Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!think!yale!bunker!wtm From: patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (Patt Haring) Newsgroups: misc.handicap Subject: Educational Disabilities (2 of 3) Message-ID: <10547@bunker.UUCP> Date: 6 Mar 90 04:44:26 GMT Sender: wtm@bunker.UUCP Reply-To: patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (Patt Haring) Distribution: misc Lines: 487 Approved: wtm@bunker.UUCP Fidonet: None Index Number: 7094 CHAPTER 3 THE INTERACTION OF HEMISPHERIC RELATED STRATEGIES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES The purpose of this Chapter is to provide evidence that the individual difference aspect of LEM has meaningful behavioral correlates in an educational setting. No assumptions were made as to the neuropsychological substrate of LEM. They were used simply as a means of dividing subjects into two groups: those who move their eyes predominantly to the right and those who move them predominantly to the left. Half of the right movers were taught a learning strategy involving verbal rehearsal and the other half a learning strategy involving imagery. The same procedure was followed for the left movers. The question was whether there is a relationship between the typical direction of LEM and the effectiveness of the two learning strategies. Method Subjects The subjects were drawn from a pool of 120 average or above average fifth and sixth graders in a suburban school system. A series of verbal, spatial, imaginal, and informational questions were asked in a face to face situation and the 72 subjects who had the most extreme number of left movements and the most extreme number of right movements participated in the study. The subjects were divided into equal numbers of male and female right and left movers. Stimuli Seventy-two words appropriate to fifth and sixth graders and matched for abstractness, concreteness, and imagery were chosen from the list provided by Pavivo, Yuille, and Madigan (1968). Two equivalent sets consisting of 18 pairs, created from this list, served as the learning stimuli. Two distractor lists of 12 pairs each were also created using the same procedure. Each pair was then photographed and developed as 35mm slide. Procedure Each subject, tested individually, was seated approximately 4 ft. from a screen on which the 18 pairs of words were presented by means of a slide projector for 4 sec. The child was then asked to recall as many pairs of words as possible and the number of correct pairs served as one dependent variable. The subjects were then shown 24 pairs of words, half of which they had already seen and half of which were distractors. These slides were then presented and the subject had to indicate by switch closure whether they had seen the word pair. Both accuracy and response time (in milliseconds) were measured. Following this procedure half of the subjects whose LEM were predominantly leftward and half whose LEM were predominantly leftward were taught a verbal rehearsal strategy in order to improve performance. They were instructed to repeat the pairs of words as many times as possible during the 4 sec interval between pairs. They were then given six practice trials. The remaining subjects were instructed on how to form an integrated image from the word pairs.They were also given six practice trials. The subjects were then tested on 18 new pairs of words using the same procedures as the in the pre-training condition. This effectively created four groups: right movers taught to use either imagery or verbal rehearsal strategies and left movers taught the same strategies. Results There were three dependent measures that were analyzed in this study: the number of pairs recalled, the number of pairs recognized, and the response time for recognition. The design for all three variables was a split plot factorial with Direction (leftward or rightward LEM) and Strategy (verbal rehearsal or imagery) as the between factors and Time (before or after training) as the within factor. The mean number of correct pairs recalled under all conditions is shown in Table 1. Table 1 Mean Number of Word Pairs Recalled for Right and Left Movers Under Verbal Rehearsal and Imagery Instructions _______________________________________________________________________ Set Pre Test Post Test _______________________________________________________________________ Verbal Left Movers 3.39 1.78 Right Movers 1.89 2.61 Imagery Left Movers 2.61 3.28 Right Movers 2.39 2.56 ________________________________________________________________________ The analysis of variance indicated no significant differences involving Direction or Strategy, but there was a significant interaction of Direction x Strategy x Time. Simple effects analysis indicated that children with rightward LEM did not change as a result of imagery instructions, but made a significant improvement as a result of verbal rehearsal instructions. Children with leftward LEM made a significant improvement as a result of imagery instructions, but showed a significant decrement as a result of verbal rehearsal instructions. Mean performance for the recognition scores is presented in Table 2. The analysis of variance