Hypothesis - Why Singapore consistently does better in PISA (Part 3)

                                                          

                       "There are none so blind as those who will not see".

Here is some corroborative evidence for you to ponder.

Ms. Nancy Hennessy who was the President of International Dyslexia Association from 2013 to 2015 said:

“……even if we settle on a middle number, let us say 10%; that still leaves a lot of children who are not dyslexic, whose brains are not wired any different way, who have reading difficulty.”

 

Dr. Richard Selznick in our email discussions in 2010 said:

“I agree with you that many of these kids are instructional casualties and if they had been taught differently, many would have not shut-down.” 

Please keep in mind that what I say and how I respond are based on my experiences and understanding of the research.  I am not a scientist or researcher, but respond from my decades of clinical experience.

Dr.G.Reid Lyon, who coined the words ‘Instructional casualties’ more than 20 years ago said in ‘Children of the code’:

“Ninety-five percent of those kids are instructional casualties. About five to six percent of those kids have what we call dyslexia or learning disabilities in reading. Ninety-five percent of the kids hitting the wall in learning to read are what we call NBT: Never Been Taught. They’ve probably been with teachers where the heart was in the right place, they’ve been with teachers who wanted the best for the kids, but they have been with teachers who cannot answer the questions:

1)     What goes into reading, what does it take? 2) Why do some kids have difficulty? 3) How can we identify kids early and prevent it? 4) How can we remediate it?” 

All of these kids that I had tried to teach and who didn’t do well had by nine years of age already begun to avoid the reading process because they couldn’t do it.

 

The interviewer of the Children of the Code, David Boulton:

10 times the number of kids who have innately biologically ordered learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned…... Until such time we can read that they are cognitively going askew relative to what they have learnt in the past then our teaching is kind of brute force against this deep core stuff that is working against us.

How much of what they are struggling with is an innate learning problem and how much of what they are struggling with is what they have learned in the past working against them learning now.

My comment:

Yes, what are the things they have learned that cause the learning difficulties? Why would he disconnect me from LinkedIn for suggesting what I had learned from my students?

More from David Boulton:

“What's at stake: More American children suffer long-term life-harm as a consequence of reading difficulties than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined. In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined.”

“But the key in both cases is to find out where they're at foundationally and then give them manageable steps into the confusion that they can work through.”

Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Chair, National Scientific Council on the Developing Child:

"So the sobering message here is that if children don't have the right experiences during these sensitive periods for the development of a variety of skills, including many cognitive and language capacities, that's a burden that those kids are going to carry; the sensitive period is over, and it's going to be harder for them."

Siegfried Engelmann:

And the mistakes that the kids made guided us to see that we had something missing. For instance, at first, we had them sound out words traditionally. We never permitted "ch-aa-tah” for chat. Unvoiced sounds were unvoiced -- "ch-a-t." Well, they showed us through their responses that that stop sound beginning was really hard for them.

So now we had precise corrections that related to what they had learned earlier. We had a procedure for sounding it out that would reach virtually 100 percent of the kids. So, we could teach even really low performers now to take the first step on the ladder. Then they can follow the entire sequence and they can learn at a rate far faster than would have been anticipated.

The following is a discussion between David and Engelmann in COTC.

David Boulton:

 

Well, today, my understanding from the National Center of Learning Disabilities, and Reid Lyon et all, is that less than five to six percent of the children in this country have anything innately neurobiological that underlies their processing problems.  For the rest of the kids the problem is instructional confusion.

 

Siegfried Engelmann:

 

I would say that it is closer to like maybe one-fourth or a fifth of one percent. No kidding. I mean, I've worked with a couple of kids...

 

David Boulton:

 

Well, is this based on your experience or based on some research you've had access to?

 

Siegfried Engelmann:

 

     Well, I've worked with hundreds of kids.

 

David Boulton:

 

You mean hundreds of kids that were labeled as having some learning disability or dyslexia, that once you met them the right way, given the way that they had adapted to the teaching that they had had, you were able to pull them through it?

 

Siegfried Engelmann:

 

    Right.

 

 

The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.