Beyond the smoke and mirrors: A critique of the national reading panel report on phonics

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 82, Issue 7, 2001, Pages 500-506

  Garan, Elaine M ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039374454     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170108200705     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. Pauline B. Gough, "fǒn'ǐks wôrz," Phi Delta Kappan, March 1989, p. 498.
2. For ease of citation, we will use the title "Phonics Subgroup Report" to refer to Chapter 2, Part II, of the Reports of the Subgroups.
3. Timothy Shanahan, "National Reading Panel Report: Work Praised, but Distortion Fears Persist," Reading Today, June/July 2000, p. 4.
4. Reports of the Subgroups, pp. 2-89 through 2-90. The questions the panel sought to answer through its meta-analysis were: • Does systematic phonics instruction help children learn to read better than nonsystematic phonics instruction or instruction teaching no phonics? • Are some types of phonics instruction more effective than others? Are some phonics programs more effective than others? • Is phonics instruction more effective when students are taught individually, in small groups, or in whole classes? • Is phonics instruction more effective when it is introduced in kindergarten or first grade to students not yet reading or in later grades after students have begun to read? • Is phonics instruction beneficial for children who are having difficulty learning to read? Is it effective in preventing reading failure among children who are at risk for developing reading problems in the future? Is it effective in remediating reading difficulties among children who have not made normal progress in learning to read? • Does phonics instruction improve children's ability to read and comprehend texts as well as their decoding and word-reading skills? • Does phonics instruction have an impact on children's growth in spelling? • Is phonics instruction effective with children at different socioeconomic levels? • Does the type of instruction given to control groups as part of a study to evaluate phonics make a difference? • If phonics instruction isfound to be more effective than less-phonics instruction, were the experiments that showed these effects well designed or poorly designed?
5. In most cases, effect sizes are calculated by subtracting the mean of the comparison group from the mean of the experimental group and dividing this number by the pooled standard deviation. Occasionally, other procedures are used. All calculations reported by the NRP were conducted with DSTAT, a software package for statistical analysis published by Erlbaum.
6. Neil J. Salkind, Exploring Research (Upper Saddle Creek, N.J.: McGraw-Hill, 2000), p. 181.
7. See study number 32, Appendix G: Maureen Lovett et al., "Can Dyslexia Be Treated? Treatment-Specific and Generalized Treatment Effects in Dyslexic Children's Response to Remediation," Brain and Language, vol. 37, 1989, pp. 90-121.
8. Jeanne Chall and Shirley Feldmann, "First-Grade Reading: An Analysis of the Interactions of Professed Methods, Teacher Implementation, and Child Background," Reading Teacher, vol. 19, 1966, pp. 569-75.
9. Salkind, p. 86.
10. "National Reading Panel Releases Report on Research-Based Approaches to Reading Instruction: Expert Panel Offers Its Groundbreaking Findings to Congress and the Nation," press release, 13 April 2000.
11. The term "reliability" is used to refer to the general findings of the NRP report (Reports of the Subgroups, p. 2-94).
12. The term "validity" is applied to the conclusions of the meta-analysis (Summary, p. 28).
13. Gough, p. 498.