Longitudinal study shows significant Fast ForWord gains over time by Melissa Agocs

Every spring, the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, abbreviated CRCT, are administered to students in Georgia, USA.  The CRCT is designed to measure how well students acquire the skills and knowledge described in the Georgia Performance Standards.

Students are tested in reading, English/language arts and mathematics. This summary will concentrate on the reading results from the Clarke County School District in Georgia.  The CRCT is given every spring to all students in grades 1-8, and the students included in this study were first through eighth graders during the time of the study.

A longitudinal study is a type of study that follows the same subjects over time. Clarke County students who used the Fast ForWord products generally started with the Fast ForWord^® Language or Fast ForWord^® Literacy series, with students then progressing through the Fast ForWord^® Reading series. Students started on the products during different years, with some starting as early as the 2006-2007 school year, and others starting aslate as the 2010-2011 school year.

The first wave of Fast ForWord participants at Clarke County started using the products in the fall of 2006 and made statistically significant improvements on the spring 2007 CRCT with continued improvements in 2008 and the following years.  Students in the second wave started using the products in the fall of 2007 and made statistically significant improvements on the spring 2008 CRCT.

After a third group started in 2008 school year, the group’s CRCT scores significantly increased and then continued to go up.  Similarly, students who began using the products in 2009 and 2010 also started to show increases in their reading scores after Fast ForWord participation.

Each cohort exhibits a similar pattern in that after Fast ForWord participation started, on average, the group showed a steady increase in their CRCT reading scores with each passing year.

Looking at the students who started using Fast ForWord products in 2010, there was an increase in the percentage of students reaching reading proficiency, with 55% of students who were not proficient in 2010 crossing the proficiency threshold in 2011.

In addition to longitudinal results, data were also analyzed for certain demographic groups, including students who were receiving Special Education services and students with Limited English Proficiency. Both groups achieved statistically significant improvements on the CRCT Reading Test after Fast ForWord participation.

If you have questions on this study or any other Fast ForWord study, please feel free to contact our Customer Service Team.

Related Reading:

Fast ForWord^® Language Series Has Greatest Impact of Any Intervention Listed by NCRTI

My Nephew Was a Struggling Learner (Not Anymore!): Carrie’s Story

Modeling Healthy Choices: Three Habits for Optimal Brain Health by Bill Jenkins Ph.D

Isaac Asimov said, “The human brain…is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.”^[i] And it’s true.  Our amazing brains are both a product of biological evolution and a reflection of the world around us.

First, the stuff of the brain – grey matter, white matter, fluids, blood vessels – is made up of nutrients from the plants and animals we consume from the world around us.

Second, in terms of brain function, our interaction with our environment has a major impact on both brain structure and brain health. Extensive and ongoing research into “brain plasticity” has proven that everything we experience, everything we see or touch or hear, creates a perception that changes the wiring of the brain itself.

Given that our brains are a product of evolution (which is outside of our control) and environment (which is only partially under our control, and often less than ideal), how can we keep our brains as healthy as possible, from birth all the way through old age?

The pathway to optimal brain health comes from the small choices we make every day. By making healthy choices on a regular basis, and particularly by turning those choices into habits, we can help our brains stay healthy while also helping the young people in our lives learn positive self-care skills that can last a lifetime.

Here are three important steps everyone can take toward optimal brain health:

• Eating more healthy foods and minimizing unhealthy foods. Eating foods that provide nutrients to build healthy brain tissues is essential. Foods high in omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon, avocados and nuts, along with foods high in potassium like bananas promote brain function. Also, lowering our intake of sodium can reduce blood pressure, a factor that can, if left unchecked, lead to stroke.
• Engaging in regular physical exercise. Like every other organ and tissue in the body, the brain needs healthy blood flow to function at its highest possible levels. Physical exercise helps improve and maintain cardio vascular health, allowing the body to efficiently and effectively deliver oxygen and nutrients to the brain. But it can do more for us. In students, educators have reported physical exercise resulting in less disruptive behavior, higher self esteem, less anxiety and greater attentiveness. Dr. John Ratey of Harvard University describes exercise as “food for the brain.”
• Giving your brain practice in the activities you want it to be good at. The neural pathways that our brains create over time, as we have said, are a direct result of the stimuli that we receive. That’s why through practice and training, a child can work to shape their brain into that of a great musician or mathematician or martial artist. At the same time, we must remember that negative input also affects our wiring. For example, excessive amounts of watching television and playing video games has been shown to have concerning chemical and biological effects, such as the suppression of melatonin release, elevated blood cholesterol and an increased chance of coronary heart disease – and these effects should be taken into consideration as we make decisions about how we spend our time.

The brain might be the most complicated organization of matter we know of, but that doesn’t make it difficult to keep healthy. By learning to choose the right foods, the right activities, and the right input, we can each take control – at any age – of building the brains we want. 

Children can begin learning to make good choices from the earliest ages, but it is up to parents and teachers to model these healthy habits of mind.  

Yes, that means you.

References:

[i] J. Hooper and D. Teresi. The Three-Pound Universe. Macmillan Publishing Company. 1^st edition 1986.

Related Reading:

Lifelong Learning and the Plastic Brain

5 Paths to Brain Health: Tips from Dr. Paul Nussbaum

Left vs. Right: What Your Brain Hemispheres Are Really Up To by Martha Burns Ph.D

In the 1980’s, brain researchers viewed the two sides of the brain as dichotomously opposed: the right hemisphere was seen as a gestalt processor, good at “seeing the big picture,” while the left hemisphere was attributed with detail processing skills. Other views at that time attributed the left hemisphere with being more logical and analytical while the right hemisphere was considered more intuitive.^[i]

Some went so far as asserting that men and women exhibited different right vs. left preferences: men were attributed with stronger left hemisphere skills and women better right hemisphere skills. Although this male-female distinction was never empirically verified through research, the somewhat “pop-psychology” view that the right hemisphere is important for skills like music and art, predominated. In fact, there were books written instructing individuals on how to “draw with the right hemisphere” or how to “teach to the right hemisphere”.^[ii]

It now appears that some of these notions need to be revised.  A current view is that, for the majority of us, the right hemisphere is a pattern recognizer that may develop before the left. From this perspective, the right hemisphere enables a child to attend to and appreciate the gist of a sensory experience within each cognitive domain. For example, in acquisition of mathematical concepts, the right hemisphere may enable a young child to appreciate quantities in terms of more vs. less prior to assigning numerical values to the quantities (which would involve left hemisphere skills). There is research demonstrating that babies can discern a group of dots in terms of general aspects of quantity.^[iii]

Patricia Kuhl at University of Washington in Seattle has shown that typically developing infants show an interest in human voices over other environmental sounds like a car horn or doorbell, and direct their attention to human voice when it conveys information that is interesting.^[iv]Ultimately this may lead to an understanding of how the melody of a voice is used to convey a person’s intent.  In other words, recent research suggests that the right hemisphere may be best at processing patterns like voice contour, facial expression, aspects of size and quantity, gestalt aspects of the world which, from a developmental perspective, represent the way children begin to learn about cognitive areas like music, art, mathematics or language.

Considering the cognitive domain of music, for example, the right hemisphere appears to have a fundamental preference for recognizing melody, which allows a young infant to be interested in and ultimately reproduce early nursery songs. In the realm of visual processing, the right hemisphere has been shown to be better at perceiving the form or outline of an object than the details contained within the object.^[v]. And, similarly, although many people regard the left hemisphere as dominant for language, newer research has shown that the right hemisphere is superior at processing information like vocal inflection (prosody), and perhaps going directly from word to meaning, especially in very familiar phrases like idiomatic expressions (eg., “it is raining cats and dogs”) while the left hemisphere is more important for processing aspects of language that depend on analyzing the specific sequence of the sounds and words which are essential for understanding grammatical form of language and perceiving internal details of words.^[vi]

