Thank you. Welcome to Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, a professional learning series presented by David Kilpatrick, sponsored by the Exceptional Student Services Unit, and created in collaboration with specific learning disability specialists, Jill Marshall and Veronica Fiedler. The Colorado Department of Education's vision is that all students in Colorado will become educated and productive citizens capable of succeeding in society, the workforce, and life. The mission of the CDE is to ensure all students are prepared for success in society, work, and life by providing excellent leadership, service and support to schools, districts, and communities across the state. in multiple ways.
You can complete all 13 modules. Participants who engage in all 13 modules will be provided a comprehensive learning experience encompassing research, impact, and critical elements of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. You can complete individual modules.
Participants may view a session or sessions for specific information and guidance on topics related to assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. This format is ideal for short professional development opportunities. For example, during an impact team meeting or professional learning community. You can also complete this as a book or chapter study.
Participants may view all or part of the series as a tandem companion or supplemental resource for supporting a study of the book, The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Module 10 Effective Approaches for Preventing Reading Difficulties Session 1 Evidence for the Prevention of Reading Difficulties Hello, this is David Kilpatrick, your presenter for the online webinars and as a result of these webinars participants are going to learn about research related to the assessment prevention and overcoming of reading difficulties here are the 13 modules We are beginning Module 10. Module 10 has two sessions. The first session has to do with evidence for the prevention of reading difficulties.
As a result of participating in this particular session, participants will be able to identify the key instructional elements that help prevent reading difficulties and describe the type of research conducted to support such best practices. When we talk about prevention, we're talking about keeping children from struggling in the first place. So, prevention refers to the types of things that we do before a student has demonstrated any reading difficulties, whether it's with all children or children we've identified at risk.
risk based upon say kindergarten screening results and what they came in with the amount of letter letter sound knowledge etc intervention on the other hand focuses on instructional choices we make with students who have demonstrated reading difficulties and that will be covered in module 11 Numerous studies in the 1980s and 1990s examined the impact of explicit letter sound instruction and phonological awareness instruction on reading outcomes. They were being compared to business-as-usual approaches. And the most common business-as-usual approaches in the 80s and 90s involved the classic whole word approach and the whole language approach the results were very consistent there was a 50% and often greater reduction in the number of struggling readers readers when explicit letter sound instruction and explicit phonological awareness were included as part of kindergarten and or first grade instruction. And this body of research was reviewed by the National Reading Panel in 2000. Interestingly there's been very little research of this sort since that time. Journals oftentimes are unlikely to publish this type of stuff and granting agencies often don't give grants for this type of research.
Why? Well the best analogy I can think of is that the American American School of Public Health of is what do you think if some researchers in the medical field decided to approach a grant agency or a journal and say they're doing a study on the relationship between smoking and cancer well I think it's pretty well established there's a relationship between smoking and cancer do we really need more data of that sort in a sense that's what's going on with the prevention research it is so well established that it's actually hard to do that kind of research and get it published anymore In these studies, there were numerous ways that children were taught. In some cases, there was whole class instruction, all the kids got it, and they had a trajectory that went throughout all of kindergarten. In other cases, they did more intensive small group instruction. All the children got it, but they got it in small groups, and they did it, for example, in the spring of kindergarten.
Some did whole group, some did small group in first grade. All these types of interventions had very similar results. The key was that the phonological awareness and the letter sound instruction was explicit and systematic. Why did these studies get such good results? I think you can explain that by going back to modules two and four, and it should become clear.
It's really based upon the alphabetic nature of the writing system. In module two, we learned that we don't read based on visual memory. In module four, we saw the very central role of phonological and phonemic skills in reading.
So it's necessary to know the code of written English, so we need to know the letter-sound relationships and we need to know that phonological skills support sight word acquisition. These prevention studies were one of the key sources behind response to intervention and multi-tiered systems of support. The first tier, of course, being whole class instruction, something that all children receive. However, there is very little evidence that these specific types of instructional strategies are widespread as of the time I am recording this. Let's talk about the strengths of the results.
The overall improvement in the reading scores were notable. When they included kids of all skill levels, they found the equivalent of 8 standard score point gain difference between kids who got the explicit instruction in phonological awareness and phonics and those that did not. Now what I am telling you is these standard scores are not the same. score points that's not the actual index they used I'm saying this because that's what most educators understand they actually used effect sizes and rather than standard score point gains based on national comparisons they were talking about the equivalent of eight standard score point differences compared to whatever the control group was in those studies that's what an effect size looks at however the results didn't always last a year or two later they may have dropped down in many cases to about four standard score point gains gain difference why is this well the reason should be clear from earlier sessions that if you're looking at all the kids of all skill levels the kids in the top two third who were not taught phonological awareness and were not taught the letter sound skills they figured those out and they caught up to their peers by about third grade however and this is pretty important to the theme of this whole set of webinars children who are at risk fared much better as a result of these types of prevention efforts.
