Student Reading Improvement Nearly Doubles In Just 24 Days

• June 28, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

This video summarizes a study of Fast ForWord Reading 1—the first product in Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord Reading Series.

The study is a randomized controlled trial that investigated the impact of Fast ForWord Reading 1 in three elementary schools.  The analyses that follow include data from 208 students in 1^st and 2^nd grade.

Students were randomly assigned to be in either the Fast ForWord group or the control group.  The randomization was stratified within grade.

Students using Fast ForWord trained for 48 minutes per day for an average of 24 school days.  Both groups were evaluated using the Test of Phonological Awareness, or the “TOPA” for short. 

There were two subtests: one for Phonological Awareness, and one for Letter-Sounds.

For each subtest, the Fast ForWord participants showed greater gains between pre-test and post-test than the control group.  These differences were both statistically significant.

In conclusion, Fast ForWord participation led to significantly larger improvements than the control group in both the Phonological Awareness and Letter Sounds subtests.

In both cases, the magnitude of the gains was about double for Fast ForWord participants: 12.8 points versus 6.9 for Phonological Awareness, and 5.5 versus 1.9 points for Letter Sounds.

Related Reading:

Fast ForWord Featured on ABC 7 News

After Just 24 Days, Summer School Students Significantly Improve Reading Scores

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Categories: Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, elementary school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, increased test scores, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics, phonological awareness, student growth, student reading improvement, technology in education, TOPA, video

Improving Reading Comprehension in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

• February 17, 2011 by Ann Osterling

Finally! I am pleased that Emily Iland, the author of the recently released book, Drawing a Blank: Improving Reading Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum, has addressed the issue of hidden reading comprehension problems in some children on the autism spectrum. For more than 30 years I have been working with children with a diagnosis of hyperlexia. Occasionally also diagnosed with High Functioning Autism or Asperger's Syndrome, these are children who can read words-with ease- often without any reading instruction,  and sometimes at a very early age. These children, who invariably show problems in socialization skills, also may exhibit significant impairments in language and auditory processing, yet they have been able to miraculously “break the code.”

These children may perform well on early tests of reading readiness and decoding. The term Hyperlexia is applied because they are often sounding out words (decoding) better than their peers who have no developmental issues. Because of their decoding skills, these children may not be identified as needing any special support in reading through the IEP process. In reality, they need help with comprehension and vocabulary of the sentences they can read aloud so easily.  Like Emily IIand, I have delighted in seeing this incredible ability to decode words develop and have recognized the issue of the comprehension problems that are often hidden in these children on the Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Iland writes from the perspective of a mother turned researcher and educational therapist. Her son’s spontaneous abilities to read and spell as a toddler were regarded as an exceptional talent (later diagnosed as hyperlexia). Although his ability to decode words continued, by fourth grade he began to struggle academically due to undetected comprehension problems. At age 13, he was tested and found to have a 12-year gap between his reading comprehension skills (4^th grade level) and mathematic skills (16^th grade level). Eventually he was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.  But after intensive intervention, he was able to earn his bachelor’s degree in accounting, pass the CPA exam, and obtain employment as an accountant. However, many students like her son do not have this happy outcome because reading comprehension issues are not identified or properly remediated.

In her review of typical reading skill development, Iland points out where the breakdowns in comprehension begin for children with autism. She discusses the impact of the social deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders on comprehension of language and reading. The child’s narrow range of interests can lead to limited exposure to the world and restricted vocabulary. Difficulties with interpersonal relationships can interfere with the ability to learn that other people may have different perspectives, motivations and beliefs. Rigid thinking can restrict the children from understanding that words can have multiple meanings and that different words can be used to mean the same thing.

The reading comprehension problems of individuals with autism are often “masked,” or hidden, by their strengths in decoding, fluency, rote memory, and understanding of concrete information. This is especially true during the early school years when there is a focus on teaching children HOW to read. There are specific difficulties in young children that correlate with later difficulties in reading comprehension that should be closely examined in children with autism. For example, a child who is reading fluently may not have good phonemic awareness abilities due to  the auditory processing problems, which are common in children with ASD.  Receptive language problems may also be present in these children. Iland discusses appropriate assessment tools for different ages, as well as the importance of identifying the underlying comprehension difficulties of these children.

