Archive for January, 2005

One to watch

Published by JohnL on 30 January 2005 in News. 0 Comments

Bill Meahan, director of special education for the Ellensburg (WA, USA) local education agency is featured in a report by Pat Muir of the Daily Record. The focus of the story is how Mr. Meahan has responded to problems with staff morale and a situation in which he managed to continue providing educational services for a boy who had assaulted teachers and administrators. That’s about all of substance to the report, but Mr. Muir does provide evidence about the support Mr. Meahan has received from the LEA’s superintendent.

This should be an interesting situation to watch. It’d be great to learn about whether Mr. Meahan’s efforts will result in better outcomes for the special education students in the Ellensburg schools. Will their scores improve on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, Washington’s state-wide assessment? How about performance on Washington’s classroom-based assessments that are tied to the Essential Academic Learning Requirements, Washington’s content standards?

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Special education–overidentification and dumping

Published by JohnL on 27 January 2005 in News. 0 Comments

The Bekeley (CA, USA) Daily Planet reported that the Berkeley local education agency received a report about special education services. According the article by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, the “report concluded that the district’s special education classes have an ‘over-representation of minority students.’” The article indicates that a parent said, “she found the problem with overidentification ‘appalling’ and said that students ’should not get dumped into the special education program’ just because the ‘general education program in the district is not working properly.’”

Several observations:

  • Much of this is the same rhetoric we’ve heard over the past 15-20 years, beginning with the regular education initiative. It’s just penetrated from the academic critics to the level of local boards.
  • The overidentification rates appear to be predicated solely on ethnicity. If the consultant who prepared the report used any form of co-variance to eliminate the contribution of SES to identification, so one could have a cleaner view of the racial issue, the article didn’t report it.
  • The LEA efforts to reform the schools apparently began a year before the report. One has to doubt that a year is sufficient time to make a dent in the problems of students who have achievement problems. How long does it take to teach a child to read, especially a child who’s already been struggling with reading?
  • Is the number of students eligible for special education the right outcome variable? What about kids’ academic and social competence? Instead of aiming for keeping them out of special education, why not aim to improve their competence regardless of placement?
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Can’ts and won’ts

Published by JohnL on 15 January 2005 in Musings. 0 Comments

My post about motivation and reading reminded me of the “can’ts-and-won’ts problem.” When a student doesn’t demonstrate some skill or knowledge, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the student is unable or unwilling to demonstrate it. Is it a “can’t” or a “won’t?” How does one tell the difference?

Testing whether motivation is the critical ingredient—i.e., if it’s a “won’t”—is easy. Find a “reluctant reader.” Identify one or more rewards that the youngster finds highly motivating (e.g., a trip to an ice cream parlor, sponsoring a party for friends, $50, etc.). Tell the student she will earn that reward if she will just read aloud from a previously unseen book. The book should be one that requires real reading—no, reading pictures doesn’t count—and the child doesn’t even have to read the entire book (only a few score or hundred words, depending on the age of the student). The student just has to read the text reasonably accurately.

This simple test provides teachers with readily applicable diagnostic information:

  1. For students who pass this test—that is, can read the material—we simply need to engineer the environment so that reading is rewarded.
  2. For those who cannot read the material, even under optimal motivation, we have to provide effective instruction.

At the very least, we educators need to teach students how to read. Then they will have a choice about whether they want to read. Until we’ve taught them how to read, they have no choice. If you don’t know how to do something, you cannot choose between doing it and not doing it.

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Motivating them is insufficient

Published by JohnL on 15 January 2005 in Musings. 1 Comment

In an article on about.com under the heading “special education,” Sue Watson recommends what she considers important steps to help students with reading problems. The list reveals a common misperception about disabilities.

According to Watson, “The first step in helping struggling readers is to ensure that they experience some form of success - to boost confidence levels.” On subsequent pages she follows this recommendation with others: Make reading enjoyable and use a variety of approaches.

