I was seven the first time my grandfather expected me to finish the story he had started to read to me. It didn't happen. How could it? I couldn't read. Even at age nine, when my grandfather persisted in his attempts to have me finish a story he had begun, its ending remained a mystery - I still couldn't read.

     "No matter." Laughed my observant grandfather. "When she's ready to read she will." His opinion carried the weight of a renowned psychologist who had worked extensively with children. His assertion that his granddaughter was an especially bright child and that her not yet reading was of no consequence was accepted as gospel. No one bothered me about my lack. I did spend considerable time being bored on days when the weather didn't permit playing outside and when not in school or with playmates. Even the schools at that time were unconcerned. Since I was a lively child, eagerly participating in classroom discussions, no one paid attention to my not reading – until in sixth grade when we were given a reading test.

     I was barely reading on the second grade level. The homeroom teacher very politely whispered "You must do something about this." That summer, working eight hours a day, I taught myself to read. Many educators would say I had demonstrated that I was finally ready to read. It wasn't until years later after becoming a psychologist working with children that I began to question the idea that you had to be "ready" to read. The questioning was triggered by a series of unexpected events.

     The first occurred when, on examining various intelligence and reading readiness tests for my clinical physiological research I made a curious discovery. According to the standard reading readiness tests I was not ready to learn to read! The second was the discovery that the techniques I had used to teach myself to read were different from the approaches used in schools. On further investigation I found that the field of education was still using out of date methodology in the teaching of reading. Something had to be done about this! And that's how a system intended for adolescents, who like myself had failed in learning to read, came to be.

     I reasoned that since the intended students were older children it made sense to embed the essential reading principles (like phonics), immediately after presentation, in amusing science fiction stories. There was no intention to reach either the retarded or kindergartners. Like other "experts" I was sure that neither group, given their mental age and/or IQ scores, would be "ready to read." Some of my staff, being young and inexperienced, thought otherwise. Much to my surprise they were right. These results, because they raised profound questions about the meaning of IQ and intelligence theory, made no sense. Which is why we did extensive research to determine the dimensions of the unexpected successes. The findings were presented at several symposia at meetings of the American Psychological Association. Various popular magazines wrote about the findings. These reports were picked up by enterprising parents who began using the system to teach their children.

     To my dismay, some were enterprising parents of four-year olds. Although our research had demonstrated the effectiveness of the system with the severely retarded, I did not think this would hold for four-year olds. Surely at four very few children would be ready to read. So I tried to discourage the eager parents. A number of the parents even had four-year olds who had already been diagnosed as learning disabled and/or dyslexic by their nursery school. These parents were especially eager to teach reading; and they were angry. "I'm not going to let them stigmatize my child, maybe for the rest of its life!" was a frequent indignant statement. I tried to explain that regardless of the supposed diagnosis, four was too young to teach reading. But I was wrong - again. The delighted parents laughed with their children at the goofy stories and they made the sessions very short. By the time the four-year olds reached kindergarten all of what were now five-year olds were reading. By first grade they had the ability to read anything that interested them. The "experts" who had previously made diagnoses of learning disability and/or dyslexia with such assurance suddenly suffered memory lapses. There was no more talk of learning disabilities or dyslexia.

     Two decades later the first group of four-year olds, by now young adults, began to get in touch with me. They described what an enjoyable experience learning to read had been, and because they had come to love books they had kept these first ones and still look at them with fondness. They also conveyed how the experience brought them closer to their parents. I began to feel downright envious. Why couldn't I have had such a useful and exciting experience; an experience that would have been such fun to share with my grandfather.

     But pangs of envy aside, the successes of the four-year olds and that of the severely retarded made me begin to question the concept of cognitive readiness. I was reminded again of my own dismal scores on the reading readiness tests (after I already had a Ph.D.). Given our research findings, what relation does reading readiness have to brain development, or even to emotional-motivational development? For that matter, how do you measure cognitive-reading readiness? Our research had demonstrated that the tests used on the four-year olds as well as the later reading readiness tests, although considered excellent predictors by many experts, failed in their predictive validity when students were taught with the new reading system.

The speed with which four-year olds learned to read with the system implied that contrary to what the readiness tests claimed, these children were indeed ready to read. And yet when the usual phonics or language arts methods had been used, these same children, because they had failed, were said "not ready to read." The conclusion: a student's capacity to learn to read is dependent on the instructional approach.

     So what can the differences between what is now called Ball-Stick-Bird and the other reading systems tell us about cognitive readiness and cognitive development in general? A major difference apparent already in the first lessons is that Ball-Stick-Bird reduces the initial memory load for out-of-context material (bits of information) in a number of ways. In that first lesson very few information bits (such as phonic sounds) have to be remembered before reading actually begins. Immediately after its introduction an information bit is used in the creation of words that tell a continuing story. Thus, the out-of-context bit becomes anchored in meaning, secured to the context of language the student has already mastered.

     The reason for reducing the initial memory load for out-of-context material is that most of us, both children and adults are not very good at remembering meaningless bits of information. But we are very good at remembering many of the details (information bits) that compose a story.

Although parents know that most two-year olds can already follow a simple story, these are rarely used as a teaching device in primary and even in secondary and science education. Almost always when we teach reading, math or even history we begin by requiring the learning of information bits that have little or no meaning; bits that are not contextually anchored. Once these meaningless bits have been memorized, we expect the child to combine them to make a meaningful whole. All too often that doesn't happen.

