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Direct attack on a maverick
Don’t touch speed reading
‘Below the belt.’ That’s what retired professor Ben Maassen thinks of the situation. Criticism is fine, but not like this. The neuropsychologist and co-coordinator of the Dutch Dyslexia Programme is angry.
‘They’re making academics look bad’, Wander Lowie adds. He is a professor of applied linguistics at the UG, and he is not amused. ‘I worked with some of these people’, he says. ‘Obviously, it’s fine if people disagree with certain issues. But they should express their criticism in an academically relevant manner.’
‘Malicious and unsportsmanlike’, says associate professor of applied linguistics Hilde Hacquebord.
Luc Koning, the retired educational expert whose research is at the centre of the controversy, is a bit calmer. He calls the situation ‘annoying’. At 73, he’s too old to get angry. Nevertheless, he thinks there might be an ulterior motive to the criticism. ‘Perhaps’, he says, ‘I will reveal that in a year or two.’ But not right now. First, the whole thing has to die down.
Resourceful reading
What kicked up the fuss was Koning receiving his PhD on November 7, 2024, for his research on ‘resourceful reading’, a method he devised which allows children to read ‘fast enough’ rather than pushing them to read as quickly as possible.
Koning suspected that ‘speed reading’, which times children while they read as many words as they can in one or three minutes, is actually stressful for children and has no added value. However, this practice has become the standard in most reading classes, and most of education is geared towards it.
They’re making academics look bad
For four years, Koning studied 1,100 children in various schools across the country and compared their reading skills to those who were pushed to read as quickly as possible. He concluded that practising fast reading is completely unnecessary. It doesn’t make children better or worse at reading.
You might think this would have put an end to the method. It’s widely known that children throughout the Netherlands have low reading skills. People aren’t happy with the mainstream methods. There’s a reason Koning has more than thirty thousand followers on his LinkedIn page, where he posts about his resourceful reading method.
Protest
But two days after Koning received his PhD, rector magnificus Jacquelien Scherpen, who also chairs the PhD Board, received a letter. In it, eleven academics at five different universities demanded that the UG distance itself from the conclusions put forward in the thesis. A few days later, they published the contents of the letter on a website about dyslexia.
The eleven, with educational expert at the University of Amsterdam Peter de Jong as their spokesperson, argued that the study was missing data and that the central thesis statement was too vague. Koning had used standards that were fifty years old, the minimal reading speed wasn’t sufficiently substantiated, and the statistics used weren’t advanced enough.
Two other members of the PhD committee allegedly didn’t have sufficient experience and critics argued that the PhD candidate had ‘financial interests’ in a study into his own method. In short: in awarding the PhD, the committee had made a mistake.
And so, they said, ‘[we] strongly protest against awarding the degree’ and ‘request you distance yourself from several conclusions reached’.
Nothing untoward
The UG investigated the matter, but decided to squarely back the PhD supervisors and the study. ‘Nothing untoward happened when awarding this PhD’, said Scherpen. All the procedures were in order, and judging the actual contents of the thesis was up to the PhD committee. And they unanimously decided everything was above board.
But the whole matter leaves one with a weird aftertaste. If the PhD thesis was so bad, why did the critics wait to say something until after the title had been awarded? Why didn’t they ask the UG to revoke Koning’s title? Why, if so many things were lacking in the thesis, didn’t they go to the integrity committee? And why did they refuse the PhD supervisors’ offer of organising a symposium to talk about the dispute?
This isn’t a substantial disagreement we can debate
The letter writers say they had good reasons. For one, the thesis had already been approved by the evaluation committee that summer. ‘We considered this a promise to the PhD candidate that he would be awarded the title of doctor. We didn’t think it was appropriate to interfere at this stage.’
They didn’t think demanding his title be revoked was something they ‘could reasonably do to a PhD candidate’, says De Jong.
What about the integrity committee? ‘We didn’t think of that’, he says. They felt organising a symposium was utter nonsense. ‘The suggestion that this was some sort of substantial disagreement that we could debate or respond to with a bunch of articles was inappropriate’, De Jong says. ‘That’s something the supervisors don’t seem to understand. We’re protesting the quality of the research.’
Financial interest
Writing a critical review, something the letter writers said was the normal procedure for a ‘weak promotion’, wouldn’t generate enough awareness. After all, the study was already making the rounds among academics. ‘The conclusions caused quite a stir in the field of education, even though they aren’t supported by the results. People start to wonder if there is something wrong with their methods. It’s comparable to the link between autism and vaccination’, says De Jong.
So all that was left was this unsparing and highly unusual attack on the study and their own colleagues. The compassion they claim to have for the PhD candidate, who is seeing his life’s work besmirched, appears to be sorely lacking. They don’t just doubt the academic competency of the research, but the integrity of everyone involved, as well. Retiree Koning is alleged to have a ‘financial interest’ in the study, since it involves a method he devised. Peter de Jong also writes that co-supervisor Hilde Hacquebord is director at Diataal, a company that publishes a test as part of resourceful reading.
Hacquebord, who indeed was director of Diataal until last year and now sits on the board, doesn’t quite know how to respond. ‘I started that company years ago based on a test I developed after my own PhD research. We focus on formative testing, which is a method that boosts the learning process. We developed a test based on our own vision and in line with Luc Koning’s methodology and included it in our selection.’
Factional dispute
She and the other members of the PhD committee suspect there is an entirely different reason for the extensive criticism. It’s more a factional dispute, the goal of which isn’t to see who is right, academically speaking, but to cause as much commotion as possible. And it’s working. Concerned parties have asked Koning about his method, as has Hacquebord. ‘It’s scaring people off’, she says. ‘The method has become a little tainted by the whole matter.’
