Archive for January, 2006

License plate

Published by JohnL on 31 January 2006 in Comments. 4 Comments

I shot this photo through my windshield, so it’s a bit obscured, but it’s still readable. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the owner’s message, but it seems to me that the owner is probably proclaiming her or his professional role. If my interpretation is accurate, I’m really glad that this person is proud enough of teaching individuals with Learning Disabilities to proclaim it so publicly. I wonder if I could find the person and invite him or her to talk about teaching students with Learning Disabilities here on LD Blog. I regret not having slipped an invitation under the window wiper…but the ink probably would’ve run and the paper might have obscured the driver’s view.

By the way, I’ve routinely thought that one of the greatest advantages of invented spelling is in aiding one’s ability to read vanity license plates. Otherwise, it’s only good for assessing phonological awareness and first drafts.

Golf celebrity dyslexia

Published by JohnL on 29 January 2006 in Dyslexia and The Press. 4 Comments

J. B. Holmes overcame dyslexia to advance through college before quitting school to begin pursuing a career as a golfer, according to Damon Hack writing in the New York (NY, US) Times. Mr. Hack leads with an illustration of a bad shot Mr. Holmes made when practicing as a youth and connects this to his difficulty with completing school work.

Holmes’s [golf practice] sessions were born of a love of golf, but also a dread of going inside to do homework — the letters of some words would flutter around the page.

Holmes, a rookie on the PGA Tour, said he thought he was dumb. His parents went on the premise that he simply was not concentrating.

The extract I’ve included here illustrates both the good and the not-so-good in Mr. Hack’s story. The good? That’s the latter part that sets up this important point: Mr. Holmes’ problems were not because he was dumb or didn’t pay attention.

The bad? The implication that reading problems cause or are caused by perceptual problems, by distortion of letters and words. Later in the article this notion is furthered by quotations attributed to Amy Craiglow, Mr. Holmes’ academic counselor at the University of Kentucky. Ms. Craiglow said that Mr. Holmes was helped by exercises that encouraged him to visualize meanings for words and by placing “diagrams, stickers or note cards around a room and picturing the words in space.”

As well-intentioned and heart-warming as stories such as this one may be, they set us back in our efforts to provide a clear, accurate picture of Learning Disabilities. There may be cases in which visualizing images associated with printed words may actually help people with reading problems, but I suspect that they are few—probably fewer than 1 in a 100,000 dyslexics, I’d guess. Help is more likely to come from systematic, explicit instruction in learning the mapping between print and spoken language. Each report of a mysterious, magic-key solution to dyslexia dilutes the potency of what we know provides the best hope for treatment.

Link to Mr. Hack’s story (free registration required). Meanwhile, congratulations to Mr. Holmes for overcoming his problems and succeeding.

ADHD on EBD Blog

Published by JohnL on 25 January 2006 in ADHD. 0 Comments

Over on EBD Blog there are several entries that might have shown up here. This is a list of five posts that have, at the least, some reference to Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder. If either of its two readers came to LD Blog looking for discussion of ADHD, I hope these cross-references (in chronological order) help her or him.

Liz on more weak writing

Published by JohnL on 24 January 2006 in Dyslexia and The Press. 0 Comments

Over on I Speak of Dreams, Liz Ditz has another entry on how writers too often make a hash when writing about disabilities. Read it here.

Spelling instruction

Published by JohnL on 17 January 2006 in Comments. 2 Comments

I have robots that search the Web for items about Learning Disabilities. One of them returned a reference to a study published in 2000 that examined the effects of explicit, systematic instruction on spelling performance by students with Learning Disabilities. The study by Craig Darch and colleagues, which appeared in the Journal of Instructional Psychology, provides a good example of how scientifically sound research provides an empirical basis for instruction. Professor Darch and colleagues initially interviewed a small number of students about the ways they approached spelling of words; such small, qualitative studies are informative, but they do not yield results that one can use to guide instruction. However, the reseach team followed that study with a larger-scale study using random assignment of 30 students to groups, repeated trustworthy measurement of spelling performance, and careful control of the instructional conditions. The results of this second study inform practice.

This study reports the results of two experiments which focused on the use of spelling strategies by students with learning disabilities and the relative effectiveness of two different approaches for teaching spelling. In experiment 1, qualitative research method was employed with four elementary students with learning disabilities to document the spelling strategies used during an structured interview, a formal spelling test and an informal writing activity. The data revealed 4 categories of spelling strategies: (1) rule-based, (2) multiple, (3) resource-based, and (4) brute force. Patterns that emerged from the data suggested that students with learning disabilities mostly used inappropriate spelling strategies (e.g., brute force, multiple, resource-based). Based on the results of experiment 1, experiment 2 compared the effectiveness of two highly dissimilar spelling instructional approaches (i.e., rule-based strategy and traditional method) to 30 elementary students with learning disabilities. The results of the experiment 2 showed that students with learning disabilities learned spelling words more effectively when the rule-based teaching and correction procedures were employed in three different probes and one post-test. This study concludes with a discussion of the instructional implications for students with learning disabilities in spelling.

After only 12 lessons, each of which lasted about 20 minutes, the students who received the rule-based teaching spelled significantly more words correctly than the students who received the activity-based teaching. For the technically inclined: Mean number of words spelled correctly was 22 (standard deviation of 2.2) and 16 (standard deviation of 4.3) for rule-based and for activity-based groups, respectively; the difference between the two groups reflects an effect size of ≈ 1.4 (using control s.d.) or ≈ 1.77 (using pooled s.d.), which is a big difference.

The rule-based approach was a commercially available program called Spelling Mastery, an example of a Direct Instruction approach to teaching. It is this sort of powerful instruction that is needed to provide students—whether they have Learning Disabilities or not—with a secure chance to succeed. Faced with evidence such as Professor Darch and colleagues provide (and there’s lots more evidence of this sort), it makes little sense to me for educators to espouse ineffective methods of teaching.

Citation: Darch, C., Kim, S., Johnson, S., & James, H. (2000) The strategic spelling skills of children with learning disabilities: The results of two studies. Journal of Instructional Psychology. 27, 15-27.

Link to the Findarticles archive of the study and a link to Professor Darch’s curriculum vita where one can find references to many other valuable articles, chapters, and books.

Accurate reporting

Published by JohnL on 14 January 2006 in The Press. 0 Comments

Liz Ditz found an article by Doug Worgul, a journalist for the Knight-Ridder syndicate, that is unusual because it portrays dyslexia accurately. The article is brief and, thus, neither breaks news nor has a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, but it is nice to read something that doesn’t make me grimace. Unlike so many articles in the popular press, Mr. Worgul doesn’t perpetuate myths (e.g., people with Learning Disabilities have counter-balancing gifts), report misinformation (e.g., reversals are a characteristic of dyslexia), or tout sham remedial methods (e.g., Irlen lenses).

Link to the post in I Speak of Dreams and a link to Mr. Worgul’s article.