Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study
A landmark study has described the way primary school pupils are taught to read in England as “uninformed and failing children”, calling on the government to drop its narrow focus on phonics. Researchers at UCL’s Institute of Education say the current emphasis on synthetic phonics, which teaches children to read by helping them to identify and pronounce sounds which they…
89% of College Students Admit to Using ChatGPT for Homework (study)
Educators are battling a new reality: easily accessible AI that allows students to take immense shortcuts in their education — and as it turns out, many appear to already be cheating with abandon. Online course provider Study.com asked 1,000 students over the age of 18 about the use of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s blockbuster chatbot, in the classroom. The responses were surprising….
The A.I. Chatbots Have Arrived. Time to Talk to Your Kids.
From the NY Times: Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons. The race is on. Companies are pouring billions of dollars into powerful online chatbots and finding new ways to integrate them into our daily lives. Are our children ready for this? Are…
The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes
This is an interesting cautionary tale… “While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of…
Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction
There is a widespread consensus in the research community that early reading instruction in English should emphasize systematic phonics. That is, initial reading instruction should explicitly and systematically teach letter (grapheme) to sound (phoneme) correspondences. This contrasts with the main alternative method called whole language in which children are encouraged to focus on the meanings of words embedded in meaningful…
What is the “C Rule” in phonics?
The other day I came across an article about the Pacific Ocean and it occurred to me that the letter “c” has 3 different sounds in that name. How is a student learning to read supposed to know which “c” sound to use for each occurrence of the letter? Traditional phonics instruction tells kids to use the “Rule of c”…
