Formed in 1997 at the request of Congress, it was a national panel with the stated aim of assessing the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read.
The panel was chaired by Donald Langenberg (University of Maryland), and included the following members: Gloria Correro (Mississippi State U.
), Cora Bagley Marrett (U. Massachusetts-Amherst), S. J. Samuels (U. of Minnesota), Timothy Shanahan (educator) (U. of Illinois at Chicago), Sally Shaywitz (Yale U.
The NRP said results from phonemic awareness (PA) instruction were "positive" and helped students in kindergarten and grade one to improve their reading, spelling and comprehension, regardless of their socioeconomic status (SES).
[3] The report clearly specified that the most effective manner of teaching PA was to include it with letters and the manipulation of phonemes (i.e. segmenting and blending with phonics), rather than limiting it to speech.
Older disabled readers also benefited from such instruction in terms of improvement in decoding, but without commensurate gains in spelling or reading comprehension.
However, it suggested that vocabulary instruction should be both direct and indirect, and include repetition, exposures in different media, and rich contexts.
[12] Of the hundreds of studies including computer technology, only 5% met the standards of the NRP so they concluded that more research is required before they can make any recommendations.