The term best practice is firmly entrenched in the discourse about teaching reading and writing in schools. What determines best practice? The usual answer comes from a term that is its kissing cousin: evidence-based practice. What is the evidence? For many educators, policymakers, researchers, and members of the general public, it is research—specifically, research comparing the averages of results obtained across instructional alternatives. In other words, an instructional approach that research, rigorously conducted, has documented works better, on average, than something else (that being the evidence) is best practice. (Click here for a detailed discussion of “best practice.”)

Who could argue with that?

But, if identifying best practice is a valid role for research, it might be exercised on a grand scale to settle some of the most consequential, and sometimes controversial, issues of practice. For example, imagine a large, national, federally funded study aimed at determining the best approach to teaching young children to read. The study would involve hundreds of districts, schools, and classrooms, collectively representing the geographical, socioeconomic, and linguistic diversity of the United States, for example. Alternative approaches to teaching beginning reading would be compared on established indicators of reading development to determine which is the best of all (on average).

That would be a scintillating study.

In fact, such a study has been conducted. But what is more scintillating, and potentially enlightening, is that its important findings and the conclusions and perspectives that might be drawn from them have been largely ignored—for 50 years. “The Cooperative Research Program in First-Grade Reading Instruction” (usually referred to simply as the “First-Grade Studies”) is a classic in the field. Its results were originally published in 1967 in Reading Research Quarterly (RR) and again verbatim in RRQ on the report’s 30th anniversary in 1997. Guy Bond and Robert Dykstra, the authors who had culled and analyzed the results from 27 subprojects around the United States, became iconic (Bond and Dykstra were to reading research what Rodgers and Hammerstein were to show tunes). Further, the list of the local or regional coordinators of the substudies read like a who’s who of reading research.

But was it landmark research?

The answer is yes, but mostly no. The conduct of the First-Grade Studies is known for its audacious scope in pursuing what today we would call best practice. But, in the decades that followed, perhaps for understandable reasons given its findings, it had little effect on research or practice. As David Pearson (1997) stated in a commentary accompanying the republication of the original report, “A common standard…for evaluating the legacy of a piece of research is whether it generates additional studies on the issue, topic, or question. By that standard, the First-Grade Studies were a dismal failure.” (p. 431).

So what were the findings and conclusions?

Let’s start with one of the First-Grade Studies’ central questions: Which, among many alternative approaches to teaching reading, leads to the best results at the end of first grade? The answer: All of them and none of them. Some approaches were the best in one context and the worst in others, with little rhyme or reason apparent in the data collected. Put another way, there was no single best practice, only unknown local variations under which some approaches worked better than others. Put in contemporary terms, there was no definitive evidence of overall best practice. The results, given one of the main purposes of the study, were anticlimactic, perhaps infuriatingly so, particularly given the controversies swirling around alternative approaches at the time (e.g., using the initial teaching alphabet and the relative benefits of linguistic, phonics, and whole-language methods).

Digging deeper into their data, Bond and Dykstra (1967) concluded, “Evidently, reading achievement is influenced by factors peculiar to school systems over and above differences in pre-reading capabilities” (pp. 121–122). Commenting on the findings from a follow-up study of second grade instruction (the “Second-Grade Studies), Dykstra (1968) stated, “One of the most important implications of this study is that future research should focus on teacher and learning situation characteristics rather than method and materials” (p. 66). In short, context is everything, and, by extension, any consideration of best practice must be grounded in particular circumstances. And, by further extension, any research that claims to inform best practice must acknowledge explicitly the complex qualifying dimensions of context.

But that was so long ago…

Yes, but history repeats itself. For example, consider the relatively more recent (2009) results of a federally funded meta-analysis (statistical synthesis of many typically small-scale research studies) conducted by the National Early Literacy Panel. Click here for a summary of that study and 11 critiques of its methodological and conceptual soundness. One goal was to determine which instructional approaches (emphases actually) in teaching beginning reading were associated subsequently with higher reading achievement. A few broad, tentative generalizations emerged such as an edge for code-based instruction. However, contextual variation did not enter into the analyses or interpretations. For example, might the overall edge for code-based instruction be attributed to all of the studies included in the analyses of that emphasis having occurred in small groups?
Why do we keep searching for best practice when it is, as the First-Grade Studies illustrated so convincingly decades ago, contextually dependent? And…

Is there another way to think about effective practice and how research might identify it? Does anything go if context is everything?

Addressing those questions will be Part 2.

David Reinking is the Eugene T. Moore Professor of Education in the School of Education at Clemson University. During the 2012-13 academic year he was a visiting distinguished professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, and in the Spring of 2013, he was a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia in Viterbo Italy.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.