Several neuroscientists have accordingly revised and expanded the early right-left dichotomy to see the right hemisphere as preferential in processing form, structure, and perhaps, direct links to emotion,^[vii]  while the left hemisphere handles complex, rapidly changing stimuli, in which discerning the specific sequential order is critical to perception (as in speech perception, for example, where one must discern and order very rapidly changing complex acoustic events very quickly.)^[viii]

Another revision to the older view of right versus left hemisphere complements the view that the right hemisphere is preferential for pattern analysis, and comes from developmental neuroscience which has reported research that supports the contention that for most cognitive skills the right hemisphere matures before the left.^[ix] This certainly seems to the case when one looks at the early stages of neuronal development and migration in the fetal brain,^[x] and also the building of early axonal superhighways, as well as the research on myelination.^[xi] In fact, it may be that when this typical right to left maturation does not occur, developmental neurological abnormalities result. For example, there is some early research evidence that Autism Spectrum Disorders may represent one example of developmental deviations in this typical right-to-left developmental hierarchy.^[xii]

Although it may seem somewhat of a stretch from the early research in this area, one can observe how this organization might be reflected in early childhood development in the stages children pass through in the gradual mastery of skills. For example, when a child first begins to enjoy music, the observant adult notices that the child moves his or her whole body to the musical rhythm. For nursery songs, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” the child often begins by humming the melodies. In both cases, this may represent right hemisphere processing.

In most cases, it will be a few years before the child will be able to read musical symbols which would presumably involve more left hemisphere skill. We do have research that shows that when three month old babies are first listening to oral language, the right hemisphere is much more active than the left.^[xiii] Patricia Kuhl has shown that mothers instinctively seem to match their speech to babies’ early developing perceptual preferences by exaggerating melodic inflection with young babies, probably reflecting their intuitive knowledge that they need to exaggerate the language cues (intonational contour and vocal inflection) that the right hemisphere seems to process preferentially while deemphasizing the production of the speech sounds themselves (left hemisphere preferences).^[xiv]
 

[i] Deutsch, Georg and Sally P. Springer. Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives From Cognitive Neuroscience . W.H. Feeman and Company/Worth Publishers. 2001.
[ii] Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Penguin Putnam Press. 1999.
[iii] Xu, Fei et al. (2005) Number sense in human infants. Developmental Science. Vol. 8. 2005.
[iv] Kuhl, Patricia. Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Vol 5. 2005.
[v] Devinsky, Orrin and Mark D’Esposito. Neurology of Cognitive and Behavioral Disorders. Oxford University Press. 2004.
[vi] Hickok, Gregory and David Poeppel. The Cortical Organization of Speech Processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2007.
[vii]Cahill, L. et al. Sex-Related Hemispheric Lateralization of Amygdala Function in Emotionally Influenced Memory: An fMRI Investigation. Learning and Memory. Vol. 11: 261-266. 2004
[viii] Tallal, Paula. Improving Language and Liteacy is a Matter of Time. Nature Reviews Neuroscience Vol. 5. 2004.
[ix] Huttenlocher, Peter. Morphometric Study of Human Cerebral Cortex Development.Neuropsychologia. Vol. 28. 1990.
[x] Galaburda, Albert et al. From Genes to Behavior in Developmental Dyslexia. Nature Neuroscience  Vol 9. 2006.
[xi] Herbert, Martha et al. Brain Asymmetries in Autism and Developmental Language Disorder: A Nested Whole-Brain Analysis. Brain: A Journal of Neurology.2004.
[xii] Herbert, Martha et al. Ibid.
[xiii] Hickock, Gregory and David Poeppel. Ibid.
[xiv] Kuhl, Patricia. Ibid.

Related Reading:

A Gymnast, a Cursor and a Monkey Named Aurora

7 Amazing Discoveries from Brain Research

Recognising emotions after brain injury: re-learning a critical social skill by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D

For most of us, interpreting and expressing emotion is something deeply instinctive. But what happens when that ability to express ourselves or read another’s emotions goes awry? Imagine what can happen to a student’s classroom experience if they can’t make sense of something as simple as their teacher’s facial expression. In the past, these kinds of students have been seen as having behavior problems. So how can we help them succeed?

Research has shown that people with traumatic brain injuries often experience this same inability to interpret and respond to emotions, a condition called "affect recognition."

Barry Willer, professor of psychiatry and specialist in TBI (traumatic brain injury) of the University of Buffalo, tells the story of a man and his wife who came into his office with a problem. The woman had experienced a mild traumatic brain injury. While her husband was supporting her recovery as best he could, she consistently described his attitude as “indifferent. “ He was frustrated, to say the least.

“His wife didn’t know she wasn’t recognizing his emotions,” said Willer, recounting the story in a 2009 interview with Insciences Journal , “and he had no idea what was going on.”

This couple is by no means alone. Nearly fifty percent of all traumatic brain injuries result in problems interpreting and expressing emotion.

As educators, being able to connect with our students at an emotional level is essential to classroom success. Without that connection, the learning process can quite easily come to a halt. Thankfully, Willer has demonstrated that there is hope for this population, and that the human brain is quite capable of re-learning how to understand facial expressions and use that information to interpret emotion.

Willer and his team have developed two specific interventions that have shown positive results:

• Facial Affect Recognition (FAR): Individuals view faces on a computer screen that directs them to concentrate on specific elements of each face. "Look at the eyes. What are the eyes doing? What is the mouth doing?" and asks them to name the emotion.
• Stories of Emotional Inference (SEI): Participants are asked to read stories that describe events, along with character’s beliefs, wants and behaviors. From this information, participants are asked to infer the character’s emotions.

"What was so exciting about our preliminary study," says Willer, "is that someone may lose the ability to recognize emotions, but even 10 years later, they can re–learn the skill if given the right assistance."

As it turns out, the only emotion that traumatic brain injuries do not erase is "happy," which is very hard–wired and has an extensive amount of "redundant circuitry." Says Willer, "I don’t know how that happened, but we all can be glad it did."

For further reading:  Milders, M., Fuchs, S., & Crawford, J. R. Neuropsychological impairments and changes in emotional and social behaviour following severe traumatic brain injury. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 25, 2003. 157-172.

Related Reading:

Lifelong Learning and the Plastic Brain

5 Paths to Brain Health: Tips From Dr. Paul Nussbaum

Fast ForWord® Language Series Has Greatest Impact of Any Intervention Listed by NCRTI by Noreen Wiesen

Educators and families who are looking for appropriate learning interventions for students often turn to The Instructional Intervention Tools Chart from the National Center on Response to Intervention (NCRTI).  Now, theFast ForWord® Language serieshas been added to the chart, with the NCRTI evaluations of research on the series supporting the claim that the products have high-quality studies, demonstrating their effectiveness when used for Response to Intervention (RtI).

The effectiveness of the Fast ForWord Language series is evident from the “effect size” found by the NCRTI. Effect size is a statistical way to measure the magnitude of the effect of an intervention.  Of the three studies on the Fast ForWord Language series that have been evaluated by the NCRTI, one showed a medium effect size and the other two showed a large effect size. In fact, two of the three Scientific Learning studies were ranked as having the highest scores in effect size, showing that the Fast ForWord Language Series had the greatest impact and the largest positive effect of any intervention listed by the NCRTI.  These evaluations of research on the Fast ForWord Language series validate the quality of the studies behind the products, demonstrating their effectiveness when used for RtI.

The impact identified in the NCRTI evaluations holds up in real-world implementations, as well.  For example, one district used the Fast ForWord program as its only intervention for kindergarteners during the 2009-2010 school year, to see what kind of difference the program could make when used as the sole intervention for participating students.  Westerly Public Schools in southern Rhode Island identified kindergarten students who scored at the deficient or very deficient levels in letter sound fluency and letter naming fluency on the AIMSweb benchmark, and placed these students into the Fast ForWord program, with no other interventions.

After using the Fast ForWord program, test scores for the participating students rose substantially, and many were able to move off of the personal literacy plans they had been placed on as struggling elementary students.  Because only the Fast ForWord program was used, the district was able to determine that these effects were due to the students’ participation in the program.  And because the students didn’t need as many interventions, the district also saved money.

The NCRTI is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The center partners with researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Kansas to build the capacity of states to assist districts in implementing proven models for RTI.

Visit http://rti4success.org/instructionTools to see Scientific Learning’s listings on the NCRTI’s “Instructional Intervention Tools Chart.”

Watch the video on “effect size” and the NCRTI evaluation of the Fast ForWord Language series products.

Neural Prostheses: The Melding of Hardware, Software and Wetware by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D

Earlier this year, I wrote about a researcher namedDr. Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center and his work with a monkey named Aurora. Through placing implants in Aurora’s skull, Nicolelis was able to record Aurora’s motor nerve signals as she used a joystick to play a simple video game. He then used a computer algorithm to convert those signals into code to power a robotic arm. Over time, because of her brain’s ability to adapt and learn, Aurora taught herself how to control the movements of that robotic arm by just thinking about it.

What we see in Nicolelis’s work is the complex interplay of three different elements of a neural prosthetic system: hardware, software, and what has been come to be known as “wetware.”

• Hardware refers to the machine part of the system. This consists of the wires, computers, circuits, implants and manufactured devices that comprise the system.
• Software refers to the set of instructions, data and algorithms – in other words, the set of rules – that govern the function and operation of the hardware.
• Wetware refers to the combination of biological elements involved in the system, generally including muscles, hormones, nerves and the brain.

Through choreographing the delicate dance between these three systemic elements, biomedical professionals are becoming more able to develop neural prosthetics that continue to improve the quality of life for any number of disabilities, substituting motor, sensory or cognitive capabilities that have been damaged as a result of injury or disease.

Today, biomedical research has given rise to any number of neural prostheses. Visual prosthetics stimulate the optic nerve to counter certain types of blindness. Spinal cord stimulators induce sensations to mask and control pain. Pacemakers work with the muscle and nerves of the heart to monitor and regulate the heartbeat and control fibrillation.

One of the most common applications of the neural prosthesis concept is in the cochlear implant. Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus and neuroscientist, was the Principal Investigator back during the development of the first cochlear implants at the University of California, San Francisco. The work showed that in as little as six months, patients were able to develop remarkable speech discrimination abilities. It was found that speech discrimination abilities improved over time due to the brain’s plastic ability to change and adapt to these new inputs.

According to the NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, over 59,000 adults and children have cochlear implants. Just like Aurora’s robotic arm, a cochlear implant involves the integration of hardware, software and wetware. But instead of using motor neurons to articulate robotic fingers, cochlear implants form the technological bridge between the world of sound and the ability to perceive that sound in someone whose ears cannot convert sound vibrations to a nerve impulse. While the ones we developed had a single channel, today’s devices have up to 120, which allows for better input fidelity through stimulating different parts of the auditory nerve.

Of the three elements of the neural prosthetic system, hardware, software and wetware, the only one of them that can be expected – even depended upon – to change over time is the wetware. Both because of normal development and brain plasticity, an individual’s ability to effectively use neural prosthetic will naturally change over time as the individual’s own nervous system adapts to make better use of the hardware and software.

As Dr. Nicolelis demonstrated with Aurora, wetware is an amazingly malleable apparatus. We might imagine these neural prosthetic systems as fantastically complex in terms of their hardware and software. That said,research out of the University of Washington, Seattle, has suggested that, because of brain plasticity, we may be able to use simpler algorithms in the external hardware and software, and depend upon the plasticity of the wetware to make optimal use of these devices.

In the end, we as humans, with our drive to heal and discover, seem to have a limitless ability to develop innovations to remedy our physical ills. And yet, it is the plasticity of our nervous system’s innate ability to adapt that will apparently allow us to make the most of these innovations.

For further reading:

Fallon, J. B., Irvine, D. Shepherd, R. Neural Prostheses and Brain Plasticity. J Neural Eng. 2009 December.

Moritz, C. T., Perlmutter, S. I., Ftez, E. E. Direct Control of Paralysed Muscles by Cortical Neurons. Nature. 2008 December.

Related Reading:

A Gymnast, A Cursor, and A Monkey Named Aurora

Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity