Gay Su Pinnell Wins Dana Award

EDUCATION PROFESSOR WINS DANA AWARD FOR READING RECOVERY WORK

     COLUMBUS -- Gay Su Pinnell, an associate professor of theory
and practice at The Ohio State University College of Education,
has received the prestigious Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering
Achievement in Education.  Pinnell was honored for her work as
the principal U.S. proponent of Reading Recovery, an alternative
early intervention reading program that enables beginning readers
who seem to be encountering reading problems to catch up to their
peers in just months.  Pinnell has spearheaded the widespread
dissemination of Reading Recovery in this country and has
documented its results.

     She shares the award with Marie M. Clay, a New Zealand child
psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of
Auckland, who founded Reading Recovery in the mid-1960s.  David
Mahoney, chairman of the Charles A. Dana Foundation presented the
$50,000 award to the two educators jointly earlier this month at
a dinner in New York City.

     The Dana Foundation honored them for their work in "helping
tens of thousands of previously 'low-achieving' first-grade
students in the United State master the skill of reading."

     Reading Recovery is widely considered to be among the most
successful and cost-effective early intervention reading programs
ever developed.  While students in most remedial programs remain
in them for more than a year -- and sometimes through the entire
course of their education -- Reading Recovery typically can be
discontinued after 10 to 20 weeks, when the child has acquired
the strategies for independent learning and is able to fully
profit from classroom work.  The method avoids the continual
drain on school resources and personnel necessary to keep
students in special classes.

     Reading Recovery works by indentifying first-grade students
who are not mastering reading and providing them with intensive
one-on-one tutoring by a specially trained teacher.  Through
these individualized sessions, Reading Recovery steers struggling
beginning readers to discover for themselves the strategies of a
good reader.

     Reading Recovery differs from "remedial" reading programs in
several ways.  Foremost is a shift in philosophy from the
"deficit" view of learning common to traditional programs, in
which students are drilled on skills they have not learned, to a
system that uses the knowledge the child already has as a
launching point for learning more.

     "The idea is to help students learn to use what they know to
get to know what they do not know," explained Pinnell.

     Most important, Reading Recovery has been successful where
other programs have not.  Students who have been through the
Reading Recovery program consistently outperform children in
remedial programs on a range of tests, and studies show the
positive results continue for many years afterward.

     Clay developed the Reading Recovery system based on
observations in her native New Zealand in the mid-1960s.  In
collaboration with Pinnell and two other Ohio State faculty
members, she introduced it into the United States in 1984.  It
was pilot tested in a few Ohio schools and has since been
replicated widely and its success documented in ongoing research
directed by Pinnell at Ohio State.

     Today, the North American Reading Recovery Program operates
in 42 states, the District of Columbia, and four Canadian
provinces.  More than 5,000 teachers at 300 sites have taken the
intensive training program that is central to the success of
Reading Recovery.  Last year, the program reached more than
30,000 children in North America, and the number is expected to
double by 1994.  Clay and Pinnell are now supporting the
development of a system to deliver the program in Spanish in the
United States.

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Contact: Gay Su Pinnell, (614) 292-7875.


[Submitted by: REIDV  (reidv@ccgate.ucomm.ohio-state.edu)
               
Fri, 19 Nov 93 15:14:35 EST]
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