tematic, longitudinal, multidisciplinary, large-scale research to try to understand very specific, focused questions.

What I would like to discuss with you today is an example of that, and it is in the area of reading. We are concerned about reading, reading development, reading difficulties, and reading instruction because of the substantial negative impact that not learning to read has on our Nation's children. I would like to show you what I mean if I could, if you could watch the monitors.

[Video clip shown.]

Dr. LYON. As we know this young lady, who is now 23, who has been with us since 5 in a major longitudinal study, when she says "The end," she not only wants to leave that session, she has wanted to leave school.

The NICHD has studied this issue for 34 years. And within that context, we have studied 34,521 children to determine what does it take to learn how to read, what goes wrong, as you just saw, when you don't, and what you do about it. In 11 clinical trials that have been ongoing for now 10 years, we are finally beginning to understand the types of instructional procedures that in combination work best for individual children. What you see on your screen now is, with the top line showing our normal controls, youngsters like that you saw on the screen starting out below the 10th percentile and moving within a year to two years period of time right up to the average range.

In the main, these graphs suggest that for most children identified as having difficulties learning to read, which ranges from 22 percent to 59 percent in our different States, all but about 5 percent to 7 percent of these children, if we do it right, if we identify them early, can be brought up to a substantial level of reading capability.

For example, as we are looking at different instructional conditions with our Nation's schools in classrooms, we find that those procedures that work, for example, the top one that says "PASP," which is just a combined instructional approach, these youngsters had the lowest rate of grade failure compared to other approaches which are most frequently used in our Nation's schools and which are most frequently taught to our Nation's teachers. Likewise, in terms of referral to special education services, certain approaches definitely have a greater integrity and power with children, but those approaches are not typically taught to our Nation's teachers and not typically used in public schools. And there remains a substantial lacuna or gap between what in the world we know and what is in fact practiced in schools.

Converging with this type of study are substantial studies in the neurosciences. We are looking at children with a number of different neuroimaging modalities and technologies. We have nice converging evidence now mapping those neurosystems that seem to subserve or undergird the reading process. You are looking at a normal signature now, or a cartoon of a normal signature. These are coronal slices, or down through the head slices. If you will just look at the yellow dots, those show the differences in how the brain handles particular language information from normal in kids who do not read. That shows the extent of difference in many children

who do not learn to read in particular defined areas of the nervous system.

What we are doing now, the children, and like those children that you saw on the screen, first are imaged across a number of sites in the country, we then enroll them in clinical trials, and we are attempting to try to understand which instructional procedures have the most power, and, as reading behavior improves, does in fact neurophysiology come along beside it. Better said, does neurophysiology change such that we know that brain is changing to support more improved behavior.

The difficulties we continue to face have to do with what both my collaborators in the IERI have talked about already, and that is taking information that we still need to learn, and taking information that we know now, and scaling that to a level that can actually enhance the education of a larger number of children, information that we can use to inform teacher preparation, which, frankly, is the black hole in all of this, so that the best productive practices can be employed to benefit our Nation's children. What you saw on the screen does not have to be. Thank you.

Chairman SMITH. Very good, Dr. Lyon. Thank you.

Dr. Wigdor.

TESTIMONY OF ALEXANDRA K. WIGDOR, ASSOCIATE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COMMISSION OF BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AND EDUCATION, NATIONAL RESOURCE COUNCIL, WASHINGTON, DC

Dr. WIGDOR. Good afternoon. I would like to pass on the greetings of Dr. Bruce Alberts, the President of the National Academy of Sciences, who is very interested in these issues. He is a cellular biologist who makes education his avocation and he is very interested in trying to strengthen the connection between research and practice.

I am here to talk to you today about this report "Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Implementation." This is a plan that proposes that we as a country undertake what the field of education has sorely lacked; that is, sustained research that is scientifically rigorous and focused on the practical problems of improving teaching and learning. The plan described in this report is really based on three propositions.

The first of chem is that there is an emerging science of learning that has important implications for the design of curricula, instruction, assessment, and learning environments. A recent report that the NRC produced, a study supported by the Office of Education Research and Improvement, called "How People Learn, Brain, Mind, Experience and School," came very strongly and powerfully to the conclusion that we do know a whole lot from the cognitive sciences, from developmental psychology, from neuroscience, from many other fields about human learning that has important implications for what goes on in schools. The report has dozens and dozens of important insights. I would like to just share one of them with you quickly.

From a number of different strands of research, it is very clear that competence, be it in expert chess players or musicians or competent grade school and high school students, competence depends

on both a foundation of rich factual knowledge and command of concepts or big ideas. Now we have in this country spent decades fighting over back to basics, just the facts, ma'am versus progressive education, the big ideas. From many different kinds of cognitive research, it is clear that competent learners have to have both. We do not need to fight about this any more. Now how you translate that into what teachers should do is an important question. But at least we have the basic learning principle with no doubt.

The second proposition that this education research plan is based on is that researchers, educators, and policymakers can work together in a partnership that can improve the effectiveness of all of them. The research will improve, the teaching will improve, and the education policy will improve. We have a bit of experience in different areas to support this. I think I will not go into that now because time is flying.

The third proposition on which this report is based is that the time now is ripe for this initiative. I have some quick information to give you about how much hunger there is out there for good, solid, science-based conclusions about learning. We published a report, our study included researchers who had been supported by OERI and a lot of researchers who had been supported by NICHD, a report on reading difficulties in young children. The report is a typical NRC thick, technical tome. In the year and several months that it has been out, we have sold 36,000 copies of that report, which for us is highly unusual. We also produced a version of that report for parents called "Starting Out Right." That came out last December, and in less than a year we have sold 52,000 of that report. There is hunger out there for real solid information on, in this case, preventing reading difficulties and what you can do to help your children.

