|
|
|
Index:
|
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui is the first Commissioner for Special Education
Research where he leads the National
Center For Special Education Research under the Institute
of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S.
Department of Education. Dr. Kame'enui is also the Director of the Institute
for the Development of Educational Achievement (IDEA). Along with
colleagues at the University of Oregon, Dr. Kame'enui is a co-creator of
the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). He is
currently on leave from the University of Oregon for two years
(2005-2007). The following interview with Dr. Edward Kame'enui was conducted at the University of Oregon on July 26, 2004 (before he was appointed Commissioner for Special Education Research). We found Dr. Kame'enui to be a down-to-earth, dedicated and passionate champion of children with special education needs, particularly in areas related to reading. His research based thinking about assessments and curricula -- about identifying and addressing the most urgent needs of struggling students -- make apparent why he was chosen to lead the nation's special education research activities.
|
The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
|
David Boulton: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. One
of the things that we like do is get a sense of who you are, the work you're
doing, and why you're doing the work you're doing. Then we'll use that as a
starting point from which to drop down deeper into specific things that we’re interested in.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Well, let's see. Is the Hawaiian connection important?
You’re doing so many different interviews with different people.
David Boulton: Yes, we're covering a broad spectrum. On the one hand there
is the social, cultural, archaeological, and anthropological implications of
3,000 years of ‘code’, with an emphasis on the past 500 years, since the
1500’s. Then there’s the brain and the neurosciences and the critical
twenty-five milliseconds that swing the difference in processing the virtual
reality that underlies our experience of reading. We’re interested in the
whole spectrum and that includes different people's difficulty coming into
reading because of the structure, the phonemic
structure, of their languages.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Right.
David Boulton: So, I'm interested in the general view that you've developed, and the work that you've done relative to reading, and also in the Hawaiian specific dimensions. We do plan to make a Hawaiian sequel to this, that would be specific for the Hawaiian people, talking to people that experience the challenge of learning to read from that different oral language base.
|
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: I grew up in a household where my dad was pure Hawaiian, had a high school education and my mom was Hawaiian-Chinese and had a high school education. My mom was deaf. They didn't promote school a lot. I went to a very prominent school for children of Hawaiian ancestry - you know it as Kamehameha.
At
the time, Kamehameha had a tracking system
where kids who were tested at a particular point in time were put in different
sections. I happened to end up in a section that wasn't college-bound, namely,
the very last section. And I struggled with reading. Also, because my mom was
deaf, I always struggled with how do people take in information. How do they
negotiate this stuff?
So,
that always stayed in the back of my mind. But I majored in English literature,
studied Shakespeare, studied Keats - English was my
primary focus. I couldn't find a job, and then ended up working at a
residential treatment center in Wisconsin for children identified with serious
behavior problems. That introduced me to not just to behavior problems, but also
to learning problems. Because kids who have behavior problems have serious
learning problems. And the behavior just masks the learning problems.
I
could manage the behavior. I could manage how to get them to sit down, how to do
their work. But I couldn't teach them. And that's why I got interested in this.
How do you get kids to get the stuff that's out there represented in the
occipital temporal lobe, in the parietal temporal lobe, in the different parts
of the brain that allow us to use our systems efficiently, and be able to be
imaginative. I enjoyed reading Shakespeare. But here are kids who could not get
access to it, and that just puzzled me. How do we do this?
So, it's really based on that experience that I started. I looked around at the universities, and I said, "What university will teach me how to teach?" I came to the University of Oregon, did my doctorate work here, then from there on, went other places, taught, and then returned here.
|
The Nation’s Greatest Learning
Disability:
David Boulton: And inside of the learning disabilities or learning differences you encountered reading was the big one.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Oh yeah, absolutely. Hands down, hands down. I have great
colleagues here who work with serious behavior problems. I could have done
that, but I realized that, to me, that was not the problem. The problem was in the
learning, in the acquisition of information, retention, and so on.
