From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
If your child has a reading disability, the school should monitor his progress frequently enough to prevent minor problems from becoming major ones, to prevent him from getting frustrated with work that’s too difficult, to prevent him from becoming bored with work he’s already mastered, to accelerate instruction when the data shows he can handle it comfortably.
In 2006, the federally-funded National Research Center on Learning Disabilities (NRCLD; Johnson et al.) recommended that schools assess the progress of students who need “extensive and intensive interventions” twice weekly (p. 2.4). Children with reading disabilities are part of this group. Read more...
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Guest Column by Patrick McCabe, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, St. John’s University
Lucinda (not real name) is a fourth grader who does well in class. She likes to attend school, does her homework, and pays attention. But there is one thing that she does not like about school: standardized tests! Read more...
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Parents and teachers who want to study a well-organized, well-written, well-researched book on reading disabilities should take a serious look at Thomas G. Gunning’s Assessing and Correcting Reading and Writing Difficulties. Every chapter of Dr. Gunning’s book deals with an important topic that can drastically affect the success—and the failure—of children with reading disabilities. Although the book is written primarily for graduate students in reading or reading disabilities programs and for teachers, it offers great value to parents who need to advocate for their child with reading disabilities. By understanding its contents (as well as that in our book, Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds), parents can more fully understand what a reading evaluation should look like, what good instruction involves, what their child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) should include. Read more...
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A critical component of beginning reading and word recognition is your child’s ability to isolate, identify, and manipulate or apply sounds that he hears within words. When kindergartners and first graders listen for, identify, and manipulate large or small units of sounds within words, like the sounds of syllables or individual letters, it’s called phonological awareness. When they do this with only the smallest meaningful sounds, sounds that distinguish between words, like the /b/ sound in bat and the /c/ sound in cat, it’s called phonemic awareness. Read more...
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Shortly after meeting me, parents often ask, “What program and services does my child need to overcome his reading disabilities?” They’re surprised when I say, “I don’t know enough about your child and his problems. Tell me more. Exactly what problems does he have? With what components of reading does he struggle? What can’t he do?” My response often surprises and disappoints them. Here’s my explanation.
A Reading Evaluation Needs to Pinpoint the Problem: The Five Areas of Reading
To be effective, programs that aim to improve the reading of children with reading disabilities need to focus on the child’s specific difficulties. Identifying those difficulties requires an evaluation from a reading specialist. Read more...
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After reading our posts on monitoring the progress of children with reading disabilities, several parents and teachers requested more information. If you want more information, we suggest you read Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds, chapters 7 (Monitoring Progress) and 9 (The IEP). We also suggest that you join our mailing list. By joining, you will get a free pdf article, Monitoring Your Child’s IEP: A Focus on Reading (co-authored by Sheila Alber-Morgan, Associate Professor, Ohio State University). We hope these suggestions help.
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The post below was originally published two months ago. I’m republishing it because its topic—monitoring children’s progress—is critically important. The topic is so important that I’ve encouraged university scholars to provide more comprehensive information on one of its recommendations, curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Thus, the Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties (RWQ) will publish a thematic issue on advances in CBM. The issue, edited by Erica Lembke of the University of Missouri, will address many CBM topics, including its use in tutoring, newly created CBM measures for students with cognitive disabilities, and the school-wide use of CBM. Read more...
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After my last post on diagnostic teaching, several parents asked me if other experts in reading disabilities think that reading evaluations should include diagnostic teaching. The answer: Yes.
Below are quotations from well-regarded graduate school textbooks. If the reading specialist will not make diagnostic teaching part of her evaluation, you may want to share these with her:
“Trying to predict which interventions will work well for individual students has not been a fruitful endeavor. Therefore, we must test curricular modifications empirically” (Witt et al., 1997, p. 51). This is exactly what diagnostic teaching does—test curricular modifications and different methods to increase the likelihood that instructional recommendations will work for the child. Read more...
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Perhaps the most important question a reading diagnosis should answer is this: “What instructional strategies will likely prove effective with this child?”
Published tests can’t answer this. Only diagnostic teaching can.
The Importance of Diagnostic Teaching
As Michael Kibby (Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo and director of its Reading Clinic for 36 years) asserts:
Only from diagnostic teaching is it possible to provide to others who might teach this child reading a valid and full description of the milieu that seems most appropriate for the child’s instruction and the methods, materials, and instructional conditions that facilitate learning. Any attempt to describe how a child can learn important reading abilities that does not include diagnostic teaching is simply armchair thinking and of limited validity. (2009, p. 253) Read more...
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Yes. But many reading specialists have little knowledge of autism and other developmental disabilities. Thus you may want to share this column with them.
The Difference
Diagnosing the reading problems of students with autism is similar to diagnosing the reading problems of all children with reading disabilities. What’s different and often interferes with obtaining a valid, effective diagnosis is the student’s label: autistic. It often evokes stereotypes that prevent a close, fine-grained analysis of the student’s functioning in critical areas of reading, such as word identification, word analysis, oral reading fluency, receptive and expressive language, vocabulary and concept development, and comprehension. Deficits in any one of these areas will adversely influence reading achievement. Read more...
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