Where is Superman?

• December 7, 2010 by Terri Zezula

Why wait for Superman?  Students across the country are making great academic gains with great teaching, rich content and outstanding educators.

Take a look at Patterson High School in St Mary Parish, Louisiana where Kenny Hilliard could barely read at the level of a second grader when he reached high school. After a few weeks of doing the Fast ForWord program at school, he reads at grade level and he understands what he reads. Once at risk of dropping out of high school, now Kenny is headed for Louisiana State University on a football scholarship. Kenny had great teachers, a rich curriculum and a community that supported his academic and athletic goals. Yet Kenny, like many other students across the country, needed an intervention to help build his cognitive skills of memory, attention, processing and sequencing – the skills necessary for reading and learning.

“What changed is that Kenny did a computer program called Fast ForWord,” said Patterson High School Principal, Rachael Wilson. “He is such a talented football player, and his talents can carry him far, but recruiters are looking for kids who have talent and good grades. The first two questions recruiters ask me are ‘What kind of kid is he?’ and ‘What kind of grades does he make?’ Thanks to the progress Kenny made in Fast ForWord, he does not need to rely on athletic talent alone.”

Kenny says he was a little nervous at first, but he decided to give Fast ForWord a try. It is a program that is proven to accelerate learning and increase reading proficiency in students from kindergarten through high school. The software consists of brain fitness exercises and actually improves how the brain learns.

“It worked,” said Wilson. “Within weeks, Kenny began to see a change in his ability to focus. Over time, his reading comprehension improved dramatically and that’s helped him in all subjects, and he has the GPA and ACT scores required for enrollment into a four-year university.”

Today, Kenny continues to break records playing football for St. Mary Parish School District and is planning for his college courses at LSU. To learn more about Kenny and his amazing story, watch this video.

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

Tags: academic problems, academic success, accelerate learning, ACT, at-risk, attention, below grade level, brain training, cognitive skills, high school learning, improving reading skills, increased test scores, Louisiana, memory, processing, reading intervention, sequencing, struggling readers, struggling students, technology in education, waiting for Superman

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

Creating Reading Intention to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills in Students

• October 26, 2010 by Terri Zezula

Most everyone can stand to improve reading comprehension, from early readers to adult professionals. An internet search for reading comprehension strategies to improve this skill yields a multitude of exercises and recommendations, but overall, they all seem to arrive at a singular idea: to improve reading comprehension skills, we must prime the brain through creating a framework that allows the reader to experience a text with intent.

Teaching our students (or just re-training ourselves) to enter into the reading experience with intent allows the reader to extract and retain the key elements of information. This is quite different from simply picking up a book, flipping to page one and jumping right into “Once upon a time...” A number of things can happen before that moment to frame the reader’s mindset and prime the brain to better comprehend the information it is about to delve into.

So, what are some ways of improving reading comprehension by creating that intent and priming the brain? Here are some examples of pre-reading activities and questions that we can offer students young and old to frame their reading for improved comprehension.

Before reading, take a look around. A book is much more than the words on its pages. What is the title? What do we see on the cover? Who is the author and what kinds of stories and books does this person create? When was the book written? By taking a few minutes to focus on these elements, we can set up expectations in our minds—like a loose outline—that we will later fill in with the details.

Get a 30,000 foot view. Delving in a bit deeper, what can we learn about the story by reading the table of contents and flipping quickly through the pages? Tables of contents offer huge amounts of information to help readers further develop expectations and outlines.

Make it personal. Our brains are more likely to absorb information when it is directly applicable or related to our interests and our lives. Thinking about the information we have just accessed by answering the above questions, what aspects of this book grab our interest on a personal level? What features of the book relate directly to our lives?

Write it down. Now that we have a framework of expectations around what we are about to read, write down questions that have arisen about the story and its characters, and make some predictions about how the story might unfold.

All of these pre-reading activities help the reader to create a mental framework that will later hold the details of the text. Readers can then use these notes during and after reading to see where predictions were on target or where they might have gone off course.

Regardless of their simplicity—or maybe because of it—the reading comprehension strategies above help create the reading intention to improve reading comprehension skills. Your own internet search will yield countless additional helpful hints and resources, but don’t underestimate your own creativity. How many ways can you think of to engage students in thinking about a text prior to turning to page one?

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, child reading development, early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, high school learning, how adults learn, how children learn, improving reading skills, learning to read, reading comprehension, struggling readers

Teaching and Learning with Intent through Guided Reading Activities

• September 7, 2010 by Terri Zezula

While each educator has their own techniques for getting themselves and their students involved in the task at hand, guided reading activities offer wonderful structures for bringing students and their teachers together, and engaging both in the teaching and learning process. At its essence, guided reading is a metacognitive activity; it gets students and their teachers to think together about how they think about reading. By literally guiding students through reading, it instills the habit in students of being fully present in the process. Such habits not only lay the foundation for effective reading skills, but they build successful strategies that will lead to a life-long love of the reading adventure.

What do guided reading activities look like? While these activities can take many forms, they can be as simple as questions designed to create thoughtful, intentional approaches to a text and create connections before, during and after reading.

Before diving into a text, guided reading questions we could pose to young students might be:

• What do you think the artwork on the cover means?
• Based on the title, what do you think the story will be about?
• As you flip through the book and glance at the pictures, what do you think the story will be about?

During reading, we can stop students along the way and re-engage them through asking:

• What does that picture mean to the story? How does it make you feel?
• What do you think will happen next?
• Why did that character do that?
• What would you do if you were that character?

