Unpicking the factors of 'within child' difficulties and the role of teaching

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Unpicking the factors of 'within child' difficulties and the role of teaching

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

To what extent are the 'within child' learning difficulties - and the home circumstances of the child - considered to be the main or only factors for a child's learning difficulties and weaknesses by school psychologists and teachers?

This is a really key question in the long-standing debate about how best to teach reading, and the consequences of different teaching methods, which I touch upon in my March 2015 Reading Reform Foundation conference talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QT8kE ... e=youtu.be

If time is short (the video is nearly an hour long), the PowerPoint of my talk is available here:

http://phonicsinternational.com/RRF_con ... _2015.pptx

Kerry Hempenstall addressed this issue of perceptions of school psychologists and teachers in the 'Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties' from which I have taken a few pertinent extracts (with permission) below:

Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties

Research-driven reading assessment: Drilling to the core
Kerry Hempenstall a
a Division of Psychology, RMIT, Bundoora, Australia
Online Publication Date: 01 May 2009


Perceptions of literacy problems and causes

Alessi (1988) contacted 50 school psychologists who, between them, produced about 5000 assessment reports in a year. The school psychologists agreed that a lack of academic or behavioural progress could be attributed to one or more of the five factors below. Alessi then examined the reports to see what factors had been assigned as the causes of their students’ educational problems:

(1) Curriculum factors? No reports.

(2) Inappropriate teaching practices? No reports.
(3) School administrative factors? No reports.
(4) Parent and home factors? 10–20% of reports.
(5) Factors associated with the child? 100%.

In another study this time surveying classroom teachers, Wade and Moore (1993) noted that when students failed to learn 65% of teachers considered that student characteristics were responsible, while a further 32% emphasised home factors. Only the remaining 3% believed that the education system was the most important factor in student achievement, a finding utterly at odds with the research into teacher effects (Cuttance, 1998; Hattie, Clinton, Thompson, & Schmidt-Davies, 1995).

This highlights one of the ways in which assessment can be unnecessarily limiting in its breadth, if the causes of students’ difficulties are presumed to reside solely within the students rather than within the instructional system. Assessment of students is not a productive use of time unless it is carefully integrated into a plan involving instructional action.

When the incidence of failure is unacceptably high, as in Australia, then an appropriate direction for resource allocation is towards the assessment of instruction. It can only be flawed instruction that intensifies the reading problem from a realistic incidence of reading disability of around 5% (Brown & Felton, 1990; Felton, 1993; Marshall & Hynd, 1993; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Alexander, & Conway, 1997; Vellutino et al., 1996) to that which we find in Australia of 20–30% (see earlier). A tendency can arise for victim-blame: ‘‘Learning disabilities have become a sociological sponge to wipe up the spills of general education. . . . It’s where children who weren’t taught well go (Lyon, 1999, p. A1).

Though it is not the focus of this paper, there is an increasing recognition that an education system must constantly assess the quality of instruction provided in its schools and that it should take account of the findings of research in establishing its benchmarks and policies: ‘‘Thus the central problem for a scientific approach to the matter is not to find out what is wrong with the children, but what can be done to improve the educational system’’ (Labov, 2003, p. 128).

The interest in a national English curriculum is an example of this emerging system interest. Up to this time, education systems in Australia have been relatively impervious to such findings (Hempenstall, 1996, 2006), lagging behind significant, if tenuous, changes in the USA with Reading First (Al Otaiba et al., 2008) and in Great Britain with the Primary National Strategy (Department of Education and Skills, 2006).

Even allowing that the major problem for the education system lies in the realm of instruction, particularly in the initial teaching of reading, individual student assessment remains of value. It is, of course, necessary as a means of evaluating instructional adequacy. Beyond that, there is great potential value in the early identification of potential reading problems, in determining the appropriate focus for instruction, in the monitoring of progress in relevant skill areas and with the evaluation of reading interventions. It is the assumption in this paper that decisions about assessment should be driven by up-to-date conceptions of the important elements in reading development.

Issues in reading development that could guide assessment

In the largest, most comprehensive evidenced-based review ever conducted of research on how children learn to read, the National Reading Panel (NRP: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) presented its findings. For its review, the Panel selected methodologically sound research from the approxi- mately 100,000 reading studies that have been published since 1966 and from another 15,000 earlier studies.

The specific areas the NRP noted as crucial for reading instruction were phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Students should be explicitly and systematically taught:

. (1) phonemic awareness: the ability to hear and identify individual sounds in spoken words; 

. (2) phonics: the relationship between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language; 

. (3) fluency: the capacity to read text accurately and quickly; 

. (4) vocabulary: all the words students must know to communicate effectively; 
and 

. (5) comprehension: the ability to understand what has been read.

For children in pre-school and in their first year of formal schooling, the Panel found that early training in phonemic awareness skills, especially blending and segmenting, provided strong subsequent benefits to reading progress. It further recommended that conjoint phonemic awareness and phonics emphases should be taught directly, rather than incidentally, as effective instruction in both skills leads to strong early progress in reading and spelling.

The Panel’s emphasis on these five elements is also consonant with the findings of other several major reports, such as those of the National Research Council (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (Grossen, 1997), the British National Literacy Strategy (Department for Education and Employment, 1998) and, recently, in the Rose Report (Rose, 2006) and the Primary National Strategy (Department of Education and Skills, 2006).

