The research that has guided Ontario’s education strategy for literacy development has been faulty for decades, researchers say.
And its adverse effects on students’ reading abilities shows. As of 2019, one in four students in Grade 3, and one in five students in Grade 6 were failing to meet the province’s literacy standards, according to a Right to Read report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
To the great approval of many researchers, and guided by the findings of the report, Ontario’s Ministry of Education is changing course. Last month, it announced a new “back-to-basics” kindergarten curriculum that will take effect in September 2025.
“They say we’re moving back to the basics, but we’re actually moving forward by bringing science into our learning,” said Dr. Todd Cunningham, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
The new curriculum will prioritize phonics instruction — the practice of associating sounds with letters — and using that knowledge to read and spell words.
“It’s critical that our youngest students develop core foundational skills earlier on in their lives,” Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s education minister, said in a news release.
The province made a similar change last September when it added phonics instruction to its Grade 1 to Grade 8 curriculum.
Previous literacy education in Ontario was “not consistent with the science of reading,” the Right to Read report says.
Foundational word-reading skills had been “largely overlooked in favour of an almost exclusive focus on contextual word-reading strategies and on socio-cultural perspectives on literacy.”
Ontario’s literacy education deviated from a curriculum grounded in science because policymakers didn’t understand which research was valid, says Alicia Smith, executive director of the charity Dyslexia Canada.
Because policymakers aren’t trained to distinguish between good and bad science, they are prone to adopting the bad as it is often easier to understand, she says.
“There’s all sorts of academic journals in education that publish really low quality research. They really publish anecdotes and theories. And that is the research that has influenced Ontario’s literacy curriculum for the last three decades.”
Persuasive essay
Some of the approaches to literacy education that are promoted as “research-based” in Ontario’s former curricula are actually “based on theories or philosophies with no scientific evidence to support them,” the Right to Read report says.
Smith describes the two kinds of research in education: There’s the dry, 40-page documents outlining a sophisticated experiment, detailed results and then a conclusion with all sorts of caveats.
“Then there’s the research which reads more like a persuasive essay where the researcher just lays out a theory for what’s happening in the world.”
Researchers “will go into the classroom, watch some kids play and then draw a conclusion about how those kids are learning. That is truly the extent of the research; there’s no objective measures there or long-term follow-up,” she said.
In its rawest form, good science is difficult to communicate to policymakers whereas the less rigorous research is often digestible and convincing, Smith says.
“I used to go out and give these technical talks; here are my graphs and pre-imposed measures, and I learned none of that mattered. I had to turn it all into a nice story, and once I did that, I got buy-in,” said Cunningham of the University of Toronto.
In order for good science to be acted on, scientists are now often required to explain how they’ll communicate their findings to policymakers, he says.
“It’s called knowledge mobilization. The granting agencies want to hear strategies for how the research will impact our communities.”
Reading wars
Not all researchers are on board with the findings of the commission’s report.
According to Dr. Jim Cummins, a retired professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, the Right to Read report left out “the other 50 per cent of the science.”
He says that phonics instruction is important — but so is a contextual literacy approach, whereby children learn to read through books.
“There is a massive amount of rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental research that supports the causal role of literacy engagement,” Cummins said in an email. attaching a study from the University of Tennessee to prove his point.
The study asserts that once students acquire minimal competence as readers, their reading volume becomes a predictor of their gains in reading achievement.
It is especially important for kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds to be encouraged to read from a young age, Cummins says.
“[Those kids] will eventually learn their phonics skills. But where they fall behind is in reading comprehension. The more they encounter words, the more automatic reading becomes,” he said.
“This research has been totally left out by the authors [of the commission’s report],” he said, calling it a “profoundly unscientific document.”
But Cunningham says the assertion that the commission neglected significant portions of reading science is inaccurate.
“The [commission] has not dedicated extensive discussion to [the contextual literacy topic] primarily because Ontario already emphasizes this aspect of literacy education,” he said.
Cunningham says the focus of the Right to Read report’s criticism is on “what was lacking, a deficiency in phonemic knowledge, phonics and word decoding skills instruction.”
Cummins also argues that if Ontario’s literacy curriculum was truly a failure, it would show up on standardized testing.
“Instead, Ontario English language schools are fifth in the world in reading, second among English-speaking countries, first among Canadian provinces at the Grade 8 level,” Cummins wrote in a paper criticizing the report, citing data from the Programme for International Student Assessment.
But this is missing the point, according to Dr. Perry Klein, a professor of applied psychology at Western University. He agrees that most Ontario students are able to read, but the report “doesn’t claim Ontario has a general reading crisis.”
“[R]eading achievement comprises a distribution; it is consistent and accurate to claim that many Ontario students are learning to read well while others are struggling,” Klein wrote in a rebuttal to Cummins.
The debate around literacy education is known as the “reading wars,” Cunningham said. And it has been going on now for six decades.
He says it’s reminiscent of the lingering debate over vaccines, whereby a small number of scientists refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence.
Given Ontario is in the early stages of transitioning to more evidence-based practices, Cunningham says, he is apprehensive about revisiting the “great debate” lest we lose the progress that has been made.
