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Essay on Effectiveness of Reading Programs
The question as how do children learn to read, has motivated educational researchers for a century and produced a large body of research literature. It is a amazingly complex question that produces no simple solutions and has sparked a keen discussion stretching four decades (Chall, 1967). In an effort to move beyond that discussion, the federal government lately funded a careful meta-analysis of the reading research. This research-on-the-research produced two influential studies that offer a rational statement of what is known about the reading process along with a working outline of the “best practices” for teaching reading.
Research Literature
The Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties (PRD) studied the rich base of research on reading acquisition, reviewing quantitative studies, reading programs, and numerous qualitative studies that used descriptive, correlational and case study methods. The committee merged its findings and recommendations in the book, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) published by the National Academy Press.
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) sponsored a review, which, like the NRC, appointed a committee of reading researchers, teacher educators, administrators, and parents. This group, the National Reading Panel (NRP) was charged with the task of reviewing the reading research to identify specifically which instructional strategies could be said to “work.” This charge limited the panel's review to those research studies that were experimental or quasi-experimental in design. The Panel published its results in two documents: Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000a) and Report of the National Reading Panel: Reports of the Subgroups (NICHD, 2000b).
The reports recommended that some children come to school understanding how print works in the world. The research on this understanding, the emergent literacy skill, concludes that children who have this understanding are more likely to be successful in learning to read than their peers.......
