Basal Reading Programs: Development, Effectiveness, and Selection Jean Osborn and Marcy Stein

observing a lot of classrooms, talking with many teachers and school F rom administrators, and reviewing a great deal of the classroom observation literature, we have come to believe that commercially developed basal reading programs account for a great deal of how time is spent during the periods allocated for reading instruction in elementary classrooms. This belief is further substantiated by conversations we have had with executives, editors, and salespeople from the major educational publishing houses and, oddly enough, by our tours through the exhibit areas of the International Reading Association's regional and annual meetings. A tour through a major exhibit of basal reading publishers makes apparent the number, variety, and attractiveness of basal reading programs available to the students and teachers of American schools. What also becomes apparent is the highly commercial and competitive nature of the basal reading program market. The atmosphere of an exhibit hall full of school reading programs is rather like that of a West African market town: Colorfully decorated booths are occupied by competitive salespeople extolling their wares; balloons float overhead; clowns, large animals (we think people are underneath the fur), and storytellers wander about. Cheerful hourly announcements about the big giveaway prizes are heard over the loudspeakers, and shoppers (men and women carrying large plastic bags) are everywhere. In a West African market the bags get filled with food, cloth, and other necessities. In the exhibit area the shoppers wander in and out of the booths, filling their bags with informational brochures, posters, maps, and a variety of small giveaway items--from road atlases to fresh roses. People emerging from the exhibit area often have the burdened appearance of women carrying the bundles and packages of a morning's serious shopping in the marketplace of an exotic and faraway land. Our many visits to these book marketplaces have lead us to believe not only that what is inside the books accounts for their purchase and subsequent use in classrooms, but that some outside-the-book activities also affect how programs are chosen. These visits have also lead us to ask some questions about basal Jean Osborn is associate director of the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. Marcy Stein is currently preparing for a doctorate in special education at the University of Washington's Experimental Education Unit, where she is employed.

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Osborn and Stein

reading programsmhow are they developed? Are there differences among them? What do we know about their content? And how are they used? We discuss these questions in the next section of this article.

How Are Basal Reading Programs Developed? Most basal reading programs are developed by teams of authors who work closely with editors of educational publishing companies. (The many components of typical basal reading programs are listed and described in the opening pages of the article by Winograd and Osborn in this journal.) Authors and editors usually begin the creation of a new program with discussions of philosophies of reading, definitions of reading, approaches to reading instruction, and criteria for selecting the content of the student readers. There are also contributions from members of the marketing staff, who bring to the discussion of real-life expectations and needs of the potential purchasers of the final product. Then, outlines are made to determine what is going to be taught and w h e n - - a program's scope and sequence chart reflects much of this planning mand lessons are mapped out. The amount of author involvement in the actual writing of a program varies from company to company (and probably from decade to decade). In some cases, authors write prototype lessons for the teacher's guides, and the "illling in" is done in the publishing house. In only a very few cases do the authors write essentially everything. It is more usual for editors to be responsible for a great deal of the actual writing of what is in the teacher's guides, workbooks, and many of the other components. Increasingly however, much of this kind of work is contracted to writers and companies working outside the publishing company. Typically, much of the content of the student reader (especially after the first grade) is pulled from already written copyrighted narrative and expository texts. Student readers contain short stories, poems, excerpts (often somewhat rewritten) from longer stories and novels, and expository articles. Sometimes stories and articles are commissioned to be written especially for a program, but usually a great deal of what appears in a reader is picked up from already copyrighted books and articles. The development of a basal reading program can take up to five years, and depending upon the size of the company and the scope o' .he program can cost $10-15 million. Because so much work is done by aut mrs and "out of house" writers, it is difficult to determine how many editors and assistants are required to develop a program. What is not difficult to determine is that publishers invest a great deal of time, effort, and money when they create a new basal reading program. And in any one publishing house, programs are in a sense being developed continuously. The demands of local and state school districts for new and up-to-date programs--and title pages that display current copyright dates--assure the continuous employment of a number of

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Book Research Quarterly/Summer 1985

editors on the staffs of the major educational publishing houses as well as the "out-of-house" writers working for them. The demand for up-to-date programs has at least one serious negative effect on most basal programs, and that is the lack of time for program tryout in classrooms. Although sometimes individual lessons and segments of programs are tried out before publication, it is unusual for an entire program to be rigorously observed as it is used in classrooms and modified accordingly before it is published. We believe that much of the "bumpiness," the unevenness, and the sometimes evident lack of coordination among program components can be attributed to inadequate tryout procedures. Educational publishers market their programs to school districts throughout the United States (and sometimes abroad). Although well over a dozen wellknown basal reading programs are on the market, information (given in a somewhat clandestine fashion by publisher "sources") indicates that about 70 percent of American school districts buy one or more of the five best-selling programs. So, even though which of the programs are in the top five varies from decade to decade, it is probably safe to assert that a small number of basal reading programs have a strong influence on how American children are taught to read and what American children read.

