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Teaching Children to Read
- July 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
According to the Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read Reports of the Subgroups, the capacity to learn and grow as a reader depends on five essential skills:
Foundational Skills for Beginning Readers:
1) Phonemic Awareness: The insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemes are the speech sounds that are represented by the letters of an alphabet.
2) Phonemic Decoding: The ability to capture the meaning of unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back into the sounds that they represent, link them to one's verbal vocabulary, and access their meaning.
Skills Needed to Read for Meaning:
3) Vocabulary: Understanding the words in a passage, including the specific dimensions of their meanings or usage that matter in context. For example, knowing that “tree” when reading about a “family tree” has a different meaning from “maple tree”
4) Fluency: The ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that active attention can be focused on the meaning and message of the text and the text easily retained.
5) Comprehension: Thinking about the meaning of each segment of the text as it is read, building an understanding of the text as a whole, and reflecting on its meaning and message.
Teachers today are fortunate to have access to a wealth of scientifically based research into what works when teaching children to read. The links that follow are courtesy of the National Institute for Literacy:
Birth to Early Childhood
Children begin building literacy skills long before they go to school. Even very young children can be prepared to become successful readers later on. Research has identified certain skills that are important for later literacy development; these skills include knowing the names and sounds of printed letters, manipulating speech sounds, and remembering what has been said for a short time. Here are some ways to teach younger children these pre-reading skills.
Childhood
From kindergarten through third grade, young readers are actively developing all five of the core reading skills from phonemic awareness to fluency and comprehension. Research has shown that teaching children to read successfully during this window requires a combination of strategies and instructional approaches. Teachers must know how children learn to read and be able to tailor instructional approaches to individual children--especially those who are struggling readers. Here are some instructional approaches for the five essential skills.
Adolescence
While many adolescent readers have mastered phonemic awareness and decoding, they are often still challenged to fully understand what they read. In middle and high school, it is common for literacy skills to be developed not only in language arts courses, but also in a variety of different content areas. To prepare students for the literacy challenges of secondary school, language arts and content area teachers need to focus on the last three components of reading: vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Here are some approaches to teaching vocabulary and comprehension skills.
What are some strategies you have used when teaching children to read? Which have been most successful? Share your expertise on our Scientific Learning Facebook page!
Categories: Reading & Learning
Brain Research, Learning & Literacy: Webinar with Dr. Bill Jenkins
- May 28, 2010 by Norene Wiesen
In this pre-recorded webinar, "Addressing Literacy Through Neuroscience," Dr. Bill Jenkins discusses brain development and plasticity, takes us on a tour of the parts of the brain involved in language processing, and reviews some recent research findings on language impairment.
You will learn about the strong correlation between auditory processing and language development, the importance of timing in our perception of speech, and more.
Be sure to take advantage of this unusual opportunity to learn from an expert about what happens in the brain when we learn language, how oral language skills influence learning, and what we can do to help children learn better.
Categories: Brain Research, Fast ForWord®, Scientific Learning® Research
What is Number Sense and How Does it Relate to Math Skills?
- April 20, 2010 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.
Let’s talk about the Approximate Number System, or just "the ANS." The ANS is the instinctive ability to nonverbally represent numbers. We constantly use this capability in every day decision making, such as choosing the shorter checkout line at the store or wanting to try a meal at a crowded restaurant. In these situations, our gut decisions are mathematically based. Evidence shows that many different species not only share this capacity, but use it to guide everyday behaviors such as foraging and judging time and distance.
So how does the ANS work in non-humans? Let’s do a little study of my two labs, Bella and Buddy. Both love to chase tennis balls, love to swim, and are highly competitive in the ball-chasing department. Buddy clearly exercises his ANS judgment routinely when I throw the ball into the water. If he and Bella approach the water’s edge at about the same time, they both jump in. On the other hand, if Bella beats him to the water by a significant distance, he recognizes instinctively that he can’t beat her to the ball in the water, so he’ll stop and wait until she brings it nearly to the shore. At that point, he jumps in and goes for the steal.
