Monthly Archive for July, 2007

Learning styles yet again

Published on 30 July 2007 in Comments, News, Research and The press. 1 Comment

Sometimes the press gets something right on the $$. Julie Henry of the Great Britian (UK) Sunday Telegraph did in her coverage of efforts to thwart the spread of fertalizer about learning styles. Writing under the headline “Professor pans ‘learning style’ teaching method,” Ms. Henry has this lead:

A leading scientist has dismissed the latest approach to teaching that has been endorsed by the Government and embraced by teachers.

Under the new system children are considered to have different “learning styles” and instead of being taught by the conventional method of listening to a teacher, they should be allowed to wander around, listen to music and even play with balls in the classroom.

But now Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, has dismissed as “nonsense” the view that pupils prefer to receive information either by sight, sound or touch.

She said that the method of classifying pupils on the basis of “learning styles” is a waste of valuable time and resources.

Hear! Hear! See! See! Touch! Touch! Feel! Feel! Smell! Smell! Taste! Taste! Intuit! Intuit!

There are two points in Ms. Henry’s coverage I’d like to correct: First, the learning style movement is not new; Lester Mann covered the history of the idea in his marvelous book, On the Trail of Process (ISBN-10: 0808911376; ISBN-13: 978-0808911371). Second, the story over-emphasizes modality preference; herein is one of the problems with the literature on the topic: Some of the literature examines whether people express preferences (they can and do) but the more important matter, as I see it, is not whether they have preferences but whether adapting instruction to the purported style (whether established by preference assessment or some other means) improves their outcomes.

Despite these minor objections, hooray for Ms. Henry’s coverage. Read her entire story here. Check here for additional entries at LD Blog that refer to the matter of learning styles.

Sphere: Related Content

Reading comprehension instruction

Published on 27 July 2007 in Dyslexia and Research. 0 Comments

My colleague Daniel T. Willingham writes a regular column for the American Educator and I was reminded of one of those columns when someone asked me about teaching reading comprehension to students with Learning Disabilities. The article is entitled, “The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies” and it appeared in the winter 2006-2007) issue of . Here’s the beginning of that column.

Question: In a recent column you said that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension. What about reading comprehension strategies? Isn’t it important to teach children comprehension strategies to help them get everything out of what they read?

The effectiveness of teaching reading comprehension strategies has been the subject of over 500 studies in the last 25 years. The simple conclusion from this workis that strategy instruction improves comprehension. Much more difficult to answer are the interesting questions that follow: How much do strategies help? How do they work? Do all students benefit? How much time should be spent on them? The answers are not yet clear, but combining what cognitive scientists know about reading with patterns of data from experiments conducted in classrooms allows us to draw some tentative conclusions. It appears that reading strategies do not build reading skill, but rather are a bag of tricks that can indirectly improve comprehension. These tricks are easy to learn and require little practice, but students must be able to decode fluently before these strategies can be effective.

Beyond making the critical point that comprehending what one reads depends on being able to read it, Professor Willingham goes on to explain that there is considerable overlap with comprehending spoken language. However, the overlap is not perfect. Speakers adjust their content according to the listener, but print doesn’t adjust depending on the reader; and listeners can ask speakers to say something again in a different way, but readers only have what the author wrote.

But, back to the strategies. Professor Willingham shows how comprehension strategies produce benefits (albeit relatively small ones when one takes into account how researchers examine the benefits) and which general types of strategies have been consistently found to produce those benefits. However, these outcomes must be taken in the context of larger effects on comprehension: Students’ vocabulary and general background knowledge are major players in their understanding of what they read. To be sure, we need to teach students—especially those who have Learning Disabilities—comprehension strategies that help them make connections among sentences and remember what they have read, but we also have to help them develop stronger vocabularies and acquire a rich corpus of background knowledge.

This resolves to another argument for complete teaching. We simply can’t expect to find the proverbial magic bullet, the key skill, the one critical component that, when applied (however carefully) will turn a student with Learning Disabilities into one who’s routinely successful.