Differences Among Basal Reading Programs Among the most used programs are some differences and many similarities; teaching of comprehension varies only modestly in the beginning grade levels of programs, and in most programs, even less in the upper grade levels. The approach to the instruction of beginning reading varies from program to program but actually not across the best-selling programs. 1 Although some "favorite" stories appear in a number of student readers, the content of the readers does vary from program to program, especially in the beginning books (the primers, and a good part of the first grade readers). The content of these beginning books is more determined by the words or phonic elements the students are being taught in the teacher-directed part of the lesson, rather than by literary quality. Although some critics of children's readers enjoy taking potshots at the content of beginning readers, we cannot join that chorus. The expectation that every selection in a beginning reader can be interesting, comprehensible, and instructional is probably unrealistic. The analysis of selections in almost any beginning reader indicates that the overriding purpose of most of the selections is instructional. The words in some basal readers are chosen for their "regularity" so as to provide students with a basis for practicing (or discovering) the relationships between specific letters and sounds. Other beginning readers are written so that students have the opportunity for repeated practice of useful words that appear with great frequency in both oral and written language but are not as subject to phonic regularity.

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Student readers in the upper primary and elementary levels are much less constrained by the limits of the vocabulary and phonic elements being taught in the teacher-directed part of the lesson. As is obvious, the students know more about reading and can read a greater variety of content. And most of the programs are similar in that they contain a veritable cafeteria of content: short stories (both classic and modern), excerpts from longer works of fiction, poems, plays, expository articles (most often about topics related to natural science and historical events), biographical selections, and in the most recent editions what can be described as "self-help" selections on specific comprehension and study skills. Influences on Program Content

Authors and editors must respond to many demands as they choose the selections that make up the content of basal readers. The instructional criteria that predominate in the primers are replaced by other criteria as the selections become longer and the books bigger. Some people believe that the stories must reflect classic literary traditions; others promote stories that are "timely" so that modern students will relate to them. Selections on history, geography, and science must be accurate and represent a range of topics. To these demands are added the demands of groups seeking to have their constituencies represented in children's reading material. When the basal readers of the 1960s and those of the 1980s are compared, it is apparent that women and minority groups are represented to a much greater degree in the 1980 books. A survey of the most recent books also reveals that handicapped and elderly people are portrayed not only in the pic',ures of the books but as characters in stories as well. That there is such a change is not an accident of history. Rather, it is due to the demands of groups of people working hard to affect the content of reading programs. The sometimes competing demands of pressure groups can be bewildering. For example: Stories should be inspirational, stories should portray high ideals; Greek myths are bad because they are about pagan deities, Greek myths are good because they are about classic subjects; stories about magical characters are bad because they represent an unsuitable explanation of life, stories about magical characters are good because they foster children's imagination; American heroes from the past should be treated with respect; unsavory episodes from the American past should be frankly addressed. The list goes on, but the message is clear: Lots of people want to have lots to say about what goes into basal readers, and some people succeed in being heard. The effect of all of this interest is that publishers and authors are careful. They don't want to offend anyone, and are anxious to please everyone. It ought to come as no surprise that as a result some of the stories children read in their readers are lacking not only in literary quality but in plain, old-fashioned narrative excitement.

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Book Research Quarterly~Summer 1985

Research About the Content and Use of Basal Reading Programs The components of a basal reading program are described in the Winograd-Osborn paper. Although many components are available for purchase, the most used are the teacher's guides, the student readers, and the associated workbooks. In this section we discuss some studies that have analyzed the content of these components. What are the characteristics of the books that students use as they learn to read? If basal readers are considered preparation for reading in the larger context, then how well do these readers prepare students to read "real life" texts--short stories, novels, expository articles, directions, and instructions-they have to deal with as they progress through school and after they have finished their basal reading program? Student Readers