David Boulton: Connected to what you’re saying, it seems to me that the
nation's biggest learning disability is engendered by the process of learning to
read.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Oh, absolutely.
David Boulton: Right?
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Yes, yes, absolutely. It’s the most public — I mean...
David Boulton: The most widespread learning-disabling thing that happens to
human beings is the process of learning to read.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely. And the most public. For example, you can hide from the math stuff. You can get away with the math because you have enough other systems that can help you on that. But the reading one is tough. It's hard to hide on that one. That's a good point.
|
Getting Schools to Understand Reading:
David Boulton: Let’s talk about your work.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Okay. Well, let me start with some basics.
I
think it's fair, and rather obvious, that reading takes place in the brain. I
mean the neural circuitry that's there for language is the neural circuitry
that we rely on for kind of taking that language mechanism and really
appreciating how we use it for negotiating print. That's clear. That's
really a no-brainer.
The
part that's more complicated from my perspective is: How do you take this
peculiar conceit called an alphabetic writing system and get it in place in
complex environments known as schools? While it takes place in the brain,
teaching reading takes place in complex host environments known as schools. So,
most of my work for the last ten years has been around understanding what it
takes to get schools to appreciate the complexity of working with kids who have
a difficult time negotiating the alphabetic writing system.
So, that's a complex system when you talk about schools because you have people, you have pedagogies, you have personalities, you have principals; you have a lot of stuff coming together and interacting in complex ways. When you have a complex interaction, whether it's a chemical interaction or a social interaction, you have to understand what's responsible for that interaction. In order do that, you have to, in a sense, peel apart the threads, peel apart the pieces in order to understand what's responsible for causing the interaction.
|
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Now, in the context of failure, when kids fail in a symbolic
system there are a lot of explanations, a lot of pieces we have to unpack. But
that failure sets the stage for a fundamental ambiguity in terms of what is the
primary cause for that failure. So, kids aren't able to read. Kids come from
Waimanalo, kids come from Kalihi. They come with their own language, and they
come with their Pidgin, they come with their own variation of the Creole, and
they say, you know, "Bombadda buggah goin o’erther." What they are
coming with is the language they know. It's the only language they know. And
for most of these kids that come to school, that language is sacred. They don't
know that their language is not represented in the print that they're going to
see in school.
Think
about Hawaiian kids coming to school, they have this Pidgin, they start looking
at the print, and yet the words they own, that they learned from their fathers,
their mothers, their uncles, their aunts, their brothers and sisters, are not
represented in the English print. So, right away you have a discrepancy
between the languages they speak every day out in the neighborhood with their
families that are simply not represented in the print that's there. Right away
you have a discrepancy here.
So,
how do we understand that discrepancy? Is the problem the failure with the
child? Not at all. The child knows that. The child knows that
language. What it suggests is the system, then, has to appreciate that
discrepancy, has to make an accommodation, has to make an adjustment. Well,
with respect to the child's language and that child's inability to map his or
her language, namely the Pidgin that he or she speaks every day, to the English
and the alphabetic writing system. So, schools have to appreciate that.
Hawaii, as a state, has been on the bottom of National Assessment of Educational Progress for the last, probably, twelve years. That means that we've got a lot of work to do. Something is going on where the kids in Hawaii aren't getting it. At least one explanation is they're not understanding that the speech they bring to school is not going to be represented in the print. That when they say, "Bombadda buggah," that "bombadda buggah" is not going to be represented in English words. What they're saying is "by and by, that guy." If they don't understand that discrepancy, they're not going to be able to grab the alphabetic insight that's so critical to reading.
|
Accommodating Learning Differences:
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: So, to me, my challenge is really helping teachers and
helping school systems put in place the organizational mechanisms, the
accountability mechanisms, the instructional mechanisms that have a fighting
chance of working so that the odds are in the children's favor. My
perspective is not about giving schools a guarantee, but at least getting them
to understand if I make this investment in a 180-day school year, what's the
likelihood that that investment is going to pay off? That's one. And what's the
likelihood that the odds are in children's favor, eighty percent or more, that
if they do this, if teachers do this, if principals do this, that investment
will benefit kids so that the odds are in their favor at least eighty percent
plus. So, that's a big order, that's a big task. And there's a lot of ways for
this to go wrong. Sometimes it goes wrong just because we can't get the pieces
in place at the right time.
