index by author
index by subject
| |
home index by author index by subject |
Wednesday stream 5 Session 16.10 - 17.25 Length 25 minutes
Lisa Lynch, Angela Fawcett and Rod Nicolson
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, England. L.Lynch@surrey.ac.uk
Abstract
Intervention studies illustrate the advantages of analysing poor readers' difficulties in terms of a cognitive profile which can then be used to guide subsequent intervention. Flexible computer based learning (RITA) was used to deliver target-guided reading support. Study 1 found dramatic improvements in decoding and comprehension abilities for eight, 11 year old children (5 and 6 months) during only 10 weeks of intervention. These children were all initially severely impaired and had proved previously resistant to support (average RA-CA discrepancy at start -4.34 years). Study 2 concentrated on comprehension, comparing cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) with vocabulary enrichment training (VT). Fourteen children between the ages of 11-14 yrs made significant gains in reading comprehension, speed, and accuracy. Again these children initially had very poor reading comprehension, with a mean delay of 3.61 years. The 6 month follow up showed persistent gains in comprehension for the CSI group and persistent gains in vocabulary for the VT group. Overall, these studies illustrate the importance of combining reading comprehension and decoding instruction, of tailoring intervention to the needs of the child, and of the facilitative effect of RITA. The results are discussed in terms of effectiveness and cost effectiveness.
Slide 1: Title.
Slide 2: A brief description of what will be covered in the talk.
Slide 3: This slide presents the idea that reading is a complex process; identifying the word is just the start! We then have to access its meaning from our Long Term Memory (LTM). The order in which the words are presented is maintained in our Working Memory (WM), possibly helped by inner speech. This is then analysed to identify its syntactic structure, inferences are drawn to bridge gaps in the information and it is all interpreted in the light of what we know about the world. Reading is thus influenced by WM, in particular, phonological processing and WM capacity, this may in turn be freed up by faster, more fluent (automatic) processing. It is thus important to look at the whole of reading when designing interventions for poor readers.
Slide 4: This slide presents an overview of the RITA system. Unfortunately time does not allow a very detailed description, but it is essentially a teacher's tool that presents literacy exercises to develop a whole range of skills (based on Reason and Boote's, 1994, AT&T model). It keeps records, presents pre-prepared activities and contains a basic resource base including National Literacy Strategy vocabulary lists. The teacher can further add to these resources by creating new cloze exercises, texts and vocabulary/spelling lists.
Slide 5: This shows some of the range of activities available. These include; onset and rime, single word reading, word attack (breaking words down), consonant blends (words that start/end with particular consonant clusters), word and nonsense word flash (single, real or psuedo words are flashed in the centre of the screen), vocabulary (words spoken by the computer have to be rapidly identified on the screen), spelling, dictation (sentences/paragraphs read by the computer), cloze, fix bugs (proof reading exercise- spot and correct spelling errors in a short story), sentence jigsaw (put the words back in the correct order) and reading book (read a short story with speech support).
Slide 6: This provides an overview of the study methodology and participants. It is noteworthy that all the children were severely impaired in literacy at the start of the study. On average 4.34 years behind. This represents very little improvement since the start of Junior school, despite having had previous IEP's and intervention.
Slide 7: The first step was to create a cognitive profile for each child. This slide shows the tests used.
Slide 8: The profiles plotted each child's strengths and weaknesses. This example shows a dyslexic boy who had received previous intensive instruction in phonics and consequently, had good phonological skills as indicated by the high phonemic segmentation score. This contrasts with his still relatively weak reading and spelling, especially under timed conditions. He had average to above average scores on the 'ability' related tests as seen on the right hand side of the profile. Targets, such as those typically found in an Individual Education Plans (IEP) were set (in conjunction with the school SENCo). These profiles and targets formed the basis for differentiating the intervention for each child
Slide 9: After 10 weeks, encouraging results were found. JJ made progress in two of his targets, reading fluency and comprehension. The results for spelling were disappointing across the board, and unexpected, as RITA interventions had proved successful in improving spelling for younger children. This may be partly due to a counter productive attempt to include the children within a school-wide spelling initiative, thus a considerable amount of RITA spelling exercises were dedicated to rote learning of words that were very difficult for the child.
