assessment and Essentials of, Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties

This is my third entry about this text.

David A. Kilpatrick's Book, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, contains four chapters on assessment. Through the window of identifying the root of a reading problem, rather than identifying students for special ed services, the school psychologist examines commercially available assessments in their usefulness for pinpointing challenges so that interventions can be specific to the child.

All too often in my professional career, I have seen RTI or MTSS interventions that are one size fits all. We offer Read 180, or Wilson, or Reading Recovery for all our kids who need a Tier 2 intervention. None of these programs are bad, they just may not address the root of the problem. I was in one school where the MTSS for all students in social and behavioral realms was the same. If they struggled with using appropriate language in class, arriving to class on time, coming to school or completing in class assignments, the same data was collected and intervention was implemented. Oddly enough, this was not effective at changing behavior. The same is true with our struggling readers. They need interventions that are tied to their individual needs.

Kilpatrick sees the need for intervention in the bottom third of the student body (approximately one third of students do not read at grade level). This means that many low average scores should be addressed in spite of the identifier of average in their description. He looks at readers as falling into one of five categories as represented below.

		Language comprehension
		strong	weak
Word reading	strong	Typical	Hyperlexic (students who can read the words but do not know what they mean
	weak	Dyslexic or compensator (late emerging poor readers for whom reading comprehension is greater than 1 standard deviation below verbal skills- timed phonemic awareness and word attack skills are low)	mixed

Of note is his identification of compensators and hyperlexics who may not initially be seen as poor readers or those that are poor readers relative to their other patterns of skills, particularly on timed assessments.

Kilpatrick  describes the subtests or whole tests that can be used to pinpoint the problem area. For measures other than reading comprehension, he recommends that at least two different tests that measure the same skill be administered so that reliability and validity can be assured. One measure that he does recommend is the PAST test. which is available for free, has multiple forms, is quick to administer and reveals student understanding of basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills. It can be found here.

In these four chapters, he develops a differential for reading difficulties. The first chart describes word level reading problems and the second, comprehension challenges.

word level concerns

Nonsense words	Timed words	Untimed words	Phonemic awareness	hypothesis	Reading pattern difficulty	Potential action
w	w	w	w	Limited phonics skills and sight word vocabulary due to phonological-core deficit	Dyslexic or mixed	Train phonemic awareness and phonics skill
w	w	a	w	Limited sight vocabulary due to phonological-core deficit	Compensator or mild dyslexic	Train phonemic awareness and phonics skill
w	w	w/a	w	Incomplete phonological awareness skills; has enough for phonic decoding but not enough for efficient sight word acquisition	Mild dyslexic	Train more advanced phonemic awareness skills and increase exposure to readable connected text
a	w/a	w	a	Inadequate instruction or experience	Reading problem not likely	Improved instruction and greater reading opportunities
w	a	a	a	Inadequate phonics instruction	Reading problem not likely	Additional phonics instruction to prevent limitation in reading program
a	a	a	a	Any word reading difficulties likely due to attentional, motivational, or anxiety issues	Reading problem not likely	Further investigation of attentional, motivational and anxiety issues

w=weak               a=average                           source: Kilpatrick (2015) p 211-212

Comprehension level concerns

Listening comprehension (LC)	Reading comprehension	Verbal IQ score	hypothesis	Reading difficulty pattern	Potential action
w	w	w	General language skills are hindering reading comprehension	Hyperlexic or mixed	Develop language skills; address word level reading skills in students with mixed pattern
w	a+	a+	Poor listening comprehension skills relative to general language skills	Possible attentional or anxiety issues	Address attentional or anxiety issues
a+	Much lower than LC	a+	Word recognition skills are likely effortful and drawing attention from reading comprehension	Dyslexic or compensator	Address word level reading skills

 w=weak              a=average           a+= average or better                    source: Kilpatrick (2015) p 234


Once the probable concern is identified, interventions can be planned. That is the next portion of the book...

phonemic awareness in the Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties

This is my second post on this book. At a third of the way through, there will be more.

David Kilpatrick's Book, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, describes phonemic awareness as the most common root of reading problems. The idea that phonemic awareness has been critical to reading has been around since the 1980s, at least. Race to the Top funds required reading instruction to include this component. Many common assessment tools (ex. DIBELS and AIMSweb) include this area in assessing kindergarten and first grade students. Phonemic awareness skills, however, continue to develop in "normal" readers until the fourth grade.

What are phonemic awareness skills?

There are three main levels of these skills: early, basic and advanced.