A significant part of the book focuses on reading comprehension strategies to improve skills for these children. Iland shares the implications of the limited research on effective remediation of reading comprehension for learners with ASD. She addresses the recommendations of the National Reading Panel, pointing out the best strategies for students with ASD and helping the reader recognize strategies that would likely be a mismatch. While Iland selects strategies because of their value for children with ASD, many of them are useful for other children as well. Drawing a Blank: Improving Reading Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum is a welcome and needed resource. Emily Iland’s multiple perspectives and clear writing style make this book user-friendly for parents, educators, speech-language pathologists, students and others interested in helping individuals who are on the autism spectrum become more successful readers.

Related Reading:

Creating Reading Intention: Strategies to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills in Students

Teaching and Learning with Intent through Guided Reading Activities

Related Webinars:

Autism: What is the Latest Research?

Autism: Support and Interventions

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Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Special Education

Tags: auditory processing, autism, child reading development, improving reading skills, learning disabilities, literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension

Sing the Alphabet Backwards Sometimes: Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities

• November 30, 2010 by Norene Wiesen

In Kindergarten, phonemic awareness skills acquisition is a focal point in language and reading development.  Kindergarten phonemic awareness challenges  include memorizing the consonant sounds that are associated with each letter of the alphabet and learning to detect the part of a word where a specific consonant sound is heard.

Your Kindergarteners can practice honing their phonemic awareness skills with some of these activities available via the Web:

Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities from PBS Kids

PBS Kids offers several fun online games that even young children can play to develop phonemic awareness skills:

Elmo Rhymes

Elmo shows the child a selection of objects on the shelves of a closet.  He names one of the objects and asks the child to select all of the items in the closet that rhyme with the named object.  As the child mouses over an object, Elmo says the name of the object.

Pounce

The child hears a short word spoken and is asked to look at three written words and click on the word that he heard.  The child gets multiple chances to get it right, and after making a correct match, sees the written word next to a picture of the named object.

Fuzzy Lion Ears

The child sees a picture and a word label for the picture.  A letter is missing from the word.  It is the child’s task to select the missing letter from three letters provided.  The game also provides a little help: the child can mouse over several letters to hear the sound each one makes before selecting an answer.  

Alphabet Chant from EFL Playhouse

While the website is geared toward teachers of English Language Learners, the Alphabet Chant is appropriate as a general classroom Kindergarten phonemic awareness activity. The chant is designed to be fun, can be incorporated into the classroom in just 5-10 minutes, and over time helps young learners associate letters with sounds.

Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities from “Patti’s Classroom”

From Los Angeles County Office of Education, “Patti’s Electronic Classroom” (http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/classrooms/patti/k-1/activities/phonemic.html)  provides many resources for teachers of students in grades K-3—including a selection of kindergarten phonemic awareness activities:

• Word rhyming
• Syllable segmentation
• Beginning sound substitution
• Sound isolation
• Phonemic segmentation

Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities from SaskEd

Books and Language Play

These phonemic awareness activities from SaskEd encourage the use of books and songs that rhyme as well as tongue twisters, alliteration, and other types of language play.  The end of the article features a list of books for young children that highlight language play.

Graphophonic Strategies and Activities

In addition to the book list and language play suggestions, SaskEd’s graphophonic strategies and activities are perfect for helping kindergarteners discover the alphabetic principle, the idea that each letter of the alphabet is associated with one or two sounds.  Activities include making and reading one-letter books and a fun challenge to sing the alphabet backwards sometimes.

Have fun with these phonemic awareness activities and help your Kindergarteners begin to develop a lifelong enjoyment of language and reading and become a successful reader.

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, cognitive skills, early learning, elementary school learning, how children learn, learning through play, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics

Sharing the Practices of Phonics Practice: 5 Instructional Approaches

• November 23, 2010 by Terri Zezula

Let’s talk about phonics teaching. Actually, let’s talk about phonics practice. Together, let’s figure out and share what works. But before we start our quest forward, let’s take a quick look back.

The “Great Debate” between proponents of the whole language and phonics approaches to reading instruction and practice has gone on for decades. Essentially, the discussion comes down to the question of whether early readers should focus on developing an understanding of written language at the letter/sound level (a phonics approach) or at the word level (a whole language approach). Today, the most widely accepted strategy indicates that phonics instruction and practice represent the most effective methods of reading instruction for K-6 learners; phonics also has proven very effective in helping struggling students with learning to read and spell. (Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read, 2006)

So, what opportunities—systematically speaking—are open to educators to offer phonics practice and instruction to students? The National Reading Panel outlines five different instructional approaches that we can draw upon. Specifically, the report lists them as follows:

1. Analogy Phonics—teaching students unfamiliar words by analogy to known words (e.g., recognizing that the rime segment of an unfamiliar word—the part of a syllable used in poetic rhyme—is identical to that of a familiar word, and then blending the known rime with the new word onset, such as reading brick by recognizing that -ick is contained in the known word kick, or reading stump by analogy to jump).
2. Analytic Phonics—teaching students to analyze letter-sound relations in previously learned words to avoid pronouncing sounds in isolation.
3. Embedded Phonics—teaching students phonics skills by embedding phonics instruction in text reading, a more implicit approach that relies to some extent on incidental learning.
4. Phonics through Spelling—teaching students to segment words into phonemes and to select letters for those phonemes (i.e., teaching students to spell words phonemically).
5. Synthetic Phonics—teaching students explicitly to convert letters into sounds (phonemes) and then blend the sounds to form recognizable words. (Ibid.)

Print publishers as well as online curriculum providers have created countless tools to help educators teach phonics as well as offer practice to solidify these lessons. But any practice of these lessons that reinforces and offers further exercise in these five understandings--inside or outside the classroom--has the potential to help students solidify and improve reading skills. Guidelines for teaching phonics systematically can be found on many blogs and websites, including www.TeachingLD.org, where you can find their Current Practice Alerts publication on Phonics Instruction: Go For It! (http://www.teachingld.org/pdf/alert14.pdf)

In such a discussion of phonics practice, we must make the point that any selection of technology to assist in the process should be thoroughly researched and proven in tests as well as in the field. Speaking specifically about the Fast ForWord® products, multiple studies have shown their effectiveness in building the cognitive skills necessary for reading and writing. They do this through development of memory, attention, processing and sequencing abilities, and by exercising early reading skills including phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

That said, finding what works isn’t easy; it takes practice, but it also takes research, adaptation, experimentation and creativity. According to columnist Ruth Bettelheim as quoted recently in USA Today, one of the key elements for effective learning is giving students what she calls “the pleasure of mastery.” Phonics is one of those areas where we can—with the right instructional tools—give students the practice they need to not only achieve success, but deliver that pleasure of mastery to help stoke each student’s fire for learning.

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Categories: Family Focus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, child reading development, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics, struggling readers, technology in education

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 strategies, 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.

 

Related reading:

Sing the Alphabet Backwards Sometimes: Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities

Sharing the Practices of Phonics Practice: 5 Instructional Approaches

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, fluency, high school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, intervention, learning through play, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension, reading intervention, struggling readers, struggling students, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact, vocabulary

Phonemic Awareness as a Foundational Reading Skill

• May 18, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

Phonemic awareness is 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 the alphabet.

Phonemic decoding is 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.

Together, phonemic awareness and phonemic decoding are key foundational skills for beginning readers.

Learn more about teaching children to read from the National Reading Panel at www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/report.cfm.

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: learning to read, literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics

Announcing Our Spring Webinar Series--Register today!

• April 27, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

It’s almost here!  I’m happy to announce Scientific Learning’s Spring Webinar Series 2010 featuring five must-hear presentations by experienced, committed educators. 

Register for one or all five of the webinars and stimulate your own brain while you absorb ideas and techniques that you can use with your own students.

1) Building Brain Fitness for Struggling Students to Succeed

Presenter: Dr. Deborah Kolonay, Superintendent at Penn Trafford SD
Date & Time: Wednesday, May 12 at 10:00am Pacific

2) Teaching Fluency:  The Neglected Goal of the Reading Program

Presenter: Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.
Date & Time: Wednesday, May 19 at 11:00am Pacific

3) Moving Students to Proficiency

Presenters: Dr. Mark Keen & Cindy Keever at Westfield Washington SD
Date & Time: Wednesday, May, 25 at 10:30am Pacific

4) Autism:  Support and Interventions

Presenter: Ann Osterling
Date & Time: Thursday, May 27 at 10:00am Pacific

5) Autism:  What is the Latest Research?

Presenter: Ann Osterling
Date & Time: Tuesday, June 15 at 10:00am Pacific

For a fuller description of each session, please visit our webinars page.  And be sure to follow @scilearn on Twitter for updates as the webinar dates approach!

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Special Education

Tags: academic problems, academic success, autism, behavior, below grade level, child reading development, cognitive skills, fluency, high school learning, how children learn, increased test scores, Indiana, intervention, learning to read, literacy, Pennsylvania, phonics, reading intervention, struggling readers, technology in education, webinar

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.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, learning to read, literacy, memory, phonics, teacher impact