Why is the ANS important for math skills? It is believed that human mathematical competence comes from two representational systems. One is the "symbolic representations" that must be explicitly taught and are the basis for calculus and geometry. The other–the same one that Buddy uses above–is the older approximate number system. The evidence suggests that very young babies can use this ANS to make approximate number judgments, differentiating one item from two, two items from three and three items from greater than three. Further, a growing body of evidence indicates that individual differences in math achievement are related to variations in the acuity of an evolutionarily ancient, unlearned approximate number sense. Interestingly, evidence also suggests that this ANS may be subject to influence by early learning.
If you’d like to dig deeper into understanding the science of the ANS, I recommend reading Halberda and Feigernson’s 2008 study, "Developmental Change in the Acuity of the ’Number Sense’: The Approximate Number System in 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-Year-Olds and Adults." For an overview, The New York Times published a write up on the article and even included a link to an interactive, online activity that demonstrates the ANS in action.
Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning
The Technological Lives of Today’s Students
- April 16, 2010 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.
Today, students’ lives are steeped with technology in all its shapes and sizes and forms. They don’t stop to ask directions. They have iPhones and GPSs and they just keep going forward at full tilt. If we wish to understand our students so we can affect their lives and their futures, we—as parents, as educators, as mentors—must not only understand that mindset, but embrace it.
Think about how different the education experience is today from what it was in the 1960’s, 70’s and even a brief 20 years ago in the 80’s. Back then, learning materials were still delivered in print. Biology and chemistry labs were performed in labs or in the field. Students, side-by-side with educators, really got in and got their hands dirty.
Today’s students are likely to be reading their lessons online, performing those same experiments in simulated environments, and turning in their lab reports via a class website as opposed to writing out assignments, and looking their teacher in the eye as they hand them a written report on paper. While we might feel nostalgic for those kinds of interactions, we can—and must—take a different mindset. Essentially, this represents a new aspect of the challenge that every educator has faced: ours is to uncover ways of connecting with our students in ways that are meaningful to them. Technology has provided a new paradigm for the classroom, redefining how, when and where learning happens. Now, educators have a limitless library of tools to add depth to learning experiences. No doubt about it, technology presents challenges, but it has also added great variety to teaching and learning, making it more exciting, interactive and, yes, fun.
A number of insights can help us understand this world where our students reside:
- Our students experience their world through technology. This is one of those simple, undeniable facts that we can rail against or embrace. According to a new Kaiser Family Foundation study, the average 8 to 18 year-old spends more than seven and a half hours a day using smart phones, computers and other devices. Include texting and cell phones and the number jumps to nine and a half hours. (Levin)
- The use of technology and electronic media in K-12 education is on the rise. Every year, more wonderful, brave educators are adding more technological arrows to their classroom quivers. A research report that Grunwald Associates created for PBS indicates that almost three quarters of K-12 teachers use downloaded or streaming content from the Internet as an instructional tool. (Grunwald Associates) If you’re one of these educators, kudos to you for implementing ways to connect with your tech-savvy students!
- It has been said that our school systems are, in general, behind the rest of society. "Most students say they ‘step back in time’ when they enter the school building each morning." (Project Tomorrow) This is a hard fact to swallow, but we must accept it and deal with it, head on. If our task is to prepare students for a technology-driven, knowledge-based global economy, the mastery of technology they are getting outside of school must be just as important a part of their education as the content and skills they are learning in school.
Of course, access to technology is not a given; the economic health of the communities where our nation's students live and learn is not a constant, and we must challenge ourselves at all levels of society to ensure that every student gets a quality, relevant education. If we are to prepare our students for the world that awaits them, educators need to not only welcome technology, but we must approach the world using the high-tech eyes and speak the high-tech languages that our students use every day. As we do that and gain an increasingly deeper understanding of their technological lives, we will be able to more effectively connect them, educate them, and send them forward with the knowledge and skills that they will need to sail on to success.
Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning
Apply for the “Science of Success” Classroom Microgrant for Teachers!
- April 13, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba
How would you use the knowledge gained from brain research to create the best learning experiences for kids
WeAreTeachers is offering a “Science of Success” microgrant for teachers, sponsored by Scientific Learning, that is designed to help educators enrich their classroom instruction by incorporating information and practices derived from research into how the brain learns.
