ANN ARBOR—For decades, a debate has simmered over the best way to teach children how to read. Proponents of phonics, the whole language and meaning approach and other teaching methods long have battled for dominance, each insisting that theirs is the superior strategy.

In a new report in the Jan. 26 issue of Science, University of Michigan and Florida State University researchers argue that there is no single best method for teaching children to read.

The paper argues that individualized instruction, combined with the use of diagnostic tools that help teachers match each child with the amounts and types of reading instruction that are most effective for him or her, is vastly preferable to the standard one-size-fits-all approach to reading education that is the norm in many American elementary schools.

“There is too much of a tendency in education to go with what sounds really good,” said Carol M. Connor, assistant professor in the FSU College of Education. “What we haven’t done very well is conduct comprehensive field trials and perform the rigorous research that are the norm in other fields of science. With this study, we sought to do just that?to take a systematic approach to what works, what doesn’t, and why when teaching students to read.”

Connor, who led the research team, is also a researcher with the Florida Center for Reading Research, and a graduate of the U-M School of Education and former post-doctoral researcher in U-M’s psychology department. The team consisted of Fred Morrison, a professor in U-M’s psychology department and School of Education, and Barry Fishman, an associate professor in the U-M School of Education and the School of Information.

Among the researchers’ findings: “The efficacy of any particular instructional practice may depend on the skill level of the student. Instructional strategies that help one student may be ineffective when applied to another student with different skills.”

The trick, then, is to more precisely determine the skill level of each child and then find a way to cater the curriculum to each student’s individual needs.

“Instead of viewing the class as an organism, we’re trying to get teachers to view the students as individuals,” Connor said.

While that may sound daunting to the typical first- or second-grade teacher, Connor has turned to technology to offer a helping hand.

Connor, Morrison, and Fishman have developed “Assessment to Instruction,” or A2i, a Web-based software program. A2i uses students’ vocabulary and reading scores and their desired reading outcome (grade level by the end of first grade) to create algorithms that compute the recommended amounts and types of reading instruction for each child in the classroom.

The software then groups students based on learning goals and allows teachers to regularly monitor their progress and make changes to individual curricula as needed.

“Perhaps the greatest promise of the research is the ability to specify in precise quantitative terms the amounts and types of instruction each child needs to grow optimally,” Morrison said. “This would be a great advance for educational research and practice.”

Added Fishman: “Web-based technology holds great promise for making easy-to-use tools for individualizing instruction available to many more teachers, along with online professional development to better understand how to employ different teaching approaches with groups of children.”

A2i currently is being tested by about 60 elementary-school teachers in one Florida county. However, “right now A2i is just a research tool,” Connor said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to make it available more widely as time goes on.”

In addition to Connor and Morrison, other co-authors of the Science paper were associate professor Christopher Schatschneider and graduate teaching assistant Phyllis Underwood, both of FSU’s psychology department.

To view an A2i demonstration page, visit http://know.umich.edu/A2i/login.asp. Use the login a2idemo and the password isi06!