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Dr. David Kilpatrick is a psychologist, professor, researcher, and author whose contemporary work greatly influences our understanding of reading instruction and assessment in today’s classrooms. He speaks to sold-out crowds everywhere he goes, and today he’ll talk about influences on his work, understandings and misunderstandings, and his hopes for the future of reading instruction.
Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other “literacies” that impact children’s learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.
[00:00:00.970] - Speaker 1
Hi, I'm Laura Stewart. Welcome to Teaching, Reading, and Learning the TRL Podcast. The focus of this podcast is to elevate important conversations in the educational community in order to inform and inspire and celebrate contributions to teaching and learning. So when we decided to launch this podcast, you spoke and we listened. Our guest today was at the very top of your list of dream guests. David Kilpatrick, you're going to love this podcast. Every time I hear David, I learned something new, and I know you will, too. I think you'll get some additional insight into his work, and we'll explore the power of humility, and maybe we'll talk a little bit of magic, too. So thanks for tuning in. Enjoy. Our guest today is David Kilpatrick. I think I speak for everyone listening when I say that each time I hear David, I am in awe of an incredible grasp of the research, his insights, and his profound contributions to our collective understanding of the process of learning to read and what that means for instruction. I always really enjoy David and his humor and, of course, his magic, which we might be able to learn a little bit more about today.
[00:01:21.930] - Speaker 1
So to give you David's background, Dr. David Kilpatrick is a professor of psychology from the State University of New York College at Courtland. He is a New York State certified school psychologist with 28 years of experience in schools, and he has been teaching courses in learning disabilities in educational psychology since 1994. David is a reading researcher and the author of two books on essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties and equipped for reading success. David is also a coeditor of a third book, Reading Development and Difficulties, Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice. Dave, welcome.
[00:02:00.940] - Speaker 2
Thank you.
[00:02:02.490] - Speaker 1
So I thought we would frame our conversation around three things. I thought we'd talk a little bit about your origins because I'm guessing maybe not a lot of people who know your work, maybe kind of know your backstory, and then I'd like to really pick your brain about what do you see as some of the current obstacles in reading education and what do you see in the future? What do you see in the future of your work and our collective work around evidence based reading instruction. So if you don't mind, let's just kind of jump right in.
[00:02:32.000] - Speaker 2
Sure.
[00:02:32.630] - Speaker 1
Okay. Good. Okay. So let's just kind of go back to what made you decide to go into education and maybe some of the early influences around your work?
[00:02:43.770] - Speaker 2
Well, I never really decided to go into education. My field is psychology. I guess you could say I decided to go into education when I ended up going into a degree program for school psychology. But really, I conceptualize it, and the program to conceptualize it is psychology going into schools. But I still do think of myself as an educator on a certain level. And the strange thing was in my undergraduate days, I never even heard of school psychology. So when I came out of my undergraduate degree, I was thinking of doing more counseling or clinical psychology. I have an uncle who is a clinical psychologist, and I talked to him about it. I worked for about a year at a psychiatric hospital after I graduated. And as a result of that, what I ended up saying to my uncle is my next step. I'd rather deal with a more typical population and kind of catch them earlier, like you said. Well, how about like, school psychology? I was like, what school psychology? So anyway, I ended up pursuing a degree in that. And I will tell you, though, it wasn't until my first semester of my graduate program, sitting in a class waiting for the professor to arrive, and all of us are chitchatting, and there were some school psychologists coming back to get their doctoral degrees, and it was only then that I learned that you get summers off.
[00:04:16.410] - Speaker 2
I didn't go into this knowing it. So school psychology is a very family friendly schedule that you have. Yeah. Which would be year round. I just assumed it was year round. I didn't know it's better.
[00:04:35.300] - Speaker 1
Yeah. What were some of your early work in terms of school psychology? Did you start in the general vicinity in which you live? Where did you start practicing as a school psychologist?
[00:04:53.050] - Speaker 2
Yes, I worked locally and I grew up in central New York, Syracuse area, up in Liverpool, and so I worked right in this area. Initially, I had a big focus on behavior, behavior issues, and I was noticing right off the bat how many kids we had with reading problems. I didn't really get a lot of background that I did have a core course by Dr. Benita Blackman at Circus University on teaching disabled kids to read. But when I took it, which was, I think during my second year or the summer between my second and third year of graduate work, I didn't have a background to absorb it. I left that program knowing that phonics was important. I didn't have too many specifics. It was a summer course. You cover a lot in a short amount of time, so you forget a lot quickly. But I really didn't. Even though I had gotten some exposure to more scientifically based approaches to reading, the absorption rate was very low. And so I kept trying to use a lot of classic learning theory, behavioral psychology principles to deal with reading, and we were disappointed in the results. So anyway, just by happenstance, I got invited to a presentation in a local school district by Dr.
