome, because no statistical tests can be applied to it. This creates a vast amount of noise in the research literature. Properly conducted research is buried under an avalanche of meaningless studies, and here I refer exclusively to studies published in the peer-review journals. The fault may lie in poor training of students in the field, but the real culprits are the editors and editorial boards of the research journals who have failed to set standards and to insist on proper evaluations by informed reviewers. (The same criticism could be leveled at funding agencies.) As a result, instead of solving important problems in the field, many studies have only obscured and compounded these problems.
2. Inductive reasoning is virtually absent in this work. The research is driven by a hodgepodge of deductive theories conjured up via analogies, hunches, or beliefs that have no basis in fact. Few researchers attempt to disprove their theories, a critical omission in science. Taking reasonable steps to disprove one's theory is a fundamental platform of the scientific method, and has been ever since it was formally proposed by Francis Bacon.
Instead, researchers outline their particular deductive theory and set out to prove it. In the written report, other research is selectively cited to weave a framework (a story) for this proof. This research is often cited incorrectly, the author claiming an outcome that never occurred or that wasn't supported by the data. Citations of "commonly known studies" producing "commonly known results" have become mindless and formulaic. And, at the end of the day, if the author's own results (or someone else's) happen to contradict the deductive theory (evidence the theory is wrong), the theory is never changed to accommodate them. Conflicting data are explained away or ignored altogether.
3. Researchers don't build a solid body of knowledge from the ground up, and the field has never moved forward in a productive way. The important spadework in designing appropriate and reliable tests, in establishing norms, in carrying out large-scale correlational studies to identify what is important and what isn't, is rare to nonexistent. There are few meaningful, cumulative, or collaborative efforts in which groups of scientists are fully engaged on a coherent and well-focused problem. We have seen examples in this book of researchers who devote an entire career to a single in-house test that has never been verified as valid or reliable. For these reasons, all the deductive theories conjured up by reading researchers so far have collapsed when proper evidence was brought to bear on them.
This is not a description of science or the scientific method. It is a description of pseudoscience. And what is most startling about this body of work is that the most methodologically flawed research is often the best known and highly regarded.
[taken from Language Development and Learning to Read: The Scientific Study of How Language Development Affects Reading Skill (2005) - Diane McGuinness]
This would explain why the vast majority of teachers in the USA have no idea how to teach reading properly, and worse, don't know that they don't know. What they're taught is the faddish or hodgepodge methods (whole language and/or balanced literacy based) from those pseudoscientific studies, often by proponents of said methods who are emotionally committed to their methods and resist any logic that contradicts them. (And it would also be why I've been working on a program of my own.)
The basic question the book presented was that poor reading is attributable to one (or more) of three possibilities (but which?):
- incorrect reading instruction
- impaired speech perception
- delays/impairments in core language functions such as receptive/productive vocabulary, syntax, or semantics
The book showed (by examining those studies) that there's no proof for either of the latter two arguments (and in fact, the research essentially *disproves* them) - and other of the author's same books illustrate the illogicality of some reading instruction methods, and the ways children are confused or struggle with them. The next to last paragraph is:
Apart from a few studies that shine like diamonds in a heap of dross, giving us new ways to look at how reading is influenced by language development, the central message of this book is basically this: The research question "What's wrong with children who can't read?" is a bad question scientifically, logically, and pragmatically, and has been extremely unproductive.
(From what I can tell - in most cases, nothing is wrong with them except that they were mal-instructed. Keep in mind, children learn at varying rates too, so as long as they're on the right track, being slower at learning is not a disability except in school where the age-grade lockstep mentality assigns disabilities to anyone who doesn't march along at the same rate. A very small minority do have significant issues that will affect their overall reading ability, but given the right instruction, even children with severe mental impairments can learn to read at a basic level, and often decode decently well.)
