Some early reading approaches yield fewer failing students

Which approaches have fewer learners a year or more behind?

I was poking around in some files from the 1990s and I found something I suspected readers might find interesting. It’s a graph that I produced using data about young students’ reading under various approaches to instruction. These data come from one of the most extensive evaluations of instructional approaches ever conducted, Project Follow Through.

In Follow Through, local education agencies that drew their students from areas with high levels of poverty and other similar threats to those students’ achievement got to select a sponsor with which the LEA would collaborate for multiple years. Each sponsor would help its LEAs implement the sponsor’s approach to primary grade education. The sponsor would supply materials, coaching, and so forth to multiple K-1-2 classrooms in the LEA.

All the sponsors and cooperating LEAs agreed to a common set of guidelines. For example, every sponsor had to include a parent-involvement component. All the LEAs had to provide a certain number of days of school every year(180?). Both sponsors and schools had to participate in an assessment system conducted by an independent agency.¹

Who were the players?

The following paragraphs describe the approaches of some of the major sponsors in Follow Through. Essentially each sponsor “pitched” its approach, telling prospective partners what it would provide the LEA.² I have paraphrased the descriptions of the sponsors’ approaches from a book by Nero and associates (1976), a group of researchers who had no outright connections with any one of the sponsors.. Based on these pitches, LEAs chose the sponsor with which it would collaborate. There were also some “self-sponsors” which were LEAs that rolled their own methods, but many LEAs chose the same sponsors, based on those sponsors’ own descriptions of their philosophy and methods.

As you read about these entrants in the race, I encourage you to predict which sponsors will have fewer (and more) students reading one or more grade levels below middle-class expectations. Make notes.

Here are paraphrases of sponsors’ approaches for several that were adopted by multiple LEAs:

1. Method A: This method emphasizes providing children with experiences through which intellectual process skills will develop, helping them to develop thinking skills, concepts, processes, and attitudes that enable them to assimilate new knowledge and apply it to their expanding personal environments. The approach is based in part on Piaget's developmental theory and focuses on the underlying cognitive processes that enable the child to acquire and organize knowledge of the world. Teachers should serve as facilitators and catalysts to the child's learning. They should establish an environment in which the children may have active experiences with a variety of objects, people, and materials. On a daily basis, children should plan, work to complete those plans, and informally present the products of their work to the teacher and to peers. The teacher may also provide small-group and whole-class activities. The curriculum should include the highly integrated use of sciences, crafts, and arts. Activities should permit children to experience relationships directly as they generate products and events of personal value.

2. Method B: This approach is concerned with (1) the growth process of individual children through various stages of development and (2) the quality of their interaction with people and with materials which foster such development. The method is concerned about the kinds of people that children should become: confident, inventive, responsive, productive human beings. According to these folks, the growth and development on the part of the child is believed to occur in classrooms in which careful planning by the teaching staff is combined with self-selection or self-determination by the children within the context of an interactive world of work, creativity, and social competence. Language and reading permeates the whole environment. Initially children learn to read through the recording of their own experiences and reading is taught as a useful and pleasurable skill. The classroom is arranged so that it encourages children to choose their activities, when appropriate, within the context of a carefully planned curriculum which stresses social studies. Children work as individuals or in groups and have access to a variety of materials.

3. Method C: According to this method, research reported in journals and elsewhere clearly indicates the validity of applying behavior analysis techniques to education. The advocates recommend systematic and precise use of positive reinforcement in classroom instruction. The staff should define educational objectives, determine what the child already knows, and use instructional procedures and motivational techniques to achieve the objective. Classroom interactions should emphasize the use of positive reinforcement. Reading should begin with phonics-based instruction and progress to comprehension activities. Math instruction should emphasize correct use of mathematical terms, clear writing of numerals, correct problem solutions, and appropriate social behavior. Throughout, teachers should use token reinforcement to reward correct answers and appropriate behavior.

4. Method D: This method was designed for low-income or culturally different learners. The advocates say that children (a) learn better if instruction is given in their native language; (b) should be given concrete experiences with English words; (c) benefit from materials which emphasize syntactic and phonetic approaches; and (d) should understand and appreciate their own culture so that they can readily accept the cultures of others. Instruction should be developmental, cognitive, and social. It should help each child feel he or she is a valuable human being, develop sensory-perceptual skills, develop oral language and reading skills (in native language, first), develop thinking and reasoning skills, develop social science concepts (in the dominant language), understand and adapt language for use under varied circumstances, and understand cultural concepts represented in classrooms and to coexist with other cultures.

5. Method E: According to advocates of this approach, every child can achieve well in school if given the right instruction; children's failure is really instructional failure. According to this view, some children lag behind in developing relevant skills, particularly in language; they need to have accelerated learning to reach achievement levels of their peers. The method emphasizes (a) working in small groups, (b) using programmed instruction, (c) teaching intelligent behavior, (d) using reinforcement, and (e) monitoring child performance. Advocates say that it is important to control the details of day-to-day instruction. Instruction should move quickly and incorporate many student responses. Teachers should use materials that the children can take home to show their parents how they are progressing. They should group students homogeneously.

What are the results?

So, do you have your bets in with your bookie? Will Method A be high or low in generating kids who read well? How about Method E?

Now, here’s the key to the code on which you based your bets. In the figure, the methods have their real names, and those real names match as follows:

1. Method A = Cognitive Curriculum (AKA “High Scope”)

2. Method B = Tucson Early Education (AKA “Whole Lang” or “Balanced Lit”)

3. Method C = Behavior Analysis (AKA “Kansas”)

4. Method D = Educational Development Corporation (AKA “Southwest Labs”)

5. Method E = Direct Instruction (AKA “Oregon”)

So some of these approaches had 50% or more of their students scoring one or more years below average. One approach had 20% of its students scoring at a level that far behind.

All of you who put your money on Method E should be patting yourselves on the shoulder.

Sources

Nero and Associates (1976). Follow Through: A Resource Guide to Sponsor Models and Materials.

Stallings, J. (1975). Implementation and child effects of teaching practice in Follow Through classrooms. Monograhs of the Society for Research in Child Development (Serial No. 163), 40(7-8).

Stebbins, L. B., St. Pierre, R. G., Proper, E. C., Anderson, R. B., and Cerva, T. R. (1977). A planned variation model. Vol. IV-A Effects of Follow Through models. U.S. Office of Education, Washington, DC.

1. SRI, then known as Stanford Research Institute, conducted these assessments. SRI had no connections to any sponsors or schools, thereby reducing the chances of hanky-panky with the resulting outcome data. SRI administered a common suite of assessments (basic skills, conceptual, social-emotional) that employed many of the most widely trusted instruments of the time. Two other notes of importance here: (a) all the data collected by SRI were analyzed independently by Abt Associates (Stebbins et al., 1977) and (b) sponsors could collect their own data, too, although they agreed that the mandated data collected by SRI were critically important.

2. I’m only exaggerating a little here. Representatives of each LEA were invited to a meeting (all expenses paid, I think). At the meeting the spokespeople for each sponsor presented a brief talk explaining the sponsor’s philosophy and practice. After learning about the sponsors’ approaches, LEAs subsequently got to select. Nero and Associates (1976) and Stallings (1978) include descriptions of the process. [MORE?}