In this historical analysis, we examine the context of debates over the role of phonics in literacy and current debates about the science of reading, with a focus on the work and impact of the late literacy scholar Jeanne Chall. We open by briefly tracing the roots of the enduring debates from the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on beginning…

A decade after the publication of Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, the influence of John Hattie's statistical work continues to grow. This paper critically examines one aspect of Hattie's 'synthesis' of education meta-analyses, his summation of research data for whole language literacy teaching. Of…

Over the last 50 years, certain ideas have become dominant that make learning to read different than it once was than the ideas that children are neurologically "wired" to use language "competently" in certain ways. Noam Chomsky has promoted the idea that there are certain "syntactic structures" hard-wired in the human brain. That view, the author…

Contemporary education theory (and official South African policy) underwrites learner-centredness. I analyse learner-centredness as a possible piece of the puzzle about why it is proving so difficult to improve academic achievement. Learner-centred ideas are grounded in the belief that cognitive abilities develop spontaneously in accordance with a…