The link appears to be dead - a valid link in Science Daily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140521133706.htm

SMU - Southern Methodist University - http://www.smu.edu/AboutSMU

The program that was used - “Teachers used “Early Interventions in Reading,” a proven curriculum designed by SMU reading specialist and study co-author Patricia G. Mathes and Allor.”

And here - http://www.smu.edu/Simmons/Research/IEBE/Interventions and Assessments/Proactive

The study - http://www.smu.edu/~/media/Site/Simmons/Research/IEBE/Teaching Students with Moderate Intellectual Disabilities to Read.ashx

Also on Science Daily - I came across a couple more articles -  1. Kids’ reading success boosted by long-term individualized instruction
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130625121333.htm
2. Simple teaching tool boosts student reading performance, study finds
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110829114557.htm

Amazing how little there is in tracking students regarding reading and other remediation to not only to guide the teacher but as well checking to see if the program is working. Bonus, often the programs are free to parents and teachers such as HELPS -http://www.helpsprogram.org/materials.php

Far too much subjective observations are being used by educators to decide if a child has a reading problem. As usual, it is another window that leads to excuses based on the biases and misconceptions of the educators that are based on intelligence levels of the child.

I thought to include this as well, because phoneme awareness is often skipped, to focus on Phonological Awareness.  On Reading Rockets - http://www.readingrockets.org/article/28655

Students with reading difficulties cannot afford to skipped phoneme awareness and expect to do well in the Phonological Awareness component. “This fact is well proven: Phonological awareness is critical for learning to read any alphabetic writing system (Ehri, 2004; Rath, 2001; Troia, 2004). Phonological awareness is even important for reading other kinds of writing systems, such as Chinese and Japanese. There are several well-established lines of argument for the importance of phonological skills to reading and spelling.”

Phoneme awareness is crucial - “English uses an alphabetic writing system in which the letters, singly and in combination, represent single speech sounds. People who can take apart words into sounds, recognize their identity, and put them together again have the foundation skill for using the alphabetic principle (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989; Troia, 2004). Without phoneme awareness, students may be mystified by the print system and how it represents the spoken word.”

Englemann loves the engineering metaphor, and his book ‘Preventing Failure in the Primary Grades’ is worth reading just for his rant on the excuses that educators make for reading failure without addressing the underlying ‘manufacturing problem’. 

Englemann mapped a half-dozen standard education excuses into a form that car makers could use to justify defective car brakes.  My favorite: “The brakes are perfectly adequate, just slightly different from those on other cars. The difference is this: our model requires a greater distance to stop at highway speeds. This makes our car appear as if it has faulty brakes.”

A paper with the same name - published maybe 2000
http://thorntoncollaborativeteams.wikispaces.com/file/view/Preventing+Reading+Failure+in+the+primary+grades.pdf

And here - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131727009340438#.U4OxQ3Kfs-M

Nancy, here’s the link you are looking for:  http://www.amazon.com/Preventing-Failure-Primary-Siegfried-Engelmann/dp/B000J2U3BA

The tandfonline link is to a short review of Engelmann’s book by Carolyn Stern.  Here’s the final paragraph of the review: 

There are many teachers, especially those who reject the concept of behavioral objectives and the corollary commitment to educational accountability, who will be affronted by what might be deemed a “mechanistic” system.  It is so much easier to proclaim that “teaching is an art” hence not subject to evaluation.  When perforce measurements do reveal that the teacher’s art has made no impact on her students, it is easier to talk of environmentally-based language deficiencies, or physical brain damage, or lack of innate ability. Engelmann closes these escape hatches.  In answer to his own question of why a child fails a complex task he replies: “Because he hasn’t been taught the (prerequisite) skills.”

Nancy, you should be aware that the Liberman paper you cited is a terrible horrible blight on the reading community. 

It is the last of a series of papers that Isabelle Liberman wrote on the same subject over 15 years, usually without anything new to add, and it talks about her theory of developmental dyslexia and the experiment she first described in 1973 in “Segmentation of the Spoken Word and Reading Acquisition”.

The hypothesis she presented was that analytically segmenting syllables into phonemes is a developmental step that comes after mastery of explicitly segmenting words into syllables, and that these skills emerge naturally in sequential stages, much like language itself.

The progression from larger to smaller units is a historical footnote from Gelb’s theory of “unidirectional development” in which written languages evolve progressively from logographic (each symbol has a meaning) to syllabic (each symbol denotes a syllable) to segmental (each symbol denotes a phoneme).  Gelb (1963) is cited by Liberman who argues by analogy that reading skills follow the same progression.

To compare syllabic and phonemic segmentation, Liberman required 4-, 5-, and 6-year olds to tap out the number of syllables or phonemes in various words with a wooden dowel.  She demonstrated that younger children could segment syllables but not phonemes, that older children could segment both but were better at syllables than phonemes, and that both skills improved with age.  And most surprisingly, she found that 30% of her oldest students still could not segment phonemes, which had been correlated with a high risk of reading disability.

The implication from this experiment is that children developmentally acquire the ability to manipulate phonemes in Piagetian stages of learning.  This explicit skill follows a large-unit to small-unit progression from words to syllables to phonemes.  The lack of explicit awareness does not affect a child’s spoken language skills, but rather impairs accessory skills like reading.  Children who don’t or can’t become aware of phonemes are developmentally delayed or impaired in some way – there is something wrong with them.

This was a landmark paper, and became the foundation of scientific reading research.  Everyone in the field stands on her shoulders.