Some studies looked at at-risk kids in the bottom 10% or 20% or 30%, and what they found was a 13 standard score point difference between those at-risk readers who receive phonological awareness and letter sound instruction in kindergarten versus those that did not. But here's what's interesting. Those gains increased at follow-up studies to 20 points.
In other words, when they track these kids... six months, a year, two years down the line. The gap continued to widen between those children who received the letter sound instruction and the phonological awareness instruction in kindergarten and or first and those that did not. So this provides very, very strong evidence for the preventative nature of what we would call tier one instruction.
That is instruction that all the children receive. This all means that many children who we consider to be at risk can avoid having reading difficulties if in kindergarten and first grade we explicitly teach the letter sound skills but also the phonological awareness skills. Students who are at risk, who are not taught with these approaches, continue to struggle. They're not going to become competent readers all on their own without learning to break the code, without learning to develop the phonemic skills to benefit from an alphabet-based writing system. And it's also interesting to note that the gap between those who received such instruction and those that didn't widened over time.
It's possible to prevent many of the reading problems we see. As many as half of the reading problems we see are preventable. Explicit phonological awareness instruction and explicit letter sound instruction prevent a large portion of reading difficulties. Both whole group and small group instruction had similar prevention effects. Does your school do phonological awareness training and letter sound training in K-1?
If not, why not? Up next, we're going to talk about instructional practices that help prevent reading difficulties. Module 10, Effective Approaches for Preventing Reading Difficulties.
Session 2, Instructional Practices that Help Prevent Reading Difficulties. Hello, this is Dave Kilpatrick and I'm your presenter for the online webinars. And as a result of these webinars, the goal is to get the research out of those stuffy scientific journals that nobody seems to have access to and get them into the hands of the educators who need it the most.
And not just any research, but research that's most relevant for assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Here's an overview of the 13 modules and we are working on module 10. Module 10 has two sessions. This is the second session. We're going to look at instructional practices that help prevent reading difficulties.
As a result of listening to this particular session, participants should be able to identify specific instructional practices that reduce the likelihood of reading difficulties. The foundational instructional practices we learned from the last session are explicit and systematic letter sound instruction and explicit and systematic phonological awareness instruction. These had the greatest prevention effects for word level reading difficulties. We have nothing else that even comes close to comparing to the benefit these have anyway by explicit we mean that you don't let the child figure it out you tell them exactly what you want them to know for example when it comes to phonemic awareness.
You don't let them infer the sounds of the N words. You actually show them how to segment or how to manipulate sounds. With letter sound skills, you don't let them infer the sound that goes with the T. You teach them that this is the sound for the letter T.
Systematic means that you have a plan. You're not just teaching them explicitly, but you have a specific plan that's going to unfold. First, I'm going to teach them this letter or these letters. and then these and these so you know where you're going and you have a plan and it's all laid out as part of your curriculum I can't emphasize enough letter sound instruction is not sufficient to prevent children from having reading problems it seems to me that if we've made any changes since the reading panel it's we're getting more likely to involve explicit teachings of letters and sounds but I have to give you something that is totally non-scientific In the last 18-20 months, I've been in over 20 states. and in many different locations in those 20 states.
And when I present, I ask the same question to every group. How many of you have in place a phonological awareness training program in kindergarten or first grade? And in a room full of 100 people, 3, 4, 5 hands will go up.
Sometimes I've seen one hand go up. The most I've ever seen is about 6 or 7 hands go up out of a room of 100 people. I don't know when you're listening to this relative to when I'm recording it. I hope that changes. I hope that what I just said sounds like something from a bygone era.
But what that tells me from that experience, and that's not scientific data, that's my anecdotal experience, that tells me that we are not implementing Tier 1 in this country as of the time I'm recording this. If we were implementing Tier 1, we would be doing systematic and explicit phonological awareness. in kindergarten and first grade.
Interestingly, the studies that prompted Tier 1 or Tier 2, which we'll get to in the next session, they did one or the other. In other words, they focused on whole class instruction, or they focused on pulling at-risk kids aside and helping them under a general education remedial context. Typically, studies don't include both.
