I have the opportunity to correct small errors for the paperback version.  If you’ve found any that aren’t listed here, please either post them here for all to see, or send them by email. Thanks much!

The students in Prof. Casey Lew-Williams’ class are reading the book this week.  (You must be very good readers! Are you skimming?)  The students are going to post questions as comments on this blog entry, which I’ll answer as rapidly as possible.  It’ll be just like Reddit, but classy!  This material can be read by…… Continue reading Hello, Princeton PSY 400 students, and welcome, lurkers!

Some tweeters (hi @MiriamFein @PATSTONE55‪ @DavidWray @ManYanaEd) have asked whether the summaries of the findings about phonics and top-down guessing strategies in Chapter 11 are accurate. They are, but the book isn’t a review of the literature and so only a few representative studies are cited and discussed in detail.  Here’s some additional information.  I’ll…… Continue reading Really?

Every scientist has heard the adage, The plural of anecdote is not “data”. Anecdotes have scientific value—they can reveal new phenomena before they’ve been systematically studied—but they’re not facts.  They are nonetheless often treated as such, especially if several seem to make a consistent point.* Twitterer Sara Pikelet wittily observed that anecdotes are “small batch…… Continue reading The plural of “anecdote” is …

New K-5 teachers are underprepared for the job. There are exceptions, of course, but most programs leading to teacher certification/licensure are grossly inadequate. There’s a deeply entrenched belief that how to teach can’t be taught, and so it isn’t. Teachers are left to learn on the job, which isn’t optimal for them or for their…… Continue reading Teacher qualifications: Raise the bar, remove the bar

Young people have plenty of screen-based alternatives to reading.  Case in point: PewDiePie, most popular home-grown YouTube personality ever (53 million followers), as noted on p. 8 of the book. Update: Perhaps bored with grinding out hugely popular, impressively stupid videos, he produced a series of anti-Semitic ones. Bad move: Disney dropping multi-million $$ deal.…… Continue reading Heil PewDiePie

“A low-income family will be less able to buy books and more likely to live in a neighborhood with fewer public libraries, which serve larger populations and contain fewer books that are in worse physical condition than those in middle-class areas.” That’s from p. 116 of my book, but what does the part in bold…… Continue reading Ambiguity strikes home