     Is there research that tells us at what age children are capable of combining such meaningless fragments into meaningful wholes? To my knowledge this kind of research has not been done. Adding to the complexity of the question are the growing number of illiterate high school graduates who, although they have dutifully memorized phonics (meaningless bits of information), are still unable to utilize this knowledge to make words, and then combine these words to make a meaningful sentence.

     The second major difference in the successful approach with four-year olds and the severely retarded is the use of what psychologists call developmental linguistics, which is the sequence of language acquisition in children. My reason for the utilization of developmental linguistics was to facilitate the understanding and reading of stories. The science fiction adventures in the first two books are primarily composed with the simplest parts of speech (that means nouns and verbs). Gradually in the later books, more and more adjectives, adverbs and prepositions are used to enhance the narrative. Even more gradually advanced verb tenses such as the conditional compose the continuing story. The success of the four-year olds and the severely retarded demonstrated that it is not the length of words (the beginning books have many multisyllabic nouns) that determine language difficulty. Rather the difficulty of a sentence or paragraph depends on the stages of language acquisition during childhood. So we shouldn't be surprised when a kindergartner spouts the names of dinosaurs (nouns) and elaborately describes what they presumably did (verbs) when at the same time she/he cannot comprehend what to us adults is a simple conditional sentence.

     The third major difference that accounts for the successes of the retarded, four-year olds and learning disabled students has been the teaching of word building thereby bypassing the requirement of phonemic awareness. The system, instead of taking words apart letter by letter or syllable by syllable, teaches students how to use the letter sounds to build words that make sense in the sentence. The sentence in turn has to make sense in the story that is being read. Building words that have to make sense in the ongoing narrative helps overcome the hurdle of our haphazard English phonic system with its frequently capricious spelling. And so the power of language cohesion (something a four-year old already has in his/her proud possession), automatically becomes a part of learning to read, allowing reading to become a simple extension of talking rather than the foreign intellectual feat that it so frequently is.

     In contrast to these techniques, what are the cognitive requirements made by alternative reading approaches? And are these requirements cognitively more demanding, thereby contributing to the difference in the results? A frequent difference is the above-discussed requirement of phonemic awareness; the ability to take a word apart and correctly distinguish the letter sounds that compose it. For some of us, even as adults, phonemic awareness continues to be a weak area. I'm one of those for whom phonemic awareness never did arrive. For people like me the tests that use phonemic awareness to establish reading readiness make predictions that can be hilarious – as for example the test that labeled me as "not ready to enter kindergarten" after I had already received my Ph.D.

     Also as previously discussed is the usual teaching of out-of-context material; a more difficult task for the human brain to remember than when the same material is embedded in a story. What does the teaching of phonemic awareness and out-of-context material tell us about education's knowledge of cognitive readiness? Rather embarrassingly it indicates a limited understanding of child development.

Education has tended to ignore the extensiveness of children's grasp of language and the concomitant ability to comprehend even intricate stories. Instead of using this hallmark of human cognition, children are taught information fragments which they are expected to memorize. Eventually they are supposed to combine these fragments to make a whole. Mirroring these educational practices, the various reading readiness tests measure a child's knowledge of information fragments. Which explains their spurious results.

     How did this quagmire come to be?

     Unexpectedly the problem developed when researchers, applying correlational analyses, compared successful and failing readers on the various reading components that are taught and required in schools such as phonemic awareness, attention span, memory for out-of-context material. More recently the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) has been added to the mix. When the test results of one of these factors correlated with reading success or failure it was concluded that here was the reason for a student's success or failure in reading. In other words, the assumption was that the measured ability or "disability," or even differences in brain functioning as measured by fMRI results, was the cause for the success or failure in reading.

     But is a causal relationship what a correlation necessarily tells you? The answer is an emphatic no! All a correlation between two measures can tell you is that if (A) happens then (B) is also likely to happen. It cannot tell you why the two tend to go together. Is it because of the peculiarity of the sample; or is it because both have the same or similar causes; or is it a causal relationship but dependent on the type of intervention? Correlation coefficients cannot tell you which of these, or other alternatives, are the case. With respect to reading, our research demonstrated that after Ball-Stick-Bird intervention there was no correlation between the various factors and reading failure. The conclusion: the cause for reading failures are "failing teaching approaches".

     My own grumpiness toward the concept of cognitive readiness, especially reading readiness, stems from the realization that the Ball-Stick-Bird system would have taught me to read at age four. I would probably have learned with the same ease that so many four year olds have since. And I would have been spared eight years of boredom – my parents didn't allow TV into the house. But more important these eight years without reading prevented me from absorbing the history, science, mathematics, and literature that I avidly tried to catch up on once I could read. Catch-up after missing out on eight years is not easy - especially when the early formative years are involved.

     To what extent is the concept of cognitive readiness meaningful? What are we capable of learning and at what age? Looking back on my years of research with children I wonder whether these are productive questions. Should we instead be asking, "What are the techniques, the approaches that will allow us to teach advanced skills and understandings to children." As our research demonstrated, when told as a story many advanced concepts can become surprisingly easy for even young children to grasp. Although it took humankind many millennia to develop written communication, children can be literate at age four when what has to be learned is embedded in an exciting narrative. Many concepts in science, which required our most brilliant minds standing on the shoulder of other brilliant minds to develop, can be within the grasp of elementary schoolers if they are transmitted as a story. Telling such wonderful stories can be the true meaning of education.

     Oh, how my grandfather would have been delighted with that idea. I do wish he were still here to share and enjoy what we found. He always did like a good story.