[00:06:21.810] - Speaker 2
Phil McGinnis, and he alerted me to the issue of there's a huge scientific enterprise studying reading, both normal reading development and reading difficulties. And at the time, I was an adjunct as well as working full time in the school, I was an adjunct and had access to the research literature. So that's really what got me going.
[00:06:44.730] - Speaker 1
Oh, interesting. So were you in an elementary school setting?
[00:06:48.730] - Speaker 2
Yes.
[00:06:49.340] - Speaker 1
Okay. And so you were getting all these children referred for behavior issues.
[00:06:54.290] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, behavior issues. And we were responsible for doing evaluations for learning problems as well.
[00:07:00.200] - Speaker 1
Okay. So then you started noticing this connection between reading and some of these behaviors that you're.
[00:07:06.920] - Speaker 2
Well, yeah. It wasn't that simple. It's more probably a better way to put it was when I came home one day after doing it for about 810 years, and I said to my wife, 80% of what I do has to do with reading problems or ADHD. And so those became my two areas of interest. And certainly there's crossover between the two. You have plenty of kids with ADHD that are perfectly fine readers, and you have plenty of struggling readers that have no behavior problems, but there is a disproportionate overlap.
[00:07:38.790] - Speaker 1
Interesting. So connect the dots for me then how you went from school psychologist studies that you took and then kind of how you ended up researching this field. How did that actually happen?
[00:07:57.850] - Speaker 2
Well, to my great disadvantage, but maybe in a roundabout way, advantage. I didn't come out of a program that focused on reading research per se. Most I guess I could say most reading researchers, they get a graduate degree in a particular discipline. There's no PhD in reading research. Right. You're getting it in some branch of psychology. You're getting it in speech pathology, linguistics, neurology, neuroscience, et cetera, or special education, etc. So you're getting a degree in one of those areas. But in every one of those areas, people have niche area interests, and you have people who focus on that. So the idea is that you specialize in graduate school with whatever your professor that you're working with, the professors or Dean that you're working with, and then you go off into teaching University or whatever, and you specialize in that area. The research. Well, I never had that in terms of specialization. So I read in a lot of different areas in the reading research that pertained to working with the kids that I was encountering, and that the teachers I was working with and parents I was working with what they were encountering. So that led me to a few different niche areas within the reading research.
[00:09:19.350] - Speaker 2
Reading research is so huge, nobody can stay on top of all of us. So people specialize. It's kind of like medicine. All the different areas of medicine, you specialize. So it was sort of a blessing in disguise. And I didn't come most people, when they finish their doctoral program, they've already got several publications because they've been part of teams. And their name is one of several names on a study and that type of thing. I didn't have that as a background. So I came up with a bunch of ideas trying to integrate some of these different areas. The four areas that I've spent most of my time in were areas of phonological processes, and reading has to do with phonological awareness, rapid armor naming, phonological working memory. The other is just the general dyslexia research on why kids struggle. A third area is this may sound the same, but it's quite different, which is dyslexia intervention. So one study why kids struggle, the other studies, what's the best way to do about it? And certainly there's overlap between all three of those areas. But the fourth area that really framed it all for me is the area of orthographic learning and orthographic learning studies.
[00:10:29.710] - Speaker 2
How do we remember words the way we do? We remember words very efficiently. And how does that happen? And why does that happen? By dumb luck. When I first got exposed to all this reading research, the very first year I encountered Linnae Aries orthographic mapping theory, it didn't even have a name yet. By the way, she did not name that orthographic mapping until a 2014 article. And when you read that 2014 article by her and she gives you a retrospective on the history of its development, you'd think it was called that all the way along. But it wasn't. So she used to in all of her art research, she would just start right in saying this is how kids learn. She didn't give it a name. Anyway, I originally read that I read an article that was an independent research study of her theory because up until that point, the only one that studied her theory was her. And so in 10. 00, 19. 94, in a Journal called the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, four British researchers saw her theory kicking around in the literature and said, hey, let's test this out independently. And they came up with three studies that they included in that one report and all three studies aligned perfectly with her theory.
[00:11:50.770] - Speaker 2
And that was the first exposure I had. Now reading when they described her theory, I totally misunderstood it. And most people don't get it the first time through, but it stimulated an interest in that year, Ari and Matzala edited a book in which Eri had a chapter on it. And so it was very current. And then the year before that, Bonita Blackman had come out with an edited volume that had a chapter in there by Erie. And after reading those two, I had my AHA moment. So that was in that very first year after being exposed to this 97 90 school year. So the next several hundred research articles I read were from within the framework of Aries theory. And things fit together very well with a good theory. So anyway, that's the background. So I never specialized. Now I do specialize because in 2006 I jumped ship and became full time at the University. And before I was just an adjunct.
[00:12:52.770] - Speaker 1
Got it? Yeah. So go back a little bit. So when you said you totally misunderstood what did you misunderstand and how did you get clarity when the researchers of.
