FOCUS ON SPECIAL EDUCATION

ATTENTION THERAPY IMPROVES READING BY 220%

By Jim Hetherman

The ability to read with automacity and comprehension is an ability that can lead a child to successes in almost any chosen field or endeavor. The opposite is also true: A reading disability will hold a child back. It is no wonder that reading remediation receives such a focus in special education programs for children with learning disabilities and in public libraries for those who still have not learned how to read proficiently as adults. Reading remediation usually takes the form of teaching strategies that the child or adult can use to become better readers.

Those with reading disabilities often have a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using language, and those disorders may be manifested in one or more deficits including attention, visual perceptual, auditory perceptual, visual motor, conceptual, memory, and phonological, and may have behavior deficits as well. Those with severe reading disabilities are likely to have multiple deficits that appear to interact with each other and impede the acquisition of reading regardless of the remedial strategies used. However, the vast majority of children with reading disabilities can significantly improve their reading performance. 

A recent study published by Harold Solan and his fellow researchers in the November/December 2003 issue of Journal of Learning Disabilities showed how Attention Therapy using computer-assisted programs was able to improve the reading of students with mild to moderate reading disabilities by 220% without any reading remediation.

Method

The researchers randomly selected thirty students with a mild to moderate reading disability from beginning-sixth-graders in urban schools serving European American, Asian American, Hispanic, and African American students. Fifteen of the thirty students were randomly selected for the Experimental Group, and the remaining fifteen were assigned to the Control Group. Each of the thirty students was given standardized pre-tests to determine their attention level, and standardized pre-tests to determine their reading level. The Experimental Group received Attention Therapy for one-hour a week for twelve weeks, and the Control Group did not receive this therapy. Neither group received any reading remediation during the same five-months time. At the end of the study, each group was given the same sets of standardized attention and reading tests in order to determine the effect that Attention Therapy had on attention and reading.

Five attention-enhancing programs were used in each of 12 one-hour weekly sessions, and the difficulty levels were increased gradually for each participant. The five programs included Perceptual Accuracy, Visual Efficiency, Visual Search, Visual Scan, and Visual Span. Rapid and accurate visual processing correlates significantly with reading readiness in kindergarten and with reading in elementary school. Perceptual Accuracy is a program intended to develop rapid visual processing. Visual Efficiency therapy promotes the development of saccadic accuracy, automatic orienting and focusing of attention, and the opportunity to process visual stimuli. Visual Search training improves visual discrimination, figure ground perception, and perceptual speed. Visual Scan is a timed exercise that develops visual planning and strategies necessary to complement perceptual speed and accuracy. And Visual Span is especially effective in enhancing visual-temporal processing and visual-sequential memory.

Results

Following the 12 one-hour weekly sessions of attention therapy given over a five month period, the average standard attention scores of the Experimental Group improved from 95 to 113, comparable to a change from the 41st to 77th percentile. This growth in attention skills in this brief period is impressive. After completing the regimen of attention therapy, the average reading comprehension scores of the experimental group improved significantly from a grade equivalent of 4.1 to 5.2. Percentiles improved to the 35th percentile, compared to the 23rd percentile in reading comprehension before attention therapy. The Control Group showed no significant change in either attention scores or reading. Another way to look at the results is to compare the achieved learning rate over a time period. Prior to receiving Attention Therapy, students in the Experimental Group improved their grade equivalent reading level by 3 years over 5.2 years in school, or a learning rate of 58%. Following completion of the twelve one-hour weekly Attention Therapy, these same students improved their grade equivalent reading level by 1.1 over 5 months, equivalent to a learning rate of 220%.

Conclusions and Implications

The principal purpose of this study was to measure the effect of visual attention therapy on reading comprehension. The children in this study did not receive any reading comprehension therapy; yet, the children in the Experimental Group that received Attention Therapy made significant improvements in reading comprehension, while the children in the Control Group made no improvement. The researchers also observed during the therapy that the integration of memory, speed of information processing, and the ability to develop improved cognitive strategies responds as a triad, which appears to influence cognitive performance and reading comprehension. The exact mechanisms behind these observations were not studied.

Experiments such as this one conducted by Harold Solan and his fellow researchers are important because they extend our knowledge about potential strategies that may help children with reading difficulties acquire fluent reading ability. Children in school will eventually transition to adult life with or without reading fluency. At one time people could still obtain good jobs without becoming proficient readers. Today many situations and events are at play that make reading more important than ever before.

In states like California and especially in the high cost urban areas, many manufacturing firms and the good jobs that they can create are fleeing. In times past, learning to follow simple repetitive manufacturing procedures could be done without becoming an expert reader, and those with reading disabilities could get along, although advancement to higher-level technical and management positions was always problematic. High wages, high taxes, high property values, high workers compensation insurance costs, inflexible work rules, mandatory health insurance costs, and complex and burdensome local, state and federal laws that drive up the cost of business for manufacturing firms, when combined with competition from other states and countries with a more favorable manufacturing business climate are eliminating potential manufacturing jobs, a leaving a void for non-proficient readers.

Parents, teachers, students and others need to have strategies and a sense of urgency that are in tune with our new political-socio-economic realities. Teachers and learning coaches must work a whole lot smarter if they are to help under-performers perform. Reading therapy experiments must be expanded and new learning methods found and implemented. If we the people fail in this charge, our beloved California and other communities may become a dichotomy between readers and non-readers, rich and the poor, upper and lower class, "can-doers" and "can't do much-ers," before finally sinking into a third world status. Should we start training our future Mother Teresa's now just in case?