 My name is Steve Goddard. I'm the Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and it's my privilege to welcome all of you to today's lecture, the Nebraska Lecture. This is the first of a series of lectures for the 2017 Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series. Those of you that are on social media, we're web-streaming the lecture today, and so if you're here in the room or watching across greater Nebraska as the web-stream, please use, and your social media user, please use hashtag NEB Lecture to communicate all the great things happening during today's lecture. We also would like to say hello and welcome our NIT viewers that may be watching this as we rebroadcast the lecture later on. We have amazing faculty here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series gives us an opportunity to share some of the excellent research and creative activity that's being done here on our campus and participate with the greater Lincoln community and greater Nebraska, the community across the state of Nebraska. This is a chance to share an intellectual life that we live every day, and we're happy to do that. The series is sponsored by the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor and the Office of Research and Economic Development and the, I'm sorry, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute known as ALI. I stumble on that every time because I always think of it as ALI and not what it means. So for those of you that are ALI members here today, a special welcome to all of you. Please give me a round of applause for them. I'd also like to recognize the Research Council. The Research Council is made up of faculty members from across many different disciplines across the campus, and they have a nomination process. They solicit nominations from the faculty for possible speakers to participate in this lecture. From that, they pick the top speakers and send forward to the Chancellor for selection for today's, to give, for example, today's lecture. This is the highest honor that we can bestow upon one of our faculty members, and so I'm really excited to have Tori Mofis today give her lecture as part of the first of the series today, this year. And in just a moment, Chancellor Ronny Green will introduce Tori. But first, I want to tell you a little bit what's going to happen. After the lecture, we'll have a question and answer session led by Dr. Kristen Olson, Associate Professor in Sociology and Chair of the Research Council. Kristen, raise your hand. So Kristen will be taking questions. So as you have questions throughout the lecture, jot them down or remember them, and then at the end you'll have an opportunity to ask those questions. After the question and answer session, we'll gather in the Heritage Hall for a reception. So you can join us there and ask more questions and socialize and further share your opinions and your experiences of the lecture at that time. Okay, at this point, I would like to introduce our wonderful Chancellor, Ronny Green, and he will officially welcome you and start the lecture series. Please join me in welcoming Ronny Green. Well, thank you very much, Steve. It is a pleasure to welcome you here today to UNL for those of you who are joining us from off campus to the Nebraska Lecture Series. It's in a very important way that we share our research and scholarship with our community and with stakeholders in kind of a town and gown format for us, if you will. I'd also like to extend my thanks, as Steve has already done, to our Research Council, to ORED, to Ollie, who are all co-partners in sponsoring the Nebraska Lecture Series. And as Steve said, this is a huge honor for any member of our faculty, Tori, for you to be selected for this lecture by your peers. It is a big honor and congratulations, Tori, to you on that. It's my great pleasure today to introduce our distinguished speaker. You can already tell I call her Dr. Tori Molfiz rather than Victoria Molfiz in a formal way. Tori is the Chancellor's Professor of Child Youth and Family Studies in our College of Education and Human Sciences here on campus, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Research for CEHS. In addition, Tori co-directs Nebraska's early development and learning laboratory. I'm particularly excited about today's lecture because not only does it fall into one of our areas of strength for UNL, the area of early childhood development and education, but it also focuses on this very important problem of children learning to read and problems and challenges that are associated with that task. Decades of research have shown us that children's reading ability is associated with all of their future success, not only academically, but also through life and their success in the workforce. This in turn also affects the economic vitality of our society around us, of our community certainly here, and as a land grant university our importance for the state of Nebraska. So it's without a doubt that it's critical to family schools and policymakers that we understand the very latest research and understanding of this field for intervening early and helping particularly for young people who struggle to learn to read to overcome those obstacles. Challenges that we face are clear and I'm sure Tori is going to share these kind of statistics with you. In Nebraska, 41% of children aged 0 to 5 are at risk in failing in school. Nationally, more than 2.2 million children receive services for specific learning disabilities, a category that includes things like dyslexia and other reading difficulties and challenges. Given the magnitude of this problem, our university is very fortunate to have a concentration of faculty members working in this area to address the significant problem. Chief among them is Dr. Molfies, who is an internationally recognized expert in the cognitive development of infants, children and adults. Today, I know that she's going to walk us through the highlights of that research that will simplify, I think, for us in the lay terms, the evidence about childhood reading and effective intervention strategies. As Tori will explain, the vast majority of struggling readers will not catch up on their own. Her research sheds light on the evidence-based teaching methods that really work and can be applied in the field. Tori joined our university faculty in 2010. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in developmental psychology from San Francisco State University and a doctorate in psychology from our partner in the Big Ten Penn State University. It's now my honor to introduce the Nebraska lecturer for today, Dr. Tori Molfies. Please join me in welcoming her. I'll turn all my switches on. So thank you so much, Chancellor Green and Vice Chancellor Goddard for that introduction and thank you to so many of you who are here today. Our task in studying reading has been in part an exploration of the mechanisms underlying the process of reading right from the newborn period but also in part to try to understand how it is that children learn to read. The sobering statistics specific to dyslexia have to do with the percentage of children that are born each year in the United States that are expected to have either dyslexia or severe inabilities to learn to read. In Nebraska alone, that's approximately 4,500 children each year. Of the youth who are incarcerated, 85% of them are unable to read and many of them are not getting services for their reading problems but the recidivism rate of the children that are not getting services is, as you can see, approximately 70% compared to 16% of individuals who are youth incarcerated who are getting services with learning to read. Those are sobering statistics. The benefits of reading, we all know, you read to learn about the world and to learn about what can be the possibilities in the world. Reading is essential for careers and professional development. It's a critical skill for learning how to do things and when it's appropriate to do things. All of the things that we do on a daily basis are the kinds of skills and abilities that children who are struggling to learn find so aversive because it's very difficult for them. We also know that learning to read is really difficult. It's a really hard task and these are NAEP statistics that are on the side here and they've been used for a variety of different purposes but what's important for our purpose today is to look to see how really slow we've been making progress in enabling children to read despite the fact that we've developed wonderful curricula to intervene with children at different ages that there's a lot of time and resources being spent on engaging children in reading related activities really early in elementary school yet it's still extremely difficult for us to bring children up to about the 50% level which is a score of approximately 250 as you can see. Today I want to talk especially about three topics. One is that there's critical variables in fact that are important to emphasize in thinking about how children learn to read and I'm going to talk in some detail about two of those phonological processing skills and alphabetic knowledge. I also am going to talk about brain and behavior evidence for how those processes are enacted in the brains of children that are typically developing as well as children that are struggling to learn to read and then I'm going to suggest that perhaps we need to think about reading tune-ups so that children that participate in interventions as well as children as they progress through the early ages are looked at and reassessed to make sure they're maintaining their reading skills at grade level. I don't know how children actually learn to read and I think that's something that most reading researchers will share in common. We know a lot about the variables that are influenced but we don't know a lot about what goes on. Here are little babies. That's our grandson. This is Olivia who's the daughter of Amanda Prokasky. You can see here by her lips that she's sounding out the word that she's got her finger pointed to. She's a four-year-old so she's not yet been in a formal reading program but somehow she taught herself how to read. If we could look deeply into her brain and figure that out I think we would have a Nobel Prize. It's a wonderful thing but there are many kids who start out strong and then they go through phases where they begin to taper off that they begin to struggle to read and there are other children that right from the start are struggling to learn to read. Those are the kids that we need to know all three groups that we need to know more about. Our friend, Hollis Scarborough, has said that this graphic is her most cited publication. None of her individual articles are anywhere nearly as close as this graphic alone because what she's been able to do is to look at the skills and abilities that are characteristic of skilled readers and untwine them to look at the individual skills so that in part there are language comprehension skills but today we're going to talk about the word recognition skills in particular so there's phonological awareness skills that we're going to talk about there's decoding skills also called word reading skills of which alphabetic knowledge is part and then there's sight word recognition. We all have a lot of words in our sight vocabulary and in fact young children do too. They can often recognize their name and there are many other words that they see frequently that they can recognize by sight but sight reading alone is not going to enable children to be good readers because as they go on through grades not only do the number of words that they might have to keep in front of their sight vocabulary at all times become longer and more numerous but they encounter words that they've never seen before and if you think back on Harry Potter books their words in the Harry Potter books none of us have ever seen before so that's one of the reasons that we need to be able to sound out those words so that we can talk with other Harry Potter people and share similar experiences so emergent literacy skills are one of the areas that's been studied a lot and those are the skills that develop in the years before there's formal schooling so usually it's preschool and pre-kindergarten age children those form the foundation for the more formal reading skills that are acquired at school age and there's two really important meta-analyses that help us understand the