If you accept that reading is about growth and development, we understand that
growth and development doesn't happen in equal units per unit of time. We know
that. We know that kids will get language more at one point in time in their
earlier years, earlier stages of language acquisition than in their later years.
So, we need to understand how that growth and development changes over time, and
how the windows of opportunity also change, and that schools, by virtue of the
systems they are, really exaggerate those differences between kids.
Horace
Mann says the schools are supposed to be the great equalizer of men. Well, the
reality is that schools exaggerate the differences that kids bring from their
home settings, from their home opportunities, from their home language. So,
if that's the case then we need to understand what are the mechanisms at
different points in time in that growth and development that we need to
accentuate, we need to put in place, we need to monitor, we need to maximize, we
need to optimize, so that kids, in fact, get the best opportunity; so that
schools will, in fact, be the great equalizer, not the great exaggerator of
differences between kids.
We
know kids come to school with differences. Some kids come to school with a lot
of language. Other kids come to school with very little language. Some kids come
to school with enormous exposure to literature, to good stories. Other kids
don't. Those differences don't stay the same. They don't come to school and
freeze. Those differences get greater over time. We can put in place lots of
things to make that happen, so that we can, in fact, have schools become the
great equalizer of the economic opportunities for all kids.
I've
been doing this now for ten years, I’ve been doing this kind of work for about
twenty-five years. My primary focus is: How do you work with schools? What are
the active ingredients that are required to get everybody on the same page with
respect to this outcome so that all kids can reach a level of performance, a
criterion level of performance, that's predictive of their ability to negotiate
the symbolic system in the future?
I’m
not looking to just improve schools, because you can improve schools and schools
still don't do the things that you want them to do. I want them to get to a
criterion level of performance, through a threshold, where we know if they're
there, the odds are in their favor that they can do those things that we expect
them to do as citizens in society, and so on.
|
David Boulton: I appreciate your point of view, that angle. We're concerning
ourselves with a lot more than just the production of a documentary. We think of
ourselves as a social education project as well as a television documentary, and
for a reason. We’re trying to find out just who are the constituents and
players
in all of this? How do we make the kind of changes that are necessary so that so
many children don't hit the wall and have their lives mangled...
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.
David Boulton: Because they couldn't negotiate this radically artificial
confusion induced by a technological artifact that we have
been ignorant and negligent about.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Yes. Did you get that on tape? It's good. Turn the camera on
him! That's absolutely right.
David Boulton: So, we're also interested in all the different perspectives
that go into this, both from the micro-timing of what's going on in the
neuroscience point of view, but also in the cultural environment. What you
described isn't restricted to the people of native Hawaiian languages.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: No, not at all.
David Boulton: This is anybody who comes with a variation of oral language
proficiency using different tones, different sound elements.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right, absolutely.
David Boulton: So, implicit in where you're going, and there must be more specific instruments that you're using to assess where children are at in a new kind of map, in order to allow educators to see these differences as well as some way to conceptualize this that gets through their resistance.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Yes.
David Boulton: I mean, ultimately this comes down to social inertia.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right, that's right, exactly.
David Boulton: So, we have to find out where are the linchpins that are
keeping the social inertia in place that's radiating in parents and in teachers.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That’s right.
|
Core, Supplemental and Interventional Curricula:
David Boulton: A big part of that is both instrumenting the mechanics, but
also getting at the underlying emotional stuff. So, tell me about it, more
specifically...
