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When companies that sell instructional software used to come calling on Reid Lyon, expert on reading instruction and former advisor to President Bush, he played a little game. First, he listened politely to the sales reps' enthusiastic pitches and colorful demonstrations of how computer software can build reading skills in new ways. Then he asked to see their technical manuals.

"I always found nothing in there that would help the consumer determine if this stuff really works," said Lyon, who last year ended a 10-year stint as chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which sponsors studies on reading. Regarding software, Lyon said, he would "rarely see any data that I would consider credible." These encounters with software makers happened so often-three to four times a month in Lyon's experience-that he observed a pattern. "They always came in excited, and left very depressed."

Educational software makers may get rebuffed by authorities like Lyon, whose endorsements, companies believed, could lead to governmental stamps of approval, and thus explosive sales. But they usually get warmer receptions in the offices of the nation's school superintendents, who are, after all, their primary customers. The system was not supposed to work this way. President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) famously requires that any instructional materials supported by federal aid be proven to work through "scientifically based research." Unfortunately, scientific proof is defined in many ways. In the world of education software, definitions abound.

Wrestling with Slippery Evidence

According to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the primary overseer of research within the Department of Education, "scientifically based research" fits the following criteria: It randomly assigns its test subjects to comparable groups; it yields reliable, measurable data; if the study makes any claims about what causes its effects, it "substantially eliminates plausible competing explanations"; its methods are clear enough that other researchers can repeat or extend them; and, finally, the study has been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal or equivalent panel of "independent experts."

But not everyone reads bulletins from the Department of Education, or interprets them the same way. Purveyors of education products of all kinds make claims that they're based on scientific proof, and thus "aligned" to federal requirements. A good many trot out studies, sometimes great numbers of them, that appear to have followed one or more steps that are hallmarks of gold standard scientific research. A select few software programs (such as Cognitive Tutor, an unusually sophisticated math program, and Fast ForWord, a language program) have gone through at least some careful vetting. But the vast majority fall somewhere along the other side of the scale. As Lyon puts it, claims "are based on any kind of document-whether it's an unpublished technical manual, an opinion piece, or an editorial. These people either don't understand the law's requirements, or they're trying to game the system."

Federal authorities were supposed to lend districts a helping evaluative hand. This was to be done primarily through a project funded by the IES called the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). Created in 2002, the WWC gathered a team of top-flight research experts whose mission was to review studies done on a range of instructional packages-both traditional and electronic-and rate the quality of their achievement data (see Figure 1). After four years and an expenditure of $23 million, the WWC had evaluated studies on only 32 products. While the WWC itself earned good ratings for the rigor of its work, plenty of people were frustrated with how little was getting done-and how few studies met the agency's standards. After complaints mounted, the WWC sped up its work. By December 2006, it had reviews out on 51 products. To accomplish this, the WWC went through 255 studies. Still, the vast majority of studies (75 percent) did not meet the agency's scientific standards, even with some "reservations."

By this time, critics were calling the WWC "the Nothing Works Clearinghouse." The nickname carries an important double meaning. To some, it's another example of governmental blockheadedness-specifically, that understanding how teaching and learning work in the real world is beyond the skill of a federal agency. To others, including many leaders in the research community, the message is actually more harsh. It is that most new classroom gimmicks don't add much of value, and studies packaged to suggest otherwise are to be treated with great suspicion. In fairness, suspicious research sometimes contains perfectly innocent flaws. That's because truly scientific research is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and costly-and thus very rare-which is precisely why the WWC has found so few studies to be satisfactory.

To compensate for the WWC's academic outlook and pace, many other organizations, both private and governmental, have developed their own evaluation systems to help schools navigate the dizzying array of curricular products on the market today. (These include a RAND Corporation resource, called the Promising Practices Network; the Comprehensive School Reform Quality Center, from American Institutes for Research; the Best Evidence Encyclopedia, out of Johns Hopkins University; and even a global survey called the International Campbell Collaboration.) While some offer useful information, their criteria and standards vary widely. And this may further confuse, or mislead, school purchasing agents.

The IES has since 2003 been working on its own evaluation of educational software, through "gold standard" methods of scientific research. The ambitious $15 million study, due sometime early in 2007, has some peculiar characteristics. IES did not begin by selecting the most popular products, but instead asked software producers to volunteer; it then chose 15 products from among those that did. And while the evaluation methods of IES appear to have been exacting, the study will answer nothing more than the most general question: Does educational software, as a class, tend to work? The individual evaluations of the 15 packages will not be released.

This is odd for two reasons. First, the basic question about software's general effectiveness has long been answered: as a whole, it works no better than cheaper traditional materials. (Former North Carolina State professor Thomas Russell watched so many studies come to this conclusion over the years that he eventually compiled a book on the subject. Covering 355 different studies done since the early 1900s, the book was titled, aptly, The No Significant Difference Phenomenon.) The more precise answer is, it depends on which software you're using, with what ages, and in what circumstances. But if you are a teacher or administrator trying to make a shopping decision, "this [study] isn't going to help you," admits the IES study's lead researcher, Mark Dynarski of Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., in Princeton, New Jersey. "We're trying to help Congress, which is spending more than $700 million a year to support technology." As basic as the general answer may be to education insiders, Dynarski believes it will be news to policymakers. "If it is this difficult to know whether this stuff helps, why is everyone so anxious to know whether to purchase it?"

The second oddity to the IES arrangement is the bargain it struck. To be included in the study, companies had to donate software for 132 schools and teacher training. In return, they get two important gifts: a free study, complete with a federal stamp of approval, and the study's individual evaluations. Companies can package and spin those evaluations however they like, since no one besides IES will have those details. "I don't know what they will do with the data," Dynarski said.

All of which raises a very large and thorny question: What really does happen, on the ground, inside the schools, when research spin and marketing hype collide with desperate classrooms?

Money, Money Everywhere

Software sales to schools have certainly been robust. According to Simba Information, a media analysis firm based in Stamford, Connecticut, the nation's K-12 schools bought $1.9 billion of electronic curricular products in 2006. While that is less than a fourth of the instructional materials market as a whole, the electronic sector's growth has been vigorous-up 4.4 percent from 2005 to 2006, as compared with the 2.6 percent growth rate of the overall instructional products market.

Among the many electronic products that schools buy, the most visible have been those geared toward reading. Building up the nation's reading skills was of course the main impetus behind No Child Left Behind. Today, schools can pick from a cornucopia of federally funded initiatives in this domain. There is Reading First, which aims $1 billion a year at grades K-3; various funds for "supplemental" products; special programs to promote educational technology or "comprehensive school reform"; and numerous initiatives under Title I, the overarching federal fund for poor students.

This plethora of options-and money-has produced an abundance of new marketing opportunities for software companies. Strangely, one of the richest of those is NCLB's scientifically based research requirement. Conceived as a strict rule with clear methodological standards, it has instead become a versatile tool-a Cuisinart for raw statistics, ideal for marketing hustle and deception. It has not helped matters that, as with many laws, it is beyond the ability of those it affects most to understand its crucial details; nor did the law's creators endow it with any sort of enforcement system.

