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

Improving auditory processing disorder in children on the Autism Spectrum, by Barbara Calhoun, Ph.D

Summary:  A recent study by Nicole Russo of Northwestern University and her colleagues, published in Behavioral and Brain Functions in 2010, evaluates whether auditory training programs such as Fast ForWord® can alleviate the auditory processing deficits so frequently seen in ASD children.

Russo’s study examines how effectively Fast ForWord could strengthen the auditory processing of speech sounds in similar ASD children. Her team hypothesized that such training would modify the neural processing of sound in children with ASD, and that such children “would show improvement in the neural encoding of speech syllables, including faster response timing, greater fidelity of the response relative to the stimulus, and more accurate pitch encoding over time.” (p. 3)

Results showed that training appeared to have benefited all participants in the experimental group, affecting their neural transcription of speech. According to Russo and her team, “each of the five children who underwent FFW training improved on at least one measure of cortical speech processing relative to the control group, with response timing improving in both quiet and noise for some children.” (p. 13)

Russo and her team were able to conclude that directed auditory training using Fast ForWord shows great promise for improving auditory processing in children with ASD – specifically, those high-functioning children who have hearing in the typical range. 

Content:  This study was published in Behavioral and Brain Functions in 2010 and was done at Northwestern University by Dr. Nicole Russo and her colleagues.   It evaluates whether auditory training programs, such as Fast ForWord, can alleviate the auditory processing deficits so frequently seen in children with autism spectrum disorders. Children with autism spectrum disorders or ASD demonstrate impairments in their use of language for social and communicative purposes.  These impairments are typically apparent prior to three years of age.

There is emerging evidence that the neural encoding of speech sounds may be impaired in some children with autism spectrum disorders leading to atypical auditory brainstem responses to speech sounds and difficulties processing speech-specific stimuli such as detecting speech in background noise. 

Since the Fast ForWord products provide auditory training including listening and sound-sequencing exercises, as well as exercises on auditory attention, auditory discrimination, phoneme discrimination, and memory, Dr Russo and her colleagues were interested in investigating the impact of the products on children with ASD.

High-functioning children with ASD who had participated in an earlier study were invited to partake in this one.   The children all had a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.  They had typical peripheral hearing, average mental abilities and average or near-average language scores.

Eleven boys with an average age of 9.2 completed the entire testing protocol and met the criteria.   The children were then given the option of taking part in the intensive auditory training. Five children opted for the training and formed the experimental group.  The other six children who opted not to take part in the training were willing to take part in the post-test and formed the control group. There was not a significant difference between the two groups in terms of age, IQ, or language ability.

Students in the experimental group used the intense intervention: the Fast ForWord Language Series which entailed the Fast ForWord Language product for an average for 20 days followed by Fast ForWord Language to Reading for an average of 32 days.

Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and Event-Related Potentials (ERP’s) were recorded from both groups.  These tests measure the size and the timing of electrical activity that occurs in the brainstem and brain in response to a sound.  In this case, the sounds were synthesized vowels that were heard in the presence of background noise, as well as in quiet.  Auditory brainstem responses are subcortical events occurring less than 10 ms after the stimuli is presented while  event-related potentials are cortical events occurring a few hundred milliseconds after the stimuli is presented.  Both ABR’s and ERP’s measure the aggregate response of neurons and neither requires active involvement by the participant. 

Due to the small number of participants, and the variations between them, the analysis involved defining a “typical change” as the average change for students in the control group plus one standard deviation, and defining a “significant change” for one of the participants as a change that was more than the control’s change plus one standard deviation. 

The researchers were particularly interested in subjects that had two or more measures with significant change.  All five students improved more than one standard deviation on at least two tests. The researchers concluded that there is Initial evidence that directed auditory training may improve auditory processing in a specific population of children with ASD – specifically high-functioning children with ASD who have hearing in the typical range.

They also concluded that computer-based training may benefit some children with ASD by acting on biological processes.