again indicated a significant interactions between Direction x Strategy x Time. Table 2 Mean Number of Correct Recognitions ________________________________________________________________________ Set Pre Test Post Test _________________________________________________________________________ Verbal Left Movers 29.28 27.61 Right Movers 28.11 29.44 Imagery Left Movers 29.56 30.67 Right Movers 29.89 29.44 ________________________________________________________________________ The simple effects analysis indicated that children with rightward LEM showed a significant improvement using a verbal rehearsal strategy and children with leftward LEM showed a significant decrement using a verbal rehearsal strategy. The mean reaction times for the recognition task is shown in Table 3. The analysis of variance indicated that there was an overall decrease in reaction time from pre to post testing and the same significant three way interaction of Direction x Strategy x Time. Table 3 Mean Reaction Times (in milliseconds) for the Recognition Task ___________________________________________________________________________ Set Pre Test Post Test ___________________________________________________________________________ Verbal Left Movers 2059 2118 Right Movers 2447 1894 Imagery Left Movers 2244 1829 Right Movers 1846 1627 ___________________________________________________________________________ Simple effects analysis indicated that children with rightward LEM were significantly faster using a verbal rehearsal strategy and children with leftward LEM were significantly slower using a verbal rehearsal strategy. The analyses of the three variables lead to the single conclusion that children who have predominantly leftward LEM should not be taught by a verbal repetition strategy. Discussion >From the theoretical perspective, these results support the findings of Ehrlichman and Weinberger that LEM are a reliable measure of an individual difference variable. It also provides evidence of the validity of LEM; individuals who differed on LEM showed differences on a relevant behavioral measure -- verbal learning. The most important question, however, is whether LEM have any relationship to brain organization. Individuals who had predominantly rightward LEM showed better retention when using the left hemisphere oriented strategy of verbal rehearsal and individuals who had predominantly leftward LEM showed decreased retention when using the left hemisphere oriented strategy. These are the facts, and while it is premature to draw firm conclusions, these facts are consistent with the existence of a relationship between LEM and brain organization. The clearest conclusion from these findings are that children differ in the extent they can benefit from a verbal repetition strategy in learning. From the educational perspective it is clear that there are children in schools who not only do not benefit from a verbal rehearsal strategy, but whose performance is also decreased. Spelling and arithmetic tables are examples of subjects that usually stress a rote memorization based on oral repetition. One alternative would be to have the child repeatedly image the letters of the word or number facts without verbalizing them. When it came time to use the word or number fact the child would recall the image. Educators must become more aware of the individual differences in the way people learn. This becomes even more evident the next chapter where these individual differences can be seen to be at the heart of what has been called reading disability. CHAPTER 4 THE DIAGNOSIS OF READING DISABILITY Although there is general agreement that reading disability is not a single entity, there is considerably less than a consensus as to the number of different syndromes that actually exist. Neuropsychological assessment, the types of errors made with verbal material, cognitive tests, and differences in processing strategies have all been used in the classification of the reading disabled into symptom-related subtypes. As many as five different subtypes of reading disability have been found through the use of neuropsychological tests. For example, Mattis, French and Rapin (1978) reported three groups and Doehring, Honshko, and Byans (1979) distinguished four types. Fisk and Rourke (1979) Petroskas and Rourke (1979) have identified subgroups which were consistent. These subtypes, however, can be considered in terms of the presence or absence of auditory linguistic deficits, a distinction reported throughout the reading disability literature. Subtypes that include auditory linguistic deficits comprise 80 to 90 percent of the total population of reading disabled children. The smaller group has usually been reported to show deficits in visual spatial processing. Boder (1973) examined the nature of the spelling errors made by reading disabled children. She used the term dysphonetic to describe the type of reading disability marked by linguistic and phonetic difficulties; and the term dyseidetic to describe the type which had difficulties with the overall visual spatial aspects of the written word. Boder estimated that the dysphonetic group was four to five times more prevalent than the dyseidetic