After reading, strategically formulated guided reading questions can help students connect to and appreciate a story:

• Can you summarize the story?
• How does what really happened compare with what you predicted would happen?
• Who was your favorite character and why?
• What was your favorite part of the story?

Additional guided reading activities may include creative exercises such as writing letters to characters, drawing pictures inspired by stories, or writing alternative endings.

These processes and teaching techniques are most effective for small groups or one-on-one instruction, as they depend upon a high level of personal interaction and response with the teacher. (Thereby lies one of the reasons that Scientific Learning’s Reading Assistant is so effective; it employs many activities formulated on the principles behind guided reading.)

On a closing note, these kinds of simple questions are not only great for engaging students in the classroom, but also at home. If we as educators can offer these as examples to parents, imagine how much we can help them make even the simplest bedtime story a more engaging, meaningful experience for a child.

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

Tags: academic success, child reading development, creativity, early learning, guided reading, how children learn, learning to read, reading comprehension

Brain Fitness Is Not A Game

• April 30, 2010 by Terri Zezula

A recent study on brain video games is causing discussions worldwide on the benefits of brain training and programs developed to improve brain functioning. The study, published in Nature and summarized on Nature News, titled “No Gain From Brain Training,” was conducted with adults, average age 39, who practiced a series of online tasks for a minimum of ten minutes a day, three times a week, for six weeks.

These tasks, focused on reasoning, planning and problem-solving abilities, were tests and not exercises intended to improve cognitive skills. While the outcome of the study brings the concept of brain training to the forefront of online discussion sites, it’s important to note that the clarification of brain video games, brain training programs and brain fitness programs and the origins of the research behind the development of these products are critical to the discussions. 

What differentiates the Scientific Learning products from those advertised as “brain video games” or “brain training programs” is the science: decades of research into how students learn preceded the development of our products. For more than 30 years, neuroscientists at Scientific Learning have studied the way the brain learns.

The expertise and collaboration of Drs. Michael Merzenich, William Jenkins, Paula Tallal, and Steven Miller, the founders of Scientific Learning, along with several other cognitive neuroscientists, resulted in the development of a research-based series of products. The Fast ForWord® software is based on the science of how the brain learns and retains information. It utilizes the principles of neuroscience and learning to exercise and develop the brain's processing efficiency, essential for academic learning and reading success.

Brain plasticity research demonstrates that completing learning tasks in a frequent, intense timeframe accelerates learning. Just as exercise promotes physical fitness, exercising our brain improves brain fitness in four critical areas: memory, attention, processing and sequencing.

In addition, the research is recognized and supported by other scientists in peer reviews from Stanford University, Cornell University, UCSF Medical Center & Rutgers University, and many other top Universities, including a recent study by Dr. Nadine Gaab of Children’s Hospital Boston ((Gaab, N., Gabrieli, J.D.E., Deutsch, G.K., Tallal, P., & Temple, E. (2007). Neural correlates of rapid auditory processing are disrupted in children with developmental dyslexia and ameliorated with training: An fMRI study. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 25, 295-310.)).

Finding the right product to improve cognitive skills can be overwhelming for the consumer. Numerous articles and research studies can be found online that address the interest and concern in this popular field of learning and brain development. In fact, a Google search on “brain video games” resulted in more than 32million hits! Members of the education community, parents and teachers alike, who are looking for programs for their students, should be cognizant of the importance of scientific research.

If a product is touted as “research-based,” what are the origins, extent and validity of that research? Are the products intended to test or improve cognitive skills? According to Dr. William Jenkins, Scientific Learning's Chief Scientific Officer, “a program that is designed to improve cognitive, reading or language skills and build brain fitness is adaptive to the student’s abilities; critical tasks are practiced at an appropriate frequency and intensity; multiple skills are cross-trained at the same time for lasting improvement; and rewards are built into the program for maximum motivation as the student progresses.”

In the study referenced above, “No Gain From Brain Training,” researchers believe that none of the groups who participated in the study boosted their performance on tests measuring general cognitive abilities such as memory, reasoning and learning. Participants in the study were volunteers who were viewers of a popular BBC game show, “Bang Goes the Theory.” The study required the participants to complete tasks for only 10 minutes a day, 3 times a week.

While the study concluded that there is no evidence of “any generalized improvements in cognitive function following brain training in a large sample of healthy adults,” it is a study that leads to more questions than answers. Were the tasks measures of current cognitive skills or were they designed to build upon these skills? The study leads the reader to conclude that these were tests of cognitive ability, not exercises to improve skills. So the conclusion that the programs did not improve cognitive function is baffling. Were the tasks adaptive, motivating, and practiced with intensity and frequency? Was there cross-training on multiple tasks to build cognitive skills? How comprehensive is a study conducted on participants who complete tasks for only a few minutes a week?

Based on the intensive studies done on proven brain training or brain fitness products already on the market that follow the basic principles of clinical trial studies (i.e Posit Science, a brain fitness program for adults), this study is not a strong indicator of the results that can be realized with a true research-based program. Whether programs are defined as brain training or brain video games or tasks designed to test cognitive skills, they don’t necessarily have the intensive scientific research that is the foundation of a proven brain fitness program.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Fast ForWord, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, adaptivity, attention, brain plasticity, brain training, cognitive skills, crosstraining, frequency, how adults learn, intensity, learning through play, memory, motivating students, processing, processing rate, sequencing, technology in education