Early- preschool to early kindergarten in typical students. Rhyming, alliteration, syllabication and identification of initial sounds. When my children were young, we read lots of Dr. Seuss and nursery rhymes and talked about words like rhyme and alliteration, and played word games with both. These activities are critical.

Basic- kindergarten and first grade. Phonemic blending and segmentation. We have kids put together /b/, /a/, /t/ to get bat, reverse the skill or ask them to sound out or stretch out words.

Advanced- end of first grade to fourth. Phonemic manipulation: delete a sound, substitute a sound or reverse sounds. My son had this young as a splinter skill. He sang "The Wheels on the Bus" with a twist. He would change the initial sound of each word to be the same letter. We had "Bo beels bon bo bus," "Mo meels mon mo mus," "Toe teels ton toe tus" and more. (Try this; it is really hard to do for the whole song.) He would sing in perfect rhythm. He could be asked to switch to another sound and off he would go.

If students fail to develop all these skills they will never become proficient readers. Advanced phonemic awareness is necessary for orthographic mapping- the mental process used to store words for efficient retrieval. Orthographic mapping allows people to have good sight word vocabularies. It can be measured by timed word identification skills. The student I briefly worked with who sounded out nearly every word could read, but it was laborious. He was not fluent and it interfered with his comprehension. If students are struggling with sight words, it may be important to go back to early or basic phonemic awareness development and press forward from there. Students need these early foundations to peg sight words with. Apparently it takes four exposures for a "typical" reader to develop a sight word if they have good phonemic awareness. As a result, reading is key to developing a robust sight word vocabulary. Older students who do not have the ability to do this indicate they may be lacking in phonemic awareness.

I look forward to continuing to read to see what suggestions are proposed for addressing this area.

Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading DIfficulties- believe the research

A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a colleague about the reading instruction we were presenting using the building approved program, LLI. I commented that the students were not paying attention to text clues and relying only on picture clues and memorized text. In the last couple of weeks several articles I had read talked about the challenge of picture clues being the tool of the weak reader whereas strong readers relied on letter and word clues. She argued that she did not believe the research. That picture clues were essential.

This showcases an important concern in education- confirmation bias. We believe the research that agrees with our beliefs. I have seen the phenomenon in gifted education and now I am seeing it in literacy instruction. Since our schools of education promote balanced reading instruction as key and popular reading programs utilize the strategies, it must be so. Unfortunately we seem to buying into a plan that has only modest impact on reading.

Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David A. Kilpatrick identifies this challenge in the opening of the text. He acknowledges the challenge of research access- few teachers who are not currently pursuing higher education at a college or university have access to peer reviewed research in journals. In my experience, even those teachers who subscribe to some sort of educational magazine choose ones that are experiential articles and ones that have quick ideas or discussions of issues such as Mailbox, American Educator, Edutopia, Educational Leadership, The Mathematics Teacher or The Reading Teacher. These publications provide ideas for right now and results of individual experiences, rarely anything solid about research. They tend to be easy to read and provide practical material to support the classroom in the moment, not peer reviewed research articles.

Researchers seem stymied by the disconnect. I am not. Time is a precious commodity for teachers. They need to budget it carefully. Quiet time to read articles from journals they may not have access to is limited. Reviews of materials are often discounted if they do not agree with the bias of the individual. Books tend to be more accessible, but the time and bias issues still abound. Books, however, tend to be more available to individuals who are choosing to pursue information in their field.

This text is an attempt to present research in an accessible way. The writing is straightforward. While multitudinous in text citations demonstrate the basis of the information, the deep statistical information that fill research articles are not present. Each chapter ends with a test yourself multiple choice quiz to help focus the reader and act as a check for understanding. I am looking forward to digesting this text with its advice for helping struggling readers.

Wooden on Leadership

John Wooden and Steve Jamison collaborated to write Wooden on Leadership. I have appreciated his writings along with John Maxwell's. Throughout my blog are entries about some of their writings. Maxwell is clearly influenced by Wooden. This book interestingly follows my reading of Relentless by Tim Grover, another basketball person with a very different view of how to be successful. Wooden's key to success is to be the best you as an individual can be, whereas Grover's is more about achieving the accolades of your particular field. Wooden strives for balance and achieving the best through mastering the fundamentals and practice in connection with positive relationships with your team and family. Grover sees those relationships as secondary and only important in that they help the individual achieve greatness. Wooden is about the team and Grover is about the individual. I prefer the team approach.

