“Science of Reading” particularly and #ResearchEd more generally, remind many of us in neurodiversity and disability communities of this from Alfie Kohn.
The underpinnings of that ideology include: a focus only on observable behaviors that can be quantified, a reduction of wholes to parts, the assumption that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement, and the creation of methods for selectively reinforcing whichever behaviors are preferred by the person with the power. Behaviorists ignore, or actively dismiss, subjective experience – the perceptions, needs, values, and complex motives of the human beings who engage in behaviors.
Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn
Scientism
Autistic people see this sort of scientism over and over.
There are many ways for people to come to understand the world. Many different approaches to learning about things, including minds. Scientism — the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge — is a philosophical mistake (Hughes 2012).
I say this as someone who loves science, who teaches it for a living and who’s in the middle of another science course right now, for general interest and with an eye to future research. Science is wonderful. We just need to be careful about how we apply it, and what ways of knowing we risk crowding out if we rely on it too heavily.
When it comes to autism, people sometimes rely on scientific studies to the point of disbelieving autistic people’s personal experiences. Despite the low quality of much of the published research on autism, non-autistic experts are assumed to understand autistic experiences better than the people having them. This is a serious problem in a number of ways, and also an interesting case study in the limitations of science.
Autism and Scientism, Research Journal Middletown Centre for Autism
This is one of the heartbreaks about being autistic. We tend to love certainty and support science. Yet, we constantly face scientific and medical professionals whose credentials we want to trust but whose information has been greatly misinformed. It’s a systemic problem.
John Marble on Twitter
The failures of autism science are not random: they reflect systematic power imbalances.
Autism and Scientism: Why science is not always the best way to learn about autism
Epistemic Injustice
A fundamental problem with “Science of Reading” is also a problem with autism research. Scientism begets epistemic injustice. The behaviorist bent of mainstream education repeatedly churns out these monsters of ed-tech that steal the credibility of science to rationalize and commodify ableism.
So much of the reason why borderline-abusive practices like ABA have been allowed to proliferate is that policy-makers have prioritised anything claiming to be scientific over the constant objections of the people having these things done to them.
Science is an incredibly powerful tool, but that just makes bad science all the more dangerous. No court would dismiss someone’s testimony of their own pain just because there are no peer-reviewed studies to show it’s real – so why do politicians?
@ferrous@neurodifferent.me
Epistemic injustice refers to harms that relate specifically to our status as epistemic agents, whereby our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity.
Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life – Chapman – 2022 – Journal of Social Philosophy – Wiley Online Library
Measuring the Surface, Badly
The “Science of Reading” is not so scientific and not compatible with neurodiversity. Like behaviorism, it measures the surface, badly.
Behind SoR is a “who’s who” of behaviorist and traditional, “back to basics”, educators who abuse the term “evidence-based” to the point of meaninglessness.
According to Skinner, when we fail to properly correct behavior (facilitated by and through machines), we are at risk of “losing our pigeons.” But I’d contend that with this unexamined behaviorist bent of (ed-)tech, we actually find ourselves at risk of losing our humanity.
The Pigeons of Education Technology
On the Problems With “Science of Reading”
We do not advocate for a particular approach to teaching reading; instead, we center children, arguing that HOW you teach reading MUST be determined by WHO you are teaching. Anything else is flawed.
Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library
As a result, journalism frequently bestows unquestioned status to systematic phonics instruction while emphasizing other aspects of literacy learning far less. This instructional approach has come to be known in the popular press by the moniker “the science of reading,” even though actual research-based science of reading is far more nuanced and expansive. Furthermore, journalists often dismiss another approach to teaching called balanced literacy, an orientation supported by 59% of reading researchers that advocates for a robust range of literacy learning opportunities that include phonics, comprehension, writing, and other forms of literacy development in contexts that motivate young literacy learners.
The Science of Reading and the Media: How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage? – Literacy Research Association
We argue that reductive and singular models of reading fail to honor the cultures, experiences, and diversity of children. This confluence of research findings reveals an unequivocal need for caution as states, universities, schools, and teachers adopt assumedly universal and narrow approaches to teaching reading.
Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library
Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library
- If the science of reading advocates only phonics instruction for all children, how can it address the various reading challenges faced by children?