evidence of what those both formal reading skills are as well as the ones that are the emergent literacy skills the national reading panel report is a report of looking at all of the evidence that was published up until about 2000 that had to do with children's reading at school age so these are all school age children the national early literacy panel report is only on children children that are in the preschool period looking at the skills that map on to reading at school age both of these reports are available free online you can just Google it and it'll come right up this is the national early literacy panel I've been coaching my students to never even think about doing a meta-analysis for a dissertation this report involved nine of us and it took us seven years so we want you to matriculate faster than that so you know please so you can see here these are the predictor variables we're going to talk about alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness and this shows that they were predictors of decoding or word reading reading comprehension that's the big goal right you need to read and you need to read relatively quickly but you need to remember what you read reading comprehension and spelling spelling is translating what you know about the speech sounds of the language into how to write it in terms of words and sentences and text the alphabetic knowledge is either strongly correlated or significantly correlated with those outcomes there are other outcomes as well that represent topics for another day we're just going to concentrate on these two so alphabetic knowledge is understanding that the sounds of a language are represented in its letters and that the letters are combined to form words phonological awareness is the ability to hear the speech sounds discriminate the speech sounds of the language and it's sometimes called phonological sensitivity or phonological processing which we're going to use today but they basically involve the same mechanisms our work has looked mostly at phonological processing because we've been looking at very young children and trying to look to see how they're discriminating between different speech sounds we spent four decades studying this in full term and preterm newborns infants, adolescents, adults you'd think after 40 plus years we'd have the answer we think we're getting closer there's a wealth of research yet to be done but what we're looking at is fine discriminations between critical speech sounds such as the difference between ba and pa bat and pat for example and ba and ga as important speech sounds and I'll tell you why there's evidence that young infants even from birth are able to discriminate these critical speech sounds they come largely pre-wired to be able to hear the differences between those speech sounds place of articulation which is refers to where in the vocal tract the tongue is when you're producing a particular sound such as ba and ga there's strong evidence that that discrimination is present at birth we found it not only full term newborns but we found it in preterm newborns as well voice onset time that is the time between when there's the pulsing of the laryngeal pulsing and the release of the speech sound those develop in the very early months we haven't found them in newborns but in the very early months and there's evidence in the right hemisphere that those mechanisms click into place now what's interesting about this left hemisphere, right hemisphere difference is at the time in which we began to publish this research most people assume that all language processes and of course reading in addition would all be left hemisphere processes that that was the part of the brain that processes language related sounds it turns out that's not true it's processed in different areas of the brain reliably so we've used brain imaging methods during speech sound discrimination with these infants and children and adults and the advantage of using brain imaging methods is that you can use it across different age samples unlike other ways in which we've gathered data which tends to be somewhat age specific these are kids that have participated in our study this is Rachel these electrodes were at a time in which we placed them individually individually a process that took about 20 minutes depending on how quiet the baby was whoops this is our son Peter with his new Mac those of you that are Mac aficionados will realize that they used to look that way I think his shirt says I like research but I'm not completely sure I can't remember but as we've gotten more sophisticated and the field of electrophysiology has gotten more sophisticated there are clearly these geodesic nets in which they can be readily applied to the heads of individuals of all ages this is a newborn very nicely holding her pacifier in place while she carefully listens to speech sounds preschool children and sometimes their dolls so the basis of a lot of our research was the good fortune of getting 16 years of funding from the National Institute of Health in which we looked at children between the ages of birth we tested them in the newborn nursery within two to three days of birth and we followed them through until they were 13 years of age so these children all came into the Malfi's lab on their or around their birthdays and I'm pretty sure most of them assume that's what everybody did on their birthday right? You have your party you have your cake you go to be tested in the Malfi's lab we had people that moved out of the area and moved out of the state who'd come home to celebrate birthdays with grandma and grandpa and they go to the Malfi's lab to be tested so we lost very few of our participants every year they had ERP testing and depending on the ages of the kids we did developmental behavioral assessments of cognitive abilities we looked at language development and later on reading development and so among the things that we were able to report about was trying to look at how much bang you get for your buck if you can identify what babies can do in the newborn period does that sensitivity to speech sounds that we've discovered in the newborn or early infancy period relate to skills and ability later on and what we find in this publication was