The Wee County Experiment

After last week’s Dickens based japes, I thought we’d open with a quick quiz question this week.

Where, in the entire history of the boys’ reading gap (a gap, let’s remember, that shows up in pretty much every country that’s ever bothered to measure it, going back 100 years) is the only documented example of a place where a teaching method actually reversed it?

Got to be Finland, right? Nope. How about Singapore, with all of its maths-adjacent wizardry? Also a strike out. Maybe South Korea? Nada.

It was Clackmannanshire. (!)

I know, right?

Now, if you’re not from central Scotland (and even if you are), you need the context that Clackmannanshire is an area SO small that even the locals call it the Wee County. I’d also put cash money on you never having said its name out loud. As we’re all about the games of late, try it now. It’s fun.

But Clackmannanshire is not just a whimsical place name.

In the 1990s and early 2000s it also was somewhere that hosted what I’d argue is the single most important experiment in the history of my research field. And it’s one practically nobody has ever heard of.

Researchers Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson tracked 300 children in Clackmannanshire’s primary schools for seven years. They followed them from Primary 1 all the way to Primary 7. Some of the classes were taught to read with what was the then-standard approach (analytic phonics, where kids were taught to absorb whole words and work back to the letter sounds). The others were taught via synthetic phonics, which is where the child learns the letter sounds first and then blends them together. Kind of like building words up like Lego.

That’s the whole intervention. No phones confiscated, nobody’s dad was made to enjoy Percy Jackson at the dining table and no hugely expensive reading scheme implemented.

And the thing is, it worked in a way nothing has worked before (or since.) Because, not only did the synthetic phonics kids end up reading better overall, but “the boys’ word reading was significantly ahead of that of the girls’ from Primary 3 onwards; by the end of the study in Primary 7 they were 11 months ahead of the girls.”

Boom!

Eleven months ahead! The gap every education system on the planet accepts as just the way things are didn’t just get closed in the Wee County, it reversed by eleven months!

So, my PhD is done, right? All we need to do is roll out phonics across the world, the gap vanishes, this newsletter over, and I’ll get back to writing books where men hunt monsters.

Yeah. Not so much. Because, sadly, the study has another sentence to it:

“However although the boys read better than the girls, they nevertheless reported a less favourable attitude to reading.”

Dammit! We finally find an intervention that makes sure that boys can actually out-read girls, and they STILL don’t like reading!

Basically, Clackmannanshire is the best demonstration we have that ability and appetite are two completely different things. Fixing the first one - eleven months people! - does not change the second one at all.

And once we recognise that those two things are VERY different, I think we start to see the same pattern everywhere in the research. There’s a 2015 study from Sarah McGeown which found that girls valued reading more than boys (no, really? Tell me more) but that this value gap was three times the size of the gap in how good they thought they were at it. Likewise, we have Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown’s work, which found that (shocker!) boys get just as much benefit from reading for pleasure as girls do, however, they just do it far less. And then there’s Francesca Borgonovi’s 2022 study I’ve mentioned before that found “boys significantly underachieve compared with girls in PISA, but no gender gap could be identified in PIAAC.”

For me, that’s what a ‘wanting’ deficit properly looks like.

And that’s the ballgame here isn’t it? Because pretty much every intervention that’s ever been aimed at developing boys’ reading has been aimed at a perceived ability and capacity issue, whereas the Clackmannanshire study shows that we can win that battle utterly and completely and STILL change nothing that matters.

It’s the ‘wanting’ that is the whole kit and caboodle.

And the ‘wanting’ simply doesn’t respond to being lectured about trying harder. Fixing that is going to be all about finding books that boys will actually pick up.

The Wee County taught the boys to read, but nobody tried to give them a reason to actually bother.

Sources

Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson, The Effects of Synthetic Phonics Teaching on Reading and Spelling Attainment: A Seven Year Longitudinal Study (Edinburgh: Scottish Executive Education Department, 2005).

Sarah P. McGeown, Lynne G. Duncan, Yvonne M. Griffiths and Sue E. Stothard, ‘Exploring the Relationship between Adolescent’s Reading Skills, Reading Motivation and Reading Habits’, Reading and Writing, 28 (2015), 545–69.

Francesca Borgonovi, ‘Is the Literacy Achievement of Teenage Boys Poorer Than That of Teenage Girls, or Do Estimates of Gender Gaps Depend on the Test? A Comparison of PISA and PIAAC’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 114.2 (2022), 239–56.

Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown, ‘Reading for Pleasure and Progress in Vocabulary and Mathematics’, British Educational Research Journal, 41.6 (2015), 971–91.