Hooked on Bad Pedagogics

Hooked on Bad Pedagogics
Monte LaOrange/The Post-Register via AP
Many fields suffer from the persistence of received ideas that are unsupportable, but the problem is especially severe in American education. In many cases, systematic research has illustrated that common current practices could be vastly improved on, but such improvements have not been implemented widely.

A 2019 report by Emily Hanford for American Public Media, “At a Loss for Words,” described how millions of students in the United States were still being taught to read using a flawed approach known as “three-cueing.” This method, Hanford writes, sprang from a 1967 paper that theorized that fluent readers recognized words not merely from their spellings but also from “contextual” factors such as sentence structure and accompanying illustrations. Primary education, the theory held, should teach students using the same process: not “sounding out” words but using only isolated phonetic components, such as a first letter, and combining these with contextual clues.

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