group. Pirozzolo (1979) used ratings, writing samples, and psychological and neuropsychological tests to separate two reading disability groups that were similar to those suggested by Boder. Bakker (1982) proposed a similar distinction that he related to hemispheric functioning. The auditory linguistic disabled reader were not effective in the use left hemisphere related tasks. There was also an association of the visual spatial disabled reader and the effective use of right hemisphere related strategies. Zenhausern (1987) distinguished these two types on the basis of both reading related tasks and the predominant direction of their lateral eye movements. He found that the majority of children with leftward lateral movements had difficulty determining whether words in their sight vocabulary did or did not rhyme. He also found that group of children with predominantly rightward lateral eye movements had no difficulty in determining whether two words rhymed, but were deficient in determining whether words and pictures represented the same concept. The auditory linguistic group had difficulty converting a word to its sound and the smaller group showed deficits in converting a word to its meaning. He used the terms Phonetic and Semantic to describe this distinction. >From a behavioral perspective, phonetic disabled readers are the children who struggle with every word when they read aloud and thus lose continuity in the text. They are frequently anomic and have a general difficulty with the auditory linguistic aspects of reading, especially the grapheme to phoneme conversion. The Semantic disabled reader, on the other hand, is the child who will give a perfect word for word rendition of text, but has no comprehension of the meaning of that text. The Semantic disabled readers can convert words into their phonetic representation, but this representation is not converted into its meaning. They have no problems with the sound of a word but are at deficit for tasks involving the meaning of words. The original study was based on 13 Phonetic and 13 Semantic readers from the second to fourth grades. One purpose of this research was to determine whether these Phonetic and Semantic subtypes would replicate across the entire elementary school population. A second goal of this study was to replicate the second finding of the original study. The Phonetic disabled readers moved their eyes predominantly to the left the left and Semantic disabled readers predominantly to the right. The second purpose of this research was to be to determine whether lateral eye movements can be used as a marker variable for the two types of reading disability. METHOD Subjects The subjects in this were 160 children from the second to the eighth grades. All we of at least average intelligence. Forty children were selected at grades 2 or 3, grades 4 or 5, grades 6 or 7, and grade 8. Of the 40 children at each age level, 20 were at or above grade level and 20 children were at least one year below grade level in reading. Half of each group were chosen to have rightward LEM and half leftward LEM. The predominant direction of LEM was determined individually for each child. A series of 20 informational questions were asked in a face to face situation and the predominant direction of LEM was noted. Normal readers split evenly between right and left movers, but 84% of the disabled readers were left movers. Materials and Procedure There were four kinds of reading related tasks that used words selected from the individual sight vocabulary of each child. A rhyme task stressed the auditory linguistic aspects of the written word and the remaining three tasks placed more emphasis on the meaning of the words. 1) The rhyme stimuli consisted of 10 each of four types of word pairs: a) words which neither rhymed nor had similar orthography (tree/eats); b) words which were both phonetically and orthographically similar (pool/cool); c) words which were orthographically similar, but did not rhyme (bone/gone); and d) words which were orthographically dissimilar, but rhymed (by/tie). 2) The word match stimuli consisted of 20 word pairs, one in upper case the other in lower case which did or did not represent the same word (TREE/tree, TREE/eats). 3) The word/picture stimuli consisted of 20 word and picture pairs, in which the word and picture did or did not represent the same concept. 4) The synonym/antonym pairs consisted of words which meant either the same or the opposite. Each stimulus was presented on 35 mm slides and projected for 130 ms. The subjects were tested individually and responded verbally as to the whether the words rhymed in the rhyme condition and whether they matched or meant the same in each of the three other conditions. All words used in the study were determined to be in the sight vocabulary of all subjects on the basis of prior testing. RESULTS The number of correct responses for all children on the four grade levels was subjected to an analysis of variance for each of the four tasks. The grouping factors included Grade Level, Reading Ability, and Eye Movement Direction. The normal readers achieved virtually perfect performance on all tasks and their results were not