Enter your project idea for a chance to win $200 and a Flip Video camera or iPod nano® that you can use to document your project! The application period starts today and ends May 13, 2010. Voting will take place on the WeAreTeachers website from May 13 – May 27, with winners announced May 31, 2010.
Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus
Child Reading Development and Language Skills Webinar
- April 8, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba
Updated June 1, 2010
Language learning begins at birth and continues throughout early childhood. A child’s brain needs plenty of early language exposure to map the phonemes—or speech sounds—of her native language.
Without a good language background, a child is likely to struggle with reading. Children who are reading below grade level in the first grade are at risk for remaining below grade level in reading ability throughout their school years, and being poor readers as adults.
Early reading intervention gets better results than remediation provided later in life. Listen to our pre-recorded child reading development webinar with Cory Armes and Dr. Joseph Noble and find out how struggling students in an Iowa school district boosted their language skills from the 36th to the 59th percentile.
The latter half of the child reading development webinar addresses various funding sources—including Stimulus Package opportunities—that districts can apply for to bring similar results to their learners.
Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus, Fast ForWord®, Reading Assistant™
How Important is Memory in the Phonics Approach to Reading?
- April 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
All of us measure our intelligence, to some extent, by how well we remember things. When a young child enters school there is a tremendous premium on the ability to memorize. From learning the alphabet to memorizing math facts, success in school is measured by memory.
Parents intuitively understand this and encourage their children to demonstrate their mnemonic skills. Reciting a poem, repeating the alphabet, counting to 100, or listing other facts like state capitals, can be a badge of “knowledge” that parents will ask their children to perform to demonstrate their intellectual prowess. But, sadly, many children who are significantly behind in some aspects of development can recite and memorize.
It is interesting, that from a neuroscience perspective, memorization is not really a very advanced skill. Memorization of facts, poems, or lists is accomplished by one of the most primitive and, from an evolutionary perspective, oldest parts of the brain, the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is a horseshoe-shaped area situated deep in the center of the brain in one of the oldest parts of the brain, the medial temporal lobe. All animals with a spinal cord have a hippocampus.
Most brain scientists regard the hippocampus as the part of the brain that allows us to learn anything new. And, in fact, when it is permanently damaged in humans, they become unable to learn anything new although they can recite without error information they learned before this part of the brain was damaged. So, it turns out that the hippocampus is like the “tape recorder” of our brain. It enables us to memorize new information but does not appear to be essential for retrieving information we learned years ago or information we know well.1
A great deal of learning in the elementary grades involves the hippocampus. Memorization of spelling rules likes “i before e except after c,” math facts, reading of “sight” words that cannot be sounded out, and geographical facts, just to name a few, demand good memorization skills (hippocampus function.). Reading curriculum used before 1970, like those used when the goal was memorization of the “Dolch” sight words, also stressed memorization skills.2
Children who were not particularly good at memorization in the 1950’s or 1960’s were at a great disadvantage in the early grades. But the 1980’s ushered in a new approach to reading, phonics. The phonics approach to teaching reading went through a slight reversal in the 1980’s and early 1990’s with an academic approach called “total language” that stressed reading speed and ease through use of contextual information like pictures and story3 familiarity, but the phonics-based approaches are now quite strong in most American academic curricula as research pointed to its overall superiority for teaching young readers.
The phonics reading approach places far fewer demands on memorization because a child can read many words without having to memorize them. But phonics does require a kind of memory – working memory – that involves a much more advanced part of the brain and is different from memorization.
1There is considerable debate about how important the hippocampus is in retrieval of different types of stored information. Squire, et al., discuss some of this debate in an excellent summary article: Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8, 872–883 (1 November 2007) | doi:10.1038/nrn2154
2 Anyone who was educated with “Dick and Jane” books was taught to memorize a list of Dolch sight words at each grade level.
3 The National Research Council now recommends that all reading curricula in U.S. schools stress phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, comprehension and vocabulary building.
Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning
Brain Fitness Summit in Utah
- March 30, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba
More than 60 people from Utah's state legislature, school districts, and education organizations congregated in Salt Lake City recently to learn about literacy, neuroscience in education, and brain fitness at the March Brain Fitness Summit presented by Scientific Learning.