I have detailed Wooden's pyramid of success in the past. It is the foundation of his approach to leadership. He tries to embody it so as to demonstrate it's role in creating success. His book starts with an overview of the pyramid and then enters the 10 keys of leadership followed by a section entitled lessons from my notebook which includes passages from his notes and how he thinks they demonstrate skills, strategies and techniques to being a successful leader, regardless of your field. Each of the leadership chapters contains a description of the technique with examples of his time as a coach, a summary of rules to live by and a statement from a former player or coach that reinforces the concept.

Unsurprisingly, the chapter that stuck me most was "Call yourself a teacher." He states that effective leaders "teach those under... [their] supervision how they could perform to the best of their ability in ways to best serve the goals of the team" (p. 92). Not only share the goals of the team, but individually understand how each member needs to grow to optimize chances of achieving the goal. He later uses a concept he calls the laws of learning: "explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction when necessary (and it usually is) and then repetition" (p. 96). This law he repeats in the text at various times. He focuses on demonstration of what makes a person successful and private correction. Public praise for the entire team, not just the star, but the whole team because every person is instrumental in achieving a goal. He does not support rewarding top achievers so much as those that help those achievers become successful. This plays into his idea that it takes ten hands to score a point, another of his rules for leaders.

Another concept I particularly liked was from a piece of advice from Wooden's father- Make each day a masterpiece. Do the absolute best you can do every day. This is a noble and difficult goal. To think that each day you have done your best because you planned, practiced and executed to do better than the day before is truly a challenge. We all have bad days. We need to learn from our mistakes and endeavor to not repeat them. Ambitious goal that if you can do it will undoubtedly lead to success.

Relentless

Tim S. Glover's book, Relentless: Going from Good, to Great to Unstoppable, describes how the best get and stay there. He is professional trainer of top athletes. One of his first patrons was Michael Jordan and his career has developed from there with his facility in Chicago being one of the major go to places for rehabbing professional athletes and those looking to perfect aspects of their game. While he started in basketball, he now works with an assortment of athletes. Stories about working with the names he worked with fill the book.

He describes categories of skill as good- people who pull it off some of the time; closers- people who can usually help a team win; and cleaners- people who consistently, year after year, do whatever it takes to be the best. In order to achieve that level, he says people need to focus on continually getting better, never being satisfied with their performance or, usually, the performance of those around them. They never rest on their laurels. They focus on perfecting their craft with a single minded determination that ignores all else. Family and friends are secondary. Other hobbies are unimportant.

Living this way may enable you to move from great to stellar in your field, but also results in you sacrificing other things. Balance is not a goal for these people. It probably makes them less like people you want to be around unless you share the same goal. While I agree that consistent top performance requires an unwavering commitment, I am struck by how limiting that will be.

Coddling of the American Mind

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, presents an uncomfortable idea that our current parenting and educating techniques are hurting our youth. They present three ideas that as the core of this theory:

• Young people are antifragile- our helicopter parenting results in children who are not able to deal with challenges and believe themselves to be vulnerable and thus require more protections. The authors site this move in the adults towards safetyism is making children more vulnerable and less able to handle the ups and downs of the real world. They recommend that we prepare children for the road rather than smooth the road for the children. They encourage free range parenting where children are taught the skills to handle problems and free play rather than regulated play.
• All people are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias- We reason with our hearts and best believe those that agree with us. Why has "fake" news become so powerful? Because we have not taught the critical analysis of information. The political polarization is a symptom of both this and the next idea.
• All people are prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism- We all believe in a black or white world. We are either right or wrong. No one wants to be wrong so we hang with people who will agree with us rather than those who challenge us to think more deeply.

 The authors discuss how colleges and universities that used to be centers for diverse thought now cater to closed mindedness. Speakers are censored. Students learn that people who disagree with them are promoting violence against them and thus should be stopped from speaking. The authors strongly oppose colleges and universities from preventing controversial speakers present. Free speech should allow the discussion of diverse viewpoints and the freedom to agree with whichever point is best defended. No, we are not talking about promoting white supremacy through violence toward others. But the freedom to express potentially disagreeable ideas. Our students need to be seen as strong enough to handle unpleasant speech and violence cannot be seen to be merely saying hurtful things. They argue for teaching discourse, rhetoric and critical thinking so that people can identify their own values rather than merely accepting those presented to them.

If we cannot debate the merits of an idea with integrity, we cannot call ourselves a civilized and thoughtful society. We need to put down our devices, talk to one another and explore the universe both physically and intellectually so that we can grow. Our children need this freedom as well.