L.A.'s $50 Million Gamble

Consider the story of Waterford Early Reading, distributed by Pearson Digital Learning. Pearson is the nation's leading seller of educational software, and its Waterford program is used in 13,000 classrooms in all 50 states. The WWC has not yet evaluated Waterford, but it is one of the 15 products that IES has elected to study.

So what could be known about products like Waterford if government evaluators chose to look into and report on the daily experiences of teachers and students? One particular school district, Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), has a long and remarkably troubled history with this product. In July of 2001, LAUSD decided to spend nearly $50 million on Waterford, instantly making itself the company's largest customer.

Waterford is designed for the earliest readers, students in grades K-2. It requires students to spend 15 to 30 minutes a day with various multimedia exercises, and costs $200 to $500 per student. In launching the program, Roy Romer, then LAUSD superintendent, said this "is like putting a turbocharger in a car engine. We are going to accelerate reading performance in Kindergarten and first grades."

Several years later, the district's own evaluation unit pronounced the program a failure. In a 2004 report, its second with negative findings, the evaluators said, "There were no statistically significant differences on reading assessments between students who were exposed to the courseware and comparable students who were not exposed to the courseware."

Some teachers found the program helpful, but many did not. Pearson and other supporters of the program argued that Waterford's effectiveness was compromised by the fact that teachers didn't fully use the product-and when they did, they often used it incorrectly. But L.A.'s last evaluation found that "neither the amount of usage nor the level of engagement had an impact on achievement."

The report, which did not make the news until early 2005, stunned L.A. school officials. Even Romer backtracked. "As I looked at this, it didn't provide as much bang for the buck as I would have liked," he told the Los Angeles Times. The district has since scaled back the Waterford program, using it as more of a sideline specifically for students with learning difficulties. (One problem was that Waterford was taking time away from students' primary literacy lessons, thereby causing actual declines in achievement.) Teachers and administrators both say sidelining Waterford has helped. But it also means that the district is getting a lot less for its $50 million than it planned on. School board members soon questioned the wisdom of the whole venture.

What happened here? And what lessons do Waterford's rise and partial fall in Los Angeles offer education policymakers, not only in other states but also in Washington?

The first lesson is to beware of seemingly persuasive numbers. Many curriculum producers started promoting their "scientific" research very soon after NCLB required it-an impossible feat, considering the many years it takes to conduct solid scientific studies.

How does questionable research get produced? In Waterford's case in Los Angeles, Julie Slayton, an analyst in LAUSD's Program Evaluation and Research Branch and one of the authors of the Waterford evaluations, says Pearson did not try to tilt the evaluators' basic data, "but they did their best to make the report come out favorably. They tried to make it focus on implementation instead of effectiveness." In other words, Pearson wanted the question to be about the district's wobbly use of Waterford-not whether the program itself inherently worked.

After failing to change the district's opinion, Pearson prepared a preliminary evaluation of its own-a "briefing packet" for Superintendent Romer, full of numbers indicating that Waterford was producing dramatic achievement gains. Ted Bartell, director of research for LAUSD, was not pleased. In a memorandum dated May 8, 2002, he urged Pearson to spell out "the methodological limitations" of its studies. Bartell argued that Pearson's sample sizes (60 students) were too small for solid conclusions to be drawn from them; that there was no evidence that Waterford and not other factors caused the gains; and that the gains were too small to be meaningful in any case, or to be representative of the district as a whole.

In the following months, Pearson continued to generate numbers indicating success, but the data drew from problematic sources. Some used the Academic Performance Index (API), which covers all grades in a school; this confounded the picture of K-2, where Waterford was used. Some involved the California English Language Development Test (CELDT), which is meant only for non-English speakers and tests advanced literacy skills that Waterford doesn't directly teach. Others drew from reading inventories created by Pearson itself. "They kept using gains and measures that are not relevant to their program," says Lorena Llosa, a former LAUSD research analyst who was completing a doctorate in applied linguistics that employs CELDT data.

In retrospect, Slayton says, "Pearson does an enormously aggressive job. They pressured us. They are in your face. They are obnoxious, and they don't go away. They are very, very good at giving people a show."

Before Los Angeles invested in Waterford, there were plenty of signs that the program might not work quite as the company promised. For years, Pearson, like many companies, had been gathering studies that offered evidence of Waterford's effectiveness. But various independent evaluators had pointed out that the bulk of these studies have methodological problems (lack of control groups, small sample sizes, missing information, numbers based on subjective survey data, and so forth). "In light of these limitations," the LAUSD evaluators said in their first report, in 2002, "much of the information from these evaluations should be interpreted with caution."

Why didn't Los Angeles officials do that? One reason is that researchers who evaluate classroom exercises and educators who work inside those classrooms represent two often conflicting cultures-this is lesson Number Two. As an illustration, when Ronni Ephraim, the district's chief instruction officer, was asked if she had looked at the research on Waterford before supporting its use in LAUSD, she said she had not, largely because it did not seem relevant. "Every classroom situation is different," she says. "And nothing compares to L.A. I'd rather listen to my own teachers." Ephraim's worldview is broadly shared. To the average administrator, the sensations of success or failure inside your own classrooms are going to feel a lot more relevant than abstract statistics drawn from schools on the other side of the country. Is it any wonder, then, that NCLB's scientific research requirements have been so widely ignored?

To researchers, however, Ephraim's way of thinking can make an instruction method look like it's working when it's not. All too often, some other environmental factor is driving the improvement; sometimes, in fact, the gains are just normal growth associated with getting older. For reassurance that none of this is the case, researchers commonly begin by looking for two facts in particular: first, studies of the program published in independent, refereed journals-ideally those of high repute; and second, the researchers' use of truly comparable groups.

So far, very few commercial programs meet these standards-although many claim they do. One such example is Renaissance Learning, Inc., whose lead product, Accelerated Reader (AR), is used in more than half the nation's public schools. Renaissance has built such a following behind AR that it regularly holds massive annual conferences that feel like religious revival meetings. Testimonials at these conferences are typically adorned with lengthy, seemingly solid studies proving AR's power. Yet none of these studies have held up to serious scrutiny. "These studies all suffer from serious confounds or design problems that make it impossible to show that AR improves reading," says Tim Shanahan, professor of urban education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and director of its Center for Literacy. Shanahan also was a member of the National Reading Panel, the group of reading experts chosen by congressional mandate that published an exacting report in 2000 evaluating decades of research on reading instruction.

Other commercial packages, both computerized and traditional, have not fared much better. In the What Works Clearinghouse ratings, not a single product has more than one study fully meeting WWC research standards. This includes two well-respected software packages: I CAN Learn and Cognitive Tutor. It should be noted, however, that good research is not a quick sign of product effectiveness. Fast ForWord, for example, had one study that cleared the WWC's top bar. That study found that while Fast ForWord was effective with language development, it was ineffective with reading achievement.