that this group of individuals who had Stanford-Benet verbal scores above the average compared to the solid line kids who had Stanford-Benet verbal skills below the average was that there were significant differences both in terms of the magnitude of the response that we're seeing but also the latency of the response so this positive going peak and this negative going peak are distinctly different in the children that had the higher language scores compared to the kids who had the lower language scores when the kids were eight years of age we were able to test them on reading skills and in this graphic what you can see is we've got kids that were able to have reading skills in the normal range and then we had two groups of kids that were reading below the normal range and they're labeled as dyslexic and poor readers but they probably are representing a similar population because what you can see here in these average newborn brainwaves these are the babies in the hospital that were tested within a few days of their birth is this classic W wave that represents the classic evoked potential and you can see these negative going waves that are characteristic are not seen in the same way in the two groups of children that are having difficulty reading at eight years of age and this second negative peak is greatly accentuated compared to the typical readers at eight years of age now what we were able to show with this is that those characteristics of the brain wave differences between the three groups were highly predictive of whether the group membership of the children so we were almost 80% accurate in predicting typically developing readers in the mid-80s for identifying the kids that are in the two poor reading groups subsequent analyses that involve more data and different statistical techniques have pushed that ability to predict reading disabilities up into the 90s from newborn brainwaves alone and what we see is that the processing time is approximately 100 milliseconds longer in the children that will go on to have more difficulty acquiring reading skills compared to the typical readers and these differences don't go away so when we look at these kids these are the newborn brainwave differences and here the typical readers are the solid line, the dotted line or the kids that are going to have the lower reading scores when we look at what they look like at birth at three years, four years and five years you can see continuing and significant differences in their brainwaves and then at six, seven and eight years of age you continue to see those changes so this isn't something that's unique with these kids in the newborn period this is a characteristic that we can use to identify children who are going to need intervention to become typical readers these research that we've done and published has been replicated Nina Krause has published an article that's using speech sounds very similar to the ones that we use as well as evoke potential techniques but she was recording her brainwaves when these five-year-olds were listening to the same types of speech sounds we use but in a noisy environment and the noisy environment is really important because that's what we usually are hearing speech produced in it's not in our nice little sound controlled laboratory what she found is that the brainwaves of these five-year-olds were strong predictors of their reading scores, sight word reading and spelling skills as well our colleagues in Finland and this is Hakey Lutmann's lab used a similar design in speech stimuli in a longitudinal study that he conducted with Finnish infants the difference with what he did compared to our research is that he recruited participants who had family members who had been diagnosed with reading disabilities so he was looking at familial risk of dyslexia in his sample and so he had a group of infants that had familial risk of dyslexia that is either a mother or a father or a sibling or a close relative had been diagnosed with dyslexia and then the other group did not have that diagnosis and what he also found is that the brain responses to speech sounds predicted later language and reading skills in both groups almost on the same magnitude as what we found now what's interesting about this study is learning to read in English is really hard compared to learning to read in Finnish that the Finnish speech sounds there are about 27 frequent speech sounds and the same 26 letters that we have we have at least 40 frequent speech sounds and 26 letters, right? they should never have assigned that to a committee that makes no sense whatsoever it means that a lot of the letters that we have that we use frequently have to have other sounds associated with it and we don't have cute little markings to indicate that you should pronounce it this way or that way, right? it's anybody's guess so the question was why are there fins with dyslexia? you know, what's going on with those guys? in English, the approximate dyslexia rate is between 10 and 12% somewhere in that ballpark the Finnish rate is 8 to 10% I would have expected it to be 0 or 1 or 2, but it isn't why not? well, beginning to read skills in both English and Finnish involves phonological processes and the sound differences have to be discriminated but importantly, those sounds need to be associated with letters and remember which letters are associated with which sound that's a skill difficulty with a good explanation in English but it's the same skill deficit in Finnish because that remembering from one time to another doesn't seem to be present in Finnish children that have dyslexia we also know that there's a lot of commonalities in terms of the areas of language and reading that are shared across different languages so this is Spanish and English and these are MRI maps that are depicting the different areas of the brain that reflect either the purple is both hearing stimuli that are in print or auditory the blue is print only and the green is speech only and you can see that there are commonalities not only for these alphabetic languages but Hebrew which has a different language system writing system but also has some alphabetic components and Chinese which is completely different but they share similarities now just it's phonologically based differences in how individuals are able to respond to what they hear and remembering what they hear now alphabetic knowledge is understanding that the sounds of the language are represented by letters and letters are combined into words it's more than reciting the letter names letter names singing the alphabet song is an important skill for children but we're going to talk about it broader than that it's more than identifying letters by name and it's more than identifying words that begin with a letter alphabetic knowledge involves remembering especially letter sounds that are associated with letters so it requires phonological skills plus alphabetic knowledge the names of the letters the sounds that are associated with letters and that's not easy in English English is complicated this is a wonderful book McGinnis early reading instruction for explaining how English is important and if you can read it right it's well worth it so speech sounds can be represented by different letters so for example the E sound in C C, Radio Lucky speech sounds but they're represented in different way alphabetically the same letters and letter combinations can represent different sounds soup soul shout the same combination but you have to remember how they're linked up with those letters in order to be able to decode what the word is so we decided in a study that we were doing in Louisville that it would be interesting to take a look at preschoolers to see what the benefits of letter naming identification are and the reason for that is that that's a very common pre-kindergarten skill being able to identify the letters of the alphabet and you see letters of the alphabet all around the school room and you see a lot of letter related activities in the school rooms as well and so this was a group of four-year-old children that hadn't been in a preschool program before they'd been in a childcare setting or a daycare setting but not a program and we looked at high frequency letters and low frequency letters that was part of the rat the wide range achievement test and all they had to do was identify what the letters were most of the children at the beginning of the school years early as we could get there in the fall knew between zero and three letters that wasn't particularly surprising given the children's backgrounds and also given how early it was in the school year but in the spring when we went back to test the children using the same set of letters what we found was that there were really two big groups there was a group that knew very few letters in the spring just as they had known very few letters in the fall and then there was a group of children that had learned quite a few letters so they this big change group ranged from four to letters four to eleven letter names in the spring compared to what they had known in the fall but the kids that were in the small change groups knew very few in the fall and not very many more in the spring so we looked at the children's abilities to do a rhyme detection task we were interested in whether they could identify from pictures whether a word rhymed or not so the word could be cat and a cat rhymed with fish, bell or hat and it was administered it's a picture task and it's relatively easy administered in the spring and what we found was that there were continued to be differences between these two groups in which the big change group was able to identify correctly many more of the rhymes compared to the children in the small change group now you can see there were a possible score of fourteen and three and a half isn't a very high score but these differences were significant so understanding the letter names seems to be important for heightening interest and abilities to detect letter sounds even though letter sounds weren't explicitly taught in the classroom in fact we rarely see a relationship between what's going on in the classroom and moving beyond letter names to letter sounds and more systematic phonics the research also shows us that naming skills at school entry makes a difference that children that knew were proficient at letters the purple line compared to the children who weren't proficient in blue lines the gold lines were different in the identification of beginning sounds ending sounds and those are really hard anyway the rhyme is really hard the sight words and words in context now when kids enter kindergarten we don't expect very many of them to be able to identify sight words but the kids that were better more proficient in letter identification nevertheless more of them tended to be able to identify some sight words compared to the kids that weren't proficient it also has meaning with regard to when you put those two skills together Joe Torgesson has spent a lifetime looking at children's reading abilities and how they intersect with different approaches and interventions to teaching reading and he looked at kids at the this is the first grade I'm sorry it's cut off the fifth grade and he was looking at the bottom 20% in terms of phoneme awareness which is what we've been looking at the Bopaw kinds of things and letter knowledge and what he found was that the kids who were at the low end at the beginning of first grade continued to fall farther behind compared to the kids who were at least average on those skills so the two of those skills together are critically important and it's critically important that they start at least at kindergarten and we've argued strongly before kindergarten because those skills go together so phonological awareness reflects the awareness that there are differences between sounds in words that you can sound at and get cat and the differences in sounds at the beginning and the end of a word make a difference so pan and ban are different words and man and math are different words and sounding them out and paying attention to those letters is important this is an example of an activity that can strengthen alphabetic and phonological skills we did a number of research with children in Appalachia in Kentucky and these were children that the school had recruited us to come and talk with them about acquisition of reading they were starting a new reading program and they wanted to determine what would be the critical elements of that reading program that we might be able to take a look at and suggest and so as part of this we were kindergarten kids and we had happened to go to a conference where Mark Wendon who's the developer along with his mother of Letter Land and you know there's lots of letter programs out there and there's nothing sacred about Letter Land this is just one that we happen to be able to have access to Mark is tall and whoops like Harry Hatman and the kids thought he was wonderful and I thought he was kind of cool too he's about 9 feet tall and he was wearing this big tall hat and among the activities that go along with this it's a scripted process was pictograms and the kids could play around with these pictograms on a board and represent the different letters of the alphabet and they have a hint at a common sound that's associated so you've got the Harry Hatman and you've got Annie Apple and you've got Munching Mike and what the kids are doing here is they're taking these pictograms and they're moving around and they're playing is this a word and so is this a word so you know ham is a word but you can see up here okay that's not a word but what the teacher is doing here is pointing to those to have the children sound those out and then they had you know is that a word or not and the kids could chime in that's not a word so how can we make it a word so there are a variety of different ways in which you can actively engage children in alphabetic skills that map onto phonological skills and alphabetic knowledge in ways that children find enchanting some children aren't ready for it in kindergarten and this was a series of kindergarten children other children were ready for it when they were 4 years old some kids aren't going to be ready for it until later but those are the kinds of activities that can make a difference in how children are able to gain experience with alphabetic knowledge and phonological assessment I want to shift a little bit to this notion of a skill tune-ups we know that there are differences in brain processing between typical readers and children that are reading below grade level and these differences are well established using fMRI techniques and electrophysiology CMOS Temple Shewitz are examples of studies that have shown this very clearly here's a study by Akasimos who's one of Dennis' PhDs who's now living in Crete and he's looking here at differences between impaired readers and children who are not impaired and here are right hemisphere responses and here are left hemisphere responses and this is activation to just listening to words and what you find in the children that are impaired readers is that there are many more areas of brain that are active during that task compared to the non-impaired readers both in both the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere let me show you activation patterns during word reading and you see the same thing many more areas are active during for the children who have impaired reading skills compared to the non-impaired readers in both hemispheres and when we were doing the study in Appalachia in Kentucky and looking at children's brain processing we were showing the children the differences in how they were processing sounds one of the nine-year-olds turned around and shouted to his mother see mom I'm using my whole brain I'm using every bit of it look here I'm pulling it but you shouldn't have to there's a reading network and is that reading network develops the number of areas that are involved become smaller and the processing time becomes more efficient think of playing having a party line in which you have to talk to a bunch of people until you get to the answer it's faster to go to the right person at the end and more accurate than it is to go through all of those different brain processing areas so the number of areas that are activated isn't a good thing having fewer areas activated is a better thing and we know that from a variety of different studies but what happens in the brain processing of children after they participate in reading intervention what do we see in those children do the differences disappear which would be a reasonable hypothesis if it's an effective intervention maybe they just completely go away and what we found is that in Peter's dissertation thanks Peter that he did a study in which they were looking at children who had been identified in the first grade as reading below grade level the children that were reading below grade level were enrolled in a reading intervention program during their second grade and then they were tested again at the end of second grade to determine if they were now reading on grade level or whether they continued to read below grade level so those two groups are commonly called the adequate responding to intervention the kids who come up to reading at grade level the kids who are continuing to not read at grade level are the kids who are inadequately responding to intervention so basically what seems to happen is that here are in the red line and the solid line are the typical readers and the kids who responded to intervention and you can see that the responses in the early component of these two groups of children are relatively similar and very different from the kids who didn't respond to the intervention and I'd like to think about them as the kids who haven't yet responded to intervention because there are a lot of intervention approaches out there these later components show the same thing so that the kids who haven't responded to the intervention are very different than the kids who have so that suggests a possible normalization of brain response right they look more like the typical readers and perhaps have normalized how they respond but in the right hemisphere you can see that there's a difference between typical readers the kids who responded to intervention and the kids who didn't respond yet to the intervention both in the early component of the brainwave as well as the later components of the brainwave that suggests the presence of compensatory mechanisms those are strategies and brain processing reflect those that are workarounds that kids develop on their own when they're not able to read it's guessing