In a study comparing characteristics of basal reader stories with those of trade book stories, Bruce (1984) found a number of differences between the two groups of stories and concluded that publishers of basal programs should expand the range of story types they include in their student readers. Or, alternatively, teachers should be made aware that children reading from basal readers are not exposed to many of the story types they will encounter in "real life" reading and should Supplement the readers with trade books. Research about stories has been carried out for a number of years; research about the characteristics of expository writing is more recent. Although almost no analysis has been made of the expository selections in basal readers, one of the studies about content area texts will perhaps shed light on some qualities of the expository prose in basal readers. Anderson, Armbruster, and Kantor (1980) analyzed sodal studies and science texts on the basis of text structure, text coherence, text unity, and audience appropriateness. Their analyses revealed many examples of unclear writing. These researchers point out that the effect of such writing on how much content area knowledge students acquire in the early elementary grades may in fact not be very great (primarily because many teachers do not use these textbooks as the primary learning source) but suggest that texts of poor quality may have a negative effect on how students in the intermediate grades learn to learn and comprehend information from texts. Research about readability formulas is of particular interest to people concerned about the quality and comprehensibility of what students read. The standard readability formulas are measures of sentence length and of the complexity, unfamiliarity, or length of vocabulary. Everybody--teachers, adoption committee members, authors and editors--assesses the difficulty of textbooks with readability formulas. In the past five years, the effect on text comprehensibility of assessing (and writing) with readability formulas has

Osborn and Stein

43

been the subject of several studies. A group of linguists compared "original texts" (from magazines and books) with the same texts rewritten to conform to readability formulas (Davison, 1984). Davison comments that the rewritten texts "do their bit to lower the vocabulary scores and sentence length" but notes that the resulting simplifications are sometimes contradictory. For example, the practice of paraphrasing hard vocabulary may considerably lengthen sentences as well as add subordinate clauses to them. She also presents evidence strongly suggesting that making changes in text solely on the basis of readability formulas can have harmful effects on a text's comprehensibility.

Teacher's Guides Although the textbooks students use have been analyzed rather extensively, there has been surprisingly little research about the manuals the teachers use. An exception is the research by Durkin (1984), who looked at the teacher's manuals associated with basal reading programs. In her analysis of comprehension instruction in the teacher's manuals of five basal reading programs, she categorized the suggestions to teachers in the manuals as instruction, review, application, and practice. She recorded the number of suggestions in each category and gave examples of their quality. She found, for example, that when manuals specify comprehension instruction, the instructions are often vague and unclear. In addition, she found that the manuals "offer precise help (for example, obvious answers to assessment questions) when it is least needed, but that they are obscure or silent when specific help is likely to be required" (p. 31). Her observations about review are no less disheartening. She remarks that "the frequency with which information or a skill is reviewed appears to have no connection with difficulty or importance for reading. Instead, the amount of review in all the series seemed more like the product of random behavior than of a pre-established plan" (p. 35). Her comments on application and practice are equally distressing.

Workbooks A number of classroom observation studies indicate that students spend a lot of time working in workbooks and other practice materials. Given the extensive use of workbooks and related materials, we need to ask what the characteristics of these materials are. In an analysis of workbooks associated with basal reading programs, Osborn (1984) commented on many aspects of workbook tasks, including: the relationship of workbook tasks to the rest of the program, vocabulary and concept level, instructional design, amount of practice, student response modes, number of task types, art, layout, quality of content, and clarity of instructions. Osborn found that workbook tasks in some programs had very little or nothing to do with the rest of the program;

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Book Research Quarterly~Summer 1985

that instructions were often unclear, obscure, or unnecessarily lengthy; that the vocabulary of the workbooks was sometimes more complex than that of the rest of the program; and that the art and page layouts were often confusing. In addition, she found that although many tasks were trivial, having little to do with reading or writing, some of the most important tasks occurred only once or twice in an entire workbook. She found little "systematic and cumulative" review of what is taught in a program represented in the corresponding workbook. Although she also found examples of well-constructed tasks, she concluded that "workbooks are the forgotten children of basal programs" and urged publishers and teachers to attend to the problems inherent in these practice materials.

The Use of Textbook Programs Why are basal reading programs so important? How much do they affect what happens in classrooms? A few researchers have tried to figure out how much time students spend with one component of published programs--the workbooks (and the worksheets run from the ditto masters) that accompany these programs. Fisher and his colleagues (1978) found that 70 percent of allocated instructional time was spent on workbook-related exercises. L. Anderson (1984) found that 30-60 percent of the instructional time allocated for reading was spent on workbook-related activities. Mason and Osborn (1982) discovered in the classrooms they observed during reading periods that students spent more time working at their desks in their workbook activities than engaged in instructional activities with their teachers. If it is acknowledged that the many components of a basal reading program account for a lot of what happens in classrooms, then the question of teacher fidelity to the teacher's guides needs to be raised. Do teachers follow the instructions in the manuals? There is mixed information about how closely teachers follow these instructions. One investigator found that teachers tended to follow all of the "after-reading activities" but relatively few of the "before-reading" activities (Durkin, 1984). Another group of investigators reported that teachers are directly geared to coverage of materials in the basal programs and that materials "drive the classroom" (Barr, et al.). This group also observed that the ability group the students are in determines the amount of material the students will cover and that the amount of material covered in any one school year has direct impact on the students' achievement--in the eyes of their teachers and in their scores on the standardized achievement tests given annually in their schools.

Improving the Adoption Process and the Quality of Textbooks In the final section of this paper we discuss the task of adoption committees and the role of publishers. We also describe the Center for the Study of Reading Adoption Guidelines Project.

Osborn and Stein

45

As discussed in the Winograd-Osborn paper, the adoption of textbook programs can take place at many levels--school, district, and state. The role of publishers who produce the textbooks the adoption committees consider is complex: They produce programs that have an important educational function; on the other hand, they must develop products their customers will buy so that the company will show a profit. Stiff competition among publishers probably contributes to their concern about being "different" and their caution about making changes. This caution affects the likelihood that instructional implications from new lines of research will be quickly translated into practice. (We agree with the publishers that sometimes findings from research are not ready to be put into practice and we add that some probably never will be). But even when the research implies reasonable changes in practice publishers are frequently reluctant to incorporate the changes until their customers begin to ask for them. Researchers at the Center for the Study of Reading have participated in two conferences for publishers of educational programs; essentially all of the major educational publishers in the United States and Canada have attended these conferences. Researchers from the center and other universities and research institutes have reported on studies that have direct implications for the design and content of basal reading programs. The responses of the publishing house executives and staff members who attended these meetings could be described as "cautiously interested." Although they often acknowledged the relevance of the research to their programs, they pointed out that in the final analysis their markets (that is, the states, districts, and schools that adopt their programs) would determine the changes that would be made in their programs. These responses highlighted the need to reexamine the procedures used in the process of adoptive programs and to acknowledge the influence of the reports--and selections--of adoption committees on publishers. How do typical adoption committees conduct their business? Typically a committee is responsible for organizing the evaluation procedures, for composing checklists, rating forms, and guidelines that reflect district objectives, as well as for engaging in the actual evaluation and selection process. Perhaps the biggest constraint is time. In a case study of the adoption process in the state of Indiana, Courtland and Farr and their colleagues (1983) reported and all the textbook reviewers felt that not nearly enough time had been allowed for a thorough examinaion of materials. An examination of the typical rating forms and checklists formulated and used by adoption committees reveals two outstanding problems: the level of objectivity seemingly inherent in the process, and the lack of representation of research-based criteria. Courtland and Farr reported that the evaluation criteria employed by most of the reviewers were based on "personal interpretations" of the general criteria that were supplied to them. When asked specifically to identify the factors that caused them to select as "best" one set of textbooks, the reviewers responded with a wide vari-

46

Book Research Quarterly~Summer 1985

ety of general information and little specificity. The researchers' general impression was that the reviewers were often looking for reasons to exclude a set of texts rather than significant reasons to adopt one textbook series. An item analysis of basal reading evaluation forms and checklists gathered from 26 school systems in 14 states (Comas, 1983) revealed that rarely did there appear an item that required committee members to document or substantiate in a quantifiable form any of their conclusions about a program. The lack of representation of research-based criteria on the items on rating forms and checklists is evident. There are usually more items about the physical features of textbooks than about more substantive topics, such as specific content, prose style in readers, and the pedagogy of the teacher's guide. The Comas item analysis found that only 34.6 percent of the districts sampled included research questions of any kind on their evaluation forms, as compared to 73.1 percent that included items about illustrations. Although researchers are acutely aware of the length of time it takes to translate research into practice, it would seem the adoption committee has a great deal of potential for facilitating this process. The solution to some of the problems of the adoption process is a major goal of the project at the Center for the Study of Reading. A set of pamphlets that adoption committees will be able to use to foster more objective evaluation of reading programs is being developed. These pamphlets incorporate the most appropriate and reliable findings from research about reading. Topics selected for the pamphlets represent aspects of reading that (a) are of primary importance, (b) are appropriate to a basal reading program, and (c) are subject to objective evaluation. For each topic, a pamphlet is being developed that provides a means for adoption committee members to examine that topic in the programs they are considering. The pamphlets are being written by different groups of authors, but most of the pamphlets follow a common framework and organization. The advantages of the pamphlet plan are many. First, people who are expert in various areas are writing about what they know best. Second, adoption committees will be able to pick and choose from among the pamphlets to evaluate programs for what they think is most important. Third, different committee members can be assigned to different topics: Committees may not like (or find useful) one pamphlet but may like and find useful other pamphlets. The topics of the pamphlets include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Organization of the Reading Lesson. Beginning Reading. Decoding Instruction (including phonics and structural analysis.) Vocabulary Instruction. Comprehension Instruction. Organization of the Reading Lesson.

