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One Hundred Years of ReadingResearch: Successes andMissteps of Edmund BurkeHuey and Other PioneersJeffrey J. Walczyka, Talar Tcholakiana, Frank Igoua &Alexa P. Dixona

a Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Louisiana TechUniversity, Ruston, LouisianaPublished online: 19 May 2014.

To cite this article: Jeffrey J. Walczyk, Talar Tcholakian, Frank Igou & AlexaP. Dixon (2014): One Hundred Years of Reading Research: Successes andMissteps of Edmund Burke Huey and Other Pioneers, Reading Psychology, DOI:10.1080/02702711.2013.790326

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Reading Psychology, 0:1–21, 2014Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0270-2711 print / 1521-0685 onlineDOI: 10.1080/02702711.2013.790326

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF READING RESEARCH:SUCCESSES AND MISSTEPS OF EDMUND BURKE

HUEY AND OTHER PIONEERS

JEFFREY J. WALCZYK, TALAR TCHOLAKIAN, FRANK IGOU, andALEXA P. DIXON

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Louisiana Tech University,Ruston, Louisiana

For more than 100 years, research on the psychology of reading has proliferated.In this article, the authors wish to help modern reading researchers understandthe origins of the discipline and benefit from its history. This article draws heav-ily on Edmund Burke Huey’s 1908 landmark volume The Psychology andPedagogy of Reading, the first scientific treatise in the field of literacy. Start-ing with Huey, some of the early pioneers’ enduring contributions to the field arehighlighted but especially their scientific mistakes that ultimately led the field inpromising new directions. An overview of the modern controversy between phon-ics and whole language instruction is underscored regarding how it arose fromearly errors.

Studies of the psychology of reading and of reading instruc-tion have proliferated in education and psychology over the past100 years (Kamil, 2012). Even so, few outside the field of literacyresearch know much about the origins and early history of this im-portant area of inquiry. In this article, we share information aboutits beginnings and some of the legacies and missteps that arosethat have contributed to the status quo.

The classic volume, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading ,was first published in 1908 and is largely unknown to many mod-ern educational researchers and experimental psychologists. Itwas the first comprehensive treatise on the history and scien-tific study of reading. In fact, it has been argued that it for-mally initiated the discipline of literacy research (Hartman, 2007).This book has also been important in the history of reading

Address correspondence to Jeffrey J. Walczyk, Psychology & Behavioral Sciences,Louisiana Tech University, P.O. Box 10048, Ruston, LA 71272. E-mail: Walczyk@latech.edu

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research and is considered one of the most influential in thehistory of educational psychology (Charles, 1987). Its author,Edmund Burke Huey (1870–1913), who was one of America’sfirst experimental psychologists, was also one of the first to ap-ply the scientific method to the study of reading. Huey reviewedthe latest scientific studies of reading. These included his pio-neering eye tracking studies and what they showed about paus-ing and rereading, along with the studies of other reading pi-oneers like Raymond Dodge. He also described the nature ofinner speech when reading and what was involved in meaninggathering. Huey discussed the history of the written word frompicture drawings on cave walls through Egyptian hieroglyphs tomodern writing systems. He compared and contrasted differentapproaches to reading instruction and identified controversiesoccurring in the field, some of which are still with us today. Heconcluded by anticipating the future of literacy research. Someof his prognostications were uncannily accurate. This seminal vol-ume serves as a primary source for much of the discussion of earlyreading triumphs and missteps that follows. This is appropriatebecause the treatise is much more than a collection of Huey’sviews; it is a comprehensive presentation of the prevailing viewsand research on literacy from many of its contributors at thebeginning of the psychology of reading as a scientific discipline(Hartman, 2007).

