Posted on 03/31/2010 5:08:44 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Boys can learn to beat girls at reading if they are given old-fashioned teaching methods, claim psychologists.
The use of more traditional phonetics-based lessons helps boys catch up with girls - even doing better on some tests - and prevents some children from needing 'special' schooling, according to new research findings.
A study of synthetic phonics also found children from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as those from better off homes.
The research, presented at the British Psychological Society's annual conference in York, has underpinned changes being made in the nation's classrooms.
They have been introduced after damning revelations that four in 10 children have failed to master the three Rs by the time they leave primary school.
There has also been concern about the growing gender divide in achievement, starting in primary schools.
Under the synthetic phonics system, children are taught the sounds that make up words rather than guess at entire words from pictures and story context.
Rhona Johnston, a professor of psychology at Hull University, and Dr Joyce Watson of St Andrews University, studied the results from 300 children originally given training using synthetic phonics when they were five.
The progress of the group at primary schools in Clackmannanshire was compared with 237 children using the more usual analytic phonics approach.
Boys taught using synthetic phonics were able to read words significantly better than girls at the age of seven, with all pupils ahead of the standard for their age.
Boys were 20 months ahead while girls were 14 months more advanced than expected.
At the end of the study, boys' reading comprehension was as good as that of the girls, but their word reading and spelling was better.
(Excerpt) Read more at thisislondon.co.uk ...
Phonics has always been a superior way to learn. There is no substitute.
Some feminist/socialists probably realized this many years ago, and this was likely the reason that phonics was dropped. To give girls an advantage, cripple the boys.
Why wouldn’t teaching children how our alphabet works, work better than reducing words to pictograms that have to be guessed at and learned by sight?
Duh. These geniuses never cease to amaze me. It’s as if the entire educational establishment has been thrown over to gender war zealots.
Well, come to think of it, it has.
It's because they're disadvantaged.
It's because they're poor.
It's because they're minority.
It's because they're not well represented on mainstream TV.
It's because they're oppressed.
It's because they're hungry and need school lunches and breakfasts.
It's because they're without a computer.
It's because they're unmotivated.
... or something along those lines.
Whole word learning must not effect girls but it’s a disaster for boys. My son was unable to read in the third grade because of that and it took years to overcome the bad effects.
And this is why those who "know better" have tried really hard to not teach it.
I know they are not using it in my 2nd graders school, and he is a year behind the others in reading. We have to resort to after school teaching to help him.
And Oh my God, you would not believe the math curriculum
Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI
My second grader’s school district has adopted the “Everyday Mathematics” program shown in this video. It is as bad as the lady is saying, even at the second grade level. My wife and I have a very difficult time helping him with the homework, because quite frankly this crap is hard to understand. All those old algorithms you grew up with, are not taught. They are replaced by alternative ways of finding the answer, that may work fine for math geeks who are proficient already in the old ways – but tossing away the old tried and true way and replacing it is a mistake in monstrous proportions.
It is onlt going to get worse for your second grader. My grandkid was taught global warming and jungle deforestation in Math class.
Hope your grandchild is getting the right teaching at home to counter that.
Here is a feel good about today's youth story...I got my 8 year old a transistor radio on Monday and you think he used it to play pop music? Nope, he tuned in conservative talk radio, just like Dad. I even asked him if he wanted to listen to a music station, and he said no. One of those great moments in a Dad's life. But it got better. At bed time a radio station plays old-time radio and he was listening to Charlie McCarthy as he went to bed, and laughing his head off at all the punchlines. Normally I would tell him to turn the radio off and go to sleep, but I said what the heck - enjoy
Of course I showed my kid the old-fashioned way to do it, and told him he'd understand why the method they were trying to teach him worked when he was in high school, but he'd never use it.
Girls are affected, too. My daughter was an indifferent reader and never read for pleasure until she took a phonics class.
Yes! It is called social justice math. I am not kidding; I was at a conference in Washington D.C. this past August and the phrase social justice math was used several times.
When I was young the Tucson school system was facing, “why Johnnie can’t read” stories, this was the late 40’s. They had done away with phonics so my folks sent me to a tutor so I could learn phonics. Can’t say how much I appreciated it over the years.
There is NO group with better reason to begin a Class Action Suit than the PARENTS OF AMERICAN CHILDREN. For over a hundred years American education taught the children of immigrants English, Math, Geography, History (world & US) grammar and even how to (gasp) SPELL correctly.
These children, from the 1800’s to the mid 50’s were the children of newcomers who could not speak English, people who were the “Tired, huddled masses, yearning to be free”. These children were the true children of poverty, children of people who had to work 50 to 60 hours per week to survive, children who each year saw a classmate die from a disease that today is prevented by a shot in the butt.
When I (born 1934) was in school, the death of a classmate, sometime during the year was, tragically expected. Today, two busloads of “counselors” descend on the school within hours.
In the latter 40’s new children came to school. Many had no parents, many had funny numbers tatooed on their arm, some had no idea what country they really came from.
And the OLD METHODS, proven by generations that built the “once” greatest country in the world taught them.
Today monies that would simply stun old time educators are wasted to teach children who cannot read their own diplomas, cannot find their own country on a world map, or their home states on a blank map of the USA.
In the holy name of the “NEW” our education system proudly proclaims that “ONLY” a large percentage of our children will not learn.
Who would fly an airline that advertised that ONLY 24% of their planes crashed last month?
Who would go (voluntarily) to a hospital that boasted that ONLY 32% of their patients died during surgery?
The teachers of my youth, many “elderly” people of 35 and 40, TAUGHT, and by heaven you learned.
Is it true that students get drowsy trying to read the whole language way? It must be exhausting. Someone once told me that since the word is basically considered a picture and the shape of it is memorized, it goes to the wrong side of the brain. How confusing is that?
Crazy math and reading programs do a lot of damage. I can see why kids act up in school. They are being driven crazy.
“It is called social justice math.”
I learn something new here every day.
I’m not sure about the drowsy part, but I agree with what I saw posted on another thread some time go that phonics is better suited to languages like English because our letters represent sounds. A character based language like Chinese would require a different approach.
I had phonics when I was going through grade school (early 80s plaid covered books). My wife didn’t and she went through grade school in the late 80s. As a result she has more trouble spelling words while I do fairly well.
It does make a difference. When we have kids, we’re likely to home school and phonics will definitely be part of our curriculum.
Dick, Jane and Sally was the best Reader ever devised. But they were White, so they had to go.
Maybe that’s why the schools went away from phonics - as another aspect of the war on boys and men.
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