I was born in Derby in the UK in 1949. In 1970 I graduated from the University of Manchester with an honours degree in psychology, having spent the previous three years wondering whether I should become a rock star or a poet. Almost immediately after graduation, I began working as a research associate for Professor Peter Mittler at his newly established Hester Adrian Research Centre (HARC) 'for the study of learning processes in the mentally handicapped' (as it was then known). It was at HARC in the early 1970s that I first became seriously interested in behavioural psychology. (Anything to do with operant conditioning had been virtually banned from my undergraduate course in psychology.) I completed my doctoral research at HARC on receptive language development, which was subsequently awarded the Education Section Prize of the British Psychological Society.

In 1973, aged 24,  I was appointed to a lectureship in the social psychology of education at the University of Birmingham, where I continued to research in language comprehension, including a novel way of assessing the Piagetian notion of conservation using operant conditioning. But I soon became much more interested in using behavioural psychology to help teachers to manage classroom behaviour more effectively, working with my doctoral student, and subsequently research partner, Frank Merrett.

In 1980, I jointly founded the journal Educational Psychology (published by Taylor and Francis), with my colleague Richard Riding, in an attempt to encourage more experimental research in the psychological study of education. Then in 1981 and 1982, respectively, I was elected honorary general secretary of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and appointed director of the Centre for Child Study at the University of Birmingham. Prior to moving to a chair in education at Macquarie University in Sydney in 1990, I was elected a fellow of both the British Psychological Society and of the College of Preceptors and also chaired the BPS Education Section and the Association for Behavioural Approaches with Children.

Since 1990, I have been director of Macquarie University Special Education Centre and have also served as Associate Dean (research) of the Australian Centre for Educational Studies at Macquarie (2004-2006). In 2006, I was elected President of Learning Difficulties Australia (LDA) and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) in 2007 and a Fellow of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disability in 2008. In 2008, I was also presented with the Mona Tobias Award of Learning Difficulties Australia "in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of learning difficulties in Australia".

Research and theoretical interests

I have researched and written extensively in the area of learning and behaviour difficulties, with particular emphasis on classroom behaviour management and effective instruction for older low-progress readers, and have published well over 150 books, chapters and journal articles in the field of special education and educational and child psychology. I have also acted as an adviser to both state and federal government education bodies and ministers on matters relating to special education generally and on behaviour and reading, in particular.

My research and theoretical interests fall (very) roughly into three main areas:

• language comprehension;
• classroom behaviour management;
• effective instruction for low-progress readers.

I have researched many other topics that do not fall within these three areas (such as the development of very low-birthweight babies and vocal pitch in 'motherese'), but I shall concentrate on these three.

My early research focused on receptive language development, particularly sentence comprehension, which was a hot topic in the 1970s. My work included studies examining the factors influencing sentence comprehension in young children both with and without disabilities. For example, we looked at whether intonational emphasis helped children to understand sentences presented to them. This line of inquiry also led to the development and subsequent publication of the Sentence Comprehension Test (Wheldall, Mittler & Hobsbaum 1979).

It was this concern with children's ability to understand spoken language that led to my subsequent research attempting to develop a non-verbal means of assessing the Piagetian notion of conservation. In one of those rare moments of lucid insight, it occurred to me that my developing interest in operant conditioning might provide the answer to the problems of asking young children complicated questions. By systematically training young children to press a button when they perceived two glasses of water as holding the same quantity of liquid, we were then able to observe their responses when we subsequently poured one of the glasses of water into a different shaped container. In brief, we found that many more young children could indeed conserve liquid quantity when asked to make their judgments non-verbally-that is, when they were not confused by complicated questions (Wheldall & Poborca 1980).

This fascination with operant conditioning also manifested itself in the program of research completed in the late 1970s and 1980s with my colleague Dr Frank Merrett on classroom behaviour management. In brief, we found that while teachers continually complained about the amount of time they wasted reprimanding children for 'talking out of turn' or disturbing others, they (typically) hardly ever praised children for behaving well. In various studies we demonstrated that by 'catching them being good', teachers could greatly increase the amount of time students spent 'on-task' behaving well. Another line of inquiry repeatedly showed that children spent far more time getting on with their work when seated in the traditional rows format than when seated in table groups, which had become the norm in most primary classes. We subsequently developed these ideas into the Positive Teaching Package, a course for teachers in how to manage classroom behaviour effectively (Wheldall 1987; Wheldall & Merrett 1989; Merrett & Wheldall 1990).

During this period, I also became interested in the behavioural tutoring of reading using the 'Pause, Prompt and Praise' remedial tutoring method developed by Ted Glynn and his colleagues in New Zealand. Helping older low-progress readers became the focus of much of my work in the 1990s after I had moved to Macquarie University Special Education Centre. After completing a controversial evaluation of Reading Recovery (Center, Wheldall, Freeman, Outhred & McNaught 1995), I initiated the Making Up Lost Time In Literacy, or MULTILIT, research and development initiative (see www.multilit.com). We developed a highly effective program for teaching reading and related skills to older low-progress readers (Wheldall & Beaman 2000). This aspect of my work has also included the development of the Wheldall Assessment of Reading Passages (WARP) (Wheldall, 2008; Wheldall & Madelaine 2000, 2008) which allows the tracking of reading progress on a weekly basis.