Central Thesis of this Article

Many of the notions and empirical findings of Huey (1908) andhis contemporaries were prescient, capturing ideas we accept asessentially correct today. Other views were simplistic, often basedon psychological assumptions about individuals that were widelyaccepted in the early 20th century but are discredited today. Acentral thesis permeating this historical discussion is that scien-tific understanding progresses more from error than from suc-cess, an observation generally supported in the history of science.As Kuhn (1970) observed regarding the nature of theoretical andmethodological advancement,

. . . gain was achieved only by discarding some previous standard beliefsor procedures and, simultaneously, by replacing those components of the

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Early Triumphs and Missteps in Reading Research 3

previous paradigm with others. Shifts of this sort are, I have argued, asso-ciated with all discoveries achieved through normal science. . . (p. 66)

In other words, new scientific discoveries and innovations thatlead to new knowledge, theory, and methodology often build onlessons learned from prior mistakes. The thesis that scientific er-ror is more informative than success, if tenable, may partly bedue to the truism that the reasons for success, for instance, a pre-diction supported by experimental findings, are not always clear.To illustrate, although a theory of interest to the researcher mayhave been supported in an experiment, subsequent research maylead to a more parsimonious theory that accounts equally well orbetter for the data (Kuhn, 1970). However, reasons for scientificfailures are usually clearer because they typically provide inves-tigators with more feedback regarding their likely sources. Forexample, suppose a researcher tests for a theorized positive cor-relation between word-reading fluency and comprehension, butno correlation is observed. Careful review of the data afterwardreveals a ceiling effect in comprehension scores due to an as-sessment that was too easy. Range restriction lowered the corre-lation. A follow-up study uses a more challenging assessment andfinds the predicted correlation. Along these lines, prescient no-tions and findings of Huey and other pioneers are reviewed be-low with consideration of their long-term impact. Later we sharesome of their missteps, which, according to the central thesis,might provide lessons useful for reading researchers of today.These errors certainly were instructive for their makers or forsubsequent reading researchers in correcting theories, refiningmethodologies, improving pedagogy, and rejecting invalid soci-etal assumptions. One caveat is that, with the benefit of “20/20hindsight,” our judgments of the ideas and practices of Hueyand other pioneers that are in error are based on modern con-ceptions of what is correct scientifically. In all humility, we mustconcede that some of these judgments may be deemed in er-ror by future researchers given the flawed and incremental butself-correcting nature of scientific advancement. The reader isurged to bear this warning in mind when terms such as “missteps,”“errors,” and “mistakes,” which are used interchangeably, appearhereafter.

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Prescient Ideas, Findings, and Methods of Hueyand Other Early Pioneers

Many of the ideas and findings of Huey and his contemporarieshave withstood the test of time of the past 100 years but are toonumerous to review here. A few prominent examples are notedthat helped lay the foundation of the modern edifice of readingtheory, research methodology, and instructional practice.

Some Enduring Empirical Contributions

In some of the first eye tracking studies of reading, Huey fitteda plaster of Paris cup with a hole in the middle over a reader’scornea. The cup was connected via an aluminum stylus to a ro-tating drum. This apparatus was one of the first to continuouslyrecord the eye movements of readers. Interestingly, cocaine wassometimes used as a numbing agent. Huey was also among thefirst to show that eye movements in reading involve saccadic jumpsfrom one fixation point to another rather than a continuous hor-izontal motion across a page. Additionally, he found that wordsare frequently jumped over and parts of words are often the focus,rather than whole words. Huey also noted that eyes occasionallyregress to text previously read and found that the first fixationsof a line of text are often on the second or third word. Moreover,eye fixations often exclude the last word of a line. These find-ings have been replicated and extended in modern studies usingcomputer-controlled eye tracking systems (see Rayner, Juhasz, &Pollatsek, 2005, for a review). The picture of the reader thatemerged from such early work was that of an active meaning gath-erer not a passive decoder of text, a view consistent with mod-ern accounts of reading (Kintsch, 1998; Perfetti, 1985; Sadoski &Paivio, 2004).

Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962), another readingpioneer, summarized his experimental data on reading in Psychol-ogy: A Study of Mental Life (1921). He confirmed that readers’ eyesproceed along a line of text in a sequence of saccadic leaps. Healso noted that when reading a typical line of text from a newspa-per, an efficient reader fixates three to six times. Woodworth cor-rectly concluded that readers’ eyes do not fixate on single letters,but on clusters of letters or on whole words (Woodworth, 1921).