Although Waterford has yet to be reviewed by the WWC, it has been treated to four evaluations published in peer-reviewed journals. The first was a 2002 study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, which found Waterford to be helpful in only one of nine areas the researchers tested. The second, in 2003, was a mixed evaluation in Reading Research Quarterly, the journal of the International Reading Association. Why the ambivalence? "The more careful the study, the more mixed the results. That's the punch line," explains Tracy Gray, an expert on educational technology with American Institutes for Research.

The next two studies-a 2004 evaluation in the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR), the publication of the National Reading Conference, and a 2005 article in Reading & Writing Quarterly-were both positive. But it's not clear these were full or fair contests. Neither study says much about what the non-Waterford students did while their peers played with the new computers; typically, the "control group" gets nothing of comparable novelty or potential power.. The 2004 study, Lyon says, suffers from "fatal flaws." And the 2005 study used unusually small test pools: 46 students, who were divided into four even smaller sub-groups. Three of these four, including a non-Waterford group, all made gains. So the study's praise for Waterford rests on one small group: 12 low-performing 1st graders who did not use Waterford. "That's promising, but it's not enough evidence to justify spending a lot of money," says Shanahan.

Pinning Down the Truth

These varied interpretations illustrate yet another lesson: Experts don't all agree on what constitutes good research. As an example, Wayne Linek, professor of education at Texas A&M University, in Commerce, Texas, and co-editor of the JLR, finds Lyon's view too narrow. True experimental designs that compare treatment groups to untreated "control" groups can turn students into "guinea pigs," which Linek considers unethical. Furthermore, Linek says, these kinds of studies can lean on quantitative measures-frequency of eye movements, for example, or recognition of certain letters-that are suspect and thus "bad predictors."

Linek is partly right to complain about the current obsession with measurable data, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the data are critical-they allow other researchers to replicate the original study's findings, or take them further. On the other hand, any study that looks for data in obscure factors like eye movements can be justly criticized for missing the main event, despite the fact that it qualifies for publication in any number of relatively credible journals.

Linek's first point raises an even more important question: What's wrong with turning students into guinea pigs, anyway? Medical researchers do this with people all the time. If mistakes are going to be made, isn't it more humane to make them with a small number of test subjects than with the general population?

While the research community debates such questions, the commercial sector has felt free to devise its own interpretations. Andy Myers, chief operations officer for Pearson Digital Learning, takes a sunny view of Waterford's scientific grounding. "In our experience," he says, "the more in-depth the evaluation process is, the more the Waterford program shines." When asked about the weaknesses that Lyon and others see in the Waterford studies, Myers acknowledged the studies' limitations. Then, echoing Ephraim, L.A.'s chief instruction officer, Myers questioned the relevance of the research itself. "The studies may or may not meet the rigorous standards of the What Works Clearinghouse," he said. "But what's more important to a district is, 'Does it work with our students?' Then they're going to want to expand it." When a prominent company like Pearson dismisses the quantitative research, it exploits the fact that teachers and their administrators don't understand it, and excuses them for disregarding it.

If the education world has been living in a kind of scientific denial, that era may be fast drawing to a close. At this point, the advocates of classic, quantitative science clearly have the ear of the Bush administration. And they are setting today's education standards. With its next round of software research, IES will release individual evaluations. It is also expanding its evaluations to include textbooks. Eventually, a complete list of governmentally approved product ratings will be just a mouse click away. That means that someday, it will be easy for the marketplace-namely, district superintendents and their purchasing agents-to embrace high scientific standards. When that time comes, the spoils won't go to companies that have busied themselves ginning up studies full of tilted numbers. The victors will instead be those who practice true R&D-that is, companies that dare to use these intervening years of confusion to subject their materials to research that is both rigorous and independent.

Todd Oppenheimer is the author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, which was a finalist for the 2003 book award from Investigative Reporters & Editors. He can be reached at www.flickeringmind.net.

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When companies that sell instructional software used to come calling on Reid Lyon, expert on reading instruction and former advisor to President Bush, he played a little game. First, he listened politely to the sales reps' enthusiastic pitches and colorful demonstrations of how computer software can build reading skills in new ways.

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Reading Rockets

The Access center suggests,"Reading programs are beneficial to reading instruction because they allow students to learn at their own pace; teach phonics with sound, student interaction, and immediate feedback; and allow students to read animated books. Some programs read stories that students write on the computer. Students may be scheduled for instructional or remedial time with the computer."

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References

Click the "References" link above to hide these references.

http://www.autoskill.com/ - A helping hand for literacy, this is the home site for the Autoskills computer program, which is beneficial for students who are at risk or have a reading disability and for ESL students.

http://www.bcps.org/offices/
lis/models/tips/readingpage/motivation.html - This Baltimore County ( Maryland) Board of Education Web site has activities, booklists, author lists, lesson plans, and more.

http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/
Business_to_Business/Education/
By_Subject/Reading_and_Writing/Teaching_and_Learning_Aids/ - This site presents lists of programs. Some are free and some require purchase of a program.

http://disney.go.com/disneyhand/learning/readingtogether/ - This site encourages parents and their children to read entertaining stories together. The site offers downloadable reading tips and a colorful idea book and bookmarks.

http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr183.shtml - Education World's Online Book Incentive program provides online quizzes to test students' comprehension of books they have read. Students choose library books from an online list, read them, and then take the quiz. The material is appropriate for K-8 students.

http://www.house.gov/fattah/education/funandrec.htm - Pennsylvania's Congressman Fattah's Web site offers literacy information.

http://www.netn.net/14113.htm - This site has many interesting science, early education, activity, and organization links for elementary school teachers and for parents of elementary school children. Some of the sites are free and some charge a fee for their materials.

http://www.starfall.com - This site offers phonics instruction and books that the computer reads aloud with the student.

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Click the "References" link above to hide these references. http://www.autoskill.com/ - A helping hand for literacy, this is the home site for the Autoskills computer program, which is beneficial for students who are at risk or have a reading disability and for ESL students.

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By Kimberly Moore Kneas, Ph.D. and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.

Early Childhood Today: Are young children's brains (ages three through six) well suited to the use of technology? (We define technology as children using cameras, computers, tape recorders and video cameras in classroom projects.) If so, how? Are some forms of technology better than others for these specific age levels?

Dr. Perry: In order to answer that question we must consider some of the genetic biases of the human brain. For 99 percent of the time we have been on the planet, we lived in small hunter-gatherer groups of about 40 to 50 people. Our brains developed specialized capabilities for social affiliation, communication and various kinds of symbolic representation. Our cultures evolved through social interactions, initially without written language. The development of written language changed the way human beings developed, in large part by influencing brain development and expressed new brain-mediated capabilities that had previously been un-expressed.