Theory and research into practice

In my research career, spanning over 37 years now, I have had little time for so-called pure research. I have had my more esoteric moments (researching eye widening and eyebrow raising in response to surprise in nursery school children, for example!) but they have been rare. There has simply been too much to be done on a practical level. I believe firmly in evidence-based practice and see experimental and behaviourally based educational psychology as the main means by which we can address the problems confronting education. I tire very quickly when faced with post-modern speculation and so-called critical theory (Wheldall, 2006; Carter & Wheldall, 2008).

This is not to say that I have no interest in theory or that I have not attempted to contribute to the development of psychological models. Kurt Lewin used to say that there is nothing so practical as a good theory. I agree with this, but also believe that practice undoubtedly influences theory. In considering the influence that my research may have had on practice, I shall focus on two areas: classroom behaviour management and reading instruction, since it is a source of continual amazement to me that we teach neither of them well in education faculties.

My work has clearly identified (and this has been replicated many times) that classroom behaviour of most concern to teachers is not violence and aggression (as the media would have us believe) but rather the relatively trivial but persistent and time-wasting behaviours such as 'talking out of turn' (TOOT) and 'hindering other children' (HOC). TOOT and HOC account for the vast majority of teacher complaints about student behaviour and lead to low levels of student on-task behaviour. Being on-task (paying attention to the teacher and getting on with your work) is a necessary (but not, of course, sufficient) condition for learning to take place in the classroom. Our observational studies have repeatedly shown that while teachers typically praise students for good academic product, they almost never praise them for behaving well in class. But by using methods based on positive teaching (rather than continual reprimanding), teachers can be readily trained in how to use positive reinforcement to increase levels of on-task behaviour in their classroom. We have repeatedly demonstrated this to be the case.

The other necessary condition for learning to take place is effective instruction, but we hardly ever seem to employ it in schools! This is particularly evident in the teaching of reading. In spite of the failure of so-called whole language in teaching reading, this is the approach that most teachers identify with and which dominates practice in our schools. Even when young children fail to learn to read, we tend to give them more of the same in the form of Reading Recovery. Our experimental research clearly showed that Reading Recovery is, at best, effective for only one child in three exposed to it (Center, Wheldall, Freeman, Outhredd & McNaught, 1995). But it is only now, many years after we showed this, that Reading Recovery is beginning to be questioned.

This frustration with ineffective instruction in reading and related skills led to the development of MULTILIT. By employing a rigorous, intensive, systematic, skills-based program of instruction, my partner and colleague, Dr Robyn Beaman, and I have demonstrated repeatedly that low-progress readers can make extraordinary progress. By incorporating what we have learned about how reading works from international research over the past 30 years and coupling it with what we know to be the most effective methods of instruction, we now have a program that makes it possible for most non-readers or low-progress older readers to reach, at least, functional literacy. Moreover, by using curriculum-based measures of reading such as the WARP, we can track the progress students are making over successive weeks and modify their instruction accordingly. More recently, we have demonstrated that MULTILIT also proves to be very effective with indigenous students in remote Aboriginal communities, helping them to catch up with their non-indigenous peers in reading and related skills.

Key references

Center, Y., Wheldall, K., Freeman, L., Outhred, L. & McNaught, M. (1995) An evaluation of Reading Recovery. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 240-63.

Wheldall, K. & Beaman, R. (2000) An evaluation of MULTILIT: 'Making Up Lost Time In Literacy'. Canberra: Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs.

Wheldall, K. (2006). When will we ever learn? In K. Wheldall (Ed.), Developments in educational psychology: How far have we come in 25 years? (pp. 1-12). London: Routledge.

Further references

Merrett, F. & Wheldall, K. (1990) Positive Teaching in the Primary School. London: Paul Chapman.

Multilit (2007). The Multilit reading tutor program. Sydney: Multilit Pty Ltd.

Wheldall, K. (ed.) (1987) The Behaviourist in the Classroom. London: Allen & Unwin.

Wheldall, K. (2009) The Wheldall assessment of reading passages (WARP). Sydney: Multilit Pty Ltd (in press).

Wheldall, K. & Madelaine, A. (2000) A curriculum-based passage reading test for monitoring the performance of low-progress readers: The development of the WARP. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 47, 371-82.

Wheldall, K. & Madelaine, A. (2009) Manual for the Wheldall assessment of reading passages (WARP). Sydney: Multilit Pty Ltd (in press).

Wheldall, K. & Merrett, F. (1989) Positive Teaching in the Secondary School. London: Paul Chapman.

Wheldall, K., Mittler, P. & Hobsbaum, A. (1979, 1987) Sentence Comprehension Test. Windsor: National Foundation for Educational Research.

Wheldall, K. & Poborca, B. (1980) Conservation without conversation? An alternative non-verbal paradigm for assessing conservation of liquid quantity. British Journal of Psychology, 71, 117-34.