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To study reading, Erdmann and Dodge (Raymond Dodge,1871–1942), who were contemporaries of Huey, used theirErdmann-Dodge tachistoscope. This device, revolutionary for theera, limits the time a word or other stimulus is viewed. With it,they confirmed that skilled readers tend to focus on whole wordsor word parts rather than fixating on individual letters. Cattellestablished that individuals often read words as wholes, particu-larly when the words are linked to pictures or other words (ascited in Massey, 2007). This finding was replicated by Erdmannand Dodge, who found that readers can identify words printed ina font too small for individual letters to be distinguished, whenlocated too far into the periphery of their vision to differentiatesingle letters, or when words are positioned too far away to discernsolitary letters (as cited in Massey, 2007). Erdman and Dodge de-clared that it is actually the shapes and forms of words that permitidentification (as cited in Tinker, 1965). Dodge also made an im-portant discovery concerning visual acuity. He noticed that fasterreading and decreased fixation time were characteristic of peo-ple with good peripheral vision (as cited in Massey, 2007). Eachof these findings is well supported by modern eye-tracking studies(Rayner et al., 2005).

Well ahead of his time, Huey recognized the importanceof quick visual perception of words as foundational for skilledreading. Today, the development of a large sight-word vocabularyis considered a hallmark of skilled reading (Ehri, 2005). He alsounderstood the importance of readers developing automaticreading skills so that they can focus attention on meaning ratherthan on decoding. Huey further noted that one of the best waysto develop word recognition fluency is by children repeatedlyencountering words in meaningful contexts. These ideas under-lie such modern, influential literacy accounts as LaBerge andSamuels’ (1974) Automaticity Theory of Reading and Perfetti’s(1985) Verbal Efficiency Theory. Both maintain that cognitiveresources (attention and working memory) are finite. The inef-ficient decoding of words limits the amount of these resourcesthat can be allocated to comprehension processes. These theoriesunderscore the comprehension-lowering effects of inefficientdecoding and have been supported empirically (Perfetti, 1985;Samuels & Flor, 1997). Again, each is traceable to the work ofHuey (1908) and other early pioneers.

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Huey’s (1908) account of reading comprehension was farahead of its time. He argued that the meaning of text con-cerns primarily textual units larger than isolated words, especiallythe rich networks of association across textual elements and af-forded by the reader’s experiences (Reed & Meyer, 2007). Hueyattributed the following to the act of text comprehension:

meanings in reading are mainly feeling-reactions and motor attitudes at-taching most intimately to or fused with inner utterances of the words andespecially the sentences that are read. . .The feeling of these bodily pos-tures, attitudes, gestures, etc., may well furnish the very body of much thatwe call meaning. . .(1908, p. 167)

Huey based his view partly on William James’ theory of emotions.To summarize, comprehending text to Huey involved the words,phrases, and sentences eliciting in readers related emotions, vir-tual motor responses, attitudes, and other psycho-physiologicalresponses. The body and affect are intimately involved in under-standing text.

Huey’s views uncannily anticipated the modern “embod-ied cognition” movement within cognitive science generally andwithin reading in particular. According to it, human cognitioncannot adequately be understood without reference to the body.Just as cognitive states influence bodily states, bodily states af-fect cognition (Zwaan, 2004). Rather than being disembodied,language comprehension relies on motor and perceptual sys-tems (Olmstead, Viswanathan, Aicher, & Fowler, 2009; Sadoski &Paivio, 2001, 2004), as suggested by Huey and James.

Instructional Recommendations

Huey made several recommendations for reading instruction withwhich contemporary educational psychologists and reading teach-ers would agree. For example, reacting to the inane topics of in-structional texts typical of the late 1800s, he called for educatorsto use literature that would excite and engage children as well asprovide lessons in morality and citizenship. Moreover, a prescientappreciation of Huey’s is evident in his understanding of the im-portance of home literacy for reading acquisition. He regardedthe home as a natural place for children to learn to read and

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recommended that parents read stories to their children whilemaking use of accompanying pictures and illustrations. He alsobelieved that children would acquire much knowledge of read-ing incidentally from engagement with good literature. Consis-tent with the spirit of Huey, it has now been well established thatchildren acquire pre-literacy skills in the home through sharedreading with parents, including modeled vocabulary, print knowl-edge, and acquired general knowledge (Beaty & Pratt, 2011; Ro-driguez et al. 2009). Additionally, well-educated parents interactwith their children more verbally, read to their children more,and have higher expectations for their literacy development thando less-educated parents, all of which enhance reading achieve-ment scores later in school (Forget-Dubois et al., 2009; Korat,2009; Phillips & Lonigan, 2005).