[00:13:07.460] - Speaker 2
That article when he described her theory? And one of the interesting things about Aries theory is that article was a rare incidence in where someone other than Arie explains ARY Siri, this sort of dawned on me after a while is the only person that ever explained to Erie was Erie. And I started getting suspicious that some researchers didn't quite understand the theory that well either. Because normally when you describe someone's theory, you will give a sentence, two sentences, a small paragraph describing it on behalf of the reader. But people don't do that. They usually say talk about learning and remembering words. Sight words is the term used. Of course, that's so confusing because teachers use sight words three different ways. Right. And that's not good for communication. But what she's talking about are words that we know in our long term memory. And it doesn't matter if they're high frequency or low frequency phonetically, regular or irregular. Anyway, they're words that are known and familiar. And so when they would talk about site words, they would simply cite Erie as if they were saying we don't understand it. But she does. So go read her stuff if you can figure it out.
[00:14:20.310] - Speaker 2
Okay. And so I noticed this pattern. But anyway, the authors tried to take a shot at explaining it. The funny thing is I just read their explanation literally about a month ago. I pulled it back out of mouth balls and took a look at it. And I don't think their explanation was really that great. They kind of got it, but they didn't totally get it. But anyway, I misunderstood. What I thought they were claiming was that Aries said it's saying that we become so proficient at the letter sound relationships that in a sense we're sort of sounding out every word as we go along super fast. Okay. That's what I thought. Not to be right now. I felt vindicated later. There is such a theory. And a guy named I don't know how to say properly say, I think it's Ram. Ram, R-A-M is his first name. His last name is Frost. And he's in Israel, Israeli psychologist and researcher. And he came up with something called the strong phonological theory of reading. And in a sense, that's what he proposes. And even though that sounds hard for us to believe, his work was in a top Journal, psychology.
[00:15:33.960] - Speaker 2
And he builds a pretty strong case. I think he falls short. I don't think an adequate explanation, but at least my dumb idea wasn't quite so dumb. But that wasn't what Erie was saying. So that stimulated an interest and I was able to read those. And then I had, like I said, the AHA moment, understanding what she really was saying.
[00:15:52.990] - Speaker 1
Okay, that's fascinating. So then did you get to know Lynnia? Did you get to know her personally?
[00:16:01.330] - Speaker 2
Yes. But the funny thing was, I think I pretty much understood her theory pretty well by the end of the 97, 98 school year and read a ton of stuff on it. And then over the course of a few years is when it started dawning on me that even a lot of researchers didn't quite understand it. The research, as I said, is so huge, we've got tens of millions of dollars, grant dollars going into it every year, hundreds and hundreds of research articles that occur here. It's forgivable if a portion or large portion doesn't understand something going on in a particular niche area. But the niche area of orthographic learning itself has subdivisions, niche areas. So you have people that study David Share's theory of orthographic learning, and most of those people don't interact with Ares theory, and the people that studied Aries theory don't interact with Shares, and then you have a whole another division within it that has to do with computational modeling of how we remember words. And that would be Mark Steinberg or Max Coldheart and some of the others, which is really hard to understand. Okay. And I've read a lot of stuff on that, and I get the gist of it.
[00:17:14.610] - Speaker 2
Anyway, that in itself is a pretty substantive enterprise. So it started dawning on me that people didn't really understand her theory. And I did get to meet her at a conference. The first time I met her was in 2009. And I probably seemed like the most socially awkward person in the world that I actually brought this up to her at this conference and said, I think a lot of people here at this conference don't understand your theory. But keep in mind, the context was toward the end of a very lengthy discussion that we had about her theory. And anyway, she was a bit startled simply because she sighted constantly.
[00:17:53.070] - Speaker 1
Yeah, I agree.
[00:17:54.880] - Speaker 2
Then I asked her that question again in 2013, and she said, I think you're right. Okay. So I think I put the idea in the back of her mind. And here's what made me suspicious. Number one is nobody explained her theory about her. Number two, central to her theory is that we have to be able to pull apart words into their individual phonemes. Okay. If I have a word in my long term memory, I have to be able to pull apart into individual phonemes to connect strings of letters to that in my long term memory. So the idea of phonemic awareness of phonemic segmentation. I'm always reluctant to use the word segmentation because people think of segmentation tasks, and those are some of our weakest phonological tasks in terms of corresponding or correlating with reading. We're talking about a skill, something we're doing between our ears, not something we're doing verbally with someone with a computer. So I'm going to say parse or analyze to pull apart the oral word into individual components. We've known since the late 60s. That wasn't important. And what really fascinated me is reading literally hundreds of articles that cover this issue of Phonological processes when they would talk about why it is phonymic awareness was central to reading.
