Comparison of Reading Growth Among Students With Severe Reading Deficits Who Received Intervention to Typically Achieving Students and Students Receiving Special Education

This study compared the reading growth of students with and without learning disabilities, and students with and without reading deficits in response to tier 2 reading interventions within a response-to-intervention framework. Participants were 499 second- and third-grade students in six urban schools. Students who scored at or below the 10th percentile on the fall reading screening assessment were identified as having a severe reading deficit and received a tier 2 reading intervention that was targeted to their needs. Results showed a significant effect between groups on reading growth. Students with severe reading deficits receiving targeted tier 2 intervention grew at a rate that equaled the rate of growth of students without reading deficits and was significantly higher than students who were receiving special education services for reading. Implications for practice, suggestions for future research, and study limitations are discussed.

Understanding the biological basis of dyslexia at a neural systems level

We examined the naming speed performance of 18 typically achieving and 16 dyslexic adults while simultaneously recording eye movements, articulations and fMRI data. Naming speed tasks, which require participants to name a list of letters or objects, have been proposed as a proxy for reading and are thought to recruit similar reading networks in the left hemisphere of the brain as more complex reading tasks. We employed letter and object naming speed tasks, with task manipulations to make the stimuli more or less phonologically and/or visually similar. Compared to typically achieving readers, readers with dyslexia had a poorer behavioural naming speed task performance, longer fixation durations, more regressions and increased activation in areas of the reading network in the left-hemisphere. Whereas increased network activation was positively associated with performance in dyslexics, it was negatively related to performance in typically achieving readers. Readers with dyslexia had greater bilateral activation and recruited additional regions involved with memory, namely the amygdala and hippocampus; in contrast, the typically achieving readers additionally activated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Areas within the reading network were differentially activated by stimulus manipulations to the naming speed tasks. There was less efficient naming speed behavioural performance, longer fixation durations, more regressions and increased neural activity when letter stimuli were both phonologically and visually similar. Discussion focuses on the differences in activation within the reading network, how they are related to behavioural task differences, and how progress in furthering the understanding of the relationship between behavioural performance and brain activity can change the overall trajectories of children with reading difficulties by contributing to both early identification and remediation processes.

Computation Error Analysis: Students With Mathematics Difficulty Compared To Typically Achieving Students

Though proficiency with computation is highly emphasized in national mathematics standards, students with mathematics difficulty (MD) continue to struggle with computation. To learn more about the differences in computation error patterns between typically achieving students and students with MD, we assessed 478 third-grade students on a measure of mathematics computation. Results indicated that using the wrong operation was the most common identifiable error for all students. Students with MD had similar accuracy rates for item categories (e.g., addition items) compared to typically achieving students, but students with MD consistently had more variability in incorrect item responses. This study has implications for efficacious computation instruction for students in the elementary grades.

Literacy Achievement Trends at Entry to First Grade

Recent shifts in policy and practice have brought an increasingly more academic focus to the early grades, evidenced in rising standards and the now widely accepted notion that kindergarten is the new first grade. These views however are mostly supported by teacher and parent self-reports and not by an analysis of literacy achievement data. We created an up-to-date literacy profile for beginning readers using a multiple cohort database that contained achievement data for students at entry to first grade ( n = 364,738) in the same schools ( n = 2,358) over a 12-year period starting in 2002. Our finding that overall beginning of first-grade reading achievement for both low achieving and more typically achieving students improved measurably between 2002 and 2013 provides empirical support for the growing academic focus in the early grades. However, our findings about the differential nature of that progress for low achieving students compared to those more typically achieving raise new questions and concerns about a growing literacy achievement gap in the early grades.

Writing Characteristics of Students With Learning Disabilities and Typically Achieving Peers

There is a general consensus that writing is a challenging task for students with learning disabilities (LD). To identify more precisely the extent and depth of the challenges that these students experience with writing, the authors conducted a meta-analysis comparing the writing performance of students with LD to their typically achieving peers. From 53 studies that yielded 138 effect sizes, the authors calculated average weighted effect sizes, showing that students with LD obtained lower scores than their peers on the following writing outcomes: writing quality (–1.06); organization (–1.04); vocabulary (–0.89); sentence fluency (–0.81); conventions of spelling, grammar, and handwriting (–1.14); genre elements (–0.82); output (–0.87); and motivation (–0.42). Implications for research and practice are provided based on these findings.

Fractions Learning in Children With Mathematics Difficulties

Learning fractions is difficult for children in general and especially difficult for children with mathematics difficulties (MD). Recent research on developmental and individual differences in fraction knowledge of children with MD and typically achieving (TA) children has demonstrated that U.S. children with MD start middle school behind their TA peers in fraction understanding and fall further behind during middle school. In contrast, Chinese children, who like the MD children in the United States score in the bottom one third of the distribution in their country, possess reasonably good fraction understanding. We interpret these findings within the framework of the integrated theory of numerical development. By emphasizing the importance of fraction magnitude knowledge for numerical understanding in general, the theory proved useful for understanding differences in fraction knowledge between MD and TA children and for understanding how knowledge can be improved. Several interventions demonstrated the possibility of improving fraction magnitude knowledge and producing benefits that generalize to fraction arithmetic learning among children with MD. The reasonably good fraction understanding of Chinese children with MD and several successful interventions with U.S. students provide hope for the improvement of fraction knowledge among American children with MD.

Taking Stock of 40 Years of Research on Mathematical Learning Disability: Methodological Issues and Future Directions

Although approximately 5–8% of students have a mathematical learning disability (MLD), researchers have yet to develop a consensus operational definition. To examine how MLD has been identified and what mathematics topics have been explored, we conducted a systematic review of 164 studies on MLD published between 1974 and 2013. Findings indicate that (a) there was great variability in the classification methods used, (b) studies rarely reported demographic differences between the MLD and typically achieving groups, and (c) studies overwhelmingly focused on elementary–aged students engaged in basic arithmetic calculation. To move the field toward a more precise and shared definition of MLD, we argue for standards for methodology and reporting, and we identify a need for research addressing more complex mathematics.