- If NAEP scores have been largely unchanged for the past 30 years, why are science of reading advocates warning of a reading crisis?
- If decades of empirical research conducted by the world’s most accomplished reading scholars have increasingly documented the complexity of reading, why would schools, districts, and states adopt approaches that narrowly focus on phonics?
- If reading processes are distributed across neural networks in the brain, how can phonics be the singular and universal instructional approach for teaching children to read?
- If observations of young readers reveal that different kids attend differently to various aspects of text (e.g., letters/sounds, meaning, story elements, and language patterns), how could a primary emphasis on phonics be right for all readers?
Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library
The Science of Learning flattens the complexity of both learning and the brain, misplacing outsized importance on a limited view of “cognitive science” in its relationship to schooling. It’s also important for educators to understand where the evidence in “evidence-based education”, as “the science of learning” was known in a previous life, comes from and who it leaves out when we demand its faithful implementation in schools.
According to science, it’s actually impossible to understand what happens in a learner’s brain in any given moment.
There is No Such Thing As “The Science of Learning” | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
The Science of Learning is misleading when it refers exclusively to cognitive science, memory management, and the brain, because it ignores all the unknowable and ineffable components of what happens inside a student’s brain. It positions The Science to be thoroughly researched, but it also doesn’t acknowledge a huge body of work that proves cognitive science is significantly more complex than they have portrayed it.
Research increasingly recognizes that, as medical researchers Peter Stilwel and Katharine Harmon write, “Cognition is not simply a brain event.”(*) Drawing from their intuitive 5E model, we can better understand learning as a process of sense-making about ourselves in relation to the world that is:
Embodied – sense-making shaped by being in a body
There is No Such Thing As “The Science of Learning” | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth
Embedded – bodies exist within a context in the world
Enactive – active agents in interactions with the world
Emotive – sense-making always happens in an emotional context
Extended – sense-making relies on non-biological tools and technologies
If you look carefully at their briefs for the superiority of direct instruction (DI), however, you’ll notice two things. First, any benefits they’re able to show are almost entirely short-term and/or superficial in nature. As one group of researchers put it, “Studies favoring direct instruction tend to be small-scale, use limited measures and time horizons, [and rely on] ‘skill acquisition’ or simple concepts as the learning goals…”13 (Actually, student-centered learning often produces better results even in studies with those limitations; when more meaningful outcomes are assessed, the case for DI collapses almost entirely.)
Here’s a striking illustration: DI’s defenders triumphantly cited a 2004 experiment in which science students who received “an extreme type of direct instruction in which the goals, the materials, the examples, the explanations, and the pace of instruction [were] all teacher controlled” did better on a test than their classmates who designed their own procedures. But three years later, another pair of researchers returned to the same question in the same discipline with students of the same age. This time, though, they measured the effects after six months instead of only a week and they used a more sophisticated assessment of learning. It turned out that any advantage produced by DI quickly evaporated. And on one of the outcome measures, exploration ultimately proved to be not only more impressive than DI but also more impressive than a combination of the two — further reason to believe that DI not only is less effective but can actually be counterproductive.14
The second problem with evidence said to favor DI reflects the way its proponents tend to structure what happens in the two teaching conditions they’re comparing. On the one hand, they’re apt to set up inquiry learning for failure by using a caricatured version of it, a kind of pure discovery rarely found in real-world classrooms, with teachers providing no guidance at all so that students are left to their own devices. On the other hand, the version of DI they test sometimes sneaks in a fair amount of active student involvement — to the point that the two conditions may just amount to “different forms of constructivist instruction.”15
Fairer comparisons convincingly support the case against direct instruction. To be clear, I don’t believe the evidence argues against all teacher talk and guidance (in favor of the pure discovery model that’s employed as a straw man to make traditionalism seem more appealing). But that doesn’t justify a “split the difference; just use both” conclusion: A mostly student-centered approach really does make more sense most of the time.16
Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction – Alfie Kohn
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has had a very malign effect on teaching. It offers a simple story, purportedly based on incontestable cognitive science, about why students find learning difficult, and how to respond, that many in the teaching profession have found hard to resist. It seems authoritative, but it is in fact seductive and misleading. Here are some reasons why we should take it with a shovel of salt.