[00:19:14.790] - Speaker 2
Their explanations are kind of interesting. So traditionally, phonological awareness, we talk about analysis, pulling words apart, spoken words apart, and then synthesis, which is hearing individual sounds and putting them together. That's blending. And of course, you need to blend to sound out an unfamiliar word, right? Because you're cat that's blend, but the other direction is pulling apart. You hear a word and can you pull it apart? So whenever they talked about the importance of familial awareness, I was already familiar with Aries theory. So my antenna would go up, I'd Zoom right in, I'd slow it down and say, let's see what their explanation is for why phone awareness is so important. And it shocked me that these researchers, almost universally within the field, they would get very vague. What they might say is, well, clearly blending helps with sounding out unfamiliar words. And they'd say, but the analysis part, pulling words apart, that helps with spelling and probably helps develop the alphabetic principle. And I was like, I felt like Hermione Granger in the front row going, I know the answer. I know the answer. How come they don't know the answer? So it was dawning on me, wait a minute.
[00:20:25.110] - Speaker 2
If they really understood Aries theory, they would have specifically said the importance of the phonemic analysis is to help map words into long term memory. So that's what made me those two things nobody explained to her theory but her. And the fact that they didn't make the connection to the central phenomenon within their theory is to be able to pull apart words got me suspicious. And so I could be wrong. I haven't asked her that question recently, but at least in 2013, she said she was convinced that people didn't really have a clear understanding of that.
[00:21:00.090] - Speaker 1
David, that is so fascinating. First of all, a couple of things as you're talking, I'm just thinking about, again, how you're able to pull together all of these ideas are and share and all these other ideas and bring clarity to that. And the clarity around sight words and the clarity around orthographic learning. Do you think that's why your work has struck such a decor? Is that you've brought some clarity to that? Or is there another reason that you think your work has just been so impactful for teachers?
[00:21:34.470] - Speaker 2
Yeah, that's kind of a weird question. Because the first thing well, the essentials book that came out in 2015 is in a series that's aimed at school psychologists. And if you look inside the cover, you'll see maybe 50 or 60 books already in that series. So by the time they got to me, they were scraping the bottom of the barrels.
[00:21:56.910] - Speaker 1
I don't know about that anyway.
[00:21:58.860] - Speaker 2
So I never really thought of that out. But here's the bizarre thing. I never pursued any of this. None of this, honestly, what happened was as I was developing this understanding because I wasn't just focusing on reading when I was working in elementary school and I was an adjunct and I was teaching courses and learning disabilities and children with disabilities and things like that, educational psychology. I was pursuing research on reading, writing, and math. So I wanted to know not just reading, but also word reading, reading comprehension. I read stuff in that area. I read stuff on math, I read stuff in writing. And I tried to bring that back to my work in the schools. But you can only do so much at each of those levels because those are big areas, too. And then when I went to fall 2006 became full time, I had to specialize. So I tell people that I'm up on the state of the art in math and writing as of 2005. So I'm only 15 years behind on that research. Okay. But I am working on a project, and I'm delving back into those as well. But anyway, what happened was the angle I started taking.
[00:23:11.550] - Speaker 2
I came up with a concept that I call intervention oriented assessment. So in the school psychology field, I won't get sidetracked by this. But in the school psychology field, we are in a very difficult position. We have to make a diagnosis of a learning disability based upon one of three different approaches, none of which has adequate validity to it. Okay. What I was looking at one view, which actually in New York state, we no longer can do this and States can't require schools to do it. But the classic approach was to show a discrepancy between IQ and major problems. With that, it's been replaced with an idea of a discrepancy with age or state level expectations. So basically low achievement. But it's also been replaced with two other options. One is using response to intervention and using response to intervention. The idea is that if a child gets the ideal instruction in the classroom that has been shown to help kids that are at risk readers and they're still struggling, and then if you pull them aside and do what we now call tier two, but you're using approaches in this tier two, additional general instruction that is a very high quality that shows that we can really make a difference and you're still not doing well and struggling, then you have a learning disability.
[00:24:33.960] - Speaker 2
Now, the three options we have that is the most valid approach if you're doing all the right things in tier one and tier two, but we have little evidence that's happening. So how can you possibly use that approach to diagnosing a learning disability when in tier one, they used approaches that we know don't work well with kids at risk, and in tier two use methods that we know don't work well? Anyway, school psychologists are in a tough spot. With that. The RTI approach kind of works backwards from principles of learning theory and behavioral psychology. And then the third alternative, patterns of strengths and weaknesses, works backwards from classic IQ type stuff where they'll say they'll try to make a guess as to what something on an IQ test might tell us about reading, writing, or math without really a lot of research and support. So the intervention oriented assessment works in a completely different way. It says, what research do we have on reading and writing and math and how that develops? And what are the skills, linguistic skills, cognitive skills, academic skills we need for that, and then work backwards from that to say, why is this child struggling?