I see technology doing the same things today. The brain clearly could not have a "genetics" specific for the use of a joystick. Nor could the brain have a genetics specific for continuous attention to a two-dimensional moving image such as those in the television. Yet external symbolic representation such as the written word, visual images on television, and complex three-dimensional videography are all sensed, processed, stored, and acted on by the human brain. Because the brain literally changes in response to experiences, these "new" (from a historical perspective) experiences (the written word or television) cause changes in brain development, brain organization, and brain function that were never expressed hundreds of generations ago.

Modern technologies are very powerful because they rely on one of the most powerful genetic biases we do have — the preference for visually presented information. The human brain has a tremendous bias for visually presented information. Television, movies, videos, and most computer programs are very visually oriented and therefore attract and maintain the attention of young children.

The problem with this is that many of the modern technologies are very passive. Because of this they do not provide children with the quality and quantity of crucial emotional, social, cognitive, or physical experiences they require when they are young. The developing child requires the right combination of these experiences at the right times during development in order to develop optimally. This cannot happen if the child is sitting for hours passively watching television.

Sitting young children in front of a television for hours also prevents that child from having hours of other developmental experiences. Children need real-time social interactions; technology such as television can prevent that from happening.

On the other hand there are many positive qualities to modern technologies. The technologies that benefit young children the greatest are those that are interactive and allow the child to develop their curiosity, problem solving and independent thinking skills.

ECT: Do you see the use of specific things like computers as part of an early childhood curriculum as being powerful enough to change brain development the same way you've just described television?

Dr. Perry: Absolutely. I think the difference between computers and television is that television tends to be quite passive. You sit and you are watching and things are happening in front of you but you don't do anything. Children are natural "manipulators" of the world — they learn through controlling the movement and interactions between objects in their world — dolls, blocks, toy cars, their own bodies. With television, they watch and do not control anything. Computers allow interaction. Children can control the pace and activity and make things happen on computers. They can also repeat an activity again and again if they choose.
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ECT: As you look at 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds being offered opportunities like using cameras and tape recorders and video cameras in the classroom, do you think that based on your comments earlier on how children develop with real-time activities, do you think they have the capability of understanding and using those tools well?

Dr. Perry: That's actually a really good question. Preschool children are still having significant cognitive growth. In a very real sense, children think differently than adults. This is so because their brains have not yet completely developed. So to tape a conversation and replay it for an adult means something entirely different than when a three-year-old hears their voice on a tape. These experiences can be very positive and mind-expanding for a child — as long as they are done at the right time.

Children need real-life experiences with real people to truly benefit from available technologies. Technologies should be used to enhance curriculum and experiences for children. Children have to have an integrated and well-balanced set of experiences to help them grow into capable adults that can handle social-emotional interactions as well as develop their intellectual abilities.

I think that balance and timing are the keys to healthy development. Provide the right kinds of experiences at the right time. For example, if you take a newborn and do not hold that infant and put her in a seventh grade classroom and leave her for the afternoon, it's not a good experience. It can actually be abusive. But, if you take the 14-year-old child and rather than having them spend the afternoon in school, you hold and rock them all afternoon, that is not the right experience at the right time for that child. When a six-month-old child is strapped into a chair in front of a videotape designed to teach them a different language, that is a different experience than an eight-year-old child listening to the same tape. The infant's experience would be totally inappropriate, but the eight-year-old's may be great. What's important is when experience is provided and how it's mixed in with other crucial experiences.

ECT: Your comments begin to address an issue that's important today. As we move into the 21st century with pressure to gain experiences in technology, specifically computers, would you address how parents and early childhood educators could specifically work together to create this balance for young children?

Dr. Perry: While technology can help us teach children, in the end our children learn from us. Parents and teachers must act as facilitators in children's learning. For example, sitting down together and using playing cards is a very cognitive experience. They can learn how to add, they can learn how to predict, they can laugh, and they can learn how to win. In their interaction with a parent they're using this externalized object which is a playing card and a game. A very similar thing can happen with emerging technologies. I believe parents and teachers can take advantage of the interactive qualities of a computer to enhance the experiences available to children.

As parents think about the future they need to realize two things: technology is not going to go away and we are in the midst of a major sociocultural quantum shift. These technologies are revolutionizing the world our children will live in. So our task is to balance appropriate skill-development with technologies with the core principles and experiences necessary to raise healthy children.

We must keep the core principles of healthy development in mind as we incorporate these technology and tools. If we do that we'll be fine. And at the heart of any healthy child is the opportunity for enriching and nurturing interactions with other human beings. I think the key to making technologies healthy is to make sure that we use them to enhance or even expand our social interactions and our view of the world as opposed to using them to isolate and create an artificial world.

Unfortunately, technology is often used to replace social situations and I would rather see it used to enhance human interactions. And I think that can happen.

ECT: Earlier you began to discuss some of the pitfalls that you see with respect to using technology with children. Do you have any other thoughts or anything you would specifically like to cover there?

Dr. Perry: One of the obvious issues that all parents and even the people that develop multimedia material struggle with is controlling access to content that may not be developmentally appropriate. There are going to be computer programs and sites on the Internet and television shows that have content that may be appropriate for an 18-year-old, but very inappropriate for a preschool child. It means that in an environment where there is not parental control or the possibility for supervision, a child may have access to content that has extreme violence or presents inappropriate or destructive concepts such as racism, misogyny, or age-inappropriate sexuality. In the end, as with all other tools, adults must protect children from misuse or inappropriate access.

As we begin to create more child-sensitive television, for example, we will have to recognize that young children will understand in different ways from adults. For example, a 4-year-old child seeing the Oklahoma bombing — or a plane crash coverage on the news multiple times may think that buildings are blowing up all over the place and many planes crashed — rather than understanding that these multiple stories are actually from single events. And so access to information that is developmentally appropriate is something that we need to be very concerned about.

ECT: Would you address how you see specific opportunities for the use of technology to support children, say with special needs, are at-risk or who need assistance with language development?

Dr. Perry: Yes, in fact we have seen the use of technology here work very well to help children. The use of specialized computer programs has really helped a lot of kids that we work with. Even on the simplest level, if a child has some sort of fine motor or large motor problem so that their handwriting is very immature and very slow and looks sloppy, their esteem about their work product or their homework is very low. So they may be very reluctant to work hard because they always get negative feedback. They hand in papers that are all messy. You put them on a word processor and they can hand in papers that are clean and neat and they can see how to spell words correctly. Just very simple, non-specialized, software can be very helpful if used in the right way.

In addition, there are a number of specialized programs that allow children with certain information-processing problems to get a multimedia presentation of content so that they can better understand and process the material. They are able to see the written words and see a visual image and hear the sounds — all at the same time. Combining these sensory-modalities helps a child to more efficiently internalize information about a topic. If they have, for example, an auditory processing difficulty or a reading disorder they may be very bright but they don't read very efficiently so if something is read to them on a CD-ROM with visual images they are better able to internalize the information. This helps these children feel better about themselves because they perform better. They're not as afraid of school anymore.

