in the classroom
Facing the facts
The misalignment between evidence-based research and literacy approaches in schools .
By Julie Scali
On the first day of the school year as a graduate teacher I encountered a slap in the face . I started my day brimming with confidence , but that all changed when one boy walked through the door . His name was Jacob and I quickly discovered that he could not read a single word . A Year 4 student , with four years of full time schooling under his belt and he had somehow ‘ slipped through the cracks ’ of education . How could this be ?
The next shock came when I delved into my mental toolkit of how to help him , and realised I had no idea where to begin . How was it possible that a newly graduated primary school teacher had not been taught how to teach a child the foundations of reading ?
READING RESEARCH AND AUSTRALIA ’ S GRADUAL READING DECLINE Fast-forward one year and it was the year 2000 . Some 21 years ago now , some very significant research came out from the National Reading Panel in the US around what instructional skills made the greatest impact on reading achievement . Almost identical findings were later released from Australia in 2005 with the Rowe Review ; and the UK ’ s Rose Report in 2006 .
The international research findings all indicated that in order to be efficient and skilled readers , there are five key elements of reading instruction that students need to be explicitly taught . These are : Phonemic Awareness , Phonics , Vocabulary , Fluency and Comprehension . Recent research also indicates that there should in fact be a sixth element which is Oral Language , because what children can ’ t say they will most likely not be able to read , and nor will they understand .
In that same year of 2000 when this scientific data was released , Australia was considered to be up with the best in the world , ranked 2nd in reading proficiency , according to international PISA testing for 15-year-old students .
However , over the past 20 years , our mean performance in reading has been steadily declining . In the most recent PISA test in 2018 , Australia was ranked 16th in reading , falling 14 places in 18 years .
Closer to home , NAPLAN data in 2019 indicated that 17.2 , 15.7 and 27.8 per cent of our Year 7 students in Reading , Spelling and Writing respectively , achieved at or below the national minimum standard . The results were very similar for Year 5 , but Year 3 showed a slight improvement .
So why the sudden drop in our world standing and the high proportion of students achieving such low level literacy standards ?
MISALIGNMENT BETWEEN EVIDENCE , ACTION , INTERVENTION AND IMPACT One hypothesis is that there is a misalignment between what the evidence-based research tells us and what Australian universities and schools teach at the classroom level . That is not to say that many schools are not already embedding the research and making an impact , but I know first hand that there is a large proportion of schools that are not ; and in terms of the statistics in our world standings , something is amiss .
There are still schools that have not adopted all of the ‘ Big 5 of Reading ’ skills identified back in 2000 , schools who continue to teach literacy approaches not backed by current educational research , and schools that lack effective intervention approaches to respond to literacy difficulties .
An example of this is the absence of a ‘ Response to Intervention ’ ( RTI ) approach
16 | educationreview . com . au