Handbook of Reading Disability Research

Anne McGill-Franzen, Richard Allington, Anne McGill-Franzen, Richard L. Allington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136980664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bringing together a wide range of research on reading disabilities, this comprehensive Handbook extends current discussion and thinking beyond a narrowly defined psychometric perspective. Emphasizing that learning to read proficiently is a long-term developmental process involving many interventions of various kinds, all keyed to individual developmental needs, it addresses traditional questions (What is the nature or causes of reading disabilities? How are reading disabilities assessed? How should reading disabilities be remediated? To what extent is remediation possible?) but from multiple or alternative perspectives.

Taking incursions into the broader research literature represented by linguistic and anthropological paradigms, as well as psychological and educational research, the volume is on the front line in exploring the relation of reading disability to learning and language, to poverty and prejudice, and to instruction and schooling.

The editors and authors are distinguished scholars with extensive research experience and publication records and numerous honors and awards from professional organizations representing the range of disciplines in the field of reading disabilities. Throughout, their contributions are contextualized within the framework of educators struggling to develop concrete instructional practices that meet the learning needs of the lowest achieving readers.

Part I

Perspectives on Reading Disability

EDITOR GEORGE HRUBY

1

The Political Contexts of Reading Disabilities

PATRICK SHANNON AND JACQUELINE EDMONDSON

Pennsylvania State University

The study of politics is the investigation of power within particular contexts. Power circulates through discourses among various groups who make use of and are used by values and language to participate in on-going events (e.g., Foucault, 1980; Gonick, 2003; Peet, 2007). These discourses and uses of discourse set parameters, influence actions, and position participants within events. Those who wield power in some contexts are powerless in others as negotiations push and pull participants in ways of their own making, but not entirely within their control. The discourses surrounding DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) can serve as a short introduction to the political contexts of reading disabilities, demonstrating how power works.

Each summer our campus supports a reading program for children and youth who are experiencing difficulty in learning to read at school. The program serves as a practicum for masters degree students seeking reading specialist certification. Working from a 3-to-1 students/teacher ratio, we enroll between 20 and 30 children each year. Traditionally, the enrollment process begins in late spring after teachers and parents have conferred about a student’s progress throughout the academic year and their projections for success in the next grade. In the past, parent phone calls would trickle in during late May and early June with discussions about “summer regress” and “a boost going into next year.” Over the last 3 years, however, our program is full with a waiting list by the end of January. Parents call with panic in their voices, reporting that their kindergarten and first grade children are “reading disabled” because they have not “passed the DIBELS tests.”

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills are a set of six fluency tests (letter names, initial sounds, phoneme segmentation, nonsense words, oral reading, and retelling) designed to enable regular monitoring of “prereading and early reading skills” (www.dibels.org). The purpose, content, and format of DIBELS are built upon the evidence-based conclusions of the National Reading Panel (2000) and Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1998) and are pronounced valid and reliable based on their correlations with other established tests. In these ways, DIBELS performs the discourse of experimental science—its language, logic, appearance, and values—constructing reading abilities and disabilities in its wake.

At the same time, DIBELS is a product that competes in a market created when the need for regular monitoring of these skills became generally accepted within the reading field. Although the basic materials of DIBELS can be downloaded from a website, and students’ scores can be processed and packaged into reports for $1 per student, the tests are also available commercially in several forms along with test preparation materials and technical and human support as well. These products and services are advertised through professional journals and the Internet. In these ways, DIBELS incorporates the discourse of business, working for a market share and to maximize profits, complicating what it means to determine reading ability and disability.

The market for the regular measurement of early reading was officially sanctioned when the Bush administration implemented its Reading First Initiative of the No Child Left Behind education law of 2002. In order to insure that all students would test “proficient in reading” by 2014, the Department of Education connected federal funding to state and school district compliance with testing systems that could track schools’ progress toward that goal. With the discourses of science and business firmly underlying modern policy making, federal officials searched for a valid and reliable technology to standardize the practices and outcomes of reading education across the country. According to a Department of Education Inspector General’s Report (September, 2006), Reading First officials pressured states and school districts to adopt DIBELS as the appropriate technology in order to comply with federal policy and qualify for funding. In these ways, DIBELS projects a government discourse, framing the use of its tests as lawful behavior and a commitment to helping all students become proficient readers.