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Well, there are some things that are rather traditional and
rather predictable in terms of getting schools to scale up to make this kind of
difference. Obviously, you need a curriculum. You need a way of codifying the
activities that the society and research deems as critical for kids to be
proficient in a language system, in a writing system. So, you need tools.
Teachers
need to have a curriculum. The assumption is that the curriculum is valid, it's
reliable, it's been tested; it has all the critical elements that are associated
with this conceit call the alphabetic writing system, and it's based on
research. So, there are a lot of things that schools
already have in place that we would continue to argue that they ought to have in
place — effective research based curriculum. So, that's one, the curriculum
piece.
Now,
the question is: Do we have the right curriculum? Is it a curriculum that the
public would argue is the best intervention possible? Is it tested? Is it
trustworthy? I think right now the answer is no, we don't because we don't have
the resources, at least up to this point, we don't have the resources to really
test, in a research satisfying way, experimental control group way, curricula
that allows us to say, 'Yes, if you pit curriculum A against curriculum B,
we have sufficient evidence to suggest that curriculum A gives you the greatest
impact for your investment because it gets kids to the kind of reading
achievement outcomes you want.'
We're
getting there. We still have a lot of work to do. We have a handful of programs
that have some empirical evidence that suggests that if you implement the
program kids will benefit from the implementation, assuming the implementation
has a high level of fidelity. So, that's one big piece, getting the curriculum.
And there's not one curriculum that fits all. So, that's
one of the problems. We need multiple types of curricula. We need a core
curricula for most of the kids, assuming that you have a normal
distribution of aptitude and performance. The architecture is such that it tries
to cover a lot of stuff in a short period of time, so it's horizontal. It's
going to cover a wide range of things but it's not going to go very deep. In
addition to the core curriculum, we need supplemental curriculum
that will supplement the holes that you're going to find in the core curriculum.
For
example, if we assert that alphabetic insight is critical to reading, the
phonics piece, then not all curricula will have the same amount of intensity and
explicitness as they should around teaching phonics. We may want to adopt
supplemental curriculum to enhance the core curriculum. So, that's two pieces of
the curriculum puzzle: a core curriculum and a supplemental curriculum.
Finally,
you're going to need a curriculum that's very different in architecture for the
kids who are in the bottom twenty, twenty-five percent, because the way they
manage information is very different from the kids who can benefit from the
core. That kind of curriculum we refer to as an intervention curriculum,
because the architecture is very different. The architecture should be more
careful in how it thinks about the examples that are used, how it juxtaposes
examples, the amount of scaffolding and teacher-wording that's provided, the
amount of practice, how much practice is given at any given point in time, how
much scaffolding is providing, how much rehearsal, how much fluency is built in.
David Boulton: So, more direct instruction-like control.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Possibly. It need not be direct instruction.
David Boulton: I’m not trying to advocate anything particular, but DI’s basic model of reducing the extraneous ambiguity.…
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right.
David Boulton: And focusing on particular objectives, step, step, step and
with less flexibility – more scripting.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right. More systematic, more intentional, more aligned with the kind of outcomes, more considerate in the kinds of the tasks it selects, the examples, the range of examples, and so on. So, obviously the curriculum piece, since that's the primary way we promote the symbolic system, we have to make sure that the curricula reflect the best science we have going. That's a big piece.
|
David Boulton: So, we've got this deep nuclear underlying horizontal
progression of things that everybody needs to go through.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right.
David Boulton: And we have to differentiate it so it meets the variations
and needs of each individual.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Exactly. Nicely put. Yes, it's a differentiated curriculum.
It's differentiated instruction. Kids are going to come in at different points.
David Boulton: So, our ability to differentiate comes down to either it's
actually folding around and responding to the individual variations in need
that's expressed by the student, or...
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Right.
David Boulton: It's presumptive. We're making some kind of assessment based
on our assumptions.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right.
David Boulton: It's renaissance cannon fire. We say, 'Okay, we're going
to shoot over here, and measure them, and adjust and shoot again.'