We have seen in taking the "How People Learn" book out to teachers and principals a similar hunger. They are just dying for good solid information. I think the "How People Learn" book, which I am not here to talk about today but I think it is a very important book, is, however, only a first step. It enunciates important learning principles. It does not go very far along the road to telling teachers and providing for teachers what they need in the way of preparation and tools to make these things come alive in the class

room.

We have produced another small report, "How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice," at the request of OERI, which sets out a research agenda that would take these principles the further steps to figuring out how to design curricula, how to produce textbooks, how to prepare teachers so that they can apply these principles in the classroom.

It is that kind of effort that is needed and that stands behind this report calling for a Strategic Education Research Plan, which we call, endearingly, SERP. The SERP proposal is based on something of a novel proposition-coming out of our proposition number two it is based on the idea that a collaboration in designing the research and carrying out the research, a collaboration between teachers, researchers, and policymakers, is what will make the research be focused on the real problems in schools, be feasible in the

eyes of policymakers, and be the kinds of research that the sciences can support. The researchers themselves will be there to define what indeed are the greatest opportunities in science.

So this collaboration, which I say is novel, this is at the heart of the SERP idea. The SERP proposal calls for a very-I have to wind it up. Let me tell you about four principles that are called for. It calls for a focused effort; it calls for a multidisciplinary and collaborative effort; it calls for an effort that goes on for 15 years so that we have time to accumulate the kind of findings that will generate real change; it calls not only for sustained research but solutions-oriented research. I think this is key. It cannot be research simply for the sake of research. It has to be research directed at the real needs of teachers, students, and schools.

I will be happy to answer any questions about the report or talk further about it. Thank you.

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Wigdor.
Dr. Vinovskis.

TESTIMONY OF MARIS A. VINOVSKIS, PROFESSOR, DEPART-
MENT OF HISTORY, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, AND
SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,
ANN ARBOR, MI

Dr. VINOVSKIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am very pleased to be able to be here. I have submitted for the record the longer written testimony as well as two longer papers which underlie the testimony I have.

The Federal Government has been collecting and analyzing data for over 130 years. This is nothing new. But we have not been doing a very good job of it. As Dr. Lyon pointed out, much of the research is not rigorous, does not live up to the standards of our professions, and we do have a problem there.

One of the limitations, as you pointed out in your statements, is that we do not have enough money. I certainly would favor more money, if that money is spent well. And that is what I think you need to pay more attention to than we have in the past. It is not the lack of money by itself that is our problem. And in my longer written testimony I talk about nine problems facing the field that I think we have to confront. In my short remaining time, I want to suggest six things that you as members of the subcommittee might want to think about.

First of all, something that Kent McGuire has pointed out before, most of the Department's research and development should be concentrated in OERI and things that are not related to that should be moved elsewhere. You really have to have a focus in OERI, which you do not have today.

Secondly, you need OERI to be an intellectual leader. But that means you need first-rate researchers. And for the most part, you do not have that. And you certainly do not have it by having lost 25 percent of the staff in recent years. You cannot lead the country without having first-rate individuals in that research institution.

Third, the research and development centers and the regional educational laboratories have been with us since the 1960s. They are supposed to have produced large-scale systematic research. We should be praising what they have done. We are here to tell you

it has not happened. We are going to need I think a separate program for soliciting and implementing large-scale systematic development. Much of what you are talking about is what we tried to set up in the mid-1960s. The question for you is, why did we not achieve it?

Fourth, the R&D centers do play an important role. We have spent $1.1 billion on them in the past 30 years, so we have put some money in there. Why are we not getting what we want out of them? They really need to be larger, more focused, they are too fragmented. Every time we have hearings, people come up here and tell you that. The agency heads in the past have told you we are going to change it. They told you that in 1994. Here we are again.

Five, OERI needs to target its field-initiated research competitions on particular educational problems, again, what several of you have mentioned. I do not think there is any controversy there. We just have to do it.

And sixth, and this is very sad, especially some of you who are overlapping the committees and are working on a Title I reauthorization which you just passed, first-rate, scientifically sound educational program evaluations, which we all need, are missing in the U.S. Department of Education. The Planning and Evaluation Service, which has had responsibility for that since 1985, has not done a good job. You need to ask why. You need to ask who is going to do it. I would suggest you are going to have to develop an independent unit, particularly as you get into some tough questions about programs that work and do not work in a field that is becoming more controversial. You need to have scientific confidence and political confidence in that entity. I assert you do not have that today.

One of the things that really strikes me, as you look at the research over time, and being a historian, I have actually read back through the hearings on National Institute of Education and OERI for the past 20-25 years, all the right things are said, all the right ideas come forth. And then four to five years later another crew of people come up and say we have learned from the past, we did not do quite as well as we thought, and we will do it all better. And we keep doing this.

We do not lack ideas. You are not raising questions that your predecessors haven't raised. We are not doing the execution of the job that we need to do. Some of that responsibility rests with researchers, like us, the universities, and the institutions we are in. It is not ideas we are lacking, it is the will to put them into practice to get rigorous work.

The question I lay before you is, why do we think it is going to be any different this time around than it has been for the last 20 or 30 years? Thank you.

Chairman SMITH. Wow. Very good.

Probably my first question should be why did we not achieve it and what can we do to do better. But I want to start out with the coordination of research. Is the IERI an adequate effort? How often do you meet? Is the research of the different agencies coordinated? Dr. Sunley, starting with you.