I was reviewing my bookmarks tonight -- sometimes I bookmark things to read later, and then forget they are there -- and I found this testimony of Dr. G. Reid Lyon, the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institutes of Health, to a subcommittee of the House of Representatives.

His address was about the deleterious effects on students and teachers of crummy education research. I wish I could tell when it was given -- the date isn't on the link.

Lyon believes the reason seasoned teachers pay no attention to ed research is that it isn't worth paying attention to. It's worse than worthless, he claims, and he makes the case that it has to improve if it is to become trustworthy.

And he offers a personal anecdote about the effect on his early career of the failure of ed research to deliver real guidance.

I know first hand the devastating effect that poor quality research has on teaching practices and the trust teachers have in education research. As a young brand new third grade teacher in the mid 1970s I was responsible for teaching 28 students of varying abilities and backgrounds. Many of my students had not yet learned to read which concerned me greatly, but I was informed in my education courses and via the school philosophy that this was to be expected - children learn at their own pace. My school had also adopted a reading curriculum that was based upon the assumption that reading was a natural process, similar to learning to listen and speak. Following this curriculum, I presented reading concepts to children through exposing them to wonderful literature, and attempted to teach phonics concepts incidentally as they appeared in different stories. I also employed the oral language and writing activities that were suggested in my teacher's instructional manual.

At the beginning of the year, a third of my students could not read well enough to understand what they had read. Their reading was slow and labored and they mispronounced words constantly. Their spelling was lousy. At the end of the year, the same third of my students could not read well. Their reading remained slow and effortful, the time it took to read text was so great that they could not remember what they read, and their spelling was still lousy. The only change that I could discern was that their motivation to learn to read had waned, and their self-esteem had suffered substantially. Likewise, I felt like a failure, I had let down the children I was responsible for, and I left the classroom teaching profession. I attributed my failure to the fact that I was inexperienced, which I clearly was. It was only later that I came to learn in great depth that the reading instructional approach embraced by my school was not only based upon research that was questionable at best, but that the major assumptions upon which the instructional philosophy and recommended teaching interactions rested had never been adequately tested through well designed studies.

I mention this anecdote only to provide a personal explanation for why many teachers lose trust in "research" and eschew educational research findings to guide their practice. Those that stay in the profession learn to simply "wait out" the next "research-based" instructional magic bullet.

Of course, it's a dubious sort of failure that leaves you a Branch Chief at the National Institutes of Health. But I do wonder if other potentially good teachers burn out as a result of having believed in, and being failed by, the unsupported theories that they learned in ed school.

-- CarolynJohnston - 01 Nov 2005

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