2018 COULD BRING EVIDENCE-BASED & HIGHLY EFFECTIVE DYSLEXIA INTERVENTIONS INTO SCHOOLS, INSTEAD OF INEFFECTIVE IEP's & MISGUIDED STRATEGIES

Can 2018 be the year of far fewer children and adults with Dyslexia's poor reading skills? 

Some might ask, "is highly effective intervention even a realistic goal to hope for?"

Unknown to or under appreciated by far too many educators, other professionals and parents, there exists more than 15 years of very high caliber, peer-reviewed, published research studies show the following:

1. How to successfully prevent reading difficulties for most 5-year olds (even those at highest risk for difficulty learning to read can pass K and 1st grade if they received a neurodevelopmental language processing intervention, not phonics, at age 5 years old)
2. How to successfully improve or remediate the phonological awareness and reading difficulties for most children in elementary school with dyslexia or learning disabilities in reading.
3. How to improve phonological awareness, reading and spelling skills in adults with dyslexia and even in adults with reading problems due to a brain injury called stroke.

So, just what does research show is possible for better outcomes for early intervention or remediation of phonological awareness & poor reading skills in children and adults?

The graphs below show significant gains, from Well-Below Average Reading Skills to solidly Average and even Above Average Reading Skills for children who struggled to learn to read/struggled with dyslexia for many years. These graphs show gains by students who received evidence-based & highly effective intervention for dyslexia at a FREE, dyslexia charter school, The Einstein School in Gainesville, Florida could easily be replicated at other public and private schools, as the funding exists in their budget. [see sample before and after intervention video at end of this article]

How Can We Help Focus on Evidence-Based #DyslexiaScience Treatments? We can all help make 2018 the year in which evidence-based & highly effective, #DyslexiaScience treatment programs are used to empower schools, speech-therapists, tutors and teachers to help student make "Life Changing" gains in reading, spelling, writing, math and comprehension. Educating others about evidence-based and highly effective methods based on solid scientific research studies is certainly one step we all can help accomplish. Share the research with teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, community leaders, and even your neighbor. True change first begins with awareness of what changes are even possible.

Can 2018 break the "school to prison pipeline" and the "streets to prison pipeline"? Yes, IF, evidence-based, highly effective and NOT just popular or new programs that lack rigorous scientific evidence of effectiveness are selected for school's intervention methods.

For example, do you know which commercial and popular phonics programs, like the unlimited number of variations of phonics with structured and multi sensory instruction programs (i.e., Barton, Slosson, Wilson, Read 180, Reading Recovery, Reading Mastery, etc....), DO have and which DO NOT have published, peer-reviewed evidence of the program truly being effective at improving phonological awareness and reading skills? If their website says they are "evidence-based", do you know if that means they conducted a multi-year, large scale, rigorous scientific study published in professional scientific research journals. Alternatively, do you know if the publisher gave the phonics program to a school or a district and collected some before and after treatment measures from one classroom, one school, or even one district without any scientific controls in place to make the study's outcomes rigorous, reliable and meaningful? Do you know if the findings were published in a professional science journal that requires all research studies and their publication to be thoroughly vetted for scientific rigor and proper interpretation/claims of outcomes or did the author's publishing company write their own essay claiming great outcomes - ie NOT a scientific investigation and NOT worthy of the term "evidence-based" - instead of taking all the work & time to publish the results in a professional scientific journal?

Do you know which programs, like NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading and Spelling, have high caliber, peer-reviewed, professionally published research vetted by leading scientists before publication and which documents the program's ability to early intervene with 5-year-olds and prevent the development of poor reading skills - with data on continued development/progress in students' skills at one year and at two years AFTER the intervention was stopped?

Why Use an Evidence-based Program Instead of What's Popular? As a frank comparison, recall that blood-letting with leeches used to be highly popular practice at one time in medicine. However, popularity of a method does NOT guarantee that it is the best or most effective treatment method - thankfully, scientific research later found effective medical care methods and the "popular" practice of blood-letting was determined to be a placebo (no effect) for most uses and actually harmful in many cases.

Don't children with dyslexia deserve the best methods that science can provide them? That's why the scientific method was developed, so we could determine which program is likely to be most effective for a specific population of students. [see sample before and after intervention video at end of article]

Why Ask for More Proof that a Program has a High or Low Likelihood to Work? Is what a neighbor used to help her child learn to read the best we can do? Is what "Teacher Y" learned at a 3-hour workshop and wants to try out on your child, is that the best we can do? Is what "School Z" likes to offer or has already purchased and has "on the shelf" and easily available for delivery to your child the best we can do? What about "hoping" that what "Tutor W" or "Speech Therapist X" has always done for 20+ years is going to work? Why is there still so much "guessing" in the treatment of dyslexia if we already have solid, scientific evidence on what works best for early intervention of reading difficulties.