skipping words not being able to sound them out accurately so it's inadequate word reading some of those mechanisms are still present even after intervention which leads us to think about response to intervention and the differences between adequate responders and inadequate responders so you don't get a total normalization of the brainwaves even in the children who responded well to intervention and that there are compensatory mechanisms that seem to still be present you can see the signature of difficulties in the children who didn't yet respond to the intervention in their brainwaves one of the interesting things that was noted in the dissertation is that some of the typical readers were found at the end of second grade to be now reading below grade level so understanding that kids can fall behind even if they were at grade level earlier as the text becomes more complex the words become longer the text becomes denser there are fewer pictures to help decode the words that can exist and would suggest the need for multiple ongoing assessment points to assure that children are continuing to read on grade level so what does this mean? we still have a lot to learn about the children who don't respond to intervention many of those children are children with dyslexia and as we know that's a specific learning disorder that impairs reading that children need to be diagnosed ideally early we've talked about the value of perhaps adding speech discrimination to universal newborn hearing screening a relatively simple way to do that could differentiate children that might need to be looked at more closely compared to children that are responding normally children that with dyslexia need to receive interventions that are targeting the disorder that classroom instruction frequently isn't sufficient for responding to the weaknesses of children that have dyslexia we also know that there are effective interventions that involve small group as well as individualized instruction that need to be focused, intense and multi-sensory we know that about learning a variety of different skills that multi-sensory instruction is ever so much better than unisensory instruction but most especially for children with dyslexia so the bottom line of what I'm saying is that we know a lot about reading we also know a lot about the interventions that can be applied to children and for many children are sufficient for bringing them up to grade level but for children who are not able to respond to those interventions additional resources need to be directed at the children so that they can benefit as well from early reading skills that enable them to read at grade level we have a long list of colleagues that have been associated with the research that we've done not only does nobody do research all by themselves Dennis and I have partnered in our research for decades but also you don't see single authored publications anymore or rarely anymore because we need the resources of all of our colleagues in order to make discoveries so questions? are we working? so I'd like to invite anybody to have a question to come up to the microphone and share your questions so that they can be asked if you can't move very easily I will happily bring the microphone to you you talk solely is this working? you talk solely about kids developmental improvements you talk about adults do their processes in terms of learning how to read again has that been studied and is it identical with kids are the problems identical are the solutions the same? yes no sometimes actually adults bring more to the table than children do they have a lot of information and they're able to deal with information that's presented to them in a different way largely because they have a lot of experience with learning things so that the strategies and the interventions that are most appropriate for young children are not necessarily appropriate for adults however one of the things that is the same for individuals that are really struggling to read and in fact individuals who have very poor very slow reading skills their ability to read text needs to have text that matches their ability and then challenges it it's very hard if we're talking about adolescents in particular to find texts that they're interested in reading that's at their reading level so there are our strategies it's harder and it's more of a challenge and I would like to argue that let's try to make sure we get it started early so that we don't encounter the same kinds of difficulties that many adults have struggled with for their lifetime people meant to use strategies yeah and so basically it depends on the individual of course but they're able to apply the rules in a more systematic fashion so that they can attend to the rules and they can apply the rules more systematically now one of the difficulties is that that reading is probably always going to be slow fluency rate is always going to be slow so the decoding can get better the reading comprehension can get better but that all important fluency rate is slow that's one of the reasons that I really strongly believe that we shouldn't have time tests that none of the high stakes tests that we expose children and adults to should be timed because reading fluency varies considerably and if it takes individuals longer to be able to decode the text and comprehend it because at that slower rate we need to enable them to take that time they're not going to respond to a high stakes test with information if they don't know it right but they will not be able to respond if they can't read it and giving them sufficient time to be able to do it to apply the rules to take their time and figure it out is going to be beneficial use the term learning disabilities general disabilities and then reading disabilities and dyslexia kind of interchangeably where do you draw the line so some of what I've been talking about are children because they're so young that have to do with just looking at their reading level the last comments in terms of dyslexia are dyslexia specific recommendations that there are children with in fact who have dyslexia that needs special services and those too need to be applied early we know that there's a familial risk for dyslexia which gives us