Sounds harmless, right? Except more than one exhausted and depressed mom has told me how much energy they devote to narrating every moment with their infant. And I’ve never been able to convince them that it’s ok to relax a little and enjoy their baby.
Speaking as the parent of a toddler here, educational materials for parents imply a much larger effect. There is also so much focus on coaching parents on child-directed speech, which the paper notes in passing isn’t really evidence based.
This is very cool
Such an important study. @florinaerbeli.bsky.social is doing phenomenal research.
Here is a newish paper about a full class reading intervention in upper elementary, with Sounds Write. Not sure what to make of the strong relative performance on standardized tests vs modest gains on normed assessments. But it looks pretty good: www.cmjpublishers.com/wp-content/u...
“A one-time meeting and a box of materials won’t cut it. [Teachers] need learning opportunities, resources and in-class coaching. And they should not have to spend their own time and money seeking out training.”
@j-metsala.bsky.social
macleans.ca/the-year-ahe...
Do you have a morphology program you like? I feel that is a bit of a weak point for RS. Right now I borrow a bit from the last few UFLI lessons.
In comparison to other interventions that would give them a better shot at catching up more quickly, or at all.
I use Reading Simplified. I would like to see more experimental studies on speech to print - that 2017 EBLI study worries me, though it does look like they had implementation issues, and many tutoring programs never subject themselves to that kind of scrutiny in the first place.
I am not arguing that anyone should sue over OG. But it feels like this paper has not moved practice and policy the way it should if folks who identify with the science of reading are really interested in following the evidence. This approach has had a century to prove itself.
My metric is an educationally meaningful, statistically significant, positive effect in a meta-analysis. Here's a comparable study on Direct Instruction: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...
The full text of the OG paper is here: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1...
Did you know that Julia Donaldson - of The Gruffalo, etc - wrote a series of delightful decodeable readers? They are my favourites. This one is
mostly consonant digraphs: www.amazon.ca/Read-Oxford-...
Families are often told that OG is the gold standard, but this paper, for example, suggests it is not. Students who do not progress, when other more effective approaches exist, experience harm. And families often pay a lot, over many years. What do you think? journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Im sure you’re right, but that does seem to be shifting. The low floor/high ceiling thing now in vogue in some circles seems to be coming from Building Thinking Classrooms, which I feel some concern about based on this critique: open.substack.com/pub/pershmai...
That all looks very reasonable. Has someone checked whether the students learn the math from those problems, though? One way to explain the pattern you’ve noted is that inquiry based methods take longer and don’t work as well. So, more hours, worse results.
So are we going to apply this standard to Orton Gillingham too? Because the evidence there is not great, as I understand it.
That sounds sensible. On the instructional strategy I asked about, though… I feel worried about the proliferation of understudied inquiry-based routines for math, because I work with the casualties of balanced literacy. I really hope my fears are unfounded. Thanks for sharing your study!
This makes a strong case for detracking with better differentiated instruction. I guess I wonder about the most efficient way to provide the second part. By “this pedagogy” do you mean low floor/high ceiling questions, inquiry based methods in general, or something else?
“Low floor, high ceiling” sounds like a great way to spend a lot more time than other countries on math instruction without teaching as much material. Is there evidence for any of this?
A class-action lawsuit filed today claims that the educational publishing company Heinemann falsely advertised its products as “research-backed” and “data-based.” www.apmreports.org/story/2024/1...
I’m still thinking about this defense of balanced literacy from one of North America’s biggest school boards.
Wishing had made this its own thread, so bumping it up here. It doesn’t matter how great your program is if teachers can’t get through it in the time available.
Teaching phonics to “mastery”, such that the planned scope and sequence is infeasible, and students finish first grade without even learning consonant digraphs, let alone vowel teams. While continuing to send home levelled readers, because of course.
Teaching the half of the UFLI lesson that is on the slides because teachers don’t know there is a manual or don’t have one. 🫠 That means no encoding steps. You know, the ones that really work.
I’ve been collecting examples of how increased awareness of SOR has led to surface/incomplete understandings that get translated into sub-optimal (though well-intended) instructional practice. Do you have any examples to share?
So much oral only phonemic awareness practice. 🫣
Decodable texts and intensive phonics instruction in second and third grade tier 1 instruction, meant to teach spelling skills that many students would likely develop with time and practice if they were reading more authentic texts and writing for a variety of purposes.
My notes say in part: “People say that this instruction harms no one, but there is an opportunity cost in terms of other things they could be doing”
Seidenberg’s talk at Accelerate Literacy earlier in the year was really interesting. He expressed concern about 2-3 year phonics programs. 2024.sllsummit.com/speakers/mar...
Hmm: “As it has developed so far, the ‘science of reading’ approach […] too has been developed by educators with little background in cognitive science and marketed to other educators with even less.” seidenbergreading.net/2024/11/21/c...