If we have solid, scientific, evidence-based programs available, then why take chances with a child's development of his or her language and reading skills and "wait for it to click" or "wait until he/she is ready to read" or "just accept that his 'brain works differently' and he should only listen to books on tape" or some other misguided and inaccurate advice? Evidence-based programs can provide the best level of confidence or likelihood of effective improvements for a child or an adult with dyslexia, or even for those children and adults who developed reading problems following a brain injury like stroke. The graph below shows that when we gave the NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading and Spelling program(R) to high-risk 5-year-olds in K, this was the only program that provided substantial gains and best outcomes compared to no treatment, regular classroom instruction with 1:1 support aid and 1:1 structured, multi sensory phonics. The differences in outcomes are dramatic

scientific studies show we could actually help more than 90% of high-risk children pass K and 1st grade & go on to be successful readers in grades 2, 3 & 4.

This is the power of "evidence-based" research, as now we know that neither phonics, nor 1:1 extra classroom instruction and certainly no help at all are far inferior as an early intervention/prevention for reading difficulties than the scientific neurodevelopmental approach of the NOW! Foundations program.

Why Ask for More Proof than these Common Reasons We Hear for Choosing a Program or Popular Intervention? Your child or students deserve the most consistently effective program you can find, with results like these students at The Einstein School demonstrate? 

Evidence-based methods have published data in professional research journals that they work with most any child who has similar language-based learning difficulties in reading, most commonly believed to be due to poor phonological awareness. 

Evidence-based methods are more likely to achieve the 'Life Changing' results that research has shown to be possible for nearly every child and adult with poor reading skills.

For example, this 5-year NIH funded study showed that we could screen over 1,400 Kindergarteners, find those students who are high-risk due to poor development/performance of their early phonological awareness skills and poor early literacy skills. If we gave these high-risk students no help, or 1:1 extra help with their teacher's chosen literacy program, or even 1:1 training with an explicit, multi-sensory phonics program, then 25-40% of these students STILL DID NOT PASS either Kindergarten or First Grade. In contrast, when these children received a neurodevelopment training program then 91st of these students passed Kindergarten and First Grade. 

What happens AFTER a training program is stopped? Do students' fall behind in their reading or keep advancing their reading skills? The real test of any treatment program is what happens after you stop providing the program's training - many phonics programs commonly require "years" of instruction to help students develop better reading skills and even then, rarely can these phonics programs get a child to read on grade level for sounding words out, sight words and reading comprehension - these are the three critical reading skills we want every child and adult to have as well-developed as possible. If science shows this is possible, then why not make sure you or your child are getting the most effective treatment possible in their school - the program that is backed by the most research and solid scientific evidence (not one or even a few professional's opinions or professional experience) of being highly effective?

TWO YEARS AFTER THE EVIDENCE-BASED EARLY INTERVENTION WITH THE NOW! FOUNDATIONS PROGRAM ENDED, THESE 40 STUDENTS SHOWED CONTINUED GAINS IN READING ACCURACY AND READING FLUENCY.

TWO YEARS AFTER REMEDIAL INTERVENTION WITH THE NOW! FOUNDATIONS PROGRAM, THESE 30 STUDENTS SHOWED CONTINUED GROWTH IN THEIR SKILLS AND 40% NO LONGER NEEDED IEP'S OR SPECIAL EDUCATION SERVICES; IMAGINE WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED IF THEY HAD RECEIVED MORE THAN ONLY 2 MONTHS OF INTERVENTION! [see video at end]

IF WE DO NOTHING AND WAIT AND SEE IF THE PHONICS INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOL WILL WORK FOR THESE AT-RISK FOR GENETIC DYSLEXIA STUDENTS, THEN THEY FALL FURTHER BEHIND THEIR PEERS EVERY YEAR AND THE GAP GETS LARGER AND LARGER EACH AND EVERY GRADE. WHY DO WE WANT TO LET THE GAP EVEN DEVELOP, LET ALONE GET WIDER?

We CAN do more for children at-risk and already struggling with Dyslexia/Learning Disability with Impairment in Reading, Reading Fluency or Comprehension. Let's hope and WORK to make sure 2018 is the year of better outcomes for more children who are needlessly struggling with dyslexia and poor reading skills.

We have the science, now we need the high caliber, high fidelity implementation of evidence-based, highly effective speech perception/processing methods before they jump in! Every child deserves the best education possible with an evidence-based and highly effective program. This CAN be the norm in 2018, if we all work together.

What do "large gains" in reading skills look and sound like after only a few months of an evidence-based intervention? Watch this boy's before and after NOW! Foundations intervention video clip. Be sure to notice his emotion and self-confidence he shows at the beginning of his testing yesterday!

Note: 2-months of intervention occurred because that's all the grant could provide each child for free, NOT because each child finished the intervention NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading and Spelling program in 2 months. Just think what the outcome data might look like if each child was able to actually finish the WHOLE treatment program!