Study of Dyslexic Children Confirms StudyDog Teaching Approach for Struggling Readers

Dean G. Arrasmith, Ed.D.
Chief Learning Officer
StudyDog, Inc.

Why does John Struggle?
John sits at his computer, deep in concentration and moving only the computer mouse. He is intent on completing the several reading skills test questions for StudyDog. He receives encouragement for correct responses. He sees the correct answer and hears encouragement when he misses a question. When he finishes, StudyDog, a cartoon friend, congratulates him and thanks him for his efforts. The test results show that John has a commonly occurring set of skill strengths and needs. His skill profile shows that he comprehends simple orally-presented stories and does well on first-grade sight words. However, his performance on building word families, changing one letter at a time to build a new word, and reading new words are very weak. He does not do well identifying individual letter sounds in words. He struggles as an independent reader. What accounts for the mixed levels of performance across reading skills in first grade? Why does John seem to do well with simple memory tasks, but does not read new words easily or readily identify basic sounds in words?

We have heard teachers tell parents to wait until John is ready to learn to read. Teachers share that all children learn to read at their own time and at their own rate. However, Joseph Torgesen, a reading researcher at Florida State University, says, "To the extent that we allow children to fall seriously behind at any point during early elementary school, we are moving to a "remedial," rather than a "preventive" mode of intervention." Further, Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a neuroscientist and professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, reports, from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, "[A]t least three out of four children who read poorly in third grade continue to have reading problems in high school and beyond." Further, she cautions, "Without identification and proven interventions, virtually all children who have reading difficulties early on will still struggle with reading when they are adults."

New Research
Yale neuroscientists, following research with a group of young adults who they have followed since the age five, have recently reported findings about brain functioning during simple reading tasks that offers some insight into how children learn to read. Dr. Shaywitz has recently reported on the promising brain imaging that shows similar brain system activity for "persistently poor" readers and proficient readers (Time, July 2003; Biological Psychiatry, 2003;54:25-33). More intriguing, Dr. Shaywitz reports that young adults, diagnosed as dyslexic children and had improved their reading accuracy, created new neurological connections using different parts of the brain than proficient readers. While the research cautions that it is premature to suggest diagnosis and treatment based on brain imaging, the implications are startlingly supportive of the cognitive and behavioral interpretations of children's reading development. The tentative conclusions for persistently poor readers imply that they have the rudimentary neurological systems for reading, but have not strengthened the connections between the brain systems through early reading stimulation. They simply have not practiced the right kind of reading skill tasks to develop the necessary connections in the brain at an early age.

Previous Research
Behaviorally, we know that skill-based reading programs provided to children at an early age, including phonemic awareness and alphabetic understanding, increase children's reading performance. (See the report of the National Reading Panel for a synthesis of this research.) This same research suggests that early mastery of reading skills greatly enhances children's reading success and school success. Clearly learning to read as early as possible provides greater experience reading and learning through reading. Children who struggle to read miss much of the practice that reading in school provides, and can fall behind in other subjects because of their poor reading. Remediation for these children takes time away from learning other school content and poor reading hinders other learning.

Dr. Shaywitz, in an interview with the Educational Leadership (October 1999), recommended that teaching phonologic skills will help poor readers gain the basic decoding skills to read words they have not seen before and will therefore be encouraged to read. Reading stimulates the brain systems and reinforces the connections between these systems. The recent research from the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention supports this consistent message from Dr. Shaywitz.

StudyDog
How does StudyDog incorporate the emerging understanding of the brain into its instructional design?

StudyDog provides young children highly engaging reading skill instruction, modeling, and practice that provide the brain stimulation that researchers are recommending.

StudyDog specifically addresses brain research in the following ways:

1. What we know. Reading is a learned process and not a natural process. Children have to learn that letters are associated with sounds, that words are combinations of sounds that have meaning, that sets of words carry ideas, and that ideas link with their experiences and leads to understanding text. Several brain systems have to work together for a person to read and understand text.

