Education

and replicated handily a fair number of times.

Produced an entire educational fad built on a false premise: If phonemic awareness is a good thing, teach it!

Except that it's emergent, and you can't teach it. You simply provide the right input and the little developing brains do their thing. But that didn't stop a lot of idjits from saying they were teaching it. What they were doing was teaching phonics (and testing phonics), and along the way using a lot of language around the disadvantaged tykes.

In other words, they weren't teaching PA, they were providing the right input. Krashen did a very nice meta-analysis of 300+ articles, and only two passed academic muster. One showed a slightly negative effect of trying to teach PA (in English), one showed a slightly positive one (in Hebrew). The rest lacked controls, didn't test what it claimed, had egregious errors in data analysis and sampling. But 300+ academics in schools of education got their wings for their hi kwalitee research.


The next big problem is teaching content versus process. It's unfashionable and very anti-Common-Core, but the biggest aid to understanding is knowing background knowledge about what's being said. Instead we have readings that kids really suck at because it's assumed they can read something on a topic they know nothing about and think critically about it. Enough research shows that's not happening--you take a PhD chemistry professor and a leading Critical Literary Theory scholar and give them problems and texts in history, chemistry, math, political science, English literature and you'll find that they have critical thinking skills roughly equivalent to a student in the last class those two scholars' took in those topics. Process requires a basis, it's not free-standing. (Which is exactly the point missed the pointless efforts to teach phonemic awareness.)