Discretion in the Translation of Reading Research to Policy

This paper argues that the standards for reporting and interpreting educational research should be raised. It suggests the need for a higher standard is urgent in fields such as beginning reading, in which public interest is intense, because findings can quickly become distorted or misinterpreted and enshrined through misinformed policy decisions. The paper argues that researchers investigating beginning reading should exercise extra caution to delimit findings from their own studies and should take special pains to shows how studies contribute to a larger picture of literacy development which policy makers and educational leaders, in turn, need to consider. The paper examines B.R. Foorman, D.J. Francis, J.M. Fletcher, C. Schatschneider, and P. Mehta's "The Role of Instruction in Learning to Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk Children" (1998), a recent, and uncommonly influential, reading methods study as an "example of research that has been overly promoted by the media and misused by some policy makers and educational leaders to support a simple solution to the complex problem of raising the literacy of young children in high poverty neighborhoods." Contains a figure and 93 references. (EF)