Born in Derby in the UK in 1949, childhood asthma blighted my early years and, consequently, I missed a lot of time in school. I also moved around a lot, which further disrupted my schooling, and at the age of six I was labelled “a low-progress reader”.
I have my mother to thank for teaching me to read and I was subsequently successful in the scholarship exam for a place in a selective school, named after Sir Henry Cavendish.
Like many of the post-World War II generation from the English working class, I was the first and only of my extended family to go to university. What to study, how to study, and navigating life at the university level was unknown territory. But I had a supportive family and an ambitious mother.
By 1970 I had graduated from the University of Manchester with an honours degree in psychology, despite having spent the previous three years wondering whether I should become a rock star or a poet.
Almost immediately after graduation, I began working as an academic research associate at the University’s newly established Hester Adrian Research Centre, where I worked on receptive language development in kids with intellectual disabilities.
That is when I first became interested in behavioural psychology and, in particular, the role of behavioural psychology in helping teachers to manage classroom behaviour, working with my doctoral student, and subsequently research partner, the late Dr Frank Merrett.
Helping older low-progress readers became the focus of much of my work in the 1990s after I had moved to Sydney to chair Macquarie University’s Special Education Centre.
As our research confirmed, creating a positive learning environment to manage classroom behaviour was not, on its own, sufficient to support student learning.
The other necessary pre-condition for learning to take place was effective instruction, but we hardly ever seemed to employ it in schools. This was particularly evident in the teaching of reading.
In spite of the failure of whole language in teaching reading, this was the approach that most teachers identified with during the ‘90s and which still dominates practice in many schools today.
I subsequently introduced to Sydney schools the ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’ method of supporting children to read. The approach, which stresses that children learn to read by reading, not by learning a large number of separate words, also proved to be quite successful within the Special Education Centre, where we had established a special school for children with learning difficulties.
A focus on explicitly teaching phonics – the connection between letters and sounds – also worked.
This led, in 1995, to my establishing the Making Up Lost Time in Literacy Initiative or MultiLit, where our research was focused on demonstrating that older, low-progress readers could learn to read given appropriate effective instruction.
It was also during the ‘90s that we undertook the first experimental evaluations of the popular remedial program, Reading Recovery, where we were able to point out its limitations.
At that time, when young children failed to learn to read, the solution was to take them out of class and provide more of the same whole language-based instruction in a one-on-one setting.
Our research, which was commissioned by the NSW Department of Education, clearly showed that Reading Recovery was – at best – effective for just one in three children.
You would think that would be reason enough to scrap it. Not at all! Before we'd even completed our evaluation, the Department decided to expand its provision of the program.
So, the state’s bureaucrats were not too pleased when I spoke publicly about the limited efficacy of Reading Recovery. In an earlier moment of foresight, I had insisted on a clause in the contract stating that, while the evaluation report was confidential to the Department, the researchers were permitted to present their findings to academic conferences and academic journals.
However, it would take more than 20 years for the NSW Government to stop endorsing – and funding – the program in the wake of a growing body of evidence worldwide confirming our previous findings.
I can’t help but feel for the countless students who missed out on receiving effective support and the opportunity to reach their potential as readers, as a result of such inexcusable tardiness.
It has been heartening to finally see more and more schools and school systems embrace evidence-based methods for teaching reading, particularly the use of explicit instruction for teaching novel content.
Nowadays, it seems like promoting phonics and the science of reading instruction has become de rigueur!
Things have changed a great deal, particularly in certain states in Australia. For others, there is still a way to go. But we are on the road.
If I reflect on 50 years involved in education research, what have I learned?
Follow the evidence; find your tribe; be prepared to be unpopular; learn from one another; be patient; and keep on keeping on.
Persistence is key to making a difference.
This is an edited extract from a speech Emeritus Professor Kevin Wheldall delivered upon receipt of the 2023 Eminent Researcher Award of the Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties.