included in the tables. The interaction of eye movement group and the rhyme task was significant (F (3,432 = 29.29, p < 001). The mean number of correct responses for the interaction are presented in Table 1. Table 1 Mean Number Correct on the Rhyme Task for Disabled Readers with predominately Right and Left LEM at Four Grade Levels _______________________________________________________________________ LEM Grade Similar Dissimilar Rhyme Non-Rhyme Rhyme Non-Rhyme _______________________________________________________________________ Right 2-3 17.80 15.20 14.80 14.00 4-5 17.80 17.80 16.40 17.89 6-7 17.80 18.60 18.60 19.30 8 19.90 19.80 19.10 19.70 Left 2-3 16.10 5.90 7.40 14.40 4-5 16.10 10.30 10.20 17.30 6-7 16.80 13.60 12.50 18.50 8 9.60 12.00 10.40 17.60 _______________________________________________________________________ On the basis of the simple effects analysis, those children who had predominantly leftward eye movements were significantly more impaired than those who moved predominately to the right. This was particularly true on those conditions for which the orthography and phonology of the words were inconsistent (bye/tie or bone/gone). Those children with predominantly leftward lateral eye movements are the Phonetic disabled readers who have difficulty with the auditory linguistic aspects of reading. The analyses of variance for the semantic tasks indicated a significant difference between disability groups. The results from the three tasks are presented in Table 2. Table 2 Mean Number Correct on the Uppercase/lowercase, Word/picture and Synonym/antonym tasks for Disabled Readers with Right and Left LEM at Four Grade Levels _______________________________________________________________________ LEM Grade Case Word Synonym _______________________________________________________________________ Right 2-3 15.70 7.90 8.65 4-5 17.50 7.80 6.55 6-7 18.80 13.40 13.05 8 15.90 15.90 15.00 Left 2-3 19.00 17.50 17.15 4-5 19.30 19.30 17.45 6-7 18.10 19.10 18.75 8 17.40 19.70 17.40 ________________________________________________________________________ Again the normal readers performed almost flawlessly and the disabled readers were inferior at every grade level. It was the reading disabled readers with predominately rightward LEM who were the significantly more disabled group for these.tasks. They were significantly inferior on the word matching task (F (1,144) = 4.81, p <.02), the word picture task (F (1,144) = 76.17, p < .001), and the synonym antonym task (F (1,144) = 47.04, p<.001). These children could create the sound of a word from its orthography, but did not understand the meaning of that word. This is a replication of a second type of disabled reader, a Semantic subtype whose deficit involves the meaning of words rather than their phonology. Rightward lateral eye movements is a marker for this subtype. In the past, this subtype has often been identified with visual spatial and perceptual problems. This may be true but it is incidental to their reading disability since they had no difficulty in perceiving the words in the rhyme task. These results support the existence of two subtypes of reading disability. The Phonetic disabled reader has difficulty converting the written form of a word to its phonetic counterpart. The Semantic disabled reader can convert word to its sound, but not its meaning. There were two distinct patterns of errors made by the Phonetic and Semantic disabled readers, but what is the relationship between these patterns and reading disability? The answer to this question lies in the way we teach reading. The next Chapter is a discussion of how these two deficits interact with current reading methods and the effectiveness of a different approach to the reading process. CHAPTER 5 THE THEORY AND REMEDIATION OF READING DISABILITY Current teaching methods almost invariably use an indirect phonological route to meaning in which the written word is converted to its phonological counterpart so that meaning derives from auditory comprehension. In practice, a child comes to school with auditory comprehension, that is, hearing the word "ball" leads to the concept of "a round, bouncy thing". In reading, the letters b-a-l-l must lead to the concept of "a round, bouncy thing". In virtually every case, the child is taught to see the word, say it, and understand it from its sound. This is an effective technique for two reasons. First, it takes advantage the existing auditory comprehension of children; second, it provides the background for the future decoding of new words. As effective as this procedure is for most children, a significant number of individuals are not able to learn under this protocol and they comprise the majority of the children we term "reading disabled." The Phonetic disabled reader has difficulty with the first step of this indirect phonological route to reading -- converting the graphemic form of the word into its phonological counterpart. The Semantic reading disabled readers have no difficulty with this first step; they can make the grapheme to phoneme conversion. For whatever reason, however, the sound of the word does not lead to its comprehension. The standard methods of teaching reading