Through these three (and other) discourses, DIBELS positions participants within reading education, replacing local knowledge and practices with the universal values, language, and rules of science, business, and government. For example, adults’ familiarity with students’ interest in text or children’s questions around meanings are discounted in favor of students’ speed and accuracy when decoding sound and print. School traditions and teacher decisions give way to technologies that direct students’ attention to code in printed texts. Although these discourses are sometimes contradictory, they provide new possibilities for the participants as well as limit others. DIBELS enables administrators, teachers, parents, and students to be more effective, more efficient, and more accountable during reading instruction.

However, DIBELS also defines these participants by the same terms. Each becomes defined as an abled or disabled administrator, teacher, parent, or reader according to the six measures in the DIBELS battery, and their subsequent actions are disciplined by the meanings assigned and performed through the authority of these discourses. All other relations with text become irrelevant. To the extent that participants internalize these discourses, the power of DIBELS becomes invisible and natural, and local administrators make policies, teachers label students, parents worry about their children, and readers are made or unmade accordingly. And the reach of these discourses comes knocking on the door of our campus reading program with early calls from anxious parents, who have been warned by concerned teachers, who work in schools that must prove that they have a technology to produce proficient readers within specified time limits. Our program’s enrollment becomes younger each year—filled with kindergarten graduates and first grade repeaters. Although the parents’ reactions have changed, the discourses behind the politics are not new. DIBELS is only the most recent amplification for these discourses.

In order to consider the political contexts of reading disabilities, we will examine the construction, maintenance, and uses of the discourses of science, business, and the government that have and continue to swirl around reading education in the United States. Although reading disabilities appear to be a psychological state of being, we understand the term to be ripe with politics at many levels. Our intention is to provide histories, locating the origins and consequences of these discourses within the emergence of disabilities in the reading field during the 20th century and into the 21st. Within those histories, we shall search for values and interests that moved or move the term in various ways with consequences that ripple through clinics, schools, states, and national contexts.

Science Discourses

In An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research, Lagemann (2000) argues that scholars’ efforts to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to education resulted in the creation of psychology as an academic field. In order to be recognized as a field, “scientists of the mind” had to distinguish their work from previous philosophic and religious considerations on mental activity (Shore, 2001). Toward that end, would-be psychologists secularized the Christian virtues of faith and hope in terms of science and progress and operationalized the metaphysical questions about the mind—What can I know? What ought I to do? For what can I hope?—to: How does the brain work? Accordingly a science of the mind, psychology, would provide the positive knowledge that would lead human beings out of the problems of theological fictions and metaphysical egotism toward the natural laws of learning, increasing human capacity to make life easier and securing individual and social freedom (Ward, 2002).

Although efforts to separate science from philosophy and religion began during the French Enlightenment and accelerated with August Comte’s 1830 call for a social science to make human nature comprehensible, experimental psychology began in William Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, during 1879 (Danziger, 2001). James McKeen Cattell (Wundt’s first assistant) and G. Stanley Hall are often credited for extending Wundt’s experimental work and bringing it to the United States, where it met the burgeoning applications of science to industry, medicine, and the military. William James’s (1890) Principles of Psychology is considered the first American book on psychology. Twelve years in the writing, James’s two volumes included chapters on the functioning of the brain and brain activity.

Yet, James’s work can also serve as a metaphor for the struggle among discourses of science, philosophy, and religion within the scholarly discussions of the mind (Tolman, 2001). For example, in 1902, James published The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature in which he rationalized a belief in God, not on ontological or teleological grounds, but as therapeutic. He cautioned psychologists, “Science must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all” (p. 1179). In 1904, he published his interpretation of the central crisis in American psychology, “Does Consciousness Exist?”