What StudyDog does. StudyDog uses a systematic curriculum organized so that each reading skill builds on previous skills. Children learn each reading skill to mastery before they work on new skills. They strengthen prior reading skills while they develop new reading skills, stimulating the connection between reading centers in their brains. At any stage while learning to read, children know what skills they are learning and how they are reading more and more complex sounds, words, and text. The systematic curriculum of StudyDog builds the connections between brain systems to encourage children to increase their reading skills.

2. What we know. Young children handle concrete ideas better than abstract ideas. The brain is developing connections between brain systems and abstract ideas require more higher-order connections. As children develop stronger connections, they can better deal with abstract ideas.

What StudyDog does. StudyDog explicitly teaches each reading skill (e.g., the letter "C" can have two sounds, as in "cut" and "city."). StudyDog shows children how each reading skill works. Children do not need to discover intuitively how any reading skill works. Children see the skills modeled with concrete examples, and they practice the skill to mastery. StudyDog monitors each practice response of the children and provides encouragement, reinstruction, and extended practice as necessary to achieve skill mastery.

3. What we know. Children learn by strengthening neurological memory and connections. Children, who predominately use memory to read, often become persistently poor readers. Memory of words is not adequate to read the volume of words children and adults encounter in text. Both memory of sight vocabulary and analytical skills for decoding words are necessary for proficient reading.

What StudyDog does. StudyDog's curriculum systematically organizes lessons that introduce analytic and memory reading skills that progressively build understanding of the following skill areas:
a. Phonemic Awareness - understanding the sounds in spoken words
b. Alphabetic Principal - matching sounds in written words
c. Fluency - reading smoothly, without hesitation
d. Vocabulary - building sight word recognition and word meaning
e. Text Comprehension - understanding, organizing, and using information from text
Skills build in a systematic way, previously taught skills spiral back to be reinforced in subsequent lessons. We established the validity of the StudyDog curriculum, including the scope and sequence, by comparative analyses with a synthesis of state reading standards and recommendations from the National Reading Panel and the University of Oregon's Big Idea in Reading. StudyDog teaches analytic and memory skills to mastery and reinforces these skills throughout instruction.

4. What we know. The proficient reader show strong connections between several brain systems, suggesting that they decode letters into sounds, fit the sounds together to make words, and process meaning fluently and rapidly. The brain connections are strong and work automatically. Persistently poor readers, on the other hand, rely much more on word memory to read. They use the brain centers to connect to previously remembered words and struggle with reading new words. While they use the same brain systems as proficient readers, persistently poor readers show weak connections between these systems.

What StudyDog does. StudyDog offers the phonetic stimulation and explicit skill-based instruction that will help children develop the analytic skills to attack new words. Letter sounds and word patterns provide analytical word attack skills to attack new vocabulary. In addition, children practice with sight vocabulary to builds automatic recognition of the most frequent words in order to encourage fluency as children build strong analytic word skills.

5. What we know. Learning to read stimulates the connections between brain systems. Children must be engaged in learning, and not distracted. Engaging children in effective practice of reading activities is critical for providing stimulation of the brain reading systems.

What StudyDog does. StudyDog is highly engaging for children. The graphic designs, stories, animated characters, and reinforcement and encouragement built into each lesson keeps children immersed in instruction and learning. Children want to complete new lessons because it is fun, and because it is fun, they learn the skills they need to build strong reading skills and strengthen the brain reading system connections. Further, the brain is stimulated and skills strengthened through the multi-sensory nature of the StudyDog lessons. Children engage the brain reading systems in exuberant and vivid ways with StudyDog.

Summary


StudyDog, focusing on research-proven reading content, using explicit instruction with modeling and practice, working with children to master reading skill, and spiraling the curriculum to continue to extend and reinforce specific reading skill, is a perfect strategy for stimulating and strengthening the brain systems necessary for proficient reading development. In addition, StudyDog uniquely provides a highly engaging environment that motivates children to want to keep reading. We are excited about the physical proof brain research provides for our teaching methods. The emerging research supports the cognitive and behavioral research used in the development of StudyDog.