I thought it was very fitting that I was reading Allington’s article on my was back to Austin from Seattle via Tennessee this weekend.
In reading this article, one of the first ideas was the search for a “one-size fits all” curriculum. It still amazes me with all the research out there on how that will never come to light, but yet so many resources are put into finding some magic curriculum that will improve instruction for all. Instead of looking for the magic curriculum why can’t we put those resources into teacher education programs that prepare teachers for critically thinking and researching their own classes and preparing new teachers for diverse classrooms? and as well as a multitude of other ways that resources could be spent. Not to give a simplistic answer to a complicated issue.
It was interesting to me in the Allington piece that he mentioned that the NRP was underfunded and did not have enough time to conduct the kind of research that needed to be done. I had never thought of those issues when looking at the NRP. That may contribute to why they choose to only choose quantitive studies to review. Because if they had widened their scope they would have had to have had more time and would have had to have a way to synthesize the diversity of qualitative studies done out there. However if they had looked at qualitative studies it would have provided them with plenty of teacher-education studies. They were complaining about the lack of studies available on teacher-education, but that is because they had such a narrow scope and most of those studies are qualitative. In not looking at qualitative studies, they really missed a lot of interesting and diverse work. In one sense, the report only allowed for one type of thinking to be permitted resulting in very narrow knowledge construction on a complicated issue. So much research in education is done through qualitative measures and to not allow that in the NPR I thought was really reckless and a misrepresentation of the kind of work that is happening in the field.
Allington also mentions the four aspects of effective reading instruction, which seem so simple, but why are they still not emphasized? This goes back to what is considered “scientific” based reading research. It does not surprise me that the NRP had so much focus on phonics, because that is the kind of variables you can control for in a quantitive study, while it is much harder to control what kinds of knowledge did a student gain from reading a text that he/she choose? Until the NRP extends its’ view on what is acceptable research, the results are going to be narrow and only provide a narrow “solution”.
September 17, 2009 at 9:13 pm |
Hi,
I was wondering about the length of certain sections as opposed to others and thinking about how all of my research and most of what I read would have been excluded from the report on Teacher Education. But…could they have expanded certain sections to qualitative research and not others? The idea that scientific research is limited to studies that draw from methods in psychological and medical research (see p. 5 of the summary) is so strange to me as a qualitative researcher. But, as an educator, I know that pull to know “what works” and what we should use our resources towards.
Did you notice there was an assumed monolingual, English reader in the entire summary report, although the research they reviewed included students from different subgroups such as English Language Learners? That was strange to me. There was also an assumed grade level in each summary although the studies bridged grade levels. So much missing…
Melissa