Huey argued that reading educators should use diverseapproaches when teaching reading. In particular, he reviewedthe phonetic, word, and sentences methods and argued thatno one approach will work best for all students. Huey recom-mended that teachers match the reading instructional methodsto the particular developmental and individual needs of theirstudents, a visionary idea. Per Huey’s suggestion, Walter FennoDearborn (1878–1955) correctly surmised from his investiga-tions and those of other researchers that individual differencesamong students, especially in reading disabilities, result in spe-cial needs for students. He also noted that there is no singletechnique that efficiently teaches all students to read. Thoughhe felt that most readers could benefit from phonetic analy-sis, he believed that some might do better with a whole-wordapproach (as cited in Zimmer, 2007). These notions are real-ized in recent eclectic approaches to reading instruction, suchas Dale Willow’s “Balanced Literacy Diet.” By analogizing di-verse elements of reading instruction to different food groupsand underscoring how dietary needs change developmentally, itcalls for combining effective instructional strategies from phon-ics, including phonemic awareness training and sequential phon-ics, with elements of the whole language, such as vocabularybuilding through the use of engaging literature and compositionstrategies. For instance, phonics is emphasized early on, followedlater by strategies from the whole language approach (Willows,2008).

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Regarding developing assessments of important individual-difference variables affecting literacy, one of the greatest con-tributions to the reading field stemmed from James McKeenCattell’s (1860–1944) belief that reactions to stimuli are represen-tative of nervous system functioning that denotes intelligence. Ac-cordingly, he produced a number of assessments of intelligence(Cattell, 1890; Willis, 2007). Such measures have repeatedly beenshown to be useful predictors of educational outcomes, includingreading comprehension (Boring, 1950/1929).

Implications for Societal Reform

Some aspects of Huey’s work went beyond the field of the psy-chology of reading and had broader societal implications. For in-stance, he presciently argued that experts in the area of readingresearch should be the ones within society making recommenda-tions for methods of reading instruction and assessment for im-plementation by teachers based on the latest scientific studies. Healso felt that the federal government should compile these rec-ommendations and disseminate them to the schools. Huey’s pro-posals were eventually followed, evident in publications like theNational Reading Panel (2000) report. Thus, he proposed amodel of the leadership role the federal government can play foreducational reform.

Another implication for societal reform arose out of Huey’sawareness of the chance historical factors that gave rise to themany non-phonetically spelled exceptions in English words toan ideal of one-to-one correspondence between phonemes andgraphemes (e.g., “gender,” “eight”). English has a deep orthogra-phy (Frost, 2005), that is, a writing system lacking a strict one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Hueyobserved that if such correspondence could be achieved, a mas-tery of reading, writing, and spelling would be immensely has-tened, and many educational and financial resources would besaved for society as a result. Presciently, Huey called for revamp-ing the system of English orthography in America to make it moreconsistent but did not attribute this call to any other readingpioneer. Even so, others within society made similar proposals,such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw (Venezky, 1999).In fact, during the latter part of the 19th century, a national

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committee was established. It was composed of prominent sci-entists, including Huey, educators, industrialists, and otherstasked with generating recommendations for making Englishorthography-phonology rules more consistent. Its greatest successwas an executive order by President Theodore Roosevelt, in officefrom 1901 to 1909, to the effect that 300 simplified and phonet-ically accurate spellings of commonly used words be used in allWhite House publications. However, deep opposition to the com-mittee’s recommendations came from the U.S. Congress and avocal segment of society, causing the movement to stall (Venezky,1999). To their credit, Huey, Shaw, and others fully understoodthe difficulties inherent in such an undertaking. Even so, thelikely positive impact of such reform is evident in the case of moreconsistent orthographies, like Spanish, that are mastered muchmore quickly by young readers than English (Seymour, 2005).Sadly, no appreciable progress has been made along these linesin the past 100 years.