Cognitive Load Theory: Just Brain Gym for Traditionalists?
CLT is just a fad; it is, as someone said, like Brain Gym for Traditionalists. The sooner the fad passes the better.
Cognitive Load Theory: Just Brain Gym for Traditionalists?
In general, polarising and opposing Black and White versions of teaching simply betrays a lack of familiarity with the vast amount of high-quality hybrid and nuanced “dispositional teaching” that is already happening in many states and many countries. To trash these innovations through dogmatism, cherry-picked research, and ignorance is sheer vandalism.
Part of the problem is that some of those who peddle this silliness have no training and little standing in the wider world of cognitive science. (When I spoke to my old friend Alan Baddeley FRS, CBE, godfather of “working memory” research, four years ago he had not heard of “cognitive load theory” and didn’t much like the sound of it. The model in circulation amongst CLT proponents is a travesty of the research-based complexity of Alan’s current model.) Much CLT research derives from work on high school maths and science teaching. These subjects are not valid prototypes for other subjects on the curriculum nor indeed for the many wider forms of out-of-school learning.
Another part of the problem is the gullibility of educators in the face of authoritative claims to scientific warrant by a small posse of overconfident, and in some cases ideologically-driven) academics and consultants. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
The Sciences of Learning and the Practice of Teaching
But outside these important areas of agreement, we are concerned that the “science of reading” advocacy has been grounded in some very troubling patterns:10
Policy Statement on the “Science of Reading”, National Education Policy Center and Education Deans for Justice and Equity
- Failing to place the current concern for reading in a historical context.11
- Overemphasizing recent test scores and outlier data instead of longitudinal data withgreater context (for example, NAEP).12
- Misrepresenting the “science of reading” as settled science that purportedly prescribes systematic intensive phonics for all students.13
- Overstating and misrepresenting the findings of the National Reading Panel report of 2000, without acknowledging credible challenges to those findings.14
- Focusing blame on K-12 teachers and teacher education without credible evidence or acknowledgement of challenging teaching and learning conditions and the impact of test-based accountability policies on practice and outcomes.15
- Celebrating outlier examples of policy success (in particular, the Mississippi 2019 NAEP data16) without context or high-quality research evidence for those claims.17It’s time for the media and political distortions to end, and for the literacy community and policymakers to fully support the literacy needs of all children. Much of the legislation be- ginning to emerge is harmful, especially to students living inequitable lives and attending underfunded, inequitable schools.
As long as scholars, policymakers, and practitioners treat the science of reading as primarily about assessed reading proficiency, these other aspects of reading instruction are relegated to the periphery, if not ignored entirely.
We propose that a better central question for research, policy, and practice is, How can reading instruction best help students develop and flourish as literate beings in the ways that matter most? To be sure, the question, What works? remains part of this reimagined science of reading, but a bolder and broader vision is needed.”
What Matters Most? Toward a Robust and Socially Just Science of Reading – Aukerman – 2021 – Reading Research Quarterly – Wiley Online Library
What Matters Most? Toward a Robust and Socially Just Science of Reading – Aukerman – 2021 – Reading Research Quarterly – Wiley Online Library
“Science of reading” approach is based on a small number of concepts taken from a few simple, dated studies which are being used to justify a variety of classroom practices, including ones that are contradicted by other research. (Seidenberg, Cooper Borkenhagen & Kearns, RRQ, 2021) (Seidenberg & Cooper Borkenhagen, Reading League Journal, 2020)
Not enough science in the “science of reading”.
Where Does The “Science of Reading” Go From Here?, Mark S. Seidenberg, Yale Child Study Center
Explicit instruction is there to scaffold statistical/implicit learning. Only as much as needed and not one bit more.
SoR assumes that everything has to be taught or else it won’t be learned (because “unnatural”).
That’s wrong (because of implicit learning) and it’s inefficient (SLOW)”
Where Does The “Science of Reading” Go From Here?, Mark S. Seidenberg, Yale Child Study Center
In my view, success is not guaranteed because of the shallowness of the science.
Which is resulting in the adoption of practices that are inspired by research but not closely tied to it.
Practices such as heavy emphasis on explicit instruction exist because the literature hasn’t been adequately digested.