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right.
David Boulton: It's got that kind of loop in it.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, exactly. But sometimes the measurement has to be more sensitive than we typically are familiar with and used to. Exactly.
|
Focusing on the Bottom Twenty Percent:
David Boulton: And certainly with the kids that are struggling to learn to
read.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely, yes. We talk about getting to 100 percent of the
kids, but you don't get to 100 percent unless you go through the bottom twenty
percent. So, we can talk about all kids but the reality is that our real task
with schools to get all kids reading is really focusing on the bottom twenty
percent.
Why
do we do that? Because those kids are the toughest ones. They're tough because
they may not have the language experience that they should have. They may have
different kinds of experiences that don't square with the experience that are in
place in terms of social, culture, etc. They may go to schools that don't
provide them the opportunities, don't provide them the kind of support that they
should get. They may come from homes that don't provide them the kind of
opportunities that you would like them to have. There are lots of different
reasons. So, differentiating those resources so that we can maximize the
resources at the right point in time, at the right spots, in the right places,
also requires not only curriculum but an assessment system.
|
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Now, assessment is a big piece of this. And I'm not talking
about traditional assessment, per se. Traditional assessment, obviously, is a
big piece of it. But the piece that's been missing that represents, I think, a
new genre of assessment is assessment that's timely, efficient, parsimonious,
targeted to the most essential active ingredients that kids can participate in
their writing system readily. It's recursive, in that you get feedback from it, and has the capacity to go to scale with the information technology that's
available.
For example, most assessment we think about is outcome assessment, achievement
tests and high stakes tests.
David Boulton: Which is way downstream from where the learning is actually happening.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, downstream — end of third grade, end of fourth
grade, end of eighth grade, end of twelfth grade.
David Boulton: Or end of the actual stream of flow that's at the core of the
progress.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.
David Boulton: Whether it’s a day later or an hour later, it's still downstream.
|
DIBELS:
So,
if you think about it, what I'm asserting is that in a one-minute sample you can
get a sufficient representation of a child's ability to negotiate the alphabetic
writing system. And that sample is predictive of how that child is going to be
down the road. If I take a sample of a child's behavior in kindergarten, it's
predictive of how that child will do at the end of third grade. Now that, to
me, is an assessment system that is powerful, is necessary, and also is one that
we can get to scale, and that's what we're using right now.
David Boulton: Because right now there's such a coarse correspondence
between the gross level of problems that these kids may be having and their
later performance...
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right.
David Boulton: I could see how a one-minute sample could lead to that. The
question is: How finely are you understanding the specific kinds of variations
in performance that's going on in the processing of that individual child, so
that it actually informs the instruction in a way that meets them in the flow of
their needs better?
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, yes.
David Boulton: How does that one-minute connect to that?
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Well, it depends on what you sample because what you sample is going to be critical to the kind of adjustments you make in instruction. In the research on beginning reading, we generally target five different pieces: phonological awareness, vocabulary, phonics, fluency and comprehension. Phonological awareness basically deals with the sound system independent of any text. The idea is that the sound system is predictive of how we read in text. So, I mean, that's a peculiar thing in itself.
David Boulton: Well, if we take the neuro-circuitry model you started with,
then reading is really the ‘player piano’ that is ‘virtually playing’
the sounds that you have learned in your spoken language environment.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right.
David Boulton: Then how well that
oral language system is functioning is the undercarriage that reading develops
on top of and depends on.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui:
That's right.
David Boulton: We need to go in and assess that because if there's something
wrong with it, obviously nothing else about reading is going to work very well.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right. But most people have found it peculiar
that we're using an auditory signal system sample in the absence of print
to predict print. It's contra-intuitive: How can I use sound...
David Boulton: Well, we've got to make it intuitive, because it's really
clear…
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.
David Boulton: That not understanding this is a failure to understand what
reading is at a basic level.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right, absolutely. And believe it or not, lots of practitioners have that difficult time understanding how this works.
