National Reading Panel

Education in our nation is changing. With the current accountability movements, educators have had to redirect some of their energy into educating all of our public school students, not just the select few who come into the educational arena with all the necessary components for being successful in the school environment. For some years now, schools systems around the country have been, as the plan suggests: leaving children behind. There is a gap between the educated and the non-educated in our country. Graduation rates have dwindled around the country to less than half of the students who enter high school. Basically, it comes down to who can read and who can’t.

In 1997, in an effort to address this concern, Congress asked the Secretary of Education and the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NICHD, as it will be referred to from this point, to convene a panel of reading experts to review the research that has been done in our country as it pertained to teaching children how to read. The panel was charged with “providing a report that should represent the panel’s conclusions, an indication of the readiness for application in the classroom of the results of this research, and, if appropriate, a strategy for rapidly disseminating this information to facilitate effective reading instruction in the schools.” (NRP 2000)

The NRP consisted of fourteen people. The panel consisted of: research scientists, representatives from colleges of educations, reading teachers, educational administrators, and parents. None of the panel members were paid; they all volunteered their time to work on this project. Soon after they began the project they realized they would never be able to review the literature in the year’s time, which Congress had allocated. They did however; complete the project by February 1999. The panel originally collected approximately 100,000 research studies on reading which had been published since 1966. The panel realized they would have to screen their process somewhat and they used the NRC Report: Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, &Griffin, 1998), to determine where to focus their attentions. The decision was made to focus on the following topics: Alphabetics, Fluency, and Comprehension (NRP 2000).

The next step the panel took was to adopt a rigorous set of research methodological standards of evidence-based research when reviewing the literature of research. These standards where used when they screened the research studies they would eventually report on for the project. The evidence based methodological standards adopted by the Panel are essentially those used in research studies of the efficacy of interventions in psychological and medical research. These include behaviorally based interventions, medications, or medical procedures proposed for the use in the fostering of robust health and psychological development and the prevention or treatment of a disease. (NRP PG 27) The panel believed that the evidence of teaching students how to read should not be looked at any less scientifically than medical research.

• Study participants must be carefully described
• Study interventions must be described in sufficient detail to allow for reliability, including how long the interventions lasted and how long the effects lasted
• Study methods must allow for judgments about how instruction fidelity was insured
• Studies must include a full description of the outcome measures.