And so my suggestion is that best practice would include both. All children receive a certain amount of letter sound instruction and phonological awareness, but those who you already know are at risk based on your kindergarten screenings, those kids should get pulled aside for an extra dose above and beyond what the class is getting. I'll be quite frank, I can't point to a bunch of studies that show the double dose works better than a single dose, but at this point, in the absence of any research to suggest otherwise, it seems like best practice.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is something that's been floating around for quite a long time. The National Reading Panel made a comment and their wording was such that people thought they were recommending that you teach phonemic awareness using letters, as if phonemic awareness shouldn't be just an oral skill. This is the actual quote.
They make reference to explicitly and systematically teaching children to manipulate phonemes with letters. As mentioned, I think that's been misinterpreted. That was not the intent.
of the National Reading Panel. They were not saying that we use letters to teach phonemic awareness in the sense that it's not an oral skill. You remember from module four that you need to not only have phonemic awareness as an oral skill, it needs to be automatic within the oral realm. And that may not happen if you just have letters in front of the child.
If the letters are in front of the child, say you're manipulating letter tiles, that's phonics. Well how do I know that? Am I challenging the NRP statement?
There's at least three reasons why I feel very confident in what I'm saying. First of all, I actually went through and looked at every single study that the National Reading Panel categorized as using letters and the ones that they categorized as not using letters. What is interesting is out of the group of about 30 or 40 studies that were in the category of used letters, only three of them actually used letters like letter tiles. All the others...
they incorporated the oral phonemic awareness that they were learning with letters. Those that were in the category of did not use letters, phonemic awareness was treated as a completely separate enterprise unrelated to the rest of their ELA activities. That was their point.
Their point was that phonological awareness should not just be treated as some isolated activity unrelated to reading. Rather, as children develop those phonological skills, you need to demonstrate how those skills interact with reading. That was their point. But secondly, the panel used one example to illustrate their point, and that was a study by Cunningham, 1990, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
And in that study, they specifically said they did not use letters to teach the phonological awareness. However, they talked about in that study how they integrated the learning of the oral phonological awareness with the phonological awareness. the reading ELA activities that they were doing.
They were showing children how phonemic awareness applies to reading. That's much different than teaching phonological awareness with letters. And if that's not enough to demonstrate that I'm fairly confident that I understand what the National Reading Panel said, is I directly asked the chair of that section of the National Reading Panel.
And her response was, no, if you have the letters in front of you, that's phonics, that's not phonemic awareness. phonemic awareness we now know from many studies and this got covered in module four you need to have instantaneous oral phonemic awareness to help anchor words in long-term memory and you need to have phonological awareness of the of the blending type in order to do phonic decoding. The point being phonemic skills have to be oral and automatic. However, you certainly can use letters to illustrate what you're trying to do with a child.
For example, I know I worked with a boy who was struggling. with being able to do phonological awareness and couldn't break up blends. He was a fourth grader reading at a first grade level.
And I would say to him, say brush. Now say brush without the buh. He would say ush.
He could not pull apart the blend. and I tried all kinds of oral activities with him. I tried manipulatives.
It wasn't until I wrote out the word brush, covered up the B with my thumb, and he could say rush, and I did several of those, he had his breakthrough. Then we took away the letters, and we integrated various types of manipulatives, and eventually got away from the manipulatives to the point where he could do it rapidly and automatically as a strictly oral skill. In terms of teaching phonological awareness, phonological awareness covers a span span from kindergarten right up through, it levels out maybe around third or fourth grade. And early on, rhyming and first sound awareness, syllable segmentation, yields to a kindergarten level skill we call onset rhyme awareness, mid-kindergarten to early first grade, and then phoneme awareness, depending on the nature of the task, can range anywhere from late kindergarten right through till about third or fourth grade. But it's the phoneme level awareness that interacts with reading.
Why? because the alphabetic writing system is based upon phonemes. The characters represent phonemes, so that's why you need to have phoneme awareness.
The other levels of phonological awareness, in a sense, are the runway before the kids take off. They're foundational for phoneme awareness, but if a child is very skilled at onset rhyme awareness and rhyming and syllable segmentation, that doesn't mean they'll be a good reader. You have to be skilled at phoneme level awareness, and that should be clear from how phonological skills...
interact with reading that you learned about in Module 4. There are multiple tasks that have been used successfully at the kindergarten and first grade levels. Segmentation, blending, categorizing, identifying. Segmentation and blending should be clear from the other sessions.
Categorizing is, for example, when kids have to group or associate certain sounds with each other. You may say, I'm going to say three words and tell me which one ends with a different sound than the other two. Bike, truck. and brush.
That's a categorization task. Identifying is trying to have kids figure out where they're hearing a sound in a word. Where do you hear the lul and clap?