Missteps of Huey and Other Reading Pioneers

Despite their great intellectual gifts, Huey and other early read-ing pioneers were hampered by socio-cultural misconceptions, adearth of knowledge on experimental design, technological lim-itations, and prevailing societal misconceptions of the early 20thcentury that gave rise to errors. Some errors bore fruit in encour-aging subsequent generations of researchers to ask and followup on questions that might not otherwise have been considered.Later researchers also challenged the assumptions of their prede-cessors. Some of the more colorful missteps of Huey and otherpioneers, and possible reasons for them, are now considered. Al-though we often attribute them to Huey for easy reference, pleasenote that most of the mistakes did not originate with him. Rather,he merely conveyed them in his treatise. When available, we iden-tify the sources Huey cited for mistaken positions. On other occa-sions, sources were not cited. Rather, his views seemed to be basedon societal misconceptions widely accepted in the early 1900s.We also now remind readers that our judgments of what consti-tute errors are based on modern societal assumptions, theories,and data, some of which may be shown to be wrong by futurescholars.

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Underestimating the Importance of Early Phonics Instruction

Huey (1908) argued that phonics should not be taught to chil-dren in the early grades. On page 380, he states:

The technique of reading should not appear in the early years, and verylittle early work that should be tolerated in phonics should be entirelydistinct from reading.

Rather, he thought that reading should be acquired inciden-tally by exposing children to the modeled reading of literature,not as the result of direct instruction. Such recommendationsbear some resemblance to the modern whole language approach,which analogizes learning to read with learning to speak. Wholelanguage entices children to read by exposing them to a vari-ety of engaging literature and deemphasizes direct instruction inphonics. Once engaged, children will hopefully want to learn thewords and seek out their phonology, orthography, and meaning.In short, attaining understanding is emphasized over soundingout letters (Anderson, 1984; McWhirter, 1990).

Some of Huey’s most prominent contemporaries shared suchviews, which show how widespread the belief was that teachingphonics to children in the early grades is ill-advised. For instance,John Dewey (1972), who influenced Huey, argued against teach-ing reading early on: “The plea for the predominance of learningto read in early school life because of the great importance attach-ing to literature seems to me a perversion” (p. 264). Moreover,Edward L. Thorndike, an educational psychologist who con-tributed much to early reading research (Sears, 2007), held a sim-ilar view. Specifically, he argued that drills in phonics have littlevalue in the early grades (Thorndike & Gates, 1929).

At the time of publication of Huey’s volume, a widely usedmethod of reading instruction was the whole-word approach. In-struction occurred in two ways: (a) Words would first be taught,followed by identification of the letters; or (b) alternatively,words would be presented visually as wholes and be accompa-nied directly by their sounds and meanings. The role of letterswas deemphasized in the latter case. The whole-word ap-proaches were endorsed over phonics by such notable literacypioneers as Bernice Elizabeth Leary (1890–1973) and Arthur

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Irving Gates (1890–1972). It is an interesting coincidence howclosely the periods of their lives overlapped, as did their readinginstructional philosophies (Moller, 2007; Sailors, 2007).

Partially in response to the educational recommendations ofthese early pioneers, Rudolph Flesch, in his famous 1955 book,Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It, held read-ing experts accountable for replacing systematic phonics with thewhole-word approach to beginning reading. Quickly becoming abestseller and remaining there for more than 30 weeks (Chall,1995/1967), Flesch argued that the reading field was hypocriti-cal in its proclamation of a solid scientific basis by discountingits own findings. His review uncovered no studies confirming thesuperiority of the whole-word technique over systematic phonics,but found 10 studies showing that systematic phonics producedgreater reading achievement (Flesch, 1955/1986).

Contrary to the views of Huey, Dewey, Thorndike, Leary,Gates, and other of their contemporaries, it has now been firmlyestablished that children in the early grading of normal intelli-gence and hearing are quite capable of distinguishing phonemesand learning to read syllables and other parts of spoken lan-guage, in short, learning phonics early on (Snow & Juel, 2005).One exception is the 10 to 15% of students who suffer from de-velopmental dyslexia, a reading disorder that manifests in “ba-sic and pervasive deficiencies in word identification, phonologi-cal (letter-sound) decoding, and spelling” (Vellutino & Fletcher,2005, p. 363). A problem underlying most dyslexia is a deficit inthe ability to use speech codes to represent words. Regarding theeducational value of phonics, Snow and Juel (2005) concludedfrom their review of the literature on early reading instructionthat the most effective methods of teaching beginning reading re-quire direct instruction in phonics that explicitly maps the small-est units of sound on to their corresponding orthographic units.Moreover, the best interventions for helping children with de-velopmental dyslexia provide intense and explicit instruction inthe alphabetic principle, that is, involve learning the correspon-dence between graphemes and phonemes to the extent possible(Torgesen, 2005).