Where Does The “Science of Reading” Go From Here?, Mark S. Seidenberg, Yale Child Study Center
Monsters of Ed-tech
“Science of Reading” is an emerging and growing monster of ed-tech. These ed-tech trends are implemented in practice with lots of behaviorism, ableism, and deficit ideology and without any input from the people most impacted by such reductionist trends: neurodivergent and disabled students.
There are monsters because there is a lack of care and an absence of justice in the work we do in education and education technology.
The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology
Reading Wars Are Destroying Our Schools
Our Community Wants Progressive Education, Not Regressive Education
We want progressive education, not more of this regressive and behaviorist stuff.
In short, progressive education isn’t just more engaging than what might be called regressive education; according to decades of research, it’s also more effective — particularly with regard to the kinds of learning that matter most. And that remains true even after taking our cognitive architecture into account.
Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction – Alfie Kohn
A Neurobiological Basis for Progressive Education
As the host mentions in this excellent conversation, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang‘s work essentially provides the neurobiological basis for progressive education.
In short, learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Although our coordinated neuroscientific and classroom studies are still in progress, educating for dispositions of mind is not new—in fact it is highly consistent with a century of educational research and theory (for example, Dewey, Montessori, Bruner, Perkins, Gardner), as well as with Doug’s decades of experience working with successful progressive public secondary schools. But tying these dispositions to neural development, life success, and mental health gives this effort new urgency, and points us due north in an attempt to reimagine adolescents’ schooling. Evidence suggests that educators can learn to recognize, model, and support the development of these dispositions if they know what kind of narratives to listen for and what kind of learning experiences lead to these patterns of thinking.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Why is the narrative building process so compelling to teenagers, and so tied to their growth and well-being? In adolescence, the emotional engine that drives the hard work of learning comes from connecting the goings-on, procedures, and tasks of the here-and-now to newly emerging big-picture ideas that, in essence, become a person’s abstract narratives. Crucially, these stories are connected to individuals’ sense of self and values, and to their scholarly skills, resulting in agentic scholarly identity, durable understanding, and transferable capacities. To get a sense of why, we return to the brain.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Today, there is a renewed focus on whole-learner approaches in schools, districts, and philanthropy, though now with explicit commitments to cultural responsiveness, trauma-informed practices, and restorative justice. Our findings reinforce the importance of these efforts, which focus on pedagogies that support youth in reworking the kinds of abstract narratives they create to affirm their lives, experiences, identities, values, decisions, and possible futures. By situating daily happenings in systems-level contexts with bigger, personal meaning, these pedagogies support youth learning to engage with, but also transcend and eventually reinvent, the here-and-now.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
New research on the connections between adolescents’ narrative building and brain development aligns closely with old lessons from progressive practices. Adolescent learners thrive when provided an environment conducive to building strong, personal narratives that leverage the emotional power of big ideas and abstract meaning-making in the service of motivated work on concrete tasks and skills. Presently, our public school system undercuts much of the approach we outline here, typically focusing on the here-and-now, the what-can-you-recall. Though student-driven approaches are often employed well in extracurricular activities and nonacademic spaces like the arts and afterschool clubs (Mehta & Fine, 2019), success in academics overwhelmingly relies on fast and rote activities. Students build narratives anyway, of course—but these, sadly, do not usually point kids in enlivening and healthy directions.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
The thing is, learning is essential…but it is essential because you need fodder to be able to develop around, not because it is the end point, but we call learning the ‘outcome’, ‘learning outcomes’, and then we’re done! That’s what school’s about: it’s about producing learning outcomes. But it’s not. The learning outcomes are just the midway to what you’re really supposed to be working on, which is: how did learning these things, how did engaging with thinking about these things develop you as a thinker, as a person, as a citizen? Those are the outcomes we should be caring about but we think about them as on a separate track from the learning. There’s the math, and then there’s the other stuff…which is kind of ridiculous.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Future Learning Design Podcast – The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
You have to be safe. You have to have time.
Safety and time.