David Boulton: Which comes back to Horace Mann again.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right, exactly, which comes back to Horace
Mann, and so on. Exactly. So, we assess phonological awareness; we assess critical parts of
phonological awareness that are predictive of word reading. For example,
segmenting word like mud. Tell me the first sound in mud. Mmm.
That task is more predictive of word reading than rhyming.
So,
our one-minute assessment, which by the way is called the Dynamic
Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, (DIBELS), and was created by two
colleagues here at the University of Oregon, Dr. Roland Good and
Dr. Ruth
Kaminski. It’s now used in almost every state, which is part of the Reading
First Initiative. So, we sample phonological awareness; we sample word reading,
pseudo word reading. And again, the idea is that if kids can manipulate and map
the sounds to print in words that don't make sense, you get a pretty good
indicator of their ability to map sound to print.
David Boulton: You're peering in on the implicate processing.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right. We're peering in on their ability to take sound
and map it to print in words that they don't see every day, pseudo words,
nonsense words. Yet, that one-minute sample is predictive of their ability to
read real words in print, conventional words, and so on.
David Boulton: So, you're concerned with whether they can pronounce the
word, even though they don't know the word or the word doesn't exist.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Can they pronounce...
David Boulton: According to the instructions implicit in the code because
their phonological system is working, and they're able to map it to the print.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: You got it, absolutely. They've got the sound signal intact,
they've got the ability to take the sound system and map it to print. Then the
third piece we rely on is oral reading fluency. This is a measure of a child
reading a passage that he or she has not read before, a novel passage at grade
level, reading it for one minute and we count the number of words they read
correctly. We don't ask any comprehension questions, yet that indicator of
correct words read per minute is highly predictive of children's comprehension
ability.
Again, these are constructs that the practitioner in the classroom is only
beginning to embrace. And these are constructs that are critical to the
composite of reading. We can sample these behaviors in one minute, and these one
minute samples are very predictive of highly critical reading skills down the
road.
So
to me, that's a heck of a deal, to be able to sample something in a minute,
enter it into a database system and get reports back in thirty-two seconds. You can
get class reports, school-level reports, district-level reports, so that
teachers can take these reports and use them, because the reports also make
instructional recommendations based on the performance, on the actual score, and
the risk category.
David Boulton: So, they're diagnostic and prescriptive.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: They're diagnostic and prescriptive, exactly. They tell you,
based on the score, what the risk category is; if the child is at low risk or at
some risk, or is, in fact, high risk. If the child is at low risk, that means
that child has an eighty percent chance, the child it already at benchmark and
that child can go on and do other things. If that child is at risk, that means
that unless the school intervenes on those particular constructs:
phonological awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension, fluency, alphabetic
principle, the odds of that child being successful down the road are not in his
or her favor.
So, we can get this system and we have over a million kids in that DIBELS
database right now that allows us to harvest these data, look at the schools
that are doing well, and make predictions about how they're going to do in the
future. That's two major pieces of understanding this complex host environment
known as schools. Do we have the right curriculum in place? Are we using and
employing curricula that we know are effective, that is based on the best
science? Do we have three tiers of tools that we can use — core curriculum?
Do we have supplemental curriculum? Do we have intervention?
David Boulton: Which are just gross applications for management purposes.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.
David Boulton: Ultimately, we want a fluid interactive process that provides assessment information to the process of differentiating instruction quickly down the line.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right, a seamless system.
Because of the resources that we have
available we have to be smart about how
to use those resources in a way that allows us to acknowledge the
differentiation, acknowledge the differences in terms of the risk, but at the
same time tries to have an impact. So, that's the curriculum piece.
The
other piece is getting a progress-monitoring system in place that allows us to
measure growth and assess growth every week, if we have to, so that we can
determine whether or not the instruction that's going on is making a difference.
So, you need an assessment system that's sensitive to change, sensitive to
growth.