[00:25:50.690] - Speaker 2
You've probably heard me use this before. The analogy of, like basketball, you can determine how good someone is at basketball by breaking it down. How good are they at dribbling, passing, shooting, playing defense, et cetera. In the same way, there are components that go into reading, writing, and math, and we know what those are, but they're not on the IQ test. Now, granted, there are some aspects of the IQ test, but one of the things that we've done in the school psychology field, unfortunately, is we would infer that without looking at the research. For example, I remember in seeing this from time to time, they say, well, think about it. Reading is kind of sequential. So let's look at sequential tests. Let's look at tasks that are sequential in nature. They don't correlate with reading hardly at all. Okay. But people infer that, and then they try to make judgments based on that. Anyway, that's what I was doing for a number of years. So I happened to be at a New York Association school psychologist conference, and I was sitting in on a presentation by Dawn Flanagan. Now, she kind of comes from that third category of patterns and strengths and weaknesses.
[00:26:53.840] - Speaker 2
But her view is a bit different because it's taking, in my estimation, a big step away from just trying to figure out, hey, here's some sequencing test on the site test. Maybe that's telling us something. In her approach, you have to demonstrate a difficulty in one of this in a skill area that has been shown by research and reading, writing and math to actually have an impact. So anyway, that struck a chord with me. I don't know enough about the whole approach to say if it's good or bad, but at least that particular element struck the chord with me. So we had a nice conversation afterwards. I handed her an earlier edition of the equipment. I mean, the equipment has a long history, by the way. The 2016 Copyright really had been around for 14 years before that. But anyway, I handed her an earlier version of it. We had a discussion, and you have someone at conference, something it goes on a pile and never to be seen again. Right. And recycle at the end of the year? Well, for some reason, she read the fourth chapter about Orthographic mapping, and she was very fascinated with it.
[00:28:00.780] - Speaker 2
So she contacted me and said, hey, we're editing a book, one of those books, or each chapter is written by a different person. And we'd like you to write a chapter about this in the book. I'm like, sure. Right. So I did. And the three Editors of the book liked it and went into a book that came out in 2014. And then after with a further discussion with Dr. Flanagan, she said, hey, I don't know if she suggested, I suggested or whatever, but in the course of the conversation, she was talking about how important this was for school psychologists to know. And the thought came up of maybe adding a whole book on this to that series. And so she recommended me to the Editors and I sent in an outline and they approved it. It wasn't like, I want to write a book. How do you do that? Do you get an agent? Do you?
[00:28:50.200] - Speaker 1
That is so interesting.
[00:28:54.390] - Speaker 2
I don't want to say passive because I obviously put a lot of work into it, but it wasn't something that I originally envisioned or sought after.
[00:29:02.450] - Speaker 1
I think that's so fascinating because there's such a need for that work and the need presented itself. And you came along and filled that need. Really? Yeah. And I just think that has struck a chord with so many teachers because in many ways, your whole explanation of how Orthographic mapping works has answered so many questions people have about how children develop as readers, don't you think?
[00:29:34.050] - Speaker 2
Well, yeah. I mean, that's the power of a good theory. Ary hit on this back in the late seventy s, and she started doing studies of it in the those studies supported, but there were gaps and holes in the way she designed her studies. And then those British researchers came along. They weren't the only ones, but they were the first ones to independently study her theory and then several others afterwards. Now here's an interesting thing. Both Aries theory and share theory, you'd be hard pressed to find many studies on them in the last ten years, because what happens is people do a series of studies. If you do a series of studies, particularly by independent individuals, they're all pointing in the same direction. And none of the studies are contrary. They more or less say, okay, this seems to be pretty much it, and they move on to other things.
[00:30:21.370] - Speaker 1
Other things. Yeah.
[00:30:22.950] - Speaker 2
But what's interesting about both of them is that many studies that aren't directly testing out their theories are providing lots of indirect support. In other words, they weren't studying their theory, but the findings are very consistent with that that happens in medicine. Right. Who's studying the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer? Okay. That's been pretty well established. They've moved on up. So anyway, the area theory was so on target that so many different things in the research literature kind of fell into place when you look at it through that lens. Interesting.
[00:31:02.700] - Speaker 1
So what do you think people most get wrong about the work that you're putting out there?
[00:31:15.430] - Speaker 2
Again, I think Orthographic mapping theory is a little tough to grasp. I think a lot of people that have a phonics background kind of default to phonics and they don't understand the other part of it. I mean, there's two levels of word reading, the ability to sound out an unfamiliar word, and then the second is the ability to efficiently remember words. And Aries theory is really about the second one of those, even though it builds on the foundation of the first. But if you have the foundation of the first, you don't automatically have the second. I know that's very abstract. So you can be good at sounding out words because you've got good training in it, a good phonic program. But if you have limited phonemic skills, limited ability to pull that apart, like Arie says we're doing, then you're not going to be good at remembering words. You're going to be sounding up. And by the way, that's what Dyslexia is in the regular phonetically, regular languages like Spanish and Italian, et cetera. Those dyslexics have very good accuracy at reading the words because what happens essentially for us to master the code, you're talking about 20 months, right?
