The Next Steps

As part of its Congressional charge, the NRP was directed to assess the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read and to further indicate the extent to which effective approaches were ready for application in classroom settings. The instructional topics of alphabetics (phonemic awareness and phonics), fluency, comprehension (vocabulary instruction and text comprehension), teacher education and reading instruction, and computer technology and reading instruction addressed in this Report were selected by the Panel from a candidate list of 35 topics generated from Panel members’ own expertise, from the report of the National Research Council on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), and from the input the Panel received in its regional hearings. Several additional factors contributed to the consensus decision to limit the number of topics that could be addressed and to evaluate the research literature relevant to these specific topics. These factors included (1) the hypothesized role that these topics play in reading instruction; (2) the availability of well-designed experimental or quasi-experimental studies of instructional effectiveness for each of these topic areas versus other topic areas; (3) the immensity of the research literature in reading development and reading instruction; and (4) constraints on time and Panel resources.