Dr. Martha Burns gave a presentation about brain plasticity and how boosting the brain's processing efficiency accelerates quality learning. Guest speakers gave insightful and often emotional presentations about their experiences and how they funded and implemented Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ software.
If you are a Superintendent, District/School Administrator, or Legislator and are interested in attending a Brain Fitness Summit, or if you wish to be placed on the mailing list to receive further information, email our Events team at brainevents@scilearn.com.
Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus, Education Trends, Fast ForWord®, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant™
Success in School
- March 2, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
What advice can neuroscience offer a parent who would like to prepare their child to be successful in school, career and life? Probably the most important advice is that success is a relative term that each parent must decide how to define.
Not all children can be valedictorians of their high school class, so if a parent decides that this is the academic goal for their child, most will be sorely disappointed. But there is no limit to the percentage of students who can graduate. Nor is there a limit to the number who can leave high school with a career goal in mind. Certainly, there is no limit to the number of high school seniors who can be accepted to a college or university of their choice. And finally, and perhaps the most important when the goal is perpetuating the species, the individual must be able to work with and sustain positive relationships with others.
In the United States today, high school degrees are no longer sufficient to guarantee financial stability and security, so pursuit of a career that necessitates some form of higher education is a worthwhile goal for parents. For a child to reach that goal there are specific requirements. First and foremost, an individual must be able to read fluently and adequately comprehend what they read. Unfortunately, however, learning to read is not easy for all children. There are prerequisite cognitive capacities that a child needs to be a fluent reader. Second, an individual must be able to handle numbers and understand basic numerical concepts so that he or she can earn and manage money, understand debt and monetary risk and balance a budget. Third, an individual must be able to get along with others, maintain intimate relationships and learn to manage other people to attain group goals.
Upon high school graduation, most parents would like their brain child to have a map for this future: career goals, security goals and relationship goals. Career goals will come through academic success and a work ethic, security will be achieved through ability to earn and manage money, and relationship goals will be attained through social skill attainment.
The valuable information that parents can glean from brain science is that each of these goals is attainable for all of your children. The remarkable thing is that the human brain is actually designed to achieve all of these. In most cases, a parent need only to follow his or her natural parental instincts and provide an environment rich in language and conducive to experimentation to achieve these goals.
In essence, raising a “brain child” simply requires talking to and playing with your infant. The magic here is that the human brain evolved under the circumstances that language and play actually build brain structures that support academic success and social success. Because the brain evolved over thousands of years, parents do not need, nor is it helpful, to expose very young children to television, or cell phones, or iPods or Baby Einstein. The brain is designed to develop very well when it is exposed to very simple and time-tested information like nursery rhymes, nursery songs, play routines, cuddling and play.
Categories: Brain Fitness
Building a Fit Brain: The Serious Work of Play
- February 12, 2010 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.
In the world of education, especially in the early grades, we have great debates about the skills that we wish to impart to students. What do kids need to learn to do early on so they can be successful as they move forward? When it comes down to it, one of the biggies is self-control.
"Executive function"—the ability to order and control our thoughts—refers to those mental processes that allow us to process information coherently, hold and refer to items in our short term memories, avoid distractions and stay on task. Executive function takes self control. It depends upon the individual’s ability to control and filter emotions and cognitive impulses in order to get a job done.
As it turns out, research indicates that higher executive functions demonstrated early on are indicators of short as well as long-term success, both in academics and in life. According to Paul Tough in his September 27, 2009 New York Times article, "In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests."
One program called Tools of the Mind is working to improve self-regulation abilities in young children. Now being used to teach 18,000 preK and kindergarten children in twelve states, the Tools of the Mind curriculum, created by child development scholars Deborah Leon and Elena Bodrova, is purported to teach self-regulation skills to essentially any child, regardless of socioeconomic status. At the core of their methodology is the idea that the key to developing self regulation is dramatic play, with complex, long-lasting make-believe scenarios.
While the research continues into the effectiveness of these techniques, there is no question that self-regulation is a central skill that kids need to develop early on. More information about Tools of the Mind is available at www.mscd.edu/extendedcampus/toolsofthemind/
Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning