[Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about reading?

Thu Dec 10 21:03:19 GMT 2009

And this today and on NPR also:
Learning, adaptation can change brain connections, CMU researchers say
Thursday, December 10, 2009
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Scientists used to think that the structure of the human brain didn't change much after infancy.
But in the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of studiesshowing just how adaptable and malleable the human brain is, and one ofthe most intriguing was published today by Carnegie Mellon Universityscientists.
Writing in the journal Neuron, brain researchers Marcel Just andTimothy Keller said that after just six months of intensive remedialreading instruction, children who had been poor readers were not onlyable to improve their skills, but grew new white-matter connections intheir brains.
Even though the 35 third- and fifth-graders didn't achieve the sameskill level as a group of 25 excellent readers, their white-matterconnections in one particular pathway on the left side of their brainsbecame just as strong as those in the top reading group. Meanwhile, 12poor readers who attended regular classes showed no change in theconnecting tissue.
White matter gets its name from the fatty myelin sheaths that encasethe nerve fibers that connect one "thinking" area of the brain withanother. It makes up half the brain's volume, and the Carnegie Mellonstudy is one of the few that has shown that the brain can actuallychange its connections through learning and adaptation.
There is a growing appreciation for how important these white-matterpathways are for helping the brain perform complex cognitive tasks.
The Just-Keller team had already shown in an earlier study that thewhite-matter tracts are disorganized in adults with autism. Now theyhave shown that the white matter in children with reading disabilitiescan be reorganized for the better.
To measure the changes, the scientists used a brain scanningtechnique called diffusion tensor imaging, which detects the changes inwater flow along the white matter pathways.
Dr. Just said he was not particularly surprised that the childrenwho got remedial training didn't end up as skilled as the best readersin their classes.
"It's kind of like taking people with a physical disability andgiving them training but then saying they're still not as good asprofessional athletes," he said.
That is similar to another recent study at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom that involved juggling.
In that project, researchers did brain imaging on 48 adults, andthen asked half of them to practice juggling for 30 minutes a day forsix weeks.
At the end of that study, the jugglers showed new white matterconnections in a part of the brain involved in grasping and peripheralvision, said Heidi Johansen-Berg, as well as denser gray matter abovethose tracts.
But there was still a wide variety of skill levels among those whohad the same white-matter growth, she said. Some were still doing basicthree-ball juggling, while others were doing "five balls or reversecascade juggling," she said.
Her group concluded that the white-matter improvements had more todo with how many hours people trained than how good they were.
There is no doubt, though, that people are able to improve thewiring in their brains with training, she said, and "studies like thesehighlight the importance of these communication networks in the brain."
While the reading improvement was modest in the local students, whocame from all over Allegheny County, the benefits they got shouldn't bediscounted, Dr. Just said.
"It means they can read newspapers and textbooks, which they oncehad difficulty with, and imagine the bootstrapping effect of that, sothat maybe the reading process will become less effortful over time andeverything will feed on itself."
It also cements the idea that learning can actually change the physical contours of the brain, he said.
"We all know that we learn things and we can do things we didn'tused to be able to do. But it's one thing to know it, and another tosay, here's how it happens. It really is something new to reveal partof the mechanism by which physical changes occur in the brain."
One finding that Dr. Just and Dr. Keller are still trying to unravelis the fact that the white-matter pathway that improved in the readersdoes not correspond to the gray matter areas that are known as the"reading circuit."
The front end of the pathway is in an area that helps decode words,but the back end is in a region that is part of the brain's "defaultnetwork," which is active when people are daydreaming or not thinkingabout a particular task.
That led Dr. Keller to speculate that perhaps as the young readersgot better, the white-matter signals dampened down distractingthoughts, so that they could devote more mental resources to reading.
It isn't just white-matter structures that can change in the brain.
Natasha Lepore, a brain researcher now at the University of SouthernCalifornia, has shown that in people who became blind before the age of5, the rear parts of their brains involved with vision have shrunk, asmight be expected, but their frontal lobes have increased in size tocompensate.
And an earlier study of London taxi drivers showed that a part oftheir brains' hippocampus, which is involved in memory, was much biggerthan in other people after the drivers had gone through the city'srigorous training in learning the streets of the metropolis.
For those who improve their reading ability, it is possible thestructural changes in their brains will have broader cognitivebenefits, said Guinevere Eden, a Georgetown University researcher whois president of the International Dyslexia Association.
Dr. Eden, who praised the Carnegie Mellon study as an importantadvance in understanding how reading reshapes the brain, said a studydone on Portuguese villagers has shown that children who were taught toread had noticeably different white-matter connections in their brainsthan siblings who were illiterate.
"We know that early on in life, there are a lot of changes inwhite-matter tracts in the developing brain. Now we have a study thatshows that when you train kids in reading, you change their whitematter to where it should be. And that helps show that anybody who hasacquired literacy will manifest different brain anatomy and physiologythan non-readers."
Dr. Just sees a broader lesson.
Studies like his show that "we're not at the mercy of our biology."
"I think that's a fruitful way to think about life and society ingeneral -- I truly believe that some day, there's going to be a cabinetsecretary of the brain."
Mark Roth can be reached at mroth at post-gazette.com or at 412-263-1130.