[00:32:29.670] - Speaker 2
About two years, at least by the end of second grade, most kids, if they have at least a basic instruction in the code, they pretty much have it down. There's always some refining that can go on after that. Well, in countries like Spain and Italy, they got it down in the first four months of first grade. Right. Because it's just aren't all the irregularities. They're on all the unusual patterns and things like that. But the Dyslexic in those countries, they may not get it down till the end of first grade or sometime early second grade. It may take them longer to get it down because of their phonological issues, but they eventually get it down. And now they can sound out any word. So they don't have a problem with accuracy. So they're able to do that first level of word reading at the second. They don't have sufficient phonemic skills to be good at accessing the words and scoring them in long term memory.
[00:33:25.970] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So on a real practical level, would you say that many teachers who are teaching phonics and the kids still haven't developed that ability to really have automatic access to words that you're bringing orthographic mapping to the forefront? And advanced phone proficiency has really been a key for those teachers.
[00:33:50.950] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Because the phonema proficiency drives the process. Here's the thing. This is a question I've been posing now for maybe about a year is to ask people this is what you call an Axiom. An Axiom is something that you don't actually have to prove it's, just more likely to take it as a truth. And I haven't had anybody contradict this yet. Okay. Out of thousands of people I presented this to. But think about if you have, say, 50,000 words stored in your long term memory that jump off instantaneously, what percentage of those and some of those you encountered in second grade, some you encountered in fifth grade, some in 8th grade, some in College, and some just a short time ago because you came across the new words that you hadn't seen before, what percentage of those words upon first encounter did you put some conscious effort into remembering for the next time? And if you're like most people, you're going to say somewhere between zero and 1%. That's not how orthographic learning occurs. Orthographic learning occurs automatically in the background. You come across a new word again as an adult when you're an 8th grader or whatever, you don't stop and go, oh, my gosh, a new word.
[00:35:05.090] - Speaker 2
Let me go get the flashcards or let me cover it up and try it over and over again. No. Once you've determined the word, you move on. You're waiting for comprehension. So this process of connecting the phonemes to the graphenes and storing it long term memory is automatic, unconscious, and going on behind the scenes. Think about this. If the process of storing words is automatic than any skill that goes into that process has to be automatic. So the phone proficiency concept naturally emerges from that. There's no way around it. There's no way to say that to store a word efficiently, you need to have instantaneous unconscious access. But your phone is slow, it doesn't follow. The phone is essential and universally absent among kids that are poor readers.
[00:35:59.090] - Speaker 1
Absolutely. And I think what you're bringing to life here is this whole idea that it goes underground. The process goes underground. So how do we help get kids from that conscious level of decoding to this underground automatic level?
[00:36:16.490] - Speaker 2
Right. Well, they need the skills to do that. I think it's important to point out the contrast between orthographic learning, which is the ability to remember words. Share theory shows us that one to four encounters from kids from second grade on. For we adults, it's really one or two encounters. How different is that from when you had to learn your math facts and you had to drum them in over and over again, very conscious when you had to learn the state capitals, when you had to learn your biology terms in 9th grade? It's a very different kind of learning. And so orthographic learning is just really amazing. Number one, it happens automatically in the background. Number two, once we learn it, we never forget. I bet if we quiz you on all your biology terms and your French or Spanish words that you learned in high school or College, you'd forget a bunch.
[00:37:05.450] - Speaker 1
Right now you're like, I don't know.
[00:37:06.570] - Speaker 2
And you might not be able to come up with all the state capitals or whatever. Of course, the state capital thing doesn't work well in Canada or Australia because they have fewer States and provinces. But anyway, it's an easier task for them. But the point is those types of learning are different. That's called semantic memory, and we're talking about orthographic memory. And so it's a pretty amazing type thing. We learn it very quickly, automatically behind the scenes. We don't ever forget. We have this huge storage of words, 40, 2030, 40, 50, 80,000 words, depending on how much you're doing in a lifetime. So it's a pretty amazing process. So getting back to your question, the skills have to be automatic. So go back to the example of basketball. Do you think someone is going to be able to, as they say in basketball, drive the Lane, avoid the defenders and go out and put a layup if they haven't mastered Dribbling to the point where they don't have to think about it, right. So that Dribbling has to be automatic in order for them to accomplish that. And so the same is true if the child doesn't have automaticity in terms of access to the formula, the spoken language, we don't have any good reason to think they're going to be good at memory word, because then we have to come up with some alternative explanation for memory words, and we've never come up with anything even close to an explanation that fits the data that we have.
[00:38:34.190] - Speaker 1
So do you think that this whole idea of memorizing site words on flashcards is really because we equated that with learning state capital or mathematics or vocabulary?
[00:38:47.430] - Speaker 2
That's one of the problems with applying learning theory to learning theory. Think of behavioral psychology, Skinner, Watson, all these others. It has a lot to commend itself. Don't get me wrong, because with learning theory, you're going to learn your math acts way better if you use learning theory than just intuition. Right. But that's a certain type of learning. It's called paired associate learning. So paired associate learning means that you've paired two things together. So in the presence of one, the other is automatically activated. If I look over here and I see a lamp, I say lamp automatic. I don't have to think about this pair of associate learning, but orthographic learning doesn't work like that. Paired associate learning can take many to think of kids learning letters of the Alphabet that's paired associate learning. Learning theory is very useful for teaching kids letter names and letter sounds. There's no question about it. But once they've learned the letter names and letter sounds in terms of remembering words, learning theory has very little to offer. And in fact, it'll make it harder because with parasocial learning, it's going to take kids dozens to hundreds of exposures to letter names and letter sounds for it to become automatic.
[00:39:52.590] - Speaker 2
And when we use flashcards of whole words that way. It's one thing if we're using flashcards with the letter B and the letter T and the letter L, and we want them to learn those letter names or sounds, that's great. Okay. But when we put them together in a flashcard and expect them to learn it as is as if we're showing them those others, we're making it harder. So orthographic learning takes one to four exposures, but we're using an approach that typically takes dozens to hundreds of exposures, making it harder assumption is that it's some sort of visual memory process.
[00:40:23.560] - Speaker 1
Exactly.
[00:40:24.190] - Speaker 2
I'm not going to go through that now because.
[00:40:26.060] - Speaker 1
Yeah, I understand.
[00:40:27.060] - Speaker 2
I don't have a website, I don't put up videos, but other people have. And all you need to do is Google and you'll hear all the reasons why it's not visual memory, even though that's our intuition.
[00:40:34.710] - Speaker 1
Yes. It's interesting you mention that, because I think that. Go ahead.
[00:40:38.550] - Speaker 2
But flashcards are a great tool. It's just a matter of how we use them. So if you prep children. So if you have an irregular word and you prep them before you even show them the word and you accentuate the sounds in the word, and then you talk about say if the word is yacht. Right. That's one of the toughest words. Now, you're not going to do that with first graders, but you might do it with second or third graders.
[00:41:01.850] - Speaker 1
Right.
[00:41:02.220] - Speaker 2
Depending on if it works its way into a story or something. And so you say here's the word we're going to learn today is yacht. And it's one of our tricky words. Don't call it a slight word. Okay.
[00:41:11.520] - Speaker 1
Yeah. It's too confusing.
[00:41:13.250] - Speaker 2
Yeah. So you say this is one of our tricky words. The regular words call it which one? And you say, okay, you have a word, yacht. What's the first time here in yacht? And someone may go, Why? No, not letter sound. What sound? And they go, yeah, right. Okay. What's the last time you heard the word yacht? And they go, right? That's right. What are you in the middle of yacht? And they go, Ah. And you're like, right, okay. So you've pulled apart the spoken word for them and then you say to them, okay, what letter do you think that's going to make the sound in yacht? And they say, Why? And you say, good, you write it on the board and you say what letter do you think is going to make the sound in yacht? And they say T. And you say, great, you write it there and you say what letter usually says and they say, oh, you're like, great. But that's not how we spell yacht. Here is why this is one of our tricky words. Watch. Isn't this strange? And you write ACH. Okay. In the middle and you say, that's not how we normally say Ah, is it?
[00:42:12.840] - Speaker 2
That's why it's a tricky word. This one we have to learn and then let's all read it. Let's all spell yacht. Right. So you all spell yacht and then get the now that has earned its place in a stack of flashcards because you've already prepped the memory system. You've given them shelves to store that sequence of letters in relation to the sounds. You've pointed out the irregularities. You've done the elaboration. Now using flashcards after having done that, I think is a great tool. But without doing that, you're making it really hard by accident. Nobody's doing it on purpose. No.
[00:42:49.270] - Speaker 1
But I think what you've done with that little demonstration with yacht and I've seen you do it with the word said is you really help teachers understand how important it is for children to be able to phony graphene map, and then by drawing attention to that irregular part, kids are going to be more tuned into that. Right. As opposed to just trying to memorize a whole configuration of a word. I want to go back to something you said earlier, too, about assuming that somehow this is visual memory. I think about when I came up as a teacher. I do think one of the predominant ideas is that reading was a visual process. And I think one thing that your work has really elevated for us is that understanding that it indeed is not. And I think that's really important. So thank you for that.
[00:43:43.030] - Speaker 2
Well, I assume that I assume that's a learning about Aries work, and I think it's easy to confuse visual input with visual storage or visual memory. So the input is obviously visual, but that's not how storage works. Very different part of the brain even is shown to activate in functional MRI studies between visual memory tasks and orthographic.
[00:44:08.290] - Speaker 1
Tasks, all different things. Yeah. Let me ask you this. How far when I think about us as an educational community and our understanding of the process of learning to read and our understanding of how instruction needs to guide that process, how far do you think we've come since some of your early work and what gets in our way? What gets in our way of continuing to grow in the field?
