Media and reading: How media distort reading research
http://cars.uth.tmc.edu/debate/taylorresponse.htm
In Foorman et al’s response to B. Tayler et al. (2000) critisim, they talked about how media distored their original research — from a 4-group design to a WL vs. Phonics story. It would be interesting to “reprint the London Times and The Globe and Mail articles side by side so as to show how the media can distort information.”
“In attendance at the LDA meeting in March 1996 was Marion Joseph, who is now a member of the state board of education in California. Mrs. Joseph told Steve Baldwin, chair of the educational subcommittee of the California legislature about results presented at the LDA symposium. Drs. Lyon and Foorman were asked to testify before the education subcommittee in May 1996, one year after California had passed its ABC bill. Researchers funded by the government are obligated to respond to explicit requests of this sort. Videotapes of these testimonies reveal typical academic accounts of research findings rather than the sensational, conspiracy-motivated fiction in D. Taylor (1998). However, most media accounts of our testimony and of Foormans invited presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Seattle, Washington February 16, 1997, were problematic because our four-group comparison of IC-S, IC-R, EC, and DC became reduced to a two-group comparison of Whole-language versus Phonics. On February 19, 1997, The Globe and Mail published a front page article describing our study presented at AAAS as simply a phonics versus whole-language comparison where phonics won. On February 18, 1997, the London Times published a fairly accurate description of our four-way comparison presented at AAAS. If the two articles were lined up next to each other it would be difficult to guess that they were describing the same study. On March 3, 1997, researchers at the University of Toronto (Booth, Dudley-Martin, Murphy, & Wells, 1997) wrote a commentary to The Globe and Mail complaining about our lack of attention to comprehension. We wrote a response on March 10, 1997 (Foorman, Francis, & Fletcher, 1997), explaining that the design included four, not two groups and that the large effect size of the comprehension results was of practical importance. In spite of our clarification, some members of the board of the International Reading Association talked the editor of the IRAs newspaper, Reading Today, into republishing the Wells et al. commentary. Thus, the misrepresentation of our study by the media became instantiated in the minds of reading educators across the nation. We were successful in convincing the editor of Reading Today to reprint our rebuttal to Booth et al., but we were not successful in convincing him to reprint the London Times and The Globe and Mail articles side by side so as to show how the media can distort information. “