Dyslexia, Auditory Processing Disorder, and the Road to College: Maria’s Story

• April 9, 2013 by Cory Armes

I remember the early years with my children and the dreams I had for their success. Of course, my dreams and theirs didn’t exactly end up being the same. But what happens when a mother realizes that her dreams for her child may be shattered because that child struggles with auditory processing issues, dyslexia, or other challenges never imagined? That’s exactly what Irene experienced with her daughter, Maria.

Attending school proved difficult for Maria. As she advanced from grade to grade and the work became progressively more difficult, anything presented in auditory form was especially challenging. By sixth grade, Maria had been diagnosed with dyslexia and Auditory Processing Disorder and was labeled with a language impairment. 

For obvious reasons, Maria struggled in school. Because of this, she was shy around other students, avoided reading, and required extensive help at home. Her family considered sending her to a private school, but Maria was unable to pass the entrance exams. 

By the middle of sixth grade, Maria had attended several different schools and the last was a disaster. It was then that one of her mother’s friends suggested Bridges Academy, a private school that specializes in serving students with learning challenges. Upon enrollment, Maria’s life began to turn in a new direction. When she got into her mother’s car after school she often said, “Mom, they understand me here!”

At Bridges Academy, Maria’s dyslexia and auditory processing issues were analyzed further and the Fast ForWord program was recommended in addition to Maria’s coursework and intervention regimen. Jacky Egli, the Director at Bridges Academy, explained to Maria’s mother that she personally researched every program thoroughly and only used programs that were scientifically based. Irene trusted Jacky and felt it was important to follow her recommendation, so Maria gave Fast ForWord a try.

Maria’s reading level was at least three to four years below grade level when she entered Bridges.  She also had struggled in other subjects, because every subject—even math—requires reading. But that soon began to change and, in time, Maria made significant improvements. Maria’s comprehension level increased more than two full grade levels last year. This improvement aligned with her participation in the Fast ForWord Reading and Reading Assistant programs.  Over the last 6 years, despite the odds, Maria improved on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test 7.3 grade levels.   Because of this significant improvement, she no longer receives remedial instruction.  

Irene sought the best for her daughter and found it in the caring attitude of the staff at Bridges Academy and the innovative programs they use to make a difference for struggling students. “Jacky walks the walk and talks the talk of the school’s mission,” says Irene.

Maria has transformed from a shy, struggling child to a vibrant, engaged student who participates in class, reads aloud to her peers and conducts presentations for content area classes in front of her classmates. She is an ambassador for the school who greets and escorts new students and parents through the campus as she participates in open house and school events.

And, most exciting of all, Maria has been accepted into a local college and is thrilled about rising to meet a challenge and a future that once seemed entirely out of reach.

Related reading:

What Makes a Good Reader? The Foundations of Reading Proficiency

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Trends, Family Focus, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant

Tags: academic problems, academic success, accelerate learning, at-risk, auditory processing, child reading development, Florida, improving reading skills, intervention, language learning, learning disabilities, school leader effectiveness, self-esteem, struggling readers, struggling students, success stories

Preventing Summer Brain Drain with Dr. Martha S. Burns

• May 29, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

One of my favorite webinar presenters here at Scientific Learning, Dr. Martha Burns, recently gave a webinar called “BrainPro:  Preventing Summer Brain Drain.”

Dr. Burns covered a number of points related to learning and retaining information

• How learners can benefit from current research in 3 areas: 
  • Psychology – the benefits of teaching to a child’s style of learning
  • Neuroscience and Technology – using neuroscience-based technology to individualize instruction to meet the needs of each individual student
  • Education – providing standardized content to learners across the US
• The science of how the brain learns.  The human brain has thousands of networks that work together and help us to do a lot of different things. Pathways in the brain get stronger and stronger with use.   The more we do something, the better we get at that activity.  The stronger the pathways in the brain, the easier it becomes for the child to learn and retain information. 
• Early difficulties in reading. If a child is struggling with phonological awareness, memory, vocabulary or comprehension, it may indicate a learning difficulty. The cognitive abilities of memory, attention, processing, and sequencing that are foundational to language can be exercised with the BrainPro program.

Following Dr. Burns, we heard from Jenny, a parent from Florida who had her teenage daughter use the BrainPro program to help her pass the FCAT (the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test).   Her daughter has a very high GPA and takes AP and Honors classes, but had difficulty in passing the FCAT reading test two years in a row. After she went through the BrainPro program, she took the FCAT for the 3^rd time and passed with a near perfect score on the test.  

View the webinar to for more detail and visuals about how the brain learns, and find out how the BrainPro program can help learners stay sharp over the summer break.

Related Reading:

Antidotes to Summer Brain Drain (Part 2): 5 Ways to Pull the Plug on Learning Loss

Leigh Ann’s Story: Making a Difference in Children’s Lives

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, brain plasticity, brain training, child reading development, cognitive skills, early learning, Florida, high school learning, how children learn, increased test scores, memory, processing, sequencing, student growth, success stories, webinar

How Can You Predict Student Reading Growth?

• October 15, 2010 by Andrew Ostarello

In 2007, Scientific Learning introduced Reading Progress Indicator, or RPI for short.  RPI is an individually administered, computer-based assessment for reading and language skills.  We will review the key features of RPI, demonstrate its close relationship to a wide array of high-stakes reading tests, and show how it can be used to forecast future district reading success.

When we were building RPI, we wanted an assessment that would achieve the following four goals:

1. Be an individually-administered computerized assessment.
2. Be short and easy to administer.  We wanted a test that took between 30 and 40 minutes to complete.
3. Cover key reading and language skills: phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension.
4. Quickly and reliably detect improvements after using Fast ForWord products.