Osborn and Stein

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

47

Literary Appreciation. Content Area and Study Skills. Reading and Writing. Text Difficulty. Workbooks. Assessment and Management.

The pamphlets on some topics (such as approaches to beginning reading) will cover alternative views. Nevertheless, the consideration of each alternative will include procedures for evaluating such characteristics as internal consistency, consistency across components of the program, and sufficiency of practice. Pamphlet authors have been asked to consider the task of putting together a pamphlet as an exercise in answering these questions: (1) How would you help adoption committee members look at basal reading programs so that they can find out some precise information about how your topic appears in that program? (2) What implications does what you know have for what should appear in a textbook program? We think their answers to these questions are resulting in procedures that will be easy to use, that will produce information for adoption committee members, and that will make these evaluators aware of how well recent research about teaching and learning is reflected in the programs they are examining. We hope more information about reading and about reading instruction will benefit teachers and students--and the publishers who play a very influential role in the education of American children. Note 1. Beginning reading instruction is developed in an "eclectic" manner in most of the best-seUing programs; that is, several strategies for the teaching of beginning reading are combined: The students must learn some words by sight, they are given some instruction in phonics, and they are prompted to use the contexts in which words occur to help them determine the meaning of individual words. In the programs of several of the smaller publishers (or at least publishers whose basal reading programs sell to less of the market), beginning reading instruction is more exclttsively or intensively phonic. In most of these programs, the skills necessary for "sounding out" words are taught: The students are directly taught some sound-symbol correspondences and (in some of the programs) oral blending skills. As the students progress through these programs, other strategies for recognizing words are introduced, including instruction on how to recognize words by sight.

References Anderson, L. (1984). The Environment of instruction: The function of seatwork in a commercially developed curriculum. In G.G. Duffy, L.R. Roel'tler, and J. Mason (Eds.), Comprehension Instruction, Perspectives and Suggestions New York: Longman Inc. Anderson, T.H., Armbruster, B.B., & Kantor, R.H. (1980). Haw clearly written are children's textbooks? Or, of bladdarwarts and alfa. (Reading Education Report No. 16). Urbana: University of Illinois, Center for the Study of Reading. Barr, R., & Dreeban, R. (1983). A sociological perspective on school time. In C.W. Fisher & D.C. Berliner (Eds.), Perspecthx,s on instructional time. New York: Longmans. Bruce, B. (1984). A new point of view on children's stories. In R.C. Anderson, J. Osborn, and R.J. Tierney (Eds.), Learning to Read in American schools. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Comas, J. (1983). Item analysis: Basal re~zdingevaluation forms. Unpublished manuscript, Indiana University, School of Education.

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Courtland, M.C., Farr, R., Harris, P., Tarr, J.R., & Treece, L.J. (1983). A case study of the Indiana state reading textbook adoption process. Unpublished manuscript, Indiana University, School of Education. Davison, A., (1984). Readability--Appraising text difficulty. In R.C. Anderson, J. Osborn, & R.J. Tierney (Eds.), Learning to Read in the American schools. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Kurkin, D. (1981). Reading Comprehension instruction in five basal reader series. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 515-544. Durkin, D. (1984). Is there a match between what elementary teachers do and what basal reader manuals recommend? The Reading Teacher, 37, No. 8, 734-744. Fisher, C.W., Filby, N.N., Marliave, R., Cahen, L.S., Dishaw, M.M., Moore, J.E., & Berliner, D.C. (1978). Teaching behaviors, academic learning time, and student achievement (Final report of Phase III-B, Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study, BTES Technical Report Series, Tech. Rep. V-l). San Francisco: Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development. Mason, J., & Osborn J. (1982). When do children begin "reading to learn"? A survey of classroom reading instruction practices in grades two through five. (Tech. Rep. No. 261). Urbana: University of Illinois, Center for the Study of Reading. Osborn, J. (1984). The purposes, uses, and contents of workbooks and some guidelines for teachers and publishrs. In R.C. Anderson, J. Osborn, & R.J. Tierney (Eds.) Learning to read in American schools: Basal readers and oontent texts. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Shannon, P. (1983). The use of commercial reading materials in American elementary schools. Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 68-85.

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