There are emerging technologies used in traditional video games (e.g., Sega, Nintendo) that our group is trying to get dedicated to alternative interactive games with more stimulating but non-violent themes. We are hoping to use a variety of game-like models to teach kids language, to teach children about self-esteem, to teach children about the impact of trauma and how it can be overcome, for example. I think that when these technologies are actually used for more than entertainment we're going to see tremendous positive benefits.

Even now there are a number of good software programs with a primary educational focus on mathematics or reading. These programs, which are very engaging, challenge children to read better and learn how to solve math problems. When information is presented in a fun and engaging way, it is a lot easier than looking at a single page that has a bunch of columns of numbers you're supposed to add up.

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Dr. Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., is an internationally recognized authority on brain development and children in crisis. Dr. Perry leads the ChildTrauma Academy, a pioneering center providing service, research and training in the area of child maltreatment ( www.ChildTrauma.org). In addition he is the Medical Director for Provincial Programs in Children's Mental Health for Alberta, Canada. Dr. Perry served as consultant on many high-profile incidents involving traumatized children, including the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado; the Oklahoma City Bombing; and the Branch Davidian siege. His clinical research and practice focuses on traumatized children-examining the long-term effects of trauma in children, adolescents and adults. Dr. Perry's work has been instrumental in describing how traumatic events in childhood change the biology of the brain. The author of more than 200 journal articles, book chapters, and scientific proceedings and is the recipient of a variety of professional awards.

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Using Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom

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By Kimberly Moore Kneas, Ph.D. and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Early Childhood Today: Are young children's brains (ages three through six) well suited to the use of technology? (We define technology as children using cameras, computers, tape recorders and video cameras in classroom projects.) If so, how?

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According to Francine Warlde, computers should be use to enhance and help develop students' education.
She states, "Integrating Technology Into the Overall Curriculum Use of technology in the early childhood program must not be a goal unto itself: the purpose is not to teach children how to use computers; they can do this as they get older, just as they can learn to drive a car later in their lives (Wardle, 1999). Appropriate use of technology in the classroom is to expand, enrich, implement, individualize, differentiate, and extend the overall curriculum. And, obviously, curricula goals change with age, and differ from program to program." Many computer enhanced programs are highly adaptive and help teachers to differentiate instruction. The problem with using computer programs is that some are not of high quality.

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Earlychildhood NEWS - Article Reading Center

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Earlychildhood NEWS is the online resource for teachers and parents of young children, infants to age 8. You will find articles about developmentally appropriate practice, child health, safety and behavior as well as links to teacher resources and networking opportunities.

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Waterford Early Program: What Works Clearinghouse

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Waterford Early Program: What Works Clearinghouse

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The recent 2007 report conducted by What Works Clearinghouse about  Waterford seems to indicate that the CAI program Waterford may not be as effective as the program developers claim. "One study of Waterford Early Reading program met the What Words Clearinghouse evidence and standards with reseravations."  The sample size was small and only 70 students were given the treatment. The treatment was researched in six schools.

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Does the Waterford Early Learning Program Have a positive effect on student achievement?

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Does the Waterford Early Learning Program Have a positive effect on student achievement?

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Textbook Students score better than computer assisted learning student

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Textbook Students score better than computer assisted learning student

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Does computer-assisted instruction really help to improve the learning process? - PubMed - NCBI

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Med Educ. 2001 Oct;35(10):983-9. Clinical Trial; Randomized Controlled Trial; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

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Students with disabilities benefit from computer assisted learning.  According to Hall, T.E., Hughes , C.A. , & Filbert, "M.CAI programs in reading for students with LD were most likely to employ drill-and-practice procedures, followed by strategy instruction, then simulation.The skill areas upon which CAI reading programs focused were evenly split between word recognition and reading comprehension, followed by language/vocabulary, then prereading skills instruction. Most students improved in reading when using computer-assisted instruction.Students with LD receiving CAI in reading increased performance in reading decoding and reading comprehension."

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Students with disabilities benefit from computer assisted learning.  According to Hall, T.E., Hughes , C.A. , & Filbert, "M.CAI programs in reading for students with LD were most likely to employ drill-and-practice procedures, followed by strategy instruction, then simulation.The skill areas upon which CAI reading programs focused were evenly split between word recognition and reading comprehension, followed by language/vocabulary, then prereading skills instruction. Most students improved in reading when using computer-assisted instruction.Students with LD receiving CAI in reading increased performance in reading decoding and reading comprehension."

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1. CAI programs in reading for students with LD were most likely to employ drill-and-practice procedures, followed by strategy instruction, then simulation.

2. The skill areas upon which CAI reading programs focused were evenly split between word recognition and reading comprehension, followed by language/vocabulary, then prereading skills instruction.

3. Most students improved in reading when using computer-assisted instruction.

4. Students with LD receiving CAI in reading increased performance in reading decoding and reading comprehension.

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It may be easier to determine how technology impacts intervention groups.

Are technology infused reading/math interventions more effective or less effective than using traditional. effective/reading methods?

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A Review of the literature on computer-assisted learning, particularly integrated learning systems, and outcomes with respect to literacy and numeracy | Education Counts

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Part A begins with a description of the approach taken to answer the research questions. This is followed by a discussion of issues relevant to a consideration of computer-assisted learning and, in particular, its effects on learning outcomes. First, there is a discussion of definitions of terms like computer-assisted instruction (CAI), computer-assisted learning (CAL), computer-based learning (CBL) and integrated learning system (ILS).

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Neurological Changes due to audio visuals 

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Neurological Changes due to audio visuals 

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According to Kujala et. all

"Dyslexia has been identified as a problem of phonological processing (1–5), although other difficulties like those in visual processing have also been reported (6–8). Dyslexic individuals might actually suffer from a more general auditory-perception problem, which may underlie their difficulties in phonological perception (9–18). For example, some authors suggest that these individuals have problems in processing temporal aspects of the speech signal, such as rapid acoustic transitions or tone-order reversas." If these individuals are able to use a program that allows them to use visual aids to process words will help students with dylexia read easier.

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Abstract

This study aimed at determining whether audiovisual training without linguistic material has a remediating effect on reading skills and central auditory processing in dyslexic children. It was found that this training resulted in plastic changes in the auditory cortex, indexed by enhanced electrophysiological mismatch negativity and faster reaction times to sound changes. Importantly, these changes were accompanied by improvement in reading skills. The results indicate that reading difficulties can be ameliorated by special training programs and, further, that the training effects can be observed in brain activity. Moreover, the fact that the present training effects were obtained by using a program including no linguistic material indicates that dyslexia is at least partly based on a general auditory perceptual deficit.