Behind this ambiguity, American researchers interested in psychology worked to separate themselves from philosophy (Koch, 1992). In 1883, Hall established a psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins and began to publish his results in the American Journal of Psychology in 1887. During the late 1880s, psychology departments opened at many established universities and became the founding discipline for the new Clark University (which hired Hall as its first president). There were 10 laboratories by 1890 and 20 by 1893. The American Psychological Association (APA) was formed in 1892 and held its first meeting that year. In 1895, Cattell became the editor of the Psychological Review with the first recognized editorial review board. Because philosophers found it difficult to present their papers at the APA conferences and then publish them in the psychology journals, they split from APA to form the Western Philosophical Association in 1901 and the American Philosophical Association in 1902.

Appeals to science and the use of science methods were the primary reasons for tension between these groups (Toulmin & Leary, 1992). In 1896, Karl Pearson explained,

The scientific method consists in the careful often laborious classification of facts, the comparison of their relationships and sequences, and finally in the discovery by aid of the disciplined imagination of a brief statement or formula, which in a few words resumes a wide range of facts. Such a formula is called a scientific law. (p. 22)

E. L. Thorndike (1906) explained the social advantages of this disciplined imagination and named psychologists as agents of this work.

The judgments of science are distinguished from other judgments by being more impartial, more objective, more precise, and more subject to verification by any competent observer and being made by those who by their very nature and training should be better judges. Science knows or should know no favorites and cares for nothing in its conclusions but the truth. (p. 265)

Starting with Wundt and Cattell, psychologists looked for scientific laws that would explain reading (Venezky, 1984). Although Wundt was most interested in physiology, Cattell pursued his interests in understanding individual differences by focusing on observable behaviors he thought relatable to reading, including letter and word recognition, legibility, and attention span. His interest in differences led him to extend Galton’s work through the development of mental tests (a term he coined in 1890), which could be used to establish a normal range of intelligence by sampling individual behaviors. In the same study, Cattell predicted that “experimental psychology is likely to take a place in the educational plan of our schools and universities” (p. 390). Although Cattell’s efforts to capture human difference through mental testing proved futile, his students (E L. Thorndike, Walter Dearborn, and Arthur Gates) and others would bring the concept of mental testing to their experiments on learning in general and on reading in particular. In fact, Venezky (1984) labeled this era “The Golden Years” of reading research, leading to the publication of Edmond Burke Huey’s The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading in 1908 and Thorndike’s establishment of the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1911. Kolers would note in 1968 that “remarkably little empirical information has been added to what Huey knew (about the reading process), although some of the phenomena have now been measured more precisely” (Huey, 1908/1968, p. xiv.).

In these golden years, the language about reading and reading education changed from contemplation of how reading fitted into moral development, stimulated thought, or captured beauty to analyses of perception, speed, and precision. The language of reading instruction changed from historical and descriptive accounts or personal evaluations of classroom practices and texts to statistical comparisons of basic perception among able and less able subjects and of experimental interventions against traditional methods. For example, Ruskin’s philosophical words were often quoted: “To use books rightly is to go to them for help; to be led by them into wider sight, purer conceptions than our own, and to receive from them the united sentences of the judges and councils of all time against our solitary and unstable opinions” (e.g., Brown, 1906). Such sentiments gave way in the early 20th century to a different discourse substituting scientific rationality and technological advances for the experiential basis of tradition treatments of reading and reading instruction. Consider the following statements.

After all we have thus far been content with trial and error, too often allowing publishers to be our jury, and a real rationalization of the process of inducing a child with the practice of reading has not been made. (Huey, 1908/1968, p. 9)

When the mechanics of reading, if we may use that phrase, are mastered, the whole attention may now be concentrated on the significance of the passage. (Judd, 1914, p. 366)

Any progress toward measurin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I: Perspectives on Reading Disability
• Part II: Causes and Consequences of Reading Disability
• Part III: Assessing Reading Proficiency
• Part IV: Developmental Patterns of Reading Proficiency and Reading Difficulties
• Part V: Developmental Interventions
• Part VI: Studying Reading Disabilities
• Epilogue
• About the Authors
• Index