Read the complete report on this research at the link below:

Nicole M Russo, N., Hornickel, J., Nicol, T. Zeckler, S. Kraus, N. Biological changes in auditory function following training in children with autism spectrum disorders. Behavioral and Brain Functions 2010, 6:60.

Related Reading:

Understanding Autism in Children

Language Skills Increase 1.8 Years After 30 Days Using Fast ForWord

Separating Brain Fact from Brain Fiction: Debunking a few Neuroscience Myths, by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D

The brain is one of the most mysterious and misunderstood organs in the body. It represents the seat of our judgment, our senses, perceptions and our creativity.  More than any other aspect of our anatomy, the uniqueness of our brains is at the core of what makes us truly human.

While neuroscience advances every day, there are a number of myths about the brain that are accepted by many people as fact. As a scientist, I and my colleagues have worked to uncover the brain’s truths.  So what are some of these myths – and what are the true stories behind them to the best of our scientific knowledge?

Fiction: We use only a small percentage of our brains.

Fact: General thinking is that we use only about 10% of our brains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brain scans such as MRI and PET scans show that we regularly use all parts of our brains. Certainly, different areas of the brain are activated during different types of tasks, and some parts of the brain are less critical to support vital functions than others. But as even small brain injuries can show, every part of the brain performs essential functions in how we process, communicate with, and move through the world around us. Read more athttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-we-really-use-only-10.

Fiction: The wrinkles on the surface of the brain appear and become more pronounced as we learn.

Fact: The ridges and crannies – more correctly, the gyri and sulci – on the surface of the brain actually all appear by the time a fetus is 40 weeks old. As the human brain evolved, gyri and sulci appeared as a result of the brain having to fold in upon itself as it grew larger to fit inside a correctly proportioned skull. While the gyri and sulci do not change as we learn, the brain itself – as we know from research in brain plasticity --  does continue to change throughout our lives.

Fiction: Brain damage is permanent.

This is an interesting myth, in that it is the result of ambiguous language. The brain is made up of a collection of neurons – brain cells – that are all networked together. When the brain suffers trauma and neurons are destroyed or damaged, those neurons cannot regenerate. In that sense, the damage to them is permanent. That said, those neurons are linked together at synapses to form complete networks. While a single neuron cannot be repaired, the pathways and connections throughout the brain can rewire themselves and form new pathways. If a connection is lost due to injury, we can reestablish that connection if the damage is not so acute that the entire network cannot be rewired. For a scholarly treatment of how the brain recovers from injury, seehttp://web.uvic.ca/~skelton/Teaching/General%20Readings/Robertson%20Murre%201999.pdf.

Fiction: A person is either “left-brained” or “right-brained.”

The theory goes that left-brained people are more logical and right-brained people are more creative. Certainly there are asymmetries associated with locations of certain brain functions. For example, mathematical computation and the grammar and vocabulary aspects of language seem to be controlled in most people in the left brain, while numerical approximation and comparison, along with interpretive aspects of language like prosody and intonation, appear to be controlled in the right.  These ideas date back to original research done in 1861 by French physician Pierre Paul Broca. Today, through MRI and PET imaging techniques, we have a much more complex view of the way the brain’s hemispheres control functions and interact with one another. The two perform a complex dance of information exchange that gives rise to our abilities. For a look at results of some of these MRI tests in children, seehttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8780075.

Fiction: There are five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch.

These five are simply the ones that we are most aware of in our conscious minds, but we perceive and sense the world in a great many other ways. For example, “proprioconception” describes how are bodies are oriented in the world. “Nociception” is how we perceive pain. We sense changes in temperature. We sense balance. We feel thirst and hunger. We sense the passage of time. For a quick and easy description of the senses – in humans as well as other species – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense.

As scientists continue our search for the facts, there is much we don’t know; we are expanding our knowledge of the brain’s truths every day. As new discoveries are made, it is natural for facts to become distorted and reinterpreted with each new telling.   As educators and scientists, we should take the time to explain the truths about the brain and rectify any misunderstandings we may hear others repeat. The brain is amazing, and communicating the truths about it will further society’s understanding as a whole.

Related Reading:

Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function