[senco-forum] Pilot Reading Project

Aly  - Totally objective results from any test of reading age are pure mythology. If a child readlly can have a reading-age then by implication, s/he can also have a geography age, a religous education age and a PE age, a Maths age and God forbid, even a Media Studies age. If you go down that avenue then you very quickly find yourself in  the company of all the other loonies.

Reading age is a useful concept only in so far as it is a rough means of assessing progress in reading - if you try to read more into it than that, you are in serious trouble.

Almost all widely  used methods of assessing reading-age correlate reasonably closely. I would not say more than that and I know that teachers by and large only use one of quite a narrow range of test options and since I am looking only for upward trends, in the absence of truly objective assessment instruments which to my certain knowledge do not exist, I am happy with that.

Just as behviour is a response to environment, learning is a consequence of experience.  If I arrange that a group of children are exposed to a closely controlled set of experiences, some learning will inevitably occur. My contribution to that learning is/was the compilation of the set of experiences which a pilot progject suggests are beneficial to older poor readers as far as decoding is concerned. That is the only hypothesis I am testing with my larger national project. Participation will not be compulsory. Anyone who feels this is a waste of time should not participate. My approach does not imply that if children look at books they will learn by osmosis - my approach is positively interactive and correct responses are recognised and extrinsically rewarded. That does not happen when poor readers look at books.

Finally you suggest that older poor readers would have learned to read if they are able to 'absorb' reading..Perhaps if they had been taught SP initially or had been exposed to the kind of experiences I  have devised, this may be true but it does seem likely, since they cant read, that they have had neither opportunity.

It is a fact that the children in the pilot project did double their average rate of read skills acquisiion and some of these children had reading were in Year 6 with reading ages of 5+      How would you account for that fact Aly?

Best wishes
Eddie C.