If the target is improving students’ reading outcomes, these recommendations fall short of the mark. The recommendations may be the result of a heartfelt desire to ease children into reading, the hope that a student who is favorably disposed toward reading will be easier to teach. But, as far as I know, those good intentions have no scientific documentation that they help children learn better. Instead, we have copious documentation that systematic, explicit instruction in the building blocks of reading helps children succeed (see the National Reading Panel report). In addition, there are good reasons to believe that success is a powerful motivator.

Sadly, recommendations such as those offered by Ms. Watson are common, not just on the Internet with it’s wide-open publishing standards, but in education itself. They appear to be founded more on theory and personal opinion than evidence. It is up to those of us who know better to counter these sorts of recommendations and demand that educational practices be based on evidence. What methods, techniques, practices, and procedures produce documented benefits? Let’s use those rather than falling back on unfounded intuition.

Furthermore, let’s be wary of misrepresentations of the nature of disabilities. Arguments about the primacy of motivating students with reading problems perpetuate the myth that these problems are a result of the student not trying hard enough. Indolence isn’t the cause of learning problems. These kids are not just lazy. They need effective instruction. “LD” doesn’t stand for “lazy and dumb.” (Try Googling learning disability “lazy and dumb.”)

To be sure, encouraging effort and helping students understand that their successes are related to their effort are important aspects of teaching. But let’s not confuse motivating students with teaching them.

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True?

Published by JohnL on 14 January 2005 in Musings. 0 Comments

Schools Attuned is a comprehensive professional development and service program that offers educators new methods for recognizing, understanding, and managing students with differences in learning. When implemented within schools, this program enriches the way in which all students are educated. (Schools Attuned)

I stand ready to support the idea that schools should adjust to individual differences. Great idea! From the get-go, as I understand it, that’s a foundation of the concept of special education (especially learning disabilties). So, it’s interesting that the AKoM folks–especially Dr. Levine–routinely dump on LD. I guess that foundational concept of LD isn’t consistent with the Schools Attuned philosophy.

More importantly, though, given that we’re living in a time of empirically supported practices (see “scientifically based reading research” in US federal legislation), I have to ask whether the assertion in the lead paragraph from Schools Attuned is, in fact, true. Does the Schools Attuned “program enrich[es] the way in which all students are educated?” How do we know that it does? What’s the evidence? How was “enriches” measured? What’s the body of evidence? How large are the effect sizes?

Right! Am I picking on some little phrase and ignoring the larger idea? Perhaps one would argue I am. But, I’ll ask the same question again: “Where are the data demonstrating that any of the assertions about effects of Schools Attuned produce benefits?” Are any reports more than anecdotal? Have any been peer-reviewed? Would we accept the quality of evidence about Schools Attuned from any other medical speciality?

In the words of Og Lindsley, “Show me the data!”

-JL-

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The basis for determining effectiveness

Published by JohnL on 12 January 2005 in News. 0 Comments

Each article in the current issue of Exceptional Children [2005; 71(2)] addresses “quality indicators” for research. As the editor of the journal and the individuals who contributed to it note, there are multiple ways to study effectiveness. In this special issue, they approach the topic in an inclusive manner, fitting for special education, I suppose. The articles’ topics range from experimental to qualitative research.

I’ll look forward to reading the articles closely. The authors know their individual areas well and will, I am sure, provide trustworthy suggestions about what features of, for example, qualitative studies can serve as benchmarks for judging the quality of those studies.

I’ll also be interested in the extent to which these authors contend that each of the various methods can permit one to make definitive statements about effectiveness. In the opening essay, Sam Odom and colleagues refer to the emphasis on randomized clinical trials in medicine and allied disciplines, an emphasis that some of my colleagues criticize. One of the arguments leveled at RTC and other sanctioned methods–Reading First referred to “scientifically based reading research” (for all its redundancy)–is that the evidence is not absolute, categorical, and unequivocal. Therefore, we shouldn’t follow it.

If no one method can permit one to make absolutely definitive statements, does that mean that all methods offer equally ambiguous evidence? Certainly I wouldn’t agree with that assessment. I’ll see how these articles handle that issue. I’m hoping that readers won’t be lead to confuse the quality of research with the implications for practice. It’s easy to see how we might have very high-quality studies that have little meaning for how to teach effectively, regardless of the research tradition from which they come.

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A little about one of your bloggers

Published by JohnL on 9 January 2005 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Effective instruction has been a central feature of my professional life, a grail I’ve pursued since the 1960s. I started on this quest as a beginning teacher–actually a teacher aide–when I was still in my teens. As a beginner, I was intially enamoured of the pop theories of that time, some of which still resonate with me and are still popular. However, the more I thought about those theories, they seemed to be self-reinforcing. I didn’t see any standard against which I could measure them other than my own internal standards. It seemed like the ultimate game of For-Us-or-Again-Us: If (and only if) you swore allegiance to our theory, your theory was O.K.

I thought my own preferences were just that–my own preferences, not a means of determining effectiveness. I wanted an objective measuring stick. So I began casting about for a meter stick, a scale, a way of comparing theories about education.

Of course, the measure of effectivenes is research validation. I got to that understanding by the courtesy of working with Alice Thompson while at Cal State LA and Steve Sheldon while taking research classes there. Their efforts probably were not aimed at the outcome I sought, but they pushed me to consider important ideas. Abetted by my reading of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, their influence led me to graduate study at the University of Oregon College of Education.

At Oregon I got lucky. I had the good fortune of being advised by Barb Bateman and studying with a group of professors and students who shared my bent. When we applied the effectiveness metric to what was available in education, there wasn’t much that reached beyond the subjective mark. But the conceptual foundation recommended by Zig Engelmann seemed quite solid and the initial data were very respectable. So I started from Zig’s “Direct Instruction.” Although I’d known about DI while teaching in southern California, it became apparent that Engelmann was basing his product development on the same premise as I was basing my academic interests: Compare alternatives and see which most closely approximates the desired outcomes, then refine those alternatives and test them again.

In collaboration with colleagues at Northern Illinois University–especially Mike Epstein and Doug Cullinan, but also Diane Deitz and Alan Repp–I was able to conduct a couple of studies of instructional practices with students with learning disabilities. We learned that it was possible to make a difference in those students’ outcomes.

In 1978 I moved to the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education to work with the faculty of special education on the U.Va. Learning Disabilities Research Institute. At U.Va. I have been fortunate enough to work with wonderful colleagues such as Jim Kauffman and Dan Hallahan–among others–and able to pursue research about how teaching methods change students’ performance.

At present, I am collaborating with Paige Pullen and others (for example, see MyTeachingPartner). Though the specifics vary a tad, the idea is still the same: Identify those teaching methods that produce better outcomes for learners.

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What Works Clearinghouse

Published by JohnL on 7 January 2005 in News. 1 Comment

The What Works Clearninghouse is a potentially wonderful resource for those of us who care about communicating about those methods that produce benefits for learners. In its overview, the WWC says,

The WWC promotes informed education decision making through a set of easily accessible databases and user-friendly reports that provide education consumers with ongoing, high-quality reviews of the effectiveness of replicable educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies) that intend to improve student outcomes. To do this, the WWC uses standards for reviewing and synthesizing research. The WWC is currently conducting systematic reviews of existing research, and producing study, intervention, and topic reports.

Established in 2002, it has issued one report after spending most of its first years organizing and planning. That report is about middle school math curricula. I’ve got to wonder about the choice of middle school math as the first topic, but I’m glad the clearinghouse is there. What would be your first choice of topics? Other topics–beginning reading and character education, for example–are listed as up-coming foci.

The WWC will deserve attention over the next few years. Teach Effectively will be attending!

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