The ongoing debate over which method of reading instruc-tion is best, phonics, whole-word, or whole-language, has beenraging since the 1800s in one form or another (Chall, 1995/1967;

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Monaghan, 2007). Based on the most recent evidence reviewedby Snow and Juel (2005) and Torgesen (2005), the debate hasbeen largely settled in favor of phonics. Even so, it is interest-ing to consider historically what gave rise to the error of Huey,Dewey, and Thorndike to recommend against teaching phonicsearly in school and to Leary, Gates, and others to favor whole-word methods. It was evident in Huey’s review that neither henor his contemporaries believed that young children could dis-tinguish phonemes well or easily match phonemes to the ap-propriate graphemes, a societal misconception that underesti-mated children’s abilities, shared by Dewey (1972) and Thorndike(Thorndike & Gates, 1929). As we will see, there were other in-stances when the conventional wisdom of the day denied the abil-ities or resilience of children or adults.

As another likely source of error, researchers of Huey’s daynoted the facilitative effects of contextual reading on word recog-nition. For example, the work of Cattell (as cited in Massey, 2007)and others showed that words are easier to read in context. How-ever, contextual facilitation was based on data gathered fromskilled readers. Thus, in endorsing the whole word approach,Gates, Leary, and other early pioneers may have made an inap-propriate developmental leap in generalizing these findings tobeginning readers who today we know lack the skill automaticity,vocabulary, knowledge of syntax, and background knowledge toshow these kinds of contextual facilitation effects (Kintsch, 1998;Perfetti, 1985; Sadoski & Paivio, 2004).

Ocular Damage Caused by Reading

Huey hypothesized that excessive reading in childhood con-tributes to the development of myopia through prolonged strainof ocular muscles. He based these conjectures largely on the workof two of his contemporaries, Dr. Louis Emile Javal, a French oph-thalmologist and fellow reading researcher, and the German au-thor Hermann Ludwig Cohn. Moreover, Huey suggested that ac-quired myopia, resulting form intense reading in early childhood,might be transferred to the next generation.

The weakening of the eyes by near work of the early grades means theweakening of the entire psycho-physical organism, and the fact that these

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Early Triumphs and Missteps in Reading Research 13

conditions commonly become hereditary warns us of the danger of racedegeneration coming from this abuse of the schools. (1908, p. 395)

Such reasoning shows implicit acceptance of Lamarckian evolu-tion, according to which bodily changes and changes in mentalfaculties acquired by an organism experientially can be transmit-ted to the next generation. Conversely, mental faculties or bodyparts that are no longer used, such as an appendix or wisdomteeth, will disappear from the species over generations (Gould,2002). In fact, there is no credible evidence that reading causesmyopia or that Larmarckian evolution occurs in biology. Regard-ing the latter, all evidence supports the Darwinian account thatnatural selection favors those chance mutations of germ plasmthat enhance an organism’s survival to the age of procreation(Gould, 1981, 2002).

What accounts for these errors of Huey, Javal, Cohn, andother likeminded contemporaries? Regarding the incorrect beliefthat causally linked reading in early childhood to myopia, Hueyargued, in the chapter titled “The Hygiene of Reading,” that,

The tremendous development of myopia among the peoples who readand are educated and its comparative absence among the others, its usualappearance at about the time at which the reading and other near workof the school begins, its progressive increase up the school grades, and itsgreater prevalence and degree when lighting and other conditions are par-ticularly bad, all point to reading and the other near work of the schools asa prime factor in producing this dangerous form of degeneration. (1908,p. 390)

This reasoning shows the logical fallacy of making a causal inter-pretation of correlational and anecdotal data. Granting the fac-tual nature of the observations that Huey made, it could be moreparsimoniously argued that the reason myopia appeared oftenamong the educated was because the near work with which theywere more likely to be engaged brought their myopia to light.In other words, the myopia went undetected until tasks requiringmeticulous attention to visual detail, such as reading, revealed it.It was thus less diagnosed among the non-educated, whose workmay not have required sustained attention to fine visual detail inthe early 1900s. Of course, some jobs undoubtedly did, such as aseamstress. Moreover, the fact that myopia often appeared when

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reading instruction began may reflect that before children en-tered schools, they were not challenged with tasks requiring atten-tion to fine visual detail. For them, too, myopia went undiagnoseduntil they had to learn to read.