RPI achieves all four of these goals.

If we look at the academic calendar year, we can see that most state reading assessments happen once a year, in the spring.  Though they are important for measuring student reading growth, they are infrequent.

RPI is a good supplement to the picture of student reading growth.  With a pre-test in the fall, and subsequent tests after completing each product, teachers can get more information to answer critical instruction questions:

Who’s currently succeeding? Who’s on track with their reading growth? And finally, who’s likely to do well on the state reading assessment? Now, that third question can only be answered if RPI measures reading ability in a similar way to those state reading assessments.  Does it?

It turns out it does align well with state reading assessments.  Here’s an example from Florida.  The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT, has a developmental scale score which spans all grade levels.  RPI correlates positively with this FCAT score.  The data shows the correlation is 0.51.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but 0.51 is a pretty strong correlation, and it suggests that RPI measures the same kinds of reading skills that the FCAT measures.

These results are not limited to Florida.  Here are four more tests that have a strong positive correlation to RPI.  The ITBS/ITED tests from Iowa and the ISTEP from Indiana – two more state reading assessments. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading test and the Woodcock-Johnson – both widely used supplemental reading assessments. All of these correlations are well over .5, and all are statistically significant.

So what can be done with these kinds of correlation data? Well, it’s important to realize just how rich this dataset is. We have matched data from over 25,000 RPI Users and data from over 12,000 students who took state assessments and used Fast ForWord products. 

With strong correlations between the two, we can begin to predict student performance on state assessments by looking at the trends in a student’s RPI scores.  Not perfect predictions, of course, but we can build reasonably accurate mathematical models of student growth for a variety of states. 

One application of these models is the Reading Proficiency Growth Calculator.

This tool allows districts to input simple summary numbers, such as the number of students in the district and the percentage of those students reading proficiently at grade level and see what kinds of reading gains are possible for their students under a district-wide implementation of Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ products. 

All of this is possible because of the mathematical models that carefully align RPI to state reading tests.

If you’re interested in exploring what these models forecast for your district, the Reading Proficiency Growth Calculator is available online at www.scilearn.com/RPGC.

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Categories: Fast ForWord, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, assessments, child reading development, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Reading Progress Indicator, student reading growth, technology in education

Broward County, FL: “Fast ForWord has made me a more confident learner.”

• August 10, 2010 by Carrie Gajowski

In 2010, Scientific Learning partnered with Broward County School District in Florida to implement Fast ForWord products in five schools.  Over 1,200 students worked with the products, and participant grade levels ranged from elementary to high school.  The average gain for participating students was 1 year and 1 month after only 32 days of product usage.

Principals, teachers, and students at the Broward County schools reported improved reading, improved self-esteem, and engaged learning.  In this video created by the district, staff and students share their thoughts about working with Fast ForWord software to build confidence and raise test scores.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: accelerate learning, brain training, child reading development, elementary learning, elementary school learning, Florida, high school learning, improving reading skills, increased test scores, literacy, middle school learning, motivating students, self-esteem, student reading growth, technology in education, video

Can Scientific Learning Products Improve School Test Scores?

• June 2, 2010 by Norene Wiesen

When making a buying decision about educational software for a school or district, one of the most important questions to ask is whether the product is effective.  Administrators considering the Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ products want to know: Do they help students learn and succeed?  Do they improve school test scores?  Are they evidence-based?

The answer to all of these questions is yes.  Scientific Learning products have been proven to improve language, reading, and cognitive skills as well as to improve school test scores on state assessments and other standardized tests for schools that follow the prescribed protocols.  Our Scientifically Based Research page is your starting point for exploring the 200+ studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of the programs and that serve as evidence of improved learning outcomes.

On average, students can see a 1-2 year improvement in reading level on school test scores in as little as 8-12 weeks.  English language learners, struggling readers, and special education students have all been positively impacted.  So have students performing at grade level and above.

Here are just a few examples:

Dallas Independent School District, TX (View PDF)

• Four year longitudinal study
• Fast ForWord participants significantly improved their reading achievement scores on the TAKS state assessment and maintained their improved reading skills
• Average decrease in the achievement gap for the 544 Fast ForWord participants was 25%

St. Mary Parish Public School System, LA (View PDF)

• After using Fast ForWord products, percent of Centerville, LA, 4th graders scoring proficient on state assessments exceeds state average
• Marked improvement in 4th grade Math, Science, and Social Studies test scores, highlights the impact of Fast Forword products on improving cognitive and foundational skills

Bridges Academy, Winter Springs, FL (View PDF)

• A private school serving students with learning disabilities with a goal of improving reading skills
• Case study on 2nd through 10th graders to evaluate the effects of adding Reading Assistant software to their existing Fast ForWord implementation
• Reading Assistant and Fast ForWord products are used concurrently and students are assessed before and after use
• In an average of three months, the students at the school improve their grade equivalent test scores by an average of one year and three months on the Basic Skills Composite, which combines the Word Identification and Word Attack subtests

The benefits of Scientific Learning products go beyond improving state assessment scores.  Researchers have measured improvements in self-esteem, communication skills such as vocabulary and pronunciation, improvements in listening and understanding, and stronger memory for things like phone numbers and event sequences.  Review our scientifically based research for detailed information.

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Categories: English Language Learners, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research, Special Education

Tags: academic problems, academic success, achievement gap, brain training, child reading development, cognitive skills, elementary learning, elementary school learning, Florida, high school learning, improve test scores, improving reading skills, increased test scores, intervention, language learning, learning disabilities, literacy, Louisiana, math, memory, reading intervention, science, self-esteem, social studies, struggling readers, TAKS, Texas, vocabulary