[senco-forum] Pilot reading project

How will they measure "reading ages"? Different tests measure very

I intend to leave teachers to measure reading age any way they have faith 
in. Reading-age tests not only measure different things but their outcomes 
are invatiably influenced by the skills level of the person administering 
the tests.
A very large numer of different schools will be involved in my project and I 
will be interested only in averaging out the results.
Reading age tests generally are a very imprecise measuring instrument - even 
the concept of a reading-age is itself highly questionable. I am interested 
only establishing the extent of general trends. I regard absolute trends as 
a total myth as far as measuring reading is concerned.
I define reading as the retrieval and assimilation of the intellectual 
content of text and decoding skill as the key factor in 'retrieval'   The 
ability to 'assimilate' the intellectual content of texts has more to do 
with innate intellect and life experiences and that is not something I will 
be getting into. If I can improve the ability of older, poor readers to 
improve their ability to decode texts then I am satisfied that I have 
progressed one vital step in the acquisition of reading skill.

Eddie C.

Eddie C.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary Kelly" <mary.kelly4 at ntlworld.com>
To: "'Eddie Carron'" <eddiecarron at btconnect.com>; "'Maggie Downie'" 
<maizie2004 at yahoo.co.uk>; <senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 5:00 PM
Subject: RE: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project

> How will they measure "reading ages"? Different tests measure very 
> different
> things and you need to ensure that the sample, collected together, is
> shedding light on the same thing?
> Mary
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eddie Carron [mailto:eddiecarron at btconnect.com]
> Sent: 10 August 2007 16:49
> To: Mary Kelly; 'Maggie Downie'; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
> Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project
>
> Schools which particpate will be submitting before and after reading ages 
> as
>
> well as SATS results but I am particulary targetting Year 6 children who 
> are
>
> predicted by their teachers to be unlikely to achieve Level 4 , hence the
> SATs involvement.
> The letter will be going out to LEA in two weeks time but I will be 
> looking
> for any Junior/Primary schools who wish to participate to contact me
> directly on eddiecarron at btconnect.com for more details.  Heather Govier at
> the new ictopus site info at ictopus.org.uk is going to give it a mention so
> that may also be a source of participants. I had no difficutly amassing 
> one
> thousand poor readers for my Millenium Literacy Project so hopefully it 
> will
>
> be the same this time round. I am also hoping that a proportion of
> participants will be completing the daily session at home on their own 
> home
> computers under their parents supervision because that has always been a
> highly productive strategy.
>
> Eddie C.
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Mary Kelly" <mary.kelly4 at ntlworld.com>
> To: "'Eddie Carron'" <eddiecarron at btconnect.com>; "'Maggie Downie'"
> <maizie2004 at yahoo.co.uk>; <senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk>
> Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 10:03 AM
> Subject: RE: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project
>
>
>> Dear Eddie,
>> Since the skill that your pilot is addressing is that of word recognition
>> (i.e. not language comprehension, inference, expressive language etc.
>> etc.),
>> would you not be wise to use a test of word recognition (such as the 
>> WRAT)
>> at the beginning and again at the end of the intervention? Any results in
>> terms of SATs will be controversial because SATs are not standardised and
>> they test a great deal more than word recognition. You might like also to
>> consider having a control population that is matched for its word
>> recognition scores at the start of the intervention?
>> Good luck,
>> Mary
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
>> [mailto:senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Eddie Carron
>> Sent: 09 August 2007 23:59
>> To: Maggie Downie; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
>> Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project
>>
>> Hi Maggie
>>
>> My programme doesn't purport to teach children anything .
>>
>> What is does is create an environment in which the children themselves
>> learn
>> these correspondences intuitively. There is no formal teaching involved.
>>
>> It uses words which are within children's receptive vocabularies  A group
>> of
>> such words are presented on the screen and the one of them is voiced - 
>> the
>> child's first task to make the link between what s/he hears and what s/he
>> sees.  In my pilot, children with reading deficits as great as six years
>> managed (to my surprise) to cope with this requirement, apparently with
>> little difficulty.
>>
>> As a means of extending the time which these words are held in short term
>> memory, they are also required to 'whisper-spell' each word before it
>> disappears and then to spell it using an onscreen voiced alphabet.
>>
>> It is neither intended to teach the children these words or that the 
>> words
>> themselves should be 'learned.' The words are simply vehicles which
>> contain
>> the range of grapheme/phoneme correspondences which are necessary for the
>> acquisition of decoding skills.
>>
>> The strategy I  propose would appear to be acceptable to older children.
>> It
>> is a very short (20 mins) daily session. Teachers by and large seemed to
>> be
>> supportive in the pilot project .  Some even intend to carry on with it.
>> My
>> larger project should, if the results are positive, be sufficient to
>> convince everyone except perhaps those whose convictions are fundamental.
>>
>> The sample used will be a credible one (over one thousand Year 6 poor
>> readers) and the end test (Key stage 2 results) is a widely recognised
>> one.
>>
>> Surely no reasonable person could object to a remedial research project
>> carried out in such a valid way at no cost to the taxpayer or the
>> participating schools.  If the research shows that this strategy offers 
>> no
>> significant advantage, I can live with that outcome but there are
>> indications that it will prove otherwise.
>>
>> I will be involving at least one thousand Year 6 children who are
>> predicted
>> to achieve less than Level 4 at Key Stage 2. If the project results in
>> some
>> of them in fact achieving Level 4 or higher, would you not regard that as
>> a
>> good thing?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Eddie C.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>>  From: Maggie Downie
>>  To: Eddie Carron ; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
>>  Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:08 PM
>>  Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project
>>
>>
>>  Eddie,
>>
>>  How does your programme teach children the phoneme/grapheme
>> correspondences that they don't know?  Or is it assuming that they do 
>> know
>> them all?
>>
>>  Maggie
>>
>>  Eddie Carron <eddiecarron at btconnect.com> wrote:
>>    Aly - you'll be less confused if you read my mail properly. I said '
>> These need not even be real words.' I am still experimenting with the
>> actual
>> content but one version starts with nonsense words but that sort of
>> challenge misses the point entirely.
>>
>>    There is no question of children learning lists of words. There is 
>> only
>> a question of children being exposed to the experience of all grapheme -
>> phoneme correspondences so that they can become internalised as sight
>> vocabulary.
>>
>>    We know that all poor readers have limited sight vocabularies and that
>> all good readers have very extensive sight vocabularies but no matter how
>> extensive they are, there will always remain at least 25% of words in an
>> average piece of text which have to be decoded. That is inevitable. I am
>> only hypothesizing that a healthy sight vocabulary serves as an 
>> intuitive,
>> internalised means of decoding and that sight vocab can be proactively
>> primed so as to aid decoding.
>>
>>    Decoding is a core reading skill - I regard that as an undeniable 
>> fact.
>>
>>    Eddie C.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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