Neural dysfunctions underlying dyslexia are still largely unknown despite decades of research. Dyslexia has been identified as a problem of phonological processing ( 1- 5), although other difficulties like those in visual processing have also been reported ( 6- 8). Dyslexic individuals might actually suffer from a more general auditory-perception problem, which may underlie their difficulties in phonological perception ( 9- 18). For example, some authors suggest that these individuals have problems in processing temporal aspects of the speech signal, such as rapid acoustic transitions or tone-order reversals ( 9, 14- 17). However, even some other aspects of sounds, such as rhythm or pitch, are problematic for individuals with dyslexia ( 13, 18). The evidence suggesting that these individuals have dysfunctions also in their nonlinguistic auditory and visual perception (for a review, see ref. 17) supports the view that a general sensory-processing disorder is involved. However, the role of these dysfunctions in the etiology of dyslexia is unclear. It is possible that deficits in nonspeech sound discrimination in dyslexia might just co-occur with it, having no causal role in the reading problems.

The high incidence of dyslexia and its associated role in learning impairments ( 19) accentuate the importance of finding effective methods for remediating dyslexic children. Because of the central nervous system's higher plasticity in early than later developmental stages ( 20, 21), remediation programs should be started as early as possible. Therefore, in the present study, we tested the effects of a training program for dyslexic children in the first grade of school. A training program containing no linguistic material was used to determine whether perceptual training that does not involve the phonological system could have a beneficial effect on reading impairment. We used a training "game" in which dyslexic individuals have been found to perform significantly worse than nondyslexic control subjects ( 22). The effects of the training program were evaluated by measuring subjects' brain activity, behavioral stimulus discrimination, and reading skills.

Brain activity was measured by recording the mismatch negativity (MMN), which accurately reflects auditory discrimination without such biasing factors as attention, decision making, or motor response ( 23). The MMN can be elicited by any discriminable change in a sequence of auditory stimuli, its amplitude and latency indicating how well sound changes are discriminated; the easier the discrimination, the larger the amplitude and shorter the latency ( 24). Although the MMN amplitude can be modulated by attention under some conditions ( 25), it is even elicited with no behavioral task, which enables one to determine sound-discrimination ability even in individuals with communication problems such as aphasic or comatose patients and infants ( 26- 28). Furthermore, previous studies have shown that the auditory dysfunctions in language-impaired and dyslexic individuals can be evaluated with the MMN (T.K., S.B., M.T., and R.N., unpublished observations; refs. 3, 13, 18, 29). For instance, it was found that the MMN amplitude for a consonant change occurring within a syllable ( 3), for pitch changes in tones ( 18), for rhythm changes in sound patterns ( 13), and for tone-order reversals (T.K., S.B., M.T., and R.N., unpublished observations) is diminished in dyslexia. Moreover, the MMN reduction was paralleled by a decrement in behavioral performance in dyslexic individuals ( 13, 18).

In addition, several studies ( 30- 33) have shown that the MMN can be used as a measure of cortical plastic changes induced by successful discrimination training. In these studies, no MMN was initially elicited by slight sound changes that subjects could not discriminate. However, after discrimination training, the MMN emerged in those subjects who learned behaviorally to discriminate the stimulus changes.

Materials and Methods

Reading-Skill Tests.

Four basic reading-skill measures ( 34) were included in the reading-skill evaluations of the present study. These measures are subtests of a Finnish battery devised to diagnose the reading skills in preschool and first-grade children. These measures included spelling (counting the syllables of words), deleting the first phoneme of words, and reading short words (correctness and speed). The normative data for this test battery for the correctness and speed in reading short words had been obtained from first-grade children in their spring semester (age 7 years; 227 children) and those for spelling (176 children) and deleting the first phoneme (193 children) from preschool children (age 6 years).

Subjects.

Forty-eight 7-year-old children, who were initially screened as reading impaired by the school, participated in the present study. To ensure that these children indeed were reading impaired, their reading skills were compared with those of six age-matched peers who were typically developing in reading skills. It was found that the dyslexic children performed significantly worse in each subtest than did children who were making normal progress in reading skills [ F(1,52) = 6.30-14.48, P < 0.02-0.001; one-way ANOVA]. The average test scores in each subtest were for nondyslexic and dyslexic children, respectively: spelling, 9.8 and 7.1 of the maximum of 10 points (SEM 0.2 and 0.4); deleting the first phoneme, 9.8 and 6.3 (10-point scale, SEM 0.2 and 0.36); correctly read words, 29.8 and 23.6 (30-point scale, SEM 0.2 and 1.0); reading speed, 0.9 and 5.7 (seconds/word, SEM 0.2 and 0.5).

The dyslexic children were divided into two groups, training group (9 girls, 15 boys), participating in the audiovisual training, and control group (11 girls, 13 boys), in a pseudorandom manner in the beginning of their first spring semester. The primary criterion in forming two comparable groups was the children's scores in the reading test ( 34). In addition, the children's scores in the test version of the audiovisual training program (to be explained later) and their gender were taken into account in forming these groups. Statistical analyses confirmed that before the training period, there were no significant differences in the scores of the reading-skill test or the test version of the computer game between the two groups (see Table and Fig. ). The reading skills and the performance in the training program of these children were measured again after the training period.

Table 1

Subgroups of the dyslexic children including 11 children in each group (five girls and six boys in the training group and six girls and five boys in the control group) participated in additional measurements, which involved event-related potentials (ERPs) (to obtain the MMN) as well as behavioral target detection (administered after the ERP recording session) before and after the training period. In addition, the performance IQ of these children was evaluated before the training period with WISC III (subtests: picture completion, coding, picture arrangement, block design, and object assembly), which indicated no significant IQ differences between the groups (Table ).

Training Procedure.

A computer game consisting of abstract, nonverbal tasks that require audiovisual matching ( 22) was used for training. In this game, various sound patterns with 3-15 elements were graphically presented on a computer screen as horizontal sequences of rectangles (Fig. ). The sound elements varied in pitch, duration, and intensity, which were visually represented by the vertical position, length, and thickness of the rectangles on the screen, respectively. Both easy and difficult patterns were randomly presented throughout the training period. Each training session began with a stimulus block with a 1,000-ms stimulus (element)-onset asynchrony (SOA) and a 550-ms sound duration. During the sessions, subjects could change the SOA within a window of 200-1800 ms and the sound duration within a window of 30-80% of the SOA (60-1440 ms).

Two versions of the game were used in the present study. In version 1, two patterns were drawn on the screen. After a couple of seconds, a sound sequence was played that corresponded to one of the patterns. The player's task was to indicate which one of the patterns was played. In version 2, one pattern was first drawn on the screen and then a corresponding sound sequence was played. The player's task was to follow the pattern (from left to right) as it was being played and to press the space bar at the moment when the last element of the pattern was being played. After a correct response, the subject was rewarded by a smiling face and the color change of the screen, whereas after an incorrect response, the same pattern repeated showing the correct timing so that the color of the rectangle changed at the moment when the sound corresponding to it was played.

There were 14 training sessions with the computer game during a period of 7 weeks. Each training session lasted for about 10 min and occurred twice a week. Both versions of the game were used, version 1 during the first four training sessions and version 2 during the remaining sessions. The training was started with game version 1, for it involved no time pressure in responding and was therefore easier than version 2 for the child to get familiarized with the training program.

Electrophysiological Recordings.

