(Press-News.org) The ability to read is foundational to education, but prolonged school closures and distance learning due to the pandemic have imposed unique challenges on the teaching of many fundamental skills. When in-person classes resume, many students will likely need a period of catch-up learning, especially those who lag behind in basic reading skills.
New research published in the journal Psychological Science shows that people who were taught to read by receiving explicit instructions on the relationship between sounds and spelling experienced a dramatic improvement compared to learners who discovered this relationship naturally through the reading process. These results contribute to an ongoing debate about how best to teach children to read.
A team of researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, tested both techniques on a group of 48 adults who, over an intensive two-week period, were taught to read a new language that was printed in unfamiliar symbols.
One half of the participants learned spelling-to-sound and spelling-to-meaning regularities solely through experience with reading the novel words during training. The other half received a brief session of explicit instruction on these regularities before training commenced. At the end of the two-week period, both groups were given reading tests to gauge how well they had learned the new language.
"Our results were really striking. By the end of the two weeks, virtually all learners who had received explicit instruction were able to read words printed in the unfamiliar symbols," said Kathleen Rastle, a researcher at Royal Holloway and lead author on the paper.
In contrast, despite up to 18 hours of experience with the new language, less than 25% of the "discovery learners" reached the same standard, and some showed very poor learning.
"Reading is the foundation for children's learning throughout their schooling; for this reason, the learning loss that we are seeing is very concerning and has the potential for lifelong consequences," said Rastle. "The provision of evidence-based instructional methods has never been more important. Our research highlights the significance of explicit instruction in ensuring that all pupils have the opportunity to develop strong reading skills."
INFORMATION:
Psychological Science, the flagship journal of APS, is the leading peer-reviewed journal publishing empirical research spanning the entire spectrum of the science of psychology. For a copy of this article, contact cblue@psychologicalscience.org.
Reference: Rastle, K., Lally, C., Davis, M., & Taylor, J. S. H. (2021). The Dramatic Impact of Explicit Instruction on Learning to Read in a New Writing System. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620968790
New research from Baylor College of Medicine scientists shows that a combination of deep brain stimulation (DBS) and exercise has potential benefits for treating ataxia, a rare genetic neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive irreversible problems with movement.
Working with a mouse model of the human condition, researchers at Baylor and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital discovered that combining DBS targeted to the cerebellum, a major motor center in the brain, and exercise rescued limb coordination and stepping and that the benefits persisted without further stimulation. In addition, the study reports that stimulating mice with early-stage ataxia showed the most dramatic improvements. These and other ...
BOSTON -- Billions of peripheral white blood cells are produced every day by the regular divisions of hematopoietic stem cells and their descendants in the bone marrow. Under normal circumstances, thousands of stem cells contribute progeny to the blood at any given time, making white blood cells a group with diverse ancestry.
Clonal hematopoiesis is a common age-related condition in which the descendants of one of these hematopoietic stem cells begin to dominate substantial portions of the blood. Genome-wide analyses have determined that clonal ...
COLUMBIA, Mo. - While physical activity is important for everyone, research has shown people with developmental disabilities do not exercise as often as their typically developed peers. In an effort to close this disparity, a researcher at the University of Missouri recently created fitness picture books that help youth with autism exercise more frequently while offering low-income families a simple resource for workout motivation when outdoor fitness equipment might not be accessible.
"There is so much research geared toward helping individuals with autism improve their academic ...
Treatments for beating tumours are mainly based on CD8 T lymphocytes, which specialise in detecting and eliminating intracellular infections and in killing cancer cells. A large proportion of patients, however, do not respond to these treatments. This prompted a research team from the Swiss Cancer Centre Léman (SCCL, Switzerland) to bring together the universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL), the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), EPFL and CHUV to investigate CD4 T lymphocytes. While these play a supporting role with CD8 T cells, their ability to eliminate tumour cells directly has been a matter of controversy. Using innovative nanoimaging technologies designed at the EPFL laboratory, the scientists found that when the CD4 T lymphocytes ...
The ocean floor is vast and varied, making up more than 70% of the Earth's surface. Scientists have long used information from sediments at the bottom of the ocean -- layers of rock and microbial muck -- to reconstruct the conditions in oceans of the past.
These reconstructions are important for understanding how and when oxygen became available in Earth's atmosphere and ultimately increased to the levels that support life as we know it today.
Yet reconstructions that rely on signals from sedimentary rocks but ignore the impact of local sedimentary processes do so at their own peril, according to geoscientists including David Fike in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Their new study published Feb. ...
Cells rely on membranes to protect themselves from the outside world. But these membranes can't be fully closed because nutrients and other molecules have to be able to pass through. To achieve this, cell membranes have many types of channels and pores. Also, there are receptors, antennas if you like, imbedded in the membrane that continuously monitor the outside world and signal to the cell interior. Extensive collaboration between five VIB groups resulted in a better understanding of the machinery that plants use to regulate the protein composition of their outer membrane. This discovery, published in Science Advances, enhances our basic knowledge of how the plasma membrane composition can be adapted based on external stimuli, an essential ...
A team of international researchers went back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to gain new insights into the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements on the period-ic table.
Led by scientists who collaborate as part of the International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA) (irenaweb.org) and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics - Center for the Evolution of the Elements (JINA-CEE) (jinaweb.org), the study is published in the lat-est issue of the journal Science (science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/945).
Heavy elements we encounter in our everyday life, ...
HOUSTON - (Feb. 26, 2021) - Save your silver! It's better used for jewelry than as a catalyst for drugs.
Rice University scientists have developed a greatly simplified method to make fluoroketones, precursors for drug design and manufacture that typically require a silver catalyst.
Rice chemist Julian West and graduate students Yen-Chu Lu and Helen Jordan introduced a process for the rapid and scalable synthesis of fluoroketones that have until now been challenging and expensive to make.
Their open-access work graces the cover of the Feb. 21 issue of the Royal Society of ...
Dropping out of high school, having schizophrenia, or being diagnosed with a co-occurring personality disorder increases the likelihood of someone becoming a "high utilizer" of inpatient psychiatric hospital services, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). A high utilizer is someone who has been admitted three or more times within one year.
The research was published today in The Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.
For their findings, researchers used machine learning to analyze deidentified electronic ...
MISSOULA - University of Montana researchers and their partners have discovered a slimy strategy used by bacteria to defeat antibiotics and other drugs used to combat infections afflicting people with cystic fibrosis. The research was published Feb. 23 in the journal Cell Reports.
Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits a person's ability to breathe over time. A common strain of bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, often thrives in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, as well as in wounds from burns or diabetic ulcers. Once a P. aeruginosa infection is established, ...
