Re: Talk Is Cheap

[aburke5054@aol.com]

I'll leave aside the earlier absurd accusation that I am distorting the 
truth by objecting to a partial citation of the NRP's findings 
concerning phonics by Campbell and Garan and instead provide a more 
complete citation.  I guess this further marks me as a member of George 
Bush's band of merry misleaders:  I cite the NRP's conclusions about 
the effects of phonics on beginning readers and on readers in second 
grade and above and let people make up their minds for themselves.

This guy really does understand effect-sizes.  The NRP drew no 
conclusions about the efficacy of OC for the simple reason that two 
comparisons from one study do not a meta-analysis make.  Nor, for that 
matter, would two comparisons from two studies.  OC goes two for two 
against Whole Language, so an equally fair question based on these 
limited data is what is the point of Whole Language?  Kicking these 
dead horses is an exercise in silliness.

Art


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>
To: ARN-L List <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Tue, 23 May 2006 10:22:06 -0500
Subject: Re: [arn-l] Talk Is Cheap

 Burke further attempts to distort the truth when he writes:

---

So in two studies children who received Open Court achieved better than
children who received control instruction (Whole Language) on word ID 
and
decoding, and better in one and worse in the other on spelling and 
comprehension.
The average effect-size was positive in both studies, indicating an 
advantage
to Open Court relative to control.


---


I shared this bit of sophistry with Elaine Garan. She responds below.


--begin Garan response--


There are NOT 2 studies on OC (Open Court) in the NRP report-- there is 
ONE-- what (Burke) lists as 2 studies are the assessments for first 
grade and the assessments for 2nd grade in the SAME study--- study 
number 11 which is the 1998 Foorman study done in Texas. What we see 
for 2nd grade is a drop in every single outcome. Put them in a row 
instead of a column and you see if you read ACROSS:


First Grade OC Effect Sizes  Second grade OC Effect Sizes


Word ID 1.63 (high) Word ID (.52) Moderate



Decoding: 1.14 (high) Decoding: 0.32 (small)




Spelling: 0.56  (Moderate) Spelling: -0.19 (NEGATIVE)




Comp: 0.32 (Small)  Comp: -0.19 (NEGATIVE)




Mean: 0.91 (High) Mean: 0.12 (NOT Significant)



So what the Foorman study shows is that OC showed that in first grade 
the children showed High Effect sizes in decoding but moderate for 
spelling and SMALL for comprehension with a mean of .91 which is highly 
significant. HOWEVER, by second grade, the kids dropped in every single 
skill with NEGATIVE results for kids trained in Open Court in those 
skills requiring application of phonics to real reading or writing 
(comprehension and spelling)--- the overall mean dropped to .12 which 
is NOT statistically significant.


In other words, train kids in OC in first grade and you get high 
ability in isolated skills (decoding nonwords on lists i.e. dat, wat)-- 
However, ask the kids to apply those skills and there's a huge 
discrepancy in the abiltity to apply those decoding skills to text--- 
even in first grade where comprehension is only weakly significant 
after OC training. However, the sad news comes in second grade where 
the kids cannot apply those decoding skills to real text and comp and 
sp are NEGATIVE after OC training. AND this guy (Burke) doesn't 
understand effect sizes because the mean of .12 for OC in second grade 
indicates that after OC training the overall mean was not statistically 
different from 0.


So then, what is the point of OC if its benefits are limited to helping 
first graders decode nonwords on isolated words in first grade??





=