Mrs. Cynthis Haan and her husband, Ron, are the founders of the Haan Foundation for Children; they are currently helping to fund the largest clinical trial of reading intervention ever conducted in our public schools. This research project is called "Power4Kids". You will find partnerships with some of the nation's most prominent researchers in the areas of literacy and reading assessment as well as other noted collaborators--go to the Haan Foundation "Power4Kids" website and you will see many names connected with IDA that you recognize!
Take a gander around the website to find summaries of the foundation's beliefs, purpose, and some highly memorable quotes. "Power4Kids"is striving to provide evidence-based facts about what works best for which kids under which conditions. This is one of my favorite quotes about improving the effectiveness of American education by concluding that:
"Instruction for early readers in phonemic awareness and phonics, and guided oral reading with feedback (the average student in these interventions reads more proficiently than approximately 70% of students in the control group)." Sounds like someone else is playing our song--what do you think?
I think this is one research project we will all want to watch!! Let me know your thoughts on the website.
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5 comments:
What is the website address for POWER4KIDS?
That was going to be my point also ( that active links would help readers) .I did a search and found the site right away but links are better for the visitors.
Their information is dated ( not current ) and would be of interest. I am a data junkie for dyslexia and reading studies . As advocates for the program how about sharing some data with your readers.
I read the post about making better use of your blog and went back and read everything ever posted on this blog. In my opinion you are not posting anything of interest to anyone other than your members.
My niche is visual dyslexia , not a mainstream area, but I also try to provide a service to the dyslexia community as well as visual dyslexics.
One suggestion I would make is that you include an add this button on your blog. ( search add this button) so if you ever post anything of interest people can share the post easily.
Here is another suggestion. I collect links to free dyslexia products and information such as Text to speech , audio book downloads, and several other things that are all free. People like free. Take a look at my page of links and maybe you could interest people with reviews of some of the free products and programs listed.
The address is http://dyslexiaglasses.com/links.html
On my blog ,the visual dyslexia solution,I posted about the AAO new policy about dyslexia and vision not being related at all. Maybe you could get G. Eden ,your national president, to make a comment about that. She once did a fMRI study on dyslexia and vision but the AAO used another of her studies as a reference for the argument that dyslexia and vision are not related. Has G. Eden recanted the value of her first study? Is there value to readers to determine whether or not there is a small minority of dyslexics who can describe visual problems that make reading difficult.
I think the AAO policy was based on an emotional response to the large increase is vision therapy ads claiming 80% of learning disabilities are vision related. I have no idea if anyone has ever been helped with reading issues by vision therapy but I would bet my favorite pair of shoes that vision problems aren't responsible for 80% of LD problems.
I won't spam about my product but my target group can describe their visual problems that make reading difficult. My thought is that if someone can't describe a visual problem that makes reading difficult why look for a visual intervention for reading problems.
I am sure your people have information that people would like to read. I just can't find it on your blog. lol Just trying to be helpful .
Thanks for the helpful critique of this blog; you are right about embedding links that cut out legwork!
What type of data are you looking for specifically that this blog can share regarding dyslexia? I am hopeful that when the Haan Foundation completes their research that IDA will be able to provide that info since many of our colleagues are involved in collecting the scientific evidence.
You are correct in commenting that this blog does serve to reach out to IDA members. In addition, you make an excellent point regarding free products such as audio downloads etc. I would like to see such links provided on our National IDA website as a service to the public. IDA branches might want to consider doing this as well.
IDA relies heavily on the medical research of Geschwin, Galaburta, Denkla, Shaywitz, Wolfe, and Eden regarding the neurological basis for dyslexia and the role of phonological processing. It has been my experience that some children do confuse letter sequences in reading words by inaccurately mapping the sound to the wrong letter. An example would be reading "pat" for "tap" --this could be attributed to what Dr. Martha Denkla refers to as deficits in interhemispheric collaboration. She has worked to merge the "visual-verbal" connection essential to reading the specific with the response time element. From this, Denkla and Wolfe developed the "Double Deficit" hypothesis, stating that there are problems relative to phonological awareness,paired with rapid word recognition or retrieval/processing speed.
It appears that the sound of the initial letter is not emerging first put rather the visual/spatial image of a letter that is out of sequence. It seems to me that there might be the possibility that the synchronization between hemispheres is off (as Denkla says), resulting in inaccurate reading. What I have experienced is that remediation using phonological processing --a combination of the visual and auditory modalities rather than an isolation of one or the other works best. Thus, I, too, am a strong advocate for using multi-sensory instruction that emphasizes sound sequence and sound syllable awareness.
Thank you for your comments.
Jackie,
The Haan Foundation's website address is www.haan4kids.org
Thank you for the website....
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