Unfortunately, her experiment was badly flawed, and several attempts to reproduce it failed.  By the time she wrote the 1989 paper, her theory of developmental skills was contradicted by clear evidence from other researchers (eg: Fox & Routh,  Read, Zhang, Nie & Ding).  Gelb’s theory had been discredited. 

That would have been OK - we would still remember Liberman as a great scientist and brilliant researcher for her contributions.  But Liberman had invested 30 years into this idea and could not let it go.  The baleful 1989 paper is the result.

Remarkably, she argues against teaching phonics (in this paper and previous ones).  Since the developmentally-delayed child cannot hear that ‘bag’ has three sounds, the teacher will only confuse him by insisting.

And so, the Liberman hypothesis that a dyslexic child is developmentally impaired lives on, infecting our discourse, our schools, and our research.  This is a cancer that hurts millions of students who only fault is to be poorly instructed.

Because of the stubborn obstinacy of this once-great researcher, we shrug impotently at dyslexia and look away.

Tom, thanks for the new information. It brought back a memory of six years pass, of LD parents discussing the various theories about dyslexia and how they translated to the classroom. Liberman, or should I say both the husband and wife team, were part of the early researchers building upon the research that came prior to their research. Likewise, when neuroscience appeared, Shaywitz, and others in the neuroscience fields developed a new working theory for developmental dyslexia. A paper on the theories - http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/126/4/841.full

The working theories involving dyslexic research is forever evolving including the definition of dyslexia. The researchers of today, have disproved some of the older premises and build upon other premises that further enhanced the knowledge and research. Nevertheless, both Libermans’ are part of the dyslexia researchers, and found under phonological processing -  http://www.interdys.org/ResearchArticles.htm

In a 1998 study, “As numerous studies have shown, however, such awareness is largely missing in
dyslexic children and adults (1–4). Not surprisingly, then, perhaps the most sensitive measure of the reading problem in dyslexia is inability to read phonologically legal nonsense words (5–7). As for why dyslexic readers should have exceptional
difficulty developing phonologic awareness, there is
support for the notion that the difficulty resides in the phonologic component of the larger specialization for language (8–10). If that component is imperfect, its representations will
be less than ideally distinct and, therefore, harder to bring to conscious awareness.” http://www.pnas.org/content/95/5/2636.full.pdf

Of course this is where Shaywitz’s research comes into play. Shaywitz’s book, Overcoming Dyslexia is a bible for LD parents. However as Tom has pointed out, “And so, the Liberman hypothesis that a dyslexic child is developmentally impaired lives on, infecting our discourse, our schools, and our research.  This is a cancer that hurts millions of students who only fault is to be poorly instructed.”, as it still does after Shaywitz’s research

I would argued it is not the researchers, but the K to 12 educationalists taking the research out of context to advanced the self-serving interests of the K to 12 education establishment and their precious pedagogy. If at all possible, co-opt the researchers into adapting their research following the pedagogy of Piaget, Dewey and others that are rooted in 19th century political ideologies.

In that world, or in the typical classroom of 2014,  difficulty in learning to read is connected to the outdated 19th century premise that intelligence is fixed. Where is the science?  No where to be seen in the classroom, and no Engelmann Direct Instruction in the classroom.  Nor Shaywitz or Lyon or any of the researchers in dyslexia and reading science.

How do you measure the IQ of an individual with a 40 IQ?

I’ve never seen an IQ test that didn’t require some reading ability.

Incidentally, with 10000 Einsteins as the reference population, some of them are going to have a 40 IQ.

Hey Nancy,

What you have written; does it not give a different perspective on “The Science is Settled”?

Be careful you aren’t declared a “denier” and mentally ill; they involuntary commitment programs now!

Oh the science is more or less settled for reading instruction. However, the powers to be of the K to 12 education establishment are a determined lot to keep whole language instruction alive and well. Soon to come to a near-by public school, are mental health assessments for the primary students. Instead of having assessments measuring phonemic awareness and other reading measures, parents will get to know their children’s mental health scores and the reasons to explained reading progress. All children with reading struggles will naturally have lower mental health scores, and the need to improve their mental health scores will have to be addressed before an assessment on reading difficulties can take place.

Another barrier is erected for the children with reading difficulties to prevent remediation of reading difficulties outside of the inclusive classroom. In turn prevents children from obtaining a psycho-educational assessment to identified learning disabilities. In the science, developmental dyslexia can now be diagnosed as early as 2 years old. Children like my youngest child with speech delays, are now being identified and diagnosed as having dyslexia. Prior to that, from 2003 or so, children with speech delays and undertook early speech therapy, there is a 97 % chance of that child having learning struggles in learning to read, write and do numeracy. In 1997, my youngest was 2 years old and the advances being made in the research was not at play. If my child had been born in 2005, she probably in all likelihood would have been identified as being dyslexia by the age of 2.

It sounds good eh?  Unfortunately, even if students have the dyslexia diagnoses, they would still have to fight the school for them to recognized it. If my child was 2 in 2007, in all likelihood she would also be receiving early reading instruction that targets phonemic awareness, in addition to intensive speech therapy. However, dyslexic children would still be exposed to the whole language reading instruction that will for many reasons, masked the dyslexia until grade 4 or above when they no longer can memorized words. The only solution for children who received the early diagnoses, is to teach your children to read before they enter school. This way the parent can bide their time to seek out the dyslexic label depending on severity without having children falling behind academically.

By the way, there is oral IQ tests, and have been around for well over 20 years. The number one excuse for denying early assessment for children with suspected learning disabilities, because the children are not reading. Used primary for pre-school to grade 1, and of course there is no funding for this as opposed to mental health assessments.