And manipulation can involve deleting or substituting sounds within words. Phony manipulation is more important for remediation, and we're going to talk about that in some detail in module 11. When it comes to learning the code, there's the whole question of do you teach letter names first or letter sounds first? It seems like like there's a raging debate among people on this issue. The reality is the research is equivocal. In other words, there's some research to support one, some research to support the other.
So I do not feel like I'm in a position to make any strong recommendations here. I do want to say that we obviously have to focus on letter sounds because that's what interacts with reading. But at the same time, most kids are going to show up knowing some letter names anyway, if for any other reason from having learned the alphabet. And having a name to a concept or idea is useful instructionally. Not only do we have the 26 letters of the alphabet, but we have certain key phonemes in English that are not represented by a letter of the alphabet.
They're represented by diagraphs. Think, for example, of CH and your PH and your SH and your TH. And there are others as well. They function like individual letters in the sense that they represent a single phoneme. Also, blends.
Consonant blends involve two consonants. together like in the word blend you have the BL and you have the ND blends are very common in English that's not true for a lot of spoken languages but it is true for English and getting kids to be competent that is going to be important to help them in terms of learning to read another thing that can't be emphasized enough whether it's teaching phonics or specifically when teaching phoneme awareness is that T does not say Tuh Tuh is a two phoneme nonsense word Tuh but T doesn't say Tuh When we say take, we don't say ta-ake. And so if you put an uh after a consonant sound, it's going to make it very difficult for kids to blend because ka-a-ta doesn't sound like an English word.
But ka-a-ta would be C-A-T. if you put the after it. So it's important to learn to say the sounds in isolation. Some of them are difficult, like a T. Many of the phonemes you can stretch out pretty easily.
Mm, ss, rr, l. Most of the consonant sounds can be stretched out pretty well. The T, the D, the P, and the B are the hardest.
There's no question. And what we need to do is try our best to eliminate any additional vocalization after. those phonemes because it's very difficult for a child to know what a caata is. A few additional concepts that are important.
The basic rules are are pretty useful. There aren't a whole lot of them. Sometimes people like to organize them according to the six syllable types and that's fine but it's also important to realize that we have no evidence that teaching kids the exceptions to those syllable types, in other words those basic rules, your basic rules would be You know, your silent E rule, two vowels go walking, the first does the talking, and a few others.
There are exceptions to each of those, and we have no evidence that teaching the exceptions to those rules allows weak readers to catch up. I think what's happened is that because children learn the basic rules and there are exceptions, and they don't catch up, there's this sense that we have to go even deeper into phonic analysis, when the reality is skilled readers... Couldn't tell you the exceptions to pretty much any one of those rules, but yet they became good readers anyway.
Why? Because they had good phonemic awareness. So if we find ourselves feeling like we've got to cover every possible exception in the book, maybe we need to redirect our attention to building the phonological skills so children are able to acquire the reading the way typical readers do.
Also, spelling is very important for reinforcing reading skills. Many of us have a hard time... spelling some words we can read, we almost never have a hard time reading words we can spell. If we can spell a word, we have a more precise orthographic memory for that word, and it's orthographic memory that allows us to read.
So reinforcing reading with spelling is very, very useful and effective. Also, use distributed practice. What's distributed practice? Distributed practice means that certain things you want kids to know, you come back to it throughout the day. So you reinforce letter sounds throughout the day.
not just in one session. Grab that pointer, point up to the letters up on the ABC chart, do phonological awareness at multiple times throughout the day. Children are going to pick up on these much more quickly than if it's all just done in one contained time period in the school day. Also, embedded picture mnemonics is a great way to teach early on with the letters and their sounds.
You can Google that. There are some embedded picture mnemonic letters that you can get. Some are free, some cost money. But research has shown that children pick up on learning letter sounds much more quickly with embedded picture mnemonics. Just as an illustration, the prototypical one is that the S is shaped like a snake.
So kids can hear the word snake and they can see the S and they're able to make that sort of association. There are many different features and factors that help in early reading acquisition and make our instruction more effective. It's most effective to teach phonological skills and letter sound skills in an explicit and systematic fashion.
And those skills need to become automatic. And when it comes to phonological awareness, they need to be strictly oral. But at the same time, we need to show kids how that oral skill maps onto the letters and sounds that they're learning. Also, it's important when we teach children letter-sound relationships, we use precise pronunciations and we give them multiple opportunities throughout the day through distributed practice.
Which of the teaching practices mentioned in this session are you already using? And which practices might you add? Next up is Module 11, and we're going to look at how we determine what is effective when it comes to intervention.