The MMN was recorded to infrequent order reversals of tone pairs ( 35). Subjects were presented with sequences of tone pairs with a constant pair-onset asynchrony of 600 ms. Each tone was 40 ms in duration and 70 dB (sound pressure level) in intensity. In the standard pair, which occurred on 90% of the trials, the first tone was 500 Hz and the second one 750 Hz, separated by a 10-ms silent gap. In the deviant pair, occurring randomly on 10% of the trials, the tone order was reversed.

ERPs were obtained from the nose-referenced electroencephalogram (0.1-100 Hz, sampling rate 250 Hz) by off-line averaging electroencephalogram epochs separately for the standard and deviant stimulus pairs. The analysis epoch began 100 ms before and ended 600 ms after the stimulus-pair onset. Voltage variation caused by horizontal eye movements was monitored with an electrode attached to the outer canthus of the right eye and that caused by vertical eye movements with an electrode on the forehead. Epochs contaminated by eye movements or other extracerebral artifacts producing voltage variation exceeding ±60 μV at any electrode were omitted.

ERPs were separately averaged for standard and deviant pairs and digitally filtered by using a bandpass of 1-30 Hz. Before data analysis, the responses were re-referenced to the average of the left and right mastoids to maximize the MMN signal. The MMN was delineated in the difference waveforms, obtained by subtracting the ERP elicited by the standard pair from that elicited by the deviant pair. In this way, an estimate of the neural activity associated with the discrimination of deviant stimuli from standard stimuli could be obtained ( 23). The MMN amplitude was quantified by measuring the MMN in the individual difference waveforms using consecutive 25-ms measurement windows between 200 and 325 ms from tone-pair onset. The amplitude comparisons were performed with one-way ANOVA at the Fz electrode, where the signal-to-noise ratio for the MMN is largest ( 23).

Behavioral Recordings.

The behavioral performance of the children was evaluated in two ways. First, we investigated how the children behaviorally discriminated the tone-order reversals in a target-discrimination task administered after the MMN sessions. A brief training session was conducted first in which the child was presented with single tones (500- and 750-Hz tones as the standard and deviant stimuli, respectively) to familiarize him/her with the task. The behavioral session consisted of 48 trains of four stimulus pairs (divided to four separate stimulus blocks), with 600-ms SOA of the pairs within the trains. Each sound-pair train was separated from the next one with a silent pause of 3 s. In one-half of the sound-pair trains, the fourth stimulus pair was a deviant pair, whereas in the rest it was a standard pair. The order of the sound-pair trains was randomized. The child's task was to press a response key with the thumb of the preferred hand when he/she heard a deviant sound pair. Button presses occurring within 200-3,000 ms after the onset of a deviant sound pair were regarded as hits and those occurring at any other time as false alarms.

Second, the performance in the test version of the computer game was measured. This test version (a variant of game version 2) includes a set of 30 audiovisual matching tasks. The stimulus elements were presented with a 1,000-ms SOA and sounds with a duration of 550 ms throughout the test. The number of hits was registered by space-bar presses occurring during the time window when the last sound of the pattern is played.

Results

Group differences following the audiovisual training period were found in the reading-skill test as well as in the electrophysiological and behavioral measures. The group comparison of the reading-skill measures revealed that whereas there were no group differences before the training, the children in the training group read significantly more words correctly after the training period than did the control-group children [ F(1,46) = 5.54, P < 0.03; Fig. and Table ]. In addition, after the training, the reading speed was marginally significantly higher in the training group than in the control group [ F(1,46) = 3.67, P < 0.07]. Training effects were also found in the electrophysiological and behavioral measures (obtained from the subgroups of the children), whereas the groups did not significantly differ from each other in the performance IQ (see Table ). In the two groups, the MMNs elicited by the tone-order reversals were very similar in amplitude and morphology before the training (see Fig. ), there being no significant amplitude differences. In contrast, after the training period, the MMN amplitude was considerably increased in the training group but not in the control group, with a significant difference between the groups [ F(1,20) = 5.01-7.20, P < 0.03; 225-275 ms from pair onset]. Moreover, the MMN amplitude of the training group was significantly larger after the training compared with that before the training [ F(1,10) = 10.15, P < 0.03; 225-250 ms from pair onset], whereas no such amplitude change was found for the control group.

The results were further analyzed by testing the correlation of the change in the MMN amplitude from the first to the second recording session with the change in the reading-skill scores. The change of the reading-skill scores from the first to the second reading test for each child was calculated as the difference between the unweighted sums of the scores of the four reading-skill measures. A significant correlation was found between the MMN amplitude change and the change in reading performance ( r = 0.42, P < 0.03, one-tailed Spearman test).

The analyses of the behavioral data indicated no significant differences between the groups or between the first and second recording sessions in hit or false-alarm rates. However, the reaction time (RT) was shorter in the training group than in the control group in the second recording session [ F(1,17) = 7.13, P < 0,02; two children from the training group and one child from the control group were missing from the analyses because of their refusal to participate], whereas no group differences were found in the first recording session. In addition, the training group performed significantly better than the control group in the second recording session [ F(1,46) = 10.36, P < 0.002] in the test version of the computer game, whereas there were no significant group differences in the first recording session (all 48 children included).

Discussion

Our results suggest that perceptual training with nonlinguistic audiovisual stimuli causes plastic changes in the neural substrate of sound discrimination and an improvement in reading skills. This reading-skill improvement was associated with changes at the early automatic neural level of sound discrimination, as reflected by the MMN, and at the behavioral level in the RTs and performance in the test version of the computer game. The fact that training even altered the early preattentive stage of sound discrimination while also improving reading performance gives support to the view that reading difficulties in dyslexic individuals, at least in part, stem from bottom-up processing constraints (see also ref. 36).

Several studies have shown a correlation between nonlinguistic processing and reading skills ( 37) as well as between acoustic temporal-processing problems and language-related impairments, including dyslexia ( 12- 17, 19). Our results support this view that difficulties in dyslexia are based, at least to some extent, on the dysfunction of general sensory discrimination rather than on deficit specific to phonological processing. However, no previous study has shown that training to discriminate nonspeech stimuli improves language-related abilities. For example, Tallal et al. ( 36) and Merzenich et al. ( 38) used nonspeech as well as speech stimuli in training language learning-impaired children, which does not permit one to specify the role of nonspeech stimuli in causing the improvement in children's ability to discriminate speech contrasts. The current results indicating that training with nonlinguistic stimuli does improve language functions, such as those involved in reading, suggests that the language-processing system is at least partly hierarchically built on acoustic nonspeech representations. To determine to what extent this is so, a further study should be conducted to compare the effects of training using phonetic and nonphonetic stimuli with each other.

