Customer Reviews

Misreading Reading : The Bad Science That Hurts Children

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Dr Coles' book is a sure guide to the thickets, trials and tribulations of learning to read and teaching to read and helpful counselor for parents and professionals. The writing is straight (with an enlivening dry wit) and will take the reader with certainty to an understanding of what occurs in our schools and of what must be done. And with the understanding comes a how-to knowledge that will help all concerned. Dr Coles gives a comprehensible history of the science and mis-science and practices of reading teaching that will enable advocates to present their cause comprehensibly. It tells one where the "experts", good and bad, are coming from and arms one to encounter them capably. Buy this book: you'll like it and use it!

This the second book I have read by Coles and I continued to be impressed by his clarity and incisive thinking. This is a great book for all those who feel so battered about by all the arguements for and against the really topical issues in reading such and phonemic awareness and pathological reasons for reading difficulty to name just a few. Cole's summaries of the most significant research are a Godsend to those who do not have the time or resources to review all the current research themselves. I work as a Literacy Advisor in schools and this book has helped me in my understanding of the issues.

"Research-based" has become code for "direct-instruction", "phonics only", and "NICHD/Reid Lyon-supported". In Coles' important book, this research is carefully and responsibly examined and discredited. A must for everyone who, in good conscience, is standing up to this recent wave of (as Frank Smith has said) reading nonsense.

Reading research has found its Voltaire! Coles lobs a well directed grenade into a number of precious narratives of the reading research community and in tenaciously examining that research he discloses a murky pool. It is of publicly funded research where a community of researchers have made up their minds about what's right before they do the research; where unwarranted significance is conferred on certain "skills" which are illegitimately wrested from the broader span of preschool language and literacy achievement; where researchers select certain bits of their procedures and findings for reporting while they omit others; where they inaccurately summarise the results of other research; where they stubbornly confuse correlation with causation, and where the scientific process is distorted by the fabrication of evidence through the multi-repetition of flimsy, badly designed studies. An extremely important book.

The book should be entitled "misreading reading research." There have been great advances in the past three decades in understanding how better to teach children to read, with much of the work being very good science that decidedly is helping children and has the potential to help many more children if more widely applied. Every page of Coles' book contains at least one assertion that is at a minimum debatable. I gave this a 1-star rating only because zero stars was not an option.

I am a school psyc and former reading clinician. I've coordinated summer interventions for three years (K-3). Coles misread the reading panel. He picked only a few studies out of many. The reading panel research is not at narrow as he claims. The NRP attempted to lay out the "anatomy" of how children learn to read and narrowed down the best "types" of programs which tended to be phonics "based." The NRP did compare phonics against whol language and Reading Recovery. Also, most of the researchers from what I can tell WERE former teachers who have moved up to research. Second, assessments did include reading at higher levels than phonemic awareness and decoding. Don't let his rhetoric fool you. Coles is just bitter because is ideology was just not supported. He needs to let go like a true researcher and revise his ideas. Research clearly shows his whole language approach makes reading abilities plumet downward on well designed studies. A generation has been lost to those teachings. I don't think Coles takes the reading problems serious enough. The NRP is a huge project relatively, and the quality of sciency involved is just above Coles. This book only increased my awareness of how uninformed and resistant many educators are.