With this post, I’m beginning a series of polls to assess readers’ perspectives on response to intervention or response to instruction (RtI) and Learning Disabilities. As most people concerned with LD know, RtI was expressly permitted in the most recent set of regulations under the US law, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Although most special educators agree at least in part with RtI, one of the most controversial issues is whether implementing RtI will reduce the incidence of LD. That’s the topic of this poll.
Do you expect that providing tier-one and tier-two reading instruction according to an RTI model during primary and elementary grades will reduce the incidence of Learning Disabilities (dyslexia)?
- No (39%, 14 Votes)
- Yes, a little (e.g., from ~5% to ~4%) (33%, 12 Votes)
- Yes, some (e.g., from ~5% to ~2-3%) (22%, 8 Votes)
- Yes, lots (e.g., from ~5% to ~1%) (6%, 2 Votes)
Total Voters: 36
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By the way, the Division for Learning Disabilities published a good booklet providing basic background about RtI. It is written in practitioner-friendly language and can be read in only a few minutes. Visit the products section of TeachingLD.org to learn more about it. (Yes, I contributed to the booklet, but I don’t make any royalties from it.)
By the way (2), over on Teach Effectively there are a set of slides from presentations about RTI. These presentations were delivered by prominent special educators at the 2007 meeting of the Council for Exceptional Children.
Please note that this poll should not be consider scientific evidence. Do not construe the results of any of these polls as representative of systematic polls conducted by reputable polling organizations. These results simply reflect the opinion of the people who responded to the question. The sample of people who respond is selective, not randomly drawn from a defined population.
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Tara Parker-Pope provided a brief overview of alternatives to medication in the treatment of ADHD in a column for the New York Times of 17 Jun 2008. Under the headline, “Weighing Nondrug Options for A.D.H.D.,” Ms. Parker-Pope briefly reviewed concerns about drugs and described several alternatives. In her discussion of St. John’s Wort, echinacea, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, and omega-3 fatty acids, Ms. Parker-Pope noted that alternative medical treatments are rarely used individually.
Link to Ms. Parker-Pope’s article. Thanks to Joel Mittler for alerting me to the article.
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Images from CMU Site
As Liz mentioned in a comment on the post RC > WR, Ann Meyler and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a study documenting changes in children’s brain functioning following remedial reading instruction. In “Modifying the brain activation of poor readers during sentence comprehension with extended remedial instruction: A longitudinal study of neuroplasticity,” Professor Meyler and colleagues reported the results of conducting fMRI examinations of children while they performed sentence comprehension tasks at three different times: (i) prior to remedial reading instruction, (ii) following 100 hours of remedial reading instruction, and (iii) one year after remedial instruction had ended. The team found that the sample of students whom they imaged had clearly different patterns of activity in their brains following remediation and that the differences persisted one year after intervention ended.
Continue reading ‘Remediation affects brain functioning’
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A team of researchers who study reading and neuropsychology has reported results from a study that show what parts of the brain are involved in sentence comprehension other than those used for recognizing the words in the sentences. In a study entitled “Functional MRI of Sentence Comprehension in Children with Dyslexia: Beyond Word Recognition” that will appear soon in Cerebral Cortex, S. L. Rimrodt and colleagues (including Ken Pugh and Laurie Cutting, whom I know) compared the fMRI data from groups of children with and without dyslexia on tasks involving word reading and sentence comprehension. They found that the children with dyslexia had disproportional activation of areas of the brain usually employed in processing linguistic information, attending, and selecting responses.
Continue reading ‘RC > WR’
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Although perceptual explanations for reading problems were common in the early discussions of Learning Disabilities, educators now mostly agree that the language factors have far greater influence on reading problems. A recent study by Nicole Halaar and colleagues underscores this idea and, especially importantly, points to the importance of early childhood language development in later reading competence. In fact, although genetic factors play a role in later reading competence, environmental exert substantial influence.
Of course, given the extensive work on them over the past 20 years, educators understand the importance of phonemic awareness and decoding in reading. But these factors do not completely explain the variation in outcomes for children learning to read. The contributions of semantic and syntactic factors must be included to move closer to explaining why children differ in their reading outcomes, especially when the outcome of concern is facility in comprehending what one has read.
Continue reading ‘Preschool language factors affecting reading achievement’
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Adult consequences of LD
When children and youth with Learning Disabilities grow up, they often report that the difficulties they faced in schools are repeated in the work-a-day world. In “Disabled and Driven: Woman faces challenges of unseen disability and a lack of understanding,” Mary Rae Bragg of the Dubuque (IA, US) Telegraph Herald relates the experience of a person identified only as “Judy” who encountered difficulty securing accommodations in her workplace.
Ms. Bragg’s article tells the full story. Here’s a link to it.
For those interested in learning about the views of adults with Learning Disabilities, there are many excellent sources:
Gerber, P. J. (1991). Speaking for themselves: Ethnographic interviews with adults with learning disabilities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rodis, P., Garrod, A., Boscardin, M. L. (2001). Learning disabilities & life stories. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
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