Monday, July 24, 2023

Research suppressed



This is a continuation of my post yesterday on my comments on Dr. Sam Bommarito’s post which said:

I think a more useful use of our time would be to explore ideas from all sides and to find practical research-based ideas that all teachers can use regardless of whose “side” it comes from.

Research if not suppressed is not publicised. The powers that be ensure that the research material is not disseminated to schools and to the public/ parents.

 

I don’t have access to much research material but since 2015 when I was informed by one of my blog readers about Children of the Code I read the material over and over again. I was pleased that what I had discovered was similar to what was discovered by the experts on COTC. More than 100 experts were interviewed and interviews were also conducted on students who were unable to read. I again quote what David Boulton replied to my email in 2015.  Children of the Code avoided advocating solutions so as not to be dismissed as having an agenda other than learning deeper into the challenge.

David Boulton disagreed with me and blocked me for telling him that the videos he recommended on Social Media are detrimental to kids. These were videos teaching the letters with extraneous sounds. However, immediately after blocking me, he deleted those videos.Why did he delete the videos?

The following are from the Children of the Code:

10 times the number of kids who have innately biologically ordered learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned. How much of what they are struggling with is what they have learned in the past working against them learning now.

This is what I have been writing about since I started my blog and these guys knew it from the research work they did and yet they promote videos that teach the wrong sounds represented by letters. Our ‘Education Guru’ Timothy Shanahan who was part of the team has not disseminated on Social Media the ‘learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned’.

Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Chairof, National Scientific Council on the Developing Child said:

"So the sobering message here is that if children don't have the right experiences during these sensitive periods for the development of a variety of skills, including many cognitive and language capacities, that's a burden that those kids are going to carry…”

The above is what Thorndike said in 1913 as well.

In a video called ‘Unhealthy Learning’, David Boulton said:

When a child’s mind starts to develop an avoidance of confusion then that avoidance can spill out to the confusion that is involved in learning about other things.

In Unfolding the Ambiguity in the Code Siegfried Engelmann said:

In other words, we've let the kids tell us what we were doing wrong…

And David Boulton replied:

Right. Which reduces the amount of ambiguity they start off with?

Yes, I learnt from my students and Engelmann said that the kids had told them what the educators were doing wrong.

My question to all the educators is what has happened to all this research which exactly is what I discovered by teaching my students? This and more is what I have elaborated in my book ‘Shut Down Kids’.

To be continued…

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