The error above likely resulted from the fact that an un-derstanding of experimental design, threats to validity, and thenature of confounding variables was in its infancy in 1908.In particular, the now well-known distinction between experi-mental and non-experimental research designs was not under-stood by most behavioral scientists in the early twentieth century(Gould, 1981).

What may underlie Huey’s tacit acceptance of Lamarckianevolution? Although Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Nat-ural Selection was published in 1859, 49 years before Huey’s volumeappeared, its logical arguments and compelling data may have stillbeen too recent or too controversial in 1908 to have been knownor accepted by reading pioneers. On the other hand, Huey mayhave known of Darwinian evolution but rejected it. Either way, nomention of Darwin or his theory is made in the 1908 book. Clearlyit was not seen as relevant, even though, in retrospect, evolutionby means of natural selection was in this instance.

Reading Silently and Quickly from the Beginning

Huey argued that silent reading should be emphasized in earlyreading instruction over reading aloud to focus readers’ attentionon meaning rather than what today would be referred to as meredecoding or “word calling.” Indeed, reading instruction duringthe late 19th and early 20th centuries concentrated mainly onrecitation as proof of reading ability. Smith (2002) noted thataround that time, the chief goal of literacy instruction was toteach children to master oral reading. Elocution was emphasizedover understanding. One of the primary transformations in read-ing education during the early 20th century occurred when read-ing experts such as Huey, and later Lewis and Rowland (1920)and Judd and Buswell (1922), promoted silent reading as thebest means of comprehending text (Flood, Lapp, & Fisher, 2003).Huey also recommended that reading occur as rapidly as possible.On page 381 (1908), he argued:

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The children from the first should read as fast as the nature of the materialand their purpose with it will permit, but without hurry. Speed drills in theeffective gathering of meaning from what is read will be very beneficial.

The distinction between “as fast as the nature of the material andtheir purpose with it will permit” and “without hurry” is unclear.Huey further believed that reading quickly would allow the readerto attain “prompt extraction of what the page has for the reader”(1908, p. 359) and grasp essential information. However, no stud-ies are cited that support these claims.

Consistent with Huey’s recommendation, by the 1920s, eyemovement research had shown that silent reading was faster thanoral reading (Monaghan, 2007). Therefore, some reading series,such as Silent Readers (Lewis & Rowland, 1920), prohibited oralreading. However, Judd and Buswell (1922) noted in their bookSilent Reading that silent and oral reading were both valuable, de-pending upon a child’s developmental level.

Findings of today are inconsistent with the views of Huey,Lewis, Roland, and other similarly thinking pioneers in these ways:(a) These pioneers appear to have over-generalized the eye track-ing results obtained with older and more experienced readers tobeginners. The former are quite adept at reading rapidly andsilently, reflecting advanced reading skills. On the other hand,beginning readers of necessity tend to read aloud and slowly aspart of their normal developmental trajectories on the way toattaining reading skill automaticity (Chall, 1995/1967; Perfetti,1985). (b) The pioneers of Huey’s day also did not appreciatethe plethora of processing factors affecting reading outcomes thatwe understand today. There are many ways to read depending onthe reader’s goal, skill, background knowledge, and text difficulty(Carver, 1997). For instance, reading aloud and reading slowlyhave both been shown to be adaptive processing adjustments thatcan compensate for text difficulty, inefficient decoding, or a noisyreading environment to ensure adequate comprehension of text(Walczyk & Griffith-Ross, 2007; Walczyk et al., 2007). (c) Finally,according to the influential cognitive developmental theory of theRussian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), young childrenengage in private speech (self-directed verbal utterances), initiallyovertly, as they master tasks. Overt private speech serves many ben-eficial psychological functions, such as helping children to recall

