Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction
We checked this card's citation and the finding we state against the source's own page or record in October 2026.
What it found
A national panel reviewed the experimental research on teaching reading. It found that systematic phonics instruction improves children's success in learning to read, that teaching children to manipulate the sounds in words was highly effective, that guided repeated oral reading improved word recognition, fluency and comprehension, that vocabulary instruction leads to gains in comprehension, and that teaching a combination of comprehension strategies works best.
What kind of study it is
- Design
- National panel report
- Weight
- A synthesis: it pools or weighs many studies, so it carries the most weight on the evidence meter.
- Who
- School-age children (K–12)
- Limits
- Published in 2000, and it reviewed only what had been studied with experiments by then. Its phonics findings were later re-analyzed and argued over (see Stuebing et al., 2008).
Read it
www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/smallbook
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