In the 1960s there was a growing interest in developing detailed systems for education. This was in part fueled by research that speculated about components that might be sequenced and mastered sequentially in order for one to learn. These systems drew their rationale from theories of learning (e.g., Gagné, 1965: Bloom, 1968) that featured optimal and/or typical sequences of skill acquisition and assessments designed to measure each step along the way. Reading was not spared this approach, as developmental approaches shifted to those that reconfigured learning as more akin to an assembly line (Guthrie, 1973). This approach did not appear overnight; to the contrary, there was a long tradition of separate, decontextualized skill instruction dating back to at least the 1930s and perhaps to the founding era of the field of educational psychology in the very early years of the Twentieth Century. ...

In the 1960s, standard curriculum remained dominated by approaches to skill development that involved a diet of graded reading materials tied to a scope and sequence of skills to be mastered across the grades. The approach to reading research remained heavily influenced by psychologists who used various tests to explore the relationship between variables and overall reading achievement. Indeed, a testing regimen increasingly dominated research, resulting in correlational studies, studies exploring aspects of reading difficulties, and research and development on curriculum (including comparisons of different approaches to beginning reading that relied on test scores or testimonies to assess respective merits). ...