Is In-School Free Reading Good for Children? Why the National Reading Panel Report is (Still) Wrong

Prompted by Timothy Shanahan's and Steven Stahl's responses to his previous Kappan article, Mr. revisits his criticisms of the National Reading Panel report. N AN EARLIER Kappan article I reviewed the section of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report that dealt with fluency.1 I argued that the panel's review of the research on free in school missed a number of studies and made serious errors in reporting the studies it did include. I noted that of the studies showed between readers and that comparisons involved students who were already advanced and had already established a habit. I pointed out that the NRP did include long-term studies, which I found to be more supportive of silent (SSR) than short-term studies. Moreover, the NRP also included one study in which students were highly constrained in what they could The case for free reading, I argued, rests on more than experimental studies; case histories also provide compelling evidence for the power of reading. Contrary to the panel's findings, I concluded that the evidence in support of free in school was strong. Timothy Shanahan and the late Steven Stahl, both members of the NRP, attempted to respond to my criticisms in The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research.2 However, their chapters contain misrepresentations of my position, as well as inaccuracies in reporting the literature. I wish to set the record straight. Just letting kids Shanahan states my position as follows: Krashen (2001) argued that letting kids is better than (p. 245). This description is simply accurate. I discussed sustained silent reading and other in-school free programs. These programs include more than just letting kids read. They set aside time to make sure children have a chance to read, they provide access to good books, and they do things that encourage reading. I strongly suspect that just letting kids read is better than many kinds of instruction, but SSR does more than that. Did I say that free is better than instruction? I actually concluded that it was at least as good as and often better than instruction, the instruction provided to comparison groups in the studies, which is generally instruction based on skill-building. Shanahan's presentation of my position can be interpreted to mean that I am opposed to all instruction, and that, of course, is false. Similarly, according to Shanahan, I claim that prefer having students instead of teaching them (p. 246). I did say that; I said that teachers prefer free to what usually goes on in language arts and classes, that is, regular instruction.3 Shanahan refers to the comparison groups in the studies of free as utilizing some impoverished form of teaching, e.g., assigning random worksheets (p. 246). I think that it is highly likely that skill-building was involved in the comparison groups, but there is evidence that the classes with the worst instruction were selected to serve as comparisons in these studies. What no difference means. Many studies comparing in-school to regular instruction show between the two groups in gains in comprehension. For Shanahan, a finding of no significant differences between in-school free programs and comparison groups is not very informative (p. 246), because the failure to find a could be the result of factors other than the efficacy of one of the treatments -- poor application, enough of a treatment, and so on. While I agree that such factors can play a role, I view these results as an invitation to closer analysis. What is interesting is that studies that do show a consistently show the same results. This is true in my analysis, in which I found negative results (in- school free fared worse than regular instruction) in only three comparisons out of 53, and in the NRP report, which found studies in which SSR students performed less well than controls. …