In 2006, the Primary Framework for Literacy and Mathematics (Department of Education and Skills, 2006) was released, updating its 1998 predecessor and mandating practice even more firmly onto an evidence base. In particular, it withdrew its imprimatur from the 3-cueing system (Hempenstall, 2003) and embraced the ‘‘Simple view of reading’’ (Hoover & Gough, 1990) that highlights the importance of decoding as the pre-eminent strategy for saying what’s on the page and comprehension for understanding that which has been decoded. Under the 3-cueing system, making meaning by any method (for example, pictures, syntactic and semantic cues) was considered worthwhile and, for many protagonists, took precedence over decoding as the prime strategy (Weaver, 1988).

The new 2006 Strategy mandates a synthetic phonics approach, in which letter-sound correspondences are taught in a clearly defined sequence and the skills of blending and segmenting phonemes are assigned high priority. This approach contrasts with the less effective analytic phonics, in which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in isolation (i.e. outside of whole words). In the analytic phonics approach, students are asked to analyse the common phoneme in a set of words in which each word contains the phoneme being introduced (Hempenstall, 2001). The lesser overall effective- ness of analytic phonics instruction may be due to a lack of sufficient systematic practice and feedback usually required by the less able reading student (Adams, 1990).
Sadly, as may be noted from my comments in the video footage of the RRF conference-talk, the multi-cueing reading strategies (referred to as the 3-cueing system) still prevail in England and multi-cueing and Reading Recovery are massively influential and embedded in most schools in the USA and Australia.

'Within-child' issues and home circumstances are of course fundamentally important factors affecting learning - but my point here is that these need to be disentangled from other prevailing factors such as teachers' professional knowledge and understanding about reading instruction, what they provide and how they provide their lessons and the overarching guidance the teaching profession is subjected to.

This is a very complex state of affairs - which is precisely why there is a need for ongoing research and for an organisation such as IFERI which aims to provide a hub to share good information and to bring together all stakeholders with an interest in raising standards of literacy!
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Unpicking the factors of 'within child' difficulties and the role of teaching

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Unpicking the factors of 'within child' difficulties and the role of teaching

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

One of my sisters was asking me about 'twin studies' recently and coincidentally, within a day or two, someone flagged up Dorothy Bishop's paper to me in which the abstract states:
Abstract

Developmental dyslexia runs in families, and twin studies have confirmed that there is a substantial genetic contribution to poor reading. The way in which discoveries in molecular genetics are reported can be misleading, encouraging us to think that there are specific genes that might be used to screen for disorder. However, dyslexia is not a classic Mendelian disorder that is caused by a mutation in a single gene. Rather, like many other common disorders, it appears to involve combined effects of many genes and environmental factors, each of which has a small influence, possibly supplemented by rare variants that have larger effects but apply to only a minority of cases. Furthermore, to see clearer relationships between genotype and phenotype, we may need to move beyond the clinical category of dyslexia to look at underlying cognitive deficits that may be implicated in other neurodevelopmental disorders.
You can read Dorothy Bishop's paper here:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 6/20143139

It is becoming increasingly understood that the English language has a particularly complex alphabetic code (the most complex alphabetic code in the world) which goes a long way to explain the struggles to achieve literacy for all in English-speaking contexts and to explain the continuing debate around 'how best' to teach reading and spelling/writing in English.

Those with a teaching background are fully aware of the very wide spectrum of learners in any one classroom - that is, the complexities of children's different capacities to learn and the challenges teachers face in providing appropriately and effectively for every child.

Dorothy Bishop's article contributes to our understanding and thoughts about differences between learners and reminds us that in our attempt to focus on the content and quality of our teaching practices (which is well-founded because teaching content and approach make a HUGE difference in terms of reading and spelling/writing results), we must nevertheless not give the impression that we have diminished the genuine challenges children face of all sorts of complexities - inherited and environmental.

In other words, of course there are 'within child' issues, but those issues must not be an excuse for large-scale weak literacy in English-speaking contexts - all the more reason to look at the findings of research and, informed by research, we must keep honing our teaching programmes and practices and measure our teaching effectiveness compared to others.

Regarding 'teaching effectiveness', this is why using the same phonics check in all and any English-speaking contexts would be invaluable and why IFERI is encouraging the wide-scale use of England's Year One Phonics Screening Check which is free to download once it has been undertaken in England:

http://www.iferi.org/resources-and-guidance/
Lucy Prabhu
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Re: Unpicking the factors of 'within child' difficulties and the role of teaching

Post by Lucy Prabhu »

Thank you for these really helpful posts. I have only been teaching synthetic phonics for a little over a year but I think the excerpts above reflect my experience to date.

My eldest son was assessed as having a 'Specific Learning Difficulty of a dyslexic nature' by a school educational psychologist and so began our long journey to find effective reading instruction for him, and led to phonics training for myself. He was born prematurely and has some quirky behaviour as a result, including some sensory processing difficulties and dyspraxia.

In the year that I've been tutoring other children I have seen many other 'difficulties' that I think may have contributed to their struggles with reading - poor attention span, dyspraxia, poor short term memory, slow 'processing' speeds etc, some of which appear to be within child/within family symptoms. Some of them have dyslexia assessments, some do not. But what they do have in common is a positive response to direct synthetic phonics instruction. To date they have all significantly improved their reading and spelling abilities and this has often had a knock-on effect in other areas - mathematics and writing for example - and also on their self-confidence. They may still have co-ordination or sensory or other problems but they have all learned to read and spell much more fluently and accurately.

My experience with my own child leads me to believe that poor initial reading instruction creates further problems and disguises other within-child difficulties that could and should receive attention, although not necessarily at school. So the impact of poor teaching is not just poor literacy/academic skills and low self-confidence, but also neglecting to identify and remediate other developmental problems.

Thank you for establishing such an essential resource at IFERI - I look forward to future developments.
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