National Reading Panel (NRP)

The Importance of Literacy
2175 Rayburn House Office Building
September 26, 2000
9:30 A.M.

Dr. Donald N. Langenberg
Chancellor
University System of Maryland
Adelphi, MD

Mrs. Pam Barret
Teacher
Tovashal Elementary School
Murrieta, CA

Ms. Linda Butler
Professional Development Specialist
NICHD Early Interventions Project
Washington, DC
*Ms. Butler will be accompanied by a student
and teacher.

Ms. Jacqueline Martino
Teacher
York Even Start Program
York, PA

Mr. Enrique Ramirez
Former Adult Education Student
San Francisco, CA

Ms. Carmelita Williams
President
International Reading Association
Washington, DC

UNIVERSITY SYSTEM OF MARYLAND (September 26, 2000) – Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I am Donald Langenberg. I was privileged to serve as Chairman of the National Reading Panel (NRP) from April 1998 to April 2000. I would like to present to you this morning an overview of the Panel's findings and recommendations.

I have submitted written testimony Mr. Chairman, which I will summarize for you to allow ample time for questions.

The NRP represented a wide variety of academic disciplines and occupations in education. It included parents and grandparents, teachers, professors of education and psychology, school and university administrators, a pediatrician, and an attorney. I myself am a professor of physics and the Chancellor of the thirteen-institution University System of Maryland. We all shared the common goal of improving the teaching and learning of reading all across our nation.

The Congress gave the Panel a very specific task:

The research literature on reading includes over 100,000 studies published since 1966, and an additional 15,000 or so published before that. It was impossible for the panel to read all of the literature and respond to the Congress in a timely manner. Choices had to be made about how to proceed. It is in the wisdom of those choices that the success of the Panel's work lies.

First, we identified a set of topics of central importance in teaching children to read. We were aided by a report of the National Research Council, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. The Panel refined its selection using information from public hearings held in five major cities across the country.

The topics the Panel studied intensively were:

Adoption of Methodological Standard!

In what may be the Panel's most important action, it developed a set of rigorous methodological standards to screen the research literature relevant to each topic. These standards are essentially those normally used in medical and behavioral research to assess the efficacy of behavioral interventions, medications or medical procedures.

The findings of the Panel's subgroups are presented in detail in their reports and are summarized in the Report of the National Reading Panel. Let me touch on just four of the highlights.

First, the Panel found that certain instructional methods are better than others, and that many of the more effective methods are ready for implementation in the classroom. For example, there was overwhelming evidence that systematic phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning to read and that such instruction is significantly more effective than instruction that teaches little or no phonics.

Second, literacy instruction can and should be provided to all children beginning in kindergarten. To become good readers, children must develop phonemic awareness, phonics skills, the ability to read words in text in an accurate and fluent manner, and the ability to apply comprehension strategies consciously and deliberately as they read. Children at risk of reading failure especially require direct and systematic instruction in these skills, and that instruction should be provided as early as possible. Such instruction should be integrated with the entire kindergarten experience in order to optimize the students' social and emotional development.

Third, research on this critical subject must stand up to critical, scientific scrutiny. No reputable physician would normally subject a patient to a treatment or a drug whose efficacy had not been proven in rigorous scientific testing. We should expect no less of a teacher subjecting a student to curricular content or a teaching methodology. Without the necessary, proven knowledge base, we can expect our schools to continue to be besieged by education fads and nostrums.

Finally, and most importantly, teachers are key! They must know how children learn to read, why some children have difficulty learning to read, and how to identify and implement effective instructional approaches for different children. They must learn to judge the quality of research literature and use it to develop curricula and teaching methods based on the most scientifically rigorous studies. To help them perform their critical role, teachers should be provided extensive preservice and inservice training in a variety of instruction techniques.

The Report of the National Reading Panel is certainly valuable for identifying what is reliably known about early reading development and instruction. It is equally valuable for identifying what we do not know, and thus for what we need to discover through future research.

As an example, today, information technology is transforming education of all kinds and at all levels. If we have a machine that can recognize speech and convert it to text - and vice versa, or analyze and critique grammar, punctuation, and syntax, or interact with students in other ways, it is plausible that it might be a useful tool in the teaching and learning of reading. Understandably, given the newness of the technology, there is very little solid research that tests that hypothesis. There ought to be more — much more — in this virgin and little explored field.

Much of the vast reading research literature consists of qualitative, descriptive, and correlational studies. These do have value. They help us to understand the general nature of a problem and to form scientifically testable hypotheses about learning mechanisms and pedagogical techniques. But correlation is not causation! We cannot separate truth from conjecture, or distinguish what really works from what might work, without scientifically rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental research of the kind on which the Panel focussed.

Let me conclude with a couple of personal observations.

I learned a great deal from my fellow Panel members in the course of our work, and my perspective on our subject has changed dramatically. There is a recent report entitled Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science. I think that is a gross underestimate. As an experimental physicist, I've done a lot of things akin to rocket science. I now believe that the teaching and learning of reading is much more complex and difficult.

Our fundamental understanding of the human brain and the mind it embodies is quite rudimentary. So is our understanding of how to translate what we do know into effective teaching and learning. But I am optimistic about the future. I am reminded of the long, slow development of our understanding of the quantum nature of the universe in the early twentieth century, led by Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, and others. By the end of the twentieth century, application of that understanding had led to the information technology revolution that is now explosively transforming our world and our lives. I hope and expect that the twenty-first century will bring us a comparable understanding of our own minds and of how best to develop them.

Mr. Chairman, you and your Congressional colleagues, in essence, asked our Panel to help save our nation from illiteracy. I am proud of the Panel's response to that daunting charge. We did not come up with any simple "silver bullet" — because none exists. But we did create, I believe, a landmark contribution to our knowledge about teaching children to read.