‘The point is that the study is kind of a sensitive issue in the Dutch world of dyslexia’, says supervisor Maassen. ‘That’s because of the Nederlands Kwaliteitsinstituut Dyslexie (NKD, the Dutch Quality Institute for Dyslexia), which determines the regulations and procedures on how to diagnose and treat dyslexia. They have a practical, and perhaps even a financial, stake in being able to do their research and keep the whole thing going.’
The NKD has a stake in maintaining dyslexia as a disorder
The ‘speed reading’ method is also a way to diagnose dyslexia. A child that’s regularly in the lowest 6 or 7 percent in terms of reading skills will need support. If that doesn’t help, the child will be referred to specialised youth care; in this case, dyslexia companies paid for by the municipal youth care budget. Before 2021, the lowest 10 percent would even be marked for support.
However, that means there are always children who are told they’re dyslexic, says professor of orthopedagogy Anna Bosman, who works at the Radboud University Nijmegen and was part of the reading committee. ‘It’s an absurd approach.’
This explains why there are twice as many diagnoses of dyslexia than the academic consensus says there should be. In 2019, research journalism platform Follow the Money estimated that municipalities spend nearly 2 percent of their total youth care budget on treating dyslexia. That makes it a million-euro industry which tends to overtreat children.
Same results
The focus on speed reading also impacts education: many schools use the method, which leaves less time for reading comprehension and spelling.
‘That constitutes teaching to the test’, says Maassen. ‘With his method, Luc has tried a broader approach to education. He wants children to be more aware of what they’re reading and not just train them to decode the text. His research shows that the resourceful reading technique pretty much gets the same results.’
Both Lowie and Maassen agree that his conclusions are sound. Although they do admit that the statistical analyses used aren’t the most advanced. After all, Koning isn’t your average academic; he is retired and worked as an educational expert his entire life. ‘That means he has a lot of experience in the field, but less so in statistics and academic writing’, says Lowie. ‘But we worked on that, and he’s made great strides forward in that regard.’
While the statistics used may be simple, they are solid. ‘In the end, it’s a unique thesis that we are backing 100 percent.’
Old standards
The lack of experience might also explain the ‘major flaw’ in the research. As De Jong and his fellow critics said, Koning used ‘standards that were fifty years old’. In addition to various other tests, Koning used a one minute reading test from a book published in 2019. What he didn’t realise, is that the publisher was still using the standards from 1972. The revised standards had to be ordered separately. ‘I didn’t realise that’, he says. ‘Who would, since the book was published in 2019?’
The results supported my original conclusions
When the letter writers pointed out this mistake, he redid his calculations and submitted the new results to the PhD board. ‘But these results supported my original conclusions’, says Koning.
Lowie also counters the criticism that the PhD committee wasn’t experienced enough. It’s true that not everyone on the committee was an expert in dyslexia, although Ben Maassen, Anna Bosman, and Barry de Groot do have experience with the matter. But this thesis didn’t focus on dyslexia; it focused on reading education. And other PhD supervisors and committee members had more experience when it came to tests or reading processes. ‘As far as I’m concerned, a complementary and interdisciplinary PhD committee is essential to prevent a closed-off in-crowd and foster innovation in research’, says Lowie.
De Jong, however, doesn’t think there’s any reason to think he wouldn’t be open to innovation. ‘We think the thesis statement is interesting’, he says, when asked. ‘It’s just something that’s really difficult to study.’
Research network
But it’s also clear that De Jong is part of a tenured group of dyslexia researchers. Not only is he an educational expert with a long service record in the field of dyslexia, but he also sits on the board of the Stichting Dyslexie Nederland (Dutch Dyslexia Foundation) as well as a member of the academic advisory council for the prestigious NKD, which focuses on treating dyslexia. Dyslexie Centraal, the website the writers also published their letter on, is connected to the NKD.
Six of the ten other critics are also connected to the NKD through the academic advisory council. One of them is on the board, while two others are also part of the Stichting Dyslexie Nederland. ‘It’s a research circle, a network, and they’re not particularly happy when someone proposes a fundamentally different approach’, says Maassen.
People aren’t happy when someone proposes a fundamentally different approach
Anna Bosman experienced this for herself in 2016, when she first expressed her surprise at the gigantic number of dyslexia diagnoses in the Netherlands and suggested that perhaps it wasn’t always a case of disorder, but just of a child who wasn’t very good at reading.
But she had opened a can of worms. Her inbox became filled with hate mail. ‘Fortunately, I had some really nice people in my corner, who deleted those before I could read them’, she says. ‘But they told me it was really bad.’
What was worse, she says, was her colleagues from the field suddenly ignoring her. Her latest article, in which she writes that dyslexia as a disorder cannot be proven, was ignored. ‘No one has engaged with what I wrote. They just keep treading the ground. I was like, debate me!’
She thinks a similar thing is happening to Koning. ‘They refuse to discuss it. All they want is to stop the PhD candidate.’
See the good
Hacquebord wants to see the good in people. ‘My hope is that these people are just as passionate as Luc Koning and they’re just concerned for dyslexic students. They want these children to be acknowledged, just like their parents do. So, even though they have the best intentions, everyone is part of this system that prioritises the label of dyslexia and it’s become impossible to question it.’
But in the end, this has resulted in people questioning Koning’s work. He has lain low in the past few weeks, agreeing with the faculty that, on his LinkedIn, he will communicate in an ‘academically justified manner’, i.e. as an academic rather than an activist. But his thirty thousand followers have questions.
‘I’d like to publish something on my page as soon as possible, in consultation with my supervisory committee’, he says. ‘I started writing a series of articles on LinkedIn on January 16, to show that the latest numbers support my conclusions. After that, I will publish several articles in professional journals.’