David Boulton: So, the basic DIBELS mechanism can slide across the scale and
pick up the same implicate readings no matter where they are, at what content
level, to be able to feedback into this assessment that prescribes the pieces
you’re describing.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right. You hit a ceiling, because once you get — I
mean, basically we have a handful of measures. We can tap phonological awareness
in a minute, lots of different ways. We can tap the phonics piece, the
alphabetic principle through pseudo word reading or even word identification
reading in one minute.
David Boulton: That last point would imply that you've picked out what you
think are the most problematic to focus on because you're not going to hit the
spectrum.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: You're not going to hit all of it, that's right.
David Boulton: So, you've got a top five list of where are the greatest letter-sound correspondence confusions that they're tripping on, and you're actually intentionally constructing their one-minute experiences to reveal how they're dealing with the most difficult challenges.
|
Reading is a Categorical Mistake:
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Exactly. You've captured it. Reading is a categorical
mistake. It’s a construct that's so unwieldy that you can assign anything you
want, you can define it in any way you choose. One of my colleagues that I used
to teach with used to argue that reading is about human emancipation. My
response is reading is about reading a writing system, and in this case,
it’s an alphabetic writing system. Those are two very different
interpretations of reading.
So,
yes, it's a categorical mistake. It's an unwieldy category. So, we have to make
decisions about this peculiar conceit. We can't tap it all. The question is:
What does the research tell us about what is most essential to tap? Phonological
awareness, alphabetic principle, alphabetic insight, taking the sounds and
mapping onto the print, vocabulary development. Children who know a lot of
words, have a storehouse of words, have this kind of dictionary in their head,
those kids have this kind of home depot of words in their head that they can
draw on.
David Boulton: They've got a lower threshold of recognition, which speeds
the reading process, because they can hear the word in their head.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right. They've got an instant — that's right.
David Boulton: But the struggling readers have to figure out, ‘Does this
word make sense, because I've never heard it before.’ This is a big piece of
the fourth grade slump.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right, exactly. They have to have something there, a
representation from the environment that they can hook up to when somebody
says...
David Boulton: Until they get confident that it's okay not to have that because they can reliably assemble the sounds of words and figure out what words mean.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: They can make it up on their own, that's right.
David Boulton: Then with that level of confusion, it's okay to use context
to deduce things
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, exactly. That's
right, it's not okay in the earlier part, exactly.
|
Alphabetic Insight/Principle:
David Boulton: I’ve got to take you to task on the alphabetic insight.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Sure.
David Boulton: People use that a lot, Dr. Reid Lyon uses that, as well as
Dr. Whitehurst. It's kind of suggestive of a singular event; ‘a principle’,
meaning something that's relatively stable and once you get it, it's there.
Similarly, the word ‘insight’, means a singular event, right?
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Yeah.
David Boulton: But the correspondence between the alphabet and the sound
system is anything but a single principle or a single insight.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right. That's fair enough. But there is a moment where,
for the child who has not understood — like the child in Waimanalo, Hawaii,
who will use words and not understand that words have a concrete representation
until they see the concrete representation. And they'll say, 'Ah, I thought
that word was this, but the word is not this, it's that.' That's an
insight.
David Boulton: Right. To get that there's a fundamental correspondence
between just speaking and writing…
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That's right, exactly.
David Boulton: Thereafter…
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Thereafter, yeah…
David Boulton: We're talking about the development of these internal
processing reflexes that create this virtual reality stream, which is an
entirely different business.
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: That’s right. Yes, the insight is an important part, but
it's not all. You're absolutely right.
David Boulton: When we look at the kids that are struggling on the downside,
I mean, I would imagine that only a small percent of them are having a problem
getting the insight. They're having a problem on the other side of the insight
trying to actually process the complexity…
Dr.
Edward Kame'enui: Once they — yeah, that's right, right, absolutely, that's
right.
David Boulton: And develop fluent code level processing.
Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right. How do I continue to make the connection? That's right. That's fair enough.
