Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities, A Blog by

Dr. Gary G. Brannigan & Dr. Howard Margolis

Parents and school personnel often make a critical mistake. They assume that instruction and related factors do little or nothing to cause or sustain reading disabilities, that all reading problems lie within the struggling reader. Thus, reading and other educational evaluations that reflect this assumption stress five things: testing, testing, testing, testing, and testing. They minimize or ignore everything else.

This produces a report, with recommendations that sometimes work, but too often fail. And too often, parents and school personnel, such as reading specialists, don’t quickly know if the report’s recommendations are failing. They don’t know if the struggling reader is drowning in a sea of failure. The reason is simple: parents, reading specialists, and other school personnel fail to frequently monitor progress. Thus, the struggling reader’s problems not only continue, but often worsen.

One way to help prevent this mess—this cascade of escalating failure—is for reading specialists and other educational evaluators to use a comprehensive model of evaluation that assesses the struggling reader’s current abilities, observes how he functions in his classes, assesses his success with modifications, adaptations, and different approaches to instruction, and frequently monitors his progress. Below is a simplified description of my favorite comprehensive model, the Assessment-Instruction Process (A-IP) of Marjorie Lipson and Karen Wixson. If you understand its components, you might help your child (or student) beat the odds of overcoming reading disabilities.

Initially Identify the Problem. To begin to precisely identify the struggling reader’s reading problems and to get the information needed to plan the initial assessment, the reading specialist should review the struggling reader’s records, observe him during reading and related instruction (e.g. social studies), and interview his teachers and, if needed, his parents.

Evaluate the Context. “Not infrequently, struggling readers’ reading and writing problems are exacerbated, if not actually caused, by contextual factors,” such as overly difficult or sterile reading materials, poor instructional strategies, inflexible grouping arrangements, and insufficient instructional time. To understand the influence of these and other contextual factors on reading proficiency, reading specialists need to use a variety of assessment procedures (e.g., observations, interviews, checklists). They should not limit the evaluation to testing.

Evaluate the Struggling Reader: Focus on Reading and Writing. To assess struggling readers’ reading abilities, their beliefs about them, and their interests, reading specialists should use a combination of informal assessment instruments and techniques and norm-referenced tests. To identify struggling readers’ instructional and frustration reading levels, specialists might have struggling readers read from an informal reading inventory and several textbooks. Specialists might also use Curriculum-Based Assessment (CBA) procedures to assess reading levels. If struggling readers have had appreciable difficulty using phonics, specialists might assess their phonemic awareness abilities (e.g., phoneme isolation, identity, categorization, blending, and segmentation). If struggling readers tend to withdraw from reading, specialists might informally assess self-efficacy [confidence] by discussing struggling readers’ perceptions of their ability to learn to read and to succeed on different reading tasks.

Evaluate the Match Between the Struggling Reader and the Context. Here, specialists compare the instructional context (e.g., materials, methods, physical arrangements) to struggling readers’ knowledge, abilities, and motivation. For example, if struggling readers need to read 3^rd-grade materials to develop fluency, but are regularly required to read 5^th-grade materials, specialists should recommend substituting 3^rd-grade materials. If, on typical reading and writing tasks, struggling readers have self-regulation difficulties—-problems setting immediate task goals and organizing time and effort to complete tasks—they may need shorter, less complicated tasks and direct instruction in setting goals, organizing time, and self-monitoring. Without changing such mismatches, progress is improbable.

Reflect, Make Decisions, and Plan. Here, specialists try to answer the critical question, “What is the primary source[s] of interference with learning or performance?” Specialists answer this question by reflecting on the previously gathered information. Because this step informs the next step—diagnostic teaching and instructional recommendations—it is, in a sense, the heart of the whole process. As such, specialists should deliberately dwell on their findings and reflect on how to validate their implications.

Identify a Better Match: Use Diagnostic Teaching. Witt and his colleagues asserted that “Trying to predict which interventions will work well for individual struggling readers has not been a fruitful endeavor. Therefore, we must test curricular modifications empirically.” This is exactly what diagnostic teaching does—test curricular modifications to increase the accuracy of instructional recommendations. In this step, specialists and teachers can vary instructional methods and alter levels of support. Even this, however, will not perfectly predict what will work with particular struggling readers. Thus, the results of diagnostic teaching must be integrated with the previously collected information about the struggling reader and the context to develop educated guesses, called a hypotheses, that better predicts what will work. And like all hypotheses, it must be tested. Accordingly, the next step—to monitor and modify instruction—is critically important. Without the monitoring of struggling readers’ progress, struggling readers often remain in ineffective programs that perpetuate reading problems.

Adapt Instruction: Continually Monitor Progress and Make Needed Modifications. “Continuous monitoring of instructional programs is absolutely essential, and adaptive teaching involving modifications in texts, tasks, and materials is desirable.” Information about how you and school personnel can monitor the progress of children with reading disabilities is found in chapter 7 of our book, Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds (www.reading2008.com).

A question you may still have is, Why did I need to know this? To help your child (or student), you may have to know the parts of an effective reading evaluation. You may need to let the school know that you will not be satisfied with an evaluation that consists of tests, tests, and more tests, and little else. Having your child take a bunch of tests, no matter the statistics they produce, is unlikely to benefit him. When, in your request for a reading evaluation, you ask questions about and discuss the evaluation, you’re more likely to get one that increases your child’s chance of overcoming reading disabilities, of beating the odds against him. Knowing the parts and the process might also help you evaluate the evaluation. Much more information about getting and using reading evaluations is found in chapter 5 of our book, Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds (www.reading2008.com).

Note: This column is adapted from Howard Margolis’ article, Struggling readers: What consultants need to know. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 2004, 15(2), 191-204. Full references for all the quotations in this column are listed in the article.

Howard Margolis, Ed.D. © Reading2008 & Beyond

www.reading2008.com

References

Lipson, M. Y., & Wixson, K. K. (2003). Assessment and Instruction of Reading Disability: An Interactive Approach (3rd ed.). New York: Longman.

Margolis, H., & Brannigan, G. G. (2009). Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds. Voorhees, NJ: Reading2008 & Beyond (www.reading2008.com).