Link to a PDF of Professor Willingham’s column.

Sphere: Related Content

Mississippi legislator

Published on 18 July 2007 in Assessment, Dyslexia, News and Policy. 0 Comments

Brian Aldridge, who is a Republican member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, continues to seek ways to fund a initiative that will screen young children for reading problems, according to Ginny Miller of the Northeast Mississippi (MS, US) Daily Journal from June of 2007. As noted earlier, the problem is not getting the legislation, but getting the funding.

Aldridge drafted legislation modeled after a program in the Lee County Schools that screens children in grades K-2. With statewide screening of K-3 students, he said, “you’re able to identify a wide range of learning disabilities.”

Although the legislation was approved, Aldridge declared the results of his efforts to be “a half step in the Legislature” because lawmakers were unable to agree on funding.

Link to Ms. Miller’s article. Links here and here to earlier coverage of this story on LD Blog.

Sphere: Related Content

Pre-school ADHD

Published on 18 July 2007 in ADHD. 0 Comments

Over on EBD Blog I posted an entry about research on young children with ADHD. Some folks might find it interesting.

Self-concept and inclusion

Published on 17 July 2007 in Administration, Comments, Policy and Research. 0 Comments

One might hypothesize that inclusion promotes better social outcomes for students with Learning Disabilities, especially in the area of self-concept. One might reasons that, if they are not segregated from their non-disabled peers, students with Learning Disabilities will not feel that they are different and inferior.

Or one might theorize that inclusion has negative effects on the self-concept of students with Learning Disabilities. One might think that living in the same classrooms as their non-disabled peers might make the problems they experience all the more salient—and painful—to students with Learning Disabilities.
Continue reading ‘Self-concept and inclusion’

Sphere: Related Content

Testing-teaching relationships

Published on 9 July 2007 in Assessment and Policy. 4 Comments

Over on Pomoyemu, Silvia ran this quotation by Carl Rogers:

I believe that the testing of the student’s achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning. –Carl Rogers

Of course, I couldn’t hold still for it, so I posted a reply there. I’m reproducing that reply here.

I gotta disagree with the sentiment of the venerable Mr. (teehee) Rogers, Silvia.

If educators (including parents) consider something important enough that we plan to teach it, then we ought to want to know whether we have been successful and our students have learned that something. About the only way to ascertain whether something has been learned is to test it. A test does not have to be a pencil-and-paper assessment, of course; the test can be a demonstration of competence.

Consider crossing the street. I see crossing the street as a pretty important competency for young children. I’d even contend that it should be actively and explicitly taught. And, I’d want to know if my students faithfully executed the steps in street-crossing, so I’d test their competence. Obviously, the most appropriate tests would be administered in real-world environments, not by paper quiz, with careful oversight and under various conditions (quiet country roads; city streets; high-speed highways; etc.).

The same thinking applies to decoding in reading, solving for missing multiplicands, reporting the argument of an author, proving a geometrical relationship, and so on.

Essentially, if something’s is worth teaching, it’s worth testing.

By the way, I think the reverse is true, too. If something is important enough to test, then we ought to teach it.

Sphere: Related Content

Mississippi screening unfunded

Published on 9 July 2007 in Administration, Assessment, Comments, Dyslexia, News and Policy. 0 Comments

In “Screening may become norm: Funding still needed to detect Mississippi students with learning disabilities,” Rebecca Helmes of the Jackson (MS, US) Clarion Ledger provides the latest on efforts to screen systematically for dyslexia among school children in Mississippi. The state department of education plans to develop screening tools despite the fact that the legislature has not appropriated funds to support the effort.
Continue reading ‘Mississippi screening unfunded’

Sphere: Related Content

Return

Published on 9 July 2007 in Comments. 0 Comments

Yep. I was away for a while. No one magically filled these spaces with posts. Here we go again!