Future Learning Design Podcast – The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Stimpunks was forged in the quest for survival and educational inclusion. We had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We’ve learned a lot along the way and present to you Stimpunks Space as the syncretic synthesis of our forced interdisciplinary learning. That learning connected us with neurodiversity communities, disability communities, educators, doctors, nurses, autism researchers, sociologists, tech workers, care workers, social workers, and a long list of others. We wove together the aspects of these disciplines that were compatible with our community of neurodivergent and disabled people into a human-centered pedagogy and philosophy. We left out the stuff incompatible with and harmful to us, such as all forms of behaviorism. We built a learning space that works for us using a zero-based design approach.
We Weave Together
Effective education does not simply produce a standardized, predetermined product. It is instead about weaving a colorful cloth that reflects community members’ rich skills and relationships, with generative patterns that integrate complex knowledge and ideas, and that can look different in different contexts.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
We take the analogy of weaving cloth to highlight the properties and valuable variations of effective educational systems.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
What would it mean to weave a colorful, durable cloth of individuals’ and communities’ relationships, knowledge and skills?
We take the analogy of weaving cloth to highlight the properties and valuable variations of effective educational systems.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
Envisioning humans and their contexts as mutually constitutive threads in a cloth, we ask, how can we most productively approach the interwoven micro- and macro-adaptations in the systems that make up the individual and context? How can we conceptualize and follow the humanistic threads and patterns that individuals and groups dynamically weave through educational environments and processes, in order to most strategically redesign educational systems to support the emergence of diverse human potentials and contributions? What would it mean to weave a colorful, durable cloth of individuals’ and communities’ relationships, knowledge and skills, designing educational systems that center equity and dignity, and attend to variability of experience? How could education systems be designed to enrich human capacities to invent and sustain vibrant and meaningful lives in a vibrant and healthy society?
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
In this sense, examining learning and its contexts is like examining the weaving of a cloth—the twists and knots of different threads are interwoven, and distinct patterns, textures and colors are discernable depending on how the observer zooms in or looks from afar. At one distance, threads can represent people in community, holding each other in place in the weave; further magnified, threads could be composed of the fibers of an individual’s skills and experiences, twisted together across the threads of others as they extend through time. The fibers, patterns, and weaves of various cloths will vary substantially according to available resources, needs and aesthetics, from thick wool blankets or rugs, to flowing silk scarves, to sturdy nets or straps. Weaving itself is dynamic: it generates out of disparate parts a unified set of patterns, stronger together as a whole. Cloth also needs repair due to its day-to-day use as well as to unpredictable accidents and tears. Inevitably, new threads and new patterns will take hold. Thinking of education as supporting the weaving of fibers and also as tending to the condition of the whole cloth underscores the shared features of healthy learning communities with well- designed systems and structures, as well as the substantial and valuable variation that will emerge within and across contexts.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
Through their ideas and intentions as well as their actions, communities of individuals continually renew, together, the socio-cultural context in which they are living, including the beliefs, the norms, and the patterns of relationships that organize society’s social fabric—the cloth they are weaving.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
The cloth can be strengthened and enriched, new patterns can be collaboratively generated, and holes and tears repaired.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
Effective education does not simply produce a standardized, predetermined product. It is instead about weaving a colorful cloth that reflects community members’ rich skills and relationships, with generative patterns that integrate complex knowledge and ideas, and that can look different in different contexts.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Weaving a colorful cloth: Centering education on humans’ emergent developmental potentials
Sea glass is weathered by what it has endured at sea (Figure 2), a process that can be related to education. I am fundamentally marked by the system. Confidence eroded. Anxiety wavering. Now, overcompensation is a form of self-preservation, taking breaks is still unnatural and achievements come with a little sense of pride. Just as sea glass is ground down by every knock, its eventual form is a sum of its aquatic endurance.
Positive memories of education have been flooded by the negative. Instead, I course through the ocean propelled to defy the lack of expectations imposed on me, but also by defiance, to disprove those who wrote me off.
However, a life tussling with the tide-against the odds— has also left its mark more positively. The researcher, practitioner, colleague and peer I am today refuses to entertain ideas or set up environments that make some people (neurominority) feel less intelligent, inadequate or inferior, than others (neuromajority), just as my secondary school English teacher and other curious individuals did. In many ways, these moments anchor my practice.
‘Sea‐glass survivors’: Autistic testimonies about education experiences – Shepherd – British Journal of Special Education – Wiley Online Library
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