Slide 10: Overall, the group showed significant improvements in single word reading, even when SS's were used (these adjust the score for age and thus any improvement shows accelerated learning). Progress was also made in fluency, word attack and comprehension for those children who had these as targets. The most satisfactory gains were made in comprehension - the goal of reading after all! These results were particularly heartening given the usually poor prognosis for older children (especially for dyslexics).
Slide 11: Conclusions to study 1
Slide 12: This slide shows an overview of the methodology used in the second study. It is noteworthy that two types of training are being compared. Maintenance tests were also conducted at 6 months. These measures were introduced to reduce the likelihood of false improvements due to the 'Hawthorne Effect'. All the children showed a discrepancy between their reading comprehension and listening comprehension. They were severely impaired in reading comprehension; most of their age-equivalent scores were over 3 years behind their chronological ages.
Slide 13: Significant improvements in reading comprehension and vocabulary were found. After 6 months the CSI group continued to improve in comprehension whereas the VT group dropped of. Conversely, the VT group continued to accelerate in vocabulary, demonstrating an 'incubation' effect.
Slide 14: Both groups improved significantly in reading comprehension and vocabulary. The largest improvements in comprehension were made by the Comprehension Strategy Instruction (CSI) group. The largest gains in vocabulary were made by the Vocabulary Training (VT) group. This shows a clear differentiation in improvement. This may indicate the need for consolidation of vocabulary knowledge to facilitate the formation of new connections.
Slide 15: The results from these two studies were compared to RITA studies with younger children, meta-analyses of international intervention studies, and similar studies from the UK and USA. This type of comparison is usually performed by calculating effect-sizes, which relates the improvement back to the original variation of the sample. The effect sizes were more moderate than for the Fawcett and Nicolson (1999) studies with Infant and Junior children. However they were still encouraging given that the older children were more highly selected as being at risk. Swanson (1999) conducted an extensive meta-analysis of intervention studies of different lengths and age groups. The effect sizes found here were comparable even though the studies were smaller and used more-severely impaired children than those reported in Swanson (1999). The final comparison sets these studies within the context of several well-known interventions in the UK and USA. It should be noted that this is not comparing like with like, yet it is nevertheless an interesting exercise. Effect sizes were not available for some of the studies hence the improvement per teacher hour was used for comparison (this also takes into account the differences in length of the studies).
Slide 16: The RITA studies are comparable in terms of reading accuracy, even to interventions with younger children. Fewer studies reported results for comprehension, but it seems that the CSI and VT training produced slightly better results than the THRASS and Cumbria programs (reassuring given that the Cumbria and THRASS programs were targeting reading accuracy
Slide 17: Both studies were effective overall. This is particularly encouraging given the severity of the childrens' impairments and previous findings that dyslexic children make only 5 months improvement in reading during a year (Thompson, 1984).
This work was conducted during my Ph.D. studies at the University of Sheffield and was supervised by Dr Angela Fawcett and Prof. Rod Nicolson. Elements of the work have been published and may be referred to for further information.
Fawcett, AJ., and Lynch, L. (2000) Systematic Identification and Intervention for Reading Difficulty: Case studies of EAL children. Dyslexia, 6 57-71.
Lynch, L. Fawcett, AJ. and Nicolson, RI. (2000) Computer-assisted reading intervention in a secondary school: an evaluation study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 31 (4).
Contact Details:
Email: L.Lynch@surrey.ac.uk
Tel: 0207
2282322
01483 873313
Contact Address: Student Advice and Information Service, Wey flat 2, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 5XH
 |
 |