According to the hypothesis suggesting a more general auditory dysfunction than a deficit specific to the phonological system in dyslexic individuals, the perceptual difficulties in dyslexia especially relate to the discrimination of rapid acoustic changes ( 9, 14- 17). While supporting the general auditory dysfunction view of dyslexia, our results suggest that this dysfunction is an even more fundamental problem of auditory perception than one involving the discrimination of rapid acoustic transitions. This is because the present training effects were obtained with stimuli containing no rapid transitions and with stimulus sequences that were not rapidly presented (the fastest pace being 200-ms element onset-to-onset time). Nevertheless, this training improved the discrimination of the order reversals of brief (40-ms) sounds, as reflected by the enhanced MMNs and decreased RTs in the training group after the training period. It might be that learning to structure sensory input also affects the processing of faster stimulus elements than those originally used in the training.

Our finding of reading improvement as a result of audiovisual training was paralleled by functional changes in the brain of the trained children as reflected in the amplification of the early parts of the MMN and in the decreased RT to targets. These MMN and behavioral findings in the trained children reflect an improved sound-discrimination accuracy. The training-induced enhancement of the MMN amplitude reflects, presumably, an increased accuracy of cortical auditory representations ( 30- 33, 39). Changes of the sensory representations in the brain as a result of training were demonstrated by several animal and human studies ( 30- 33, 40- 42). Moreover, in the present study, there was a significant correlation between the change in the MMN amplitude and in the reading-skills scores, indicating a close relation between the cortical discrimination of auditory nonspeech sound elements and the reading ability.

The effectiveness of the present training program during the relatively short training period might be attributed to two factors. First, we trained the children as early as possible, for plastic changes take place more easily and are more profound in immature than mature brain structures ( 20, 21). Problems in acquiring readings skills were observed during the first fall semester in these children, and our study was started soon thereafter (when the children were 7 years old). Second, the present training program closely imitates reading performance with the exception that it is less complicated. Excluding semantic processing in the training program enables the child to concentrate on the perceptual features of the stimuli. Simplicity in the early steps of training is important; if training is started with difficult tasks that are impossible for the child to carry out successfully, then the learning process might not be initiated at all. Motivational problems might also arise, owing to too slow progression or to experiences of failure. As previous studies ( 21, 30, 40, 42) have shown, attention and motivation are important factors in causing plastic neural changes in the brain.

The present results are encouraging with respect to both understanding and remediating dyslexia. However, to develop an optimal training method, the factors underlying the beneficial effects of the present computer program should be determined in further studies. For example, the possible independent roles of the auditory and visual systems in training as compared with training involving the interaction of these systems should be determined. In addition, it is important to exclude the possible nonspecific (placebo) effects that might relate to task performance itself by using a group that has a control task. Moreover, because there are different types of dyslexia (e.g., dysphonetic and dyseidetic dyslexia; refs. 17 and 19), the remediation efficacy of the training program should be separately determined for each of these groups.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Dr. Elyse Sussman for her comments on the previous version of this manuscript. This study was supported by Academy of Finland Grant 73038.

Abbreviations

Footnotes

This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.

¶ In the first test session, administered in the beginning of the spring semester (before the training was started), the children in the training and control groups were in the correct reading of words in percentile 5 of the normative data, and in the reading speed, the respective percentile was 10. In counting syllables, the groups were in percentile 57; in deleting the first phoneme of words, the groups were in percentile 97.

References

19. Snowling M J. Dyslexia. Oxford: Blackwell; 2000.

22. Karma K. In: Auditory Structuring in Explaining Dyslexia, Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing (CSNLP-8), August 9-11 1999. Mc Kevitt P, Mulvihill C, Nualláin S, O'Riordan C, editors. National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland: Information Technology Centre; 1999.

23. Näätänen R. Attention and Brain Function. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 1992.

32. Kraus N, McGee T J, Carrell T D, King C, Tremblay K. J Cognit Neurosci. 1995;7:27-34.

34. Poskiparta E, Niemi P, Lepola J. Diagnostic Tests: I. Reading and Writing. University of Turku, Finland: The Center of Learning Research; 1994.

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Plastic neural changes and reading improvement caused by audiovisual training in reading-impaired children

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This study aimed at determining whether audiovisual training without linguistic material has a remediating effect on reading skills and central auditory processing in dyslexic children. It was found that this training resulted in plastic changes in the auditory cortex, indexed by enhanced electrophysiological mismatch negativity and faster reaction times to sound changes.

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ERIC is an online library of education research and information, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.

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Tiffany Edmonds/ Conflicting Reports Concerning Waterford

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Tiffany Edmonds/ Conflicting Reports Concerning Waterford

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According Charles Callis of The Education Technology Debate,

"Effective ICT software programs can provide the adaptive framework and sequencing to give children

the individualized instruction they need while improving reading skills and enhancing the classroom experience.

To be effective, personalized learning challenges and supports each child at his or her own level.

The curriculum included in any program aimed at offering personalized learning must be

Engaging for students to hold their interest and motivate them to continue

Based on research to provide effective curriculum and instruction

Broad and deep to provide the content needed for true individualization

Carefully sequenced to provide the personalization each child needs

In Waterford Institute’s Waterford Early Reading Program, all four requirements are met. The program is full of engaging activities, characters, music, and songs that provide research-based instruction that meet national requirements. Plus, the content is extensive and sequenced to adapt to each child’s individual needs."

Waterford seems to meet the requirements for effective programming, but actual analysis indicates that there is something lacking in the program's design.

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Technology may improve reading scores but it appears it must be in

conjunction with a reading program of the highest quality.

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The Six Ts of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction
By: Richard Allington
Richard Allington states, "The issue is less stuff vs. reading than it is a question of what sorts of and how much of stuff. When stuff dominates instructional time, warning flags should go up." Technolgy may be just extra stuff. More is mentioned about effective teaching and less about technology.
According to this article there is little to support CAI in the classroom.

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The Six Ts of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction

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The hundreds of days of classroom observation and the hundreds of interviews with teachers and students provide a clear portrayal of what good elementary teaching looks like. Below I sketch six common features - the 6 Ts of effective elementary literacy instruction - that we observed in the exemplary elementary classrooms we studied.

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Is the Waterford more effective than traditional person to person contact tutoring services?

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Is the Waterford more effective than traditional person to person contact tutoring services?

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I have narrowed down the research project to Waterford early reading.

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It appears that not all technology programs are not created equally. There is limited evidence that technology alone increases reading scores.

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This website aims to empower educators with evidence on proven programs.

Blog archive from the late Robert Slavin, who served as the Director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University

See Robert Slavin's blog archive about educational policy, research, and innovation.

Program Reviews

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Welcome to the BEE This website aims to empower educators with evidence on proven programs.

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I am collecting data not collected by the company to determine if the Waterford early math and reading programs have been

effective.

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I am looking into Common Core's Smarter Balance in order to match technology to testing.  I think that if students become accustomed to practicing skills on the computer that they will perform better.

Smarter Balance has implemented piloted tests from February to May. This new assessment is a highly adaptive computerized test. Therefore, researching a technology reading/math infused curriculum may prove beneficial.

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Smarter Balanced supports high-quality teaching, improves learning outcomes for all students, and prepares students for life after high school.