Reading Instruction: A Quantitative Analysis

Concerned with the need for documenting the effects of instructional method on reading achievement, Huey, after the turn of the century (1908), wrote have thus far been content with trial and error, too often allowing the publishers to be our jury, and a real rationalization of the process of inducting the children into the practice of reading has not been made. . . . We have come to the place where we need to pass in review all the methods that have been tried in all the centuries of reading and to learn any little that we can from each (p. 9). Some 70 years later, in discussing investigations of different instructional methods, Farr and Roser (1979) concluded, Regardless of the quantity of research, however, there are no definitive answers to the question of the best program because the results of various studies support different programs, and nothing conclusive can be shown about which programs are superior (p. 426). That nothing conclusive has resulted from the research on instructional methods is reflected in other texts written for teachers of reading; for example, Durkin (1974), Fry (1977), Mangrum and Forgan (1979), and others concluded that few important differences between methods