kind of a hint as the children that we might want to take a look at in more depth of the same fashion as our finished colleagues not every child that's at risk for dyslexia is going to develop dyslexia for all children who have no dyslexia risk some of those children will develop dyslexia part of the difficulty of being able to accurately predicted is that many families aren't very big if I was going to design the best experiments in the world there'd be big families so that we'd have information we don't have that so the best we can do is to talk about whether there are individuals in the family that are either poor readers or dyslexic readers one of the things Hakey found was that he got a big pool of volunteers who said yes we have a family history of dyslexia but when in fact they tested the individual that presumably was affected or other members of the family they found that they were poor readers but they weren't dyslexic readers so you know I would in my mind lump them together you don't read, you need to have services but there are specific services that are going to be more beneficial for individuals particularly individuals with dyslexia uh oh oh no here we go now it's a party well Tori I've come from a state I moved from a state with a third grade reading barrier couldn't move to a third grade if you couldn't read now right here in Nebraska we have a bill that's moved forward that has that same idea what advice would you give our legislators our educators about either the benefits of such a thing or some of the drawbacks of such a thing holding kids back I mean kids feel badly enough not being able to read they know that they're not reading well and so do their classmates you probably remember reading aloud in elementary school and there was always the kid that you were saying oh gosh don't ask her to read it's going to be painful those kids know it too and you know in my best world those children would have been identified earlier but if we're going to think about keeping children back we need to be prepared to provide all of the services that they need so they can get beyond that barrier because there's a lot of baggage that goes along with being kept back in school not to mention that kids are feeling badly enough about themselves let alone they're also not going to progress and they may be strong in other skills just because you're not reading well doesn't mean you're not also smart in a variety of different areas these are smart kids that seems harsh for selfish reasons I have two young children one that's about to go to kindergarten next year as a mom who's watching out for her children's development do you have anything based on your research that me and my husband can do at home with them to ensure that they're getting these skills set for future success or how we can monitor Vivian as she goes to kindergarten next year and make sure she's staying on that path okay absolutely you're right in my wheelhouse now we can so what's important for children obviously is reading to children and not just reading the story starting at page one and reading all the way through to the end but having a dialogue around reading enabling the child to tell the story enabling you to point out different words and associate the high meaning words with the storyline being able to predict the outcome it not only has a benefit on reading skills but it has a benefit for vocabulary skills for the development of oral language and communication skills as well as children understanding story plots I mean these are really little kids and pokey little puppies not a complicated plot right but reading stories even repetitive stories they all had children who wanted to read the same story night after night after night they're learning and when they're ready to move on they won't want pokey little puppy anymore they'll want something else but as parents enabling them to be a participant in the reading the so-called dialogic reading is a really important component alphabetic skills pointing out letters the common letter associated with it playing letter games with children those are all important things some of our because we've done so much newborn research in early infancy research some of the moms in the study will say yeah I read to my kids before they were born but I've been too busy after they were born please you know it's important to read before they're born but you know really you know that's an interesting study I think research is fascinating there was an interesting study where they found that the kids who are read to in utero actually preferred that story once they were born so you can read them the encyclopedia Britannica in theory if it even exists anymore and get your kid ready for the ACT on day one so anyway it's all of those kinds of skills and especially if they're ones you enjoy do the things that you enjoy they didn't go on how do I teach my kids to read before they go to school there's probably 5 million sides there's way too much pick the things that you know are important but story reading, dialogic reading that's one of the biggies Hi I'm a Spanish education major and I was wondering what you would have advice on learning to read in a second language with transferring the skills in the first language like English to a language like Spanish it's actually easier if it goes the other way because Spanish is another one of those transparent orthographies that's a little bit easier to learn than learning to read in English I'm always astonished that how kids winning the spelling bee are not necessarily native English speakers how does that work so that's the next 40 years of research I am not an expert in English language learning or learning to read in another language but again just like an adult reader you're bringing to the table skills that you learned in learning the first language that enable you to learn the second language we know that both in terms of grammatical structure but also you're able to look at word equivalencies and definitions and so forth the phonological processing is not completely different it's just more regular in English so the fact that you're reading in one language really in a related language really enables learning to read in the second language