That's Fascinating, where Mark Roth spotlights the odd and theinteresting in everyday life, is featured exclusively in the Opinionsection on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.

First published on December 10, 2009 at 12:00 am

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09344/1019898-115.stm#ixzz0ZJzaBxJy

Dick Allington
University of Tennessee
A209 Claxton

-----Original Message-----
From: richardallington at aol.com
To: tsticht at znet.com; reading-hall-of-fame at nottingham.ac.uk
Sent: Mon, Dec 7, 2009 4:16 pm
Subject: Re: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about reading?

 Here is the problem from my point of view (one informed by Strauss and Hruby on the topic): We know almost nothing about how the brain works. The "scans" that charlatans like Shaywitz use are so much scans but snapshots. Anyone who has ever had an MRI has some idea of how this brain evidence is collected. Get slid into a tube and have someone flash words on the mirror you can see. Just when you take the brain snapshot will tell you how your brain responded to a word flashed at you in a tube. I don't know about any other members but reading words flashed at me in a tube is not reading anyway and then to construct/invent explanations of how the brain reads from these snapshots is in itself enough evidence of naivete or stupidity but that doesn't stop people from buying the books these fools write.

Dick Allington
University of Tennessee
A209 Claxton

-----Original Message-----
From: tsticht at znet.com
To: reading-hall-of-fame at nottingham.ac.uk
Sent: Sat, Dec 5, 2009 6:32 pm
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Has brain science changed how you teach about reading?

Colleagues: In 2003, Sally Shawitz published Overcoming Dyslexia: A New

and Complet Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level. Four

years later, in 2007, Maryanne Wolf published Proust and the Squid: The

Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Now, two years later, in 2009,

Stanislas Dehaene has published Reading in the Brain: The Science and

Evolution of a Human Invention.

In all these books much is discussed about what areas of the brain are

involved in various reading tasks as indicated by imaging techniques. This

gives us a lot of information about how the brain functions during

different reading tasks. All these books seem to point away from whole

language and toward a phonemcs/phoncs approach to reading instruction,

Shaywitz and Dehaene most directly.

Dahaene says at the end of his book, "We now know that the whole language

approach is inefficient: all children regardless of their socioeconomic

background benefit from explicit and early taching of the corresondence

between letters and speech sounds.This is a well-established fact,

corroborated by a great many classroom experiments."

How adout this? Is this a "well established fact" in your opinion?

I'm wondering if any of you have drawn upon this new brain science

information to change the way you teach about reading instruction to future

or present teachers?

Tom Sticht

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