are well-entrenched and educators sincerely believe that this indirect phonological route to meaning is the best. Therefore, remediation for these "disabled readers" means an intensification of what was not successful in the past. Extensive drilling in phonetic skills has led to an emphasis on teaching to weakness, rather than strength. The imbalance is reflected in reading curricula and standardized tests that stress phonetic decoding at the expense of comprehension. Phonetic decoding is a means to the end of comprehension; it has become an end in itself. The purpose of, this Chapter was to investigate the effectiveness of an approach to reading which does not depend on an indirect phonological approach to comprehension. The Direct Access method has one basic principle: the meaning of the printed word should not be derived from the sound of that word. Any procedure that avoids the grapheme to phoneme conversion is consistent with this approach. The child is never required to read aloud, but asked to explain what a passage meant. Trivial deviations in verbiage, e.g., "jet" for "plane", are de-emphasized. The stress is on comprehension rather than a slavish word for word decoding. One of the simplest procedures used in the method involves pairing words and pictures until the written word directly triggers a concept, rather than indirectly through its sound. The child can then construct sentences composed of pictures in parallel with sentences composed of words. Children automatically fill in words like "a", "the", "in", etc. when they comprehend the sentence. In a very short period, the pictures are no longer needed and the written word is understood on its own. Several techniques are available for more abstract concepts. One possibility involves a class discussion of, for example, our legal system. The teacher can then show the class the word "justice" and ask the children to draw a picture of justice. It is not the picture itself that is important, but it serves a link between the written word and its conceptualization by the child. Another possibility is a homework assignment requiring the child to bring pictures to school that represent specific concepts. The Direct Access places only one constraint on the creativity of teachers: Do not teach reading by deriving of the meaning of a word from the way it sounds. Phonic decoding is a skill that should be developed, but it should not serve as the usual reading strategy for these two groups of readers. Maxwell and Zenhausern (1983) applied the method to First Grade children who were "at risk" during the second semester. After 25 half-hour sessions, the children increased their comprehension scores from the 26th to the 56th percentile on the Metropolitan Achievement Test and increased their sight vocabulary by over 100 words. A comparable control group showed no gain in comprehension. Minardi, Zenhausern, and Maxwell (1984) found similar results with Junior and Senior High School children. Using the same regimen of 25 half-hour sessions, the Junior High School students gained an average of 7 months and the Senior High School students an average of 1.4 years. The previous research on the Direct Access method of reading has been limited to a small number of children taught by a single teacher. The purpose of this study was to apply the method in a large scale basis, using a broad range of grades and teachers. Method Subjects A total of 209 children from grades 1 through 10 (with the exclusion of Grade 9) who were at least one year below grade level in reading and 240 children who were reading at least on grade level were the subjects in this study. Materials and Procedure A workshop explaining the theory and practice of the Direct Access reading method was presented to teachers throughout a 32 school District in suburban North Carolina. After the workshop was completed, those teachers who were interested were given further experience. There were no absolute procedures specified, but the teachers were shown various possibilities and were told to use any techniques that did not depend on the indirect phonological route to meaning. Following these sessions the children in the classes taught by the teachers were given the Metropolitan Achievement Test Form L as a pretest measure of their reading ability. The teachers then used the Direct Access method exclusively for 10 weeks, after which time the children were retested on the Metropolitan Achievement Test Form M. Results The results of the reading disabled children and a control group are presented in Table 3. The pre and post scores were subjected to dependent t tests for each grade. The average gain across the whole group was almost 1 year and several grades showed gains of over 2 years. Individual gains of 4 or more years were not uncommon. Given that these results were obtained during only a 10-week period, the Direct Access approach is clearly an effective strategy to use with Phonetic and Semantic reading disabled children. In addition to these objective gains, the teachers reported an extremely positive reaction on the part of the students and have commented on the effects of the method on both spelling and writing composition.