My Response To The National Inquiry Prof Brian Cambourne

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My Response To The National InquiryProf Brian
Cambourne

• Disappointed,
• Conned,
• Cynical

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Disappointed because. . .

• Could have achieved so much if ideology had NOT
  trumped evidence

3
Conned because. . . .

• . . theres some intellectually dishonest
• sleight of hand
• being perpetrated
• in the name of
• Evidence-Based Research
• (EBR)

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Cynical because . . .

• The view of
• EvidenceBased Research (EBR) is
• Narrow
• Extremist

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Cynical because . . .

• Effective reading is never explicitly defined.
  Its only when one looks at the research studies
  selected for the review that one becomes more
  fully aware of the CON being perpetrated.

Im not barking at print, Im reading effectively
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This is Whats Never Made Explicit. Its hidden
and then presented as if it is an established
scientific fact.
LETTERS SOUNDS MEANING
This step is This step
is seen to be considered
Reading Non-reading
(turning letters
(listening, or turning into
sounds and sounds into meaning)
pronouncing words
accurately) A schematic representation of how
the authors of the report define effective
reading
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This is Whats Never Made Explicit. Its hidden
and then presented as if it is an established
scientific fact.
LETTERS MEANING SOUND
READING
NON-READING ie. Reading
is ie. When we know making
meaning. the meaning of a
word, we are helped to pronounce
it. A schematic representation of how the
majority of researchers and teachers have
defined reading for as long as I can remember.
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If you define effective reading asaccurate
pronunciation of words,what kind of research do
you use to prove it ?
Research projects which measure reading ability
based on this view.
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The ONLY research considered valid by writers of
the Report

• Research which
• leads to accumulation of general laws
• seeks to prove cause-effect relationships
• employs highly controlled experiments
  quantitative methods
• proceeded in a linear or reductive fashion
• was data-informed rather than theoretical or
  speculative in nature.
• In other words it was research which was more
  like physics than biology, cultural anthropolgy,
  or political science.

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Research Which the Panel Ignored

• Research studies which address questions like
• Whats happening and what do those happenings
  mean?
• What is it like to be a child in the bottom
  reading group in a particular first grade class?
• How does Miss Smith set up her kindergarten
  classroom so that students learn to listen
  closely to what each other says?
• Why do the koori kids sit together in the
  playground at lunchtime and should we as
  educators care about that?
• How do experienced teachers, inexperienced
  teachers, skilled teachers, not so skilled
  teachers, advocates of whole language and those
  who have always followed the instructions in the
  teachers manual feel about so called
  teacher-proof materials?
• what are morally defensible criteria for
  judgments about justice in school funding
• etc.
• ONLY QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CAN ANSWER THESE
  SORTS OF QUESTIONS

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A Cautionary Tale About Scientific Extremism
In the fall of 2002, in Palo Alto, California, a
group of academics were gathered at a party. They
were discussing the NRC report and the current
federal policy of privileging randomized field
trials as the Gold Standard for educational
research. One of the people in the room was a
physician. He mentioned a report published in a
medical journal that quoted a researcher who had
worked for many years at the top laboratory for
polio research, the Salk Institute. The medical
researcher said that if knowledge development in
polio research had had to depend only on
conclusive findings from experiments, research on
polio would today consist mainly of studies of
the treatment effects of the iron lung. In sum,
the current federal agenda for increasing the
science in educational research is a mistake,
a course which if continued is likely to result
in tragic consequences for educational
researchers, practitioners, students, and
families.
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The 20 Recommendations in the ReportTonic OR
Toxin ?

• How we interpret the nitty determines the
• gritty

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Its not just biasedtheres lots of EBR
that refutes Implicit Message 1

• The Pre-Linguistically Deaf
• Evidence From Reading Homonyms
• Evidence From Reading Homographs
• Evidence From Archaeology Evolutionary Theory
• Evidence From Psycholinguistic Research Cognate
  Fields

wasnt
Why
. .this research even considered?
(See accompanying paper.)