The Conversation: Many remedial programs superior to RR

[debbie]

This is a good article written by Lorraine Hammond - (although I must confess that I am disappointed that she did not include Phonics International in the list of alternative interventions to Reading Recovery. I think people don't perceive it as an intervention programme because we don't promote it as such!)

Anyway, this is a really important article:


https://theconversation.com/there-are-m ... very-39574

[debbie]

In response to Lorraine's excellent and important article, James Chapman wrote this message:

I think the picture is even worse than that often portrayed. In a chapter on RR in the volume Excellence & Equity in Literacy Education: The Case of New Zealand (Tunmer & Chapman Eds., London, Palgrave Macmillan; in press [due out June/July 2015]) we show that the claims made by Clay and on the RR NZ website are simply false. Clay (1987) claimed that RR would “clear out of the remedial education system all the children who do not learn to read for many event-produced reasons [i.e., environmental, cultural, or economic causes] and all the children who have organically based problems but who can be taught to achieve independent status in reading and writing despite this” (p. 169). (The square brackets are Clay’s words.) These claims have never been substantiated.

Similarly, the RR NZ website claim that RR “is an effective early literacy intervention designed to significantly reduce the number of children with literacy difficulties in schools,” (http://www.readingrecovery.ac.nz)... the RR programme “may be characterized as an insurance against low literacy levels” (http://www.readingrecovery.ac.nz/reading_recovery), is equally without any substance.

On the contrary, NZ data reported in 2 follow-up studies of successfully discontinued RR children (Jesson & Limbrick, 2014; Nicholas & Parkhill, 2013) showed that around 50% were performing at below average levels on standardized measures of reading. While RR claims an 80% success rate based on annual data, the “successes” are often not sustained.

Further, our analyses of NZ reading achievement data from the PIRLS 2011 survey of 9-year olds showed that students who had been in RR 3 years earlier were considerably behind their same-age peers: for Maori and Pacific children and those in schools located in low SES neighborhoods, PIRLS reading achievement scores were around 100 points (over 1 standard deviation) below the scores of students who did not receive RR or any other type of remedial reading programme.

James Chapman

Are politicians and our misguided teaching profession going to promote multi-cueing reading strategies and Reading Recovery forever - regardless of the research and classroom findings?

How does one change the status quo when it is so very entrenched in the 'establishment' (internationally) and so many teachers put their blind faith into Reading Recovery?