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steps of problem solving, helping them to formulate a plan of ac-tion (Vygotsky, 1978), and in reading, providing an overt feedbackloop by which success at decoding can be monitored with the ears(Walczyk & Griffith-Ross, 2007). As children mature, overt privatespeech becomes internalized as covert speech (adult internalizedthinking; Vygotsky, 1978). Analogous to overt private speech inproblem solving, reading aloud serves a feedback and self-guidingfunction in beginning reading (Chall, 1995/1967) and becomesinternalized as the “inner speech” of skilled reading. Along theselines, Kintsch (1998) analogized Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal de-velopment” (tasks children can accomplish with social support)to his “zone of learnability” (texts from which students have mod-erate amounts of background knowledge and can therefore learnfrom the most). Such analogies can open up new areas of read-ing research and generate new instructional practices. Of course,the work of Vygotsky was published after Huey’s death and thuscould not have been known to him or his contemporaries. Sadly,both these outstanding scholars died in their thirties before thefull promise of their genius could be realized.

Need for Direct Experience, Not Just “Reading About It”

Huey argued that direct experience with objects and situations ispreferable for cultivating cognition, affect, and their integrationthan simply reading about it. He further believed that continu-ously reading in the absence of direction experience could resultin a mind that

will be disintegrated by much reading. The mind which continually passesin review quantities of ideas, impulses, and feelings, without acting onthem, tends to take on itself the shapelessness and disorganization of whatit finds in reading. (1908, p. 362)

Huey’s misstep consists of the fact that there was no compellingevidence at the time (only anecdotes) that excessive readingin the absence of direct experience disintegrates the mind. Infact, no studies or authorities are cited in the 1908 volumein support of this claim. In contrast, many modern studies ofreading converge on the conclusion that reading extensivelywithin a domain of knowledge builds up schemata and semantic

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propositional networks in memory that facilitate the learning ofnew material and enhance conceptual organization, even with-out direct experience within a domain (Kintsch, 1998; Perfetti,1985). In essence, as semantic knowledge accumulates and is or-ganized in long-term memory, it provides “hooks” for catchingnew information on the same topic (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). Ofcourse, Huey did not have the benefit of the paradigm shift of thecognitive revolution and the re-conceptualization of learning thatattended it (Solso, 2001).

What underlies Huey’s mistaken belief in a disintegration ofthe mind due to repeated readings in the absence of experience?The belief seems to have arisen again from a societal misconcep-tion prevalent in 1908 that learning through vicarious experience(e.g., by reading) is inherently inferior to learning from directexperience. As noted above, no supportive evidence or citationswere provided. Rather, it was tacitly and uncritically accepted,stemming from an inaccurate view of readers as susceptible tomental disintegration without regular dollops of direct experi-ence to keep the mental linkages between thoughts, action, andaffect in full vigor.

Conclusion

It was our intent to highlight some of the enduring legaciesof early reading researchers, especially Huey, the author of thefirst scientific treatise of the domain of reading. These includedan understanding of the saccadic nature of eye movementsin reading and their call for developing consistent grapheme-phoneme spellings in English. As a counterpoint, we also illus-trated how socio-cultural misconceptions, methodological limi-tations, a dearth of knowledge on threats to validity, and otherfactors led to missteps that were made early on, albeit as judgedthrough the possibly mistaken prism of what reading researcherscurrently accept as “correct.” Along these lines, the central the-sis of this article is that scientific errors are necessary for funda-mental advancement to take place in any area of scientific inquirybecause of their highly instructive nature compared with scien-tific successes. Advancement includes basic paradigm shifts thatcause dramatic re-conceptualizations of problems in a domainand new paradigms for data gathering (Kuhn, 1970). This thesis

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is well supported by the early history of reading research. Severalinstances of errors were made but later corrected by their makersor subsequent scientists. The missteps were often due to under-estimating the abilities or resilience of readers. Fortunately forliteracy scientists and other educational researchers generally, theself-correcting nature of our common enterprise does help us toachieve a form of cumulative progress that is still ongoing. Indeed,it is interesting to speculate on what the state of knowledge aboutliteracy will be in 2108 on the bicentennial of the publication ofHuey’s classic volume.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers fortheir helpful comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

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