[00:44:35.550] - Speaker 2
Well, I think it's come a long way. I know that my opinion might be biased here, but I think a lot has happened since the Reading League was founded, and it's become very popular very quickly. It's got a Journal that directly communicates between researchers and teachers. And as opposed to normally, it's researchers communicating with other researchers and the coaching that they're doing, the website professional, lots of great stuff along those lines. But there are others as well. And I think that people in International Dyslexia Association, they've been around a long time and they have some great stuff, but I think people are more learning about them and all the advantages they have to offer. And you have like plain talk conference. I know it's been around a few years, but there are more and more opportunities. It seems like in the last five years or more, maybe I'm more aware of it. Sometimes you get a new vehicle and suddenly you notice all other similar vehicles like that you didn't notice before. I don't know. I didn't see much movement going on that I worked in prior to that. So I think we're moving in the right direction.
[00:45:44.970] - Speaker 2
And to some degree, the Emily Hanford podcast, I mean, just wonderful taken. Wraps off of kind of the big secret in education is that there are four ways. There are four different classic approaches to teaching reading. Depending on your focus, you focus on individual letters and graph themes. That's going to be your phonic approach, chunks of words that's going to be your word family approach, whole word that's the whole word approach, and sentences and paragraphs. That's your balance literacy approach. And of those four, the one that comes out with the weakest results time and time again is the one that we use most commonly in schools. And she's taking the reps off that. And people need to know that. The general public needs to know this. And I appreciate that so much of what she's doing. So I think the stuff she's doing, the reading lead and a bunch of these other organizations coding Dyslexia.
[00:46:39.810] - Speaker 1
Molly, you.
[00:46:40.540] - Speaker 2
Might want to tweak this little thing or that little thing that they're doing, but they're still part of the same type of push that's going in the right direction. Now, I think the problem is that if you're very invested in an approach that's very different from that, you don't just go, okay, all right, I'm going to just go away. My 1st 30 years of my work and I'll jump and there are some people that do I apologize if you heard me say this before, but one of the important features of science, people don't think of this, but one of the most important features of science is a virtue humility. Because in the science you say, I have this idea and I'm creating an experiment to find out if it really is accurate, true description of whatever you're studying, and you have to have the ability to go, I was wrong. I have to go back and revise. So people that are trained in a more scientific mentality, more or less have to have that kind of dose of humility or doesn't work. The whole enterprise doesn't work. So I think we need that. We need a recognition to say, let me test some of my own ideas.
[00:47:46.910] - Speaker 2
That's one of the most important elements of critical you hear people talk about critical thinking, but I don't really see much of it going on. I don't know. Have you been following the election? Anyway, critical thinking doesn't happen in politics. It's all about persuasion. And that's part of the problem is that people then take the persuasion approach. I have been doing this for a long time. It makes sense to me. And now my goal is to persuade you. And one of the best ways to persuade someone is to show them how bad and how wrong the other view is. And social science, this idea, when you see politicians, they spend so much of their time telling you how horrible the world will be if we have this other politician in here. Right. The reason is that works, okay? They're not doing a coincidence. It's not because they're inherently evil people, okay? It's because that works. And all their advisors show them that one of the best ways to defend your view, if you're not into taking scientific approaches, is to try to come up with ways to villainize that. And that's happened, which is unfortunate.
[00:48:49.750] - Speaker 2
So I think there's an investment. I had two different summer workshops where I had a person come up to me during a break or lunch or something and say, you know what? I'm going into my final year of teaching, and this is all new to me, and this is so exciting. I'm so looking forward to this year. And I was like, that's the attitude we need to take. That's the attitude we need to take instead of looking back at, oh, man, did I do this all wrong? No. That's so unproductive.
[00:49:21.070] - Speaker 1
Yes, I totally agree. It's interesting. I was speaking to another guest, and we were talking about the power of curiosity. Right. If we can maintain that curiosity. And as you said, with humility, that teacher who's been teaching for 30 years and is excited that's the mindset that allows her to just keep going and be curious about something that might make a difference for more kids. Yeah, that's a positive.
[00:49:46.630] - Speaker 2
I was inspired by a resource teacher. She just passed away, actually. She was one of the two people I dedicated the essentials book to. I was always inspired by she was like 20 years older than me. So she had been at it for a long time when I arrived on the scene. And I couldn't believe how, even though she was very good at what she did and she seemed to get pretty good results, always trying to come up with a better way, never satisfied with the results, always looking for better ways and moving ahead and not feeling like I have to hold on to this particular approach. And that's hard. We humans have a very natural tendency to.
[00:50:21.440] - Speaker 1
Yes, well, I think that's true. We kind of want to protect our turf. But I think that you're making just an excellent point here about our curiosity are continuing to grow. That's what this is really all about. Yeah. So tell us what you're working on now. You mentioned writing, you mentioned math. What are you working on right now?
[00:50:40.690] - Speaker 2
Well, I probably shouldn't say because it might never happen.
[00:50:43.620] - Speaker 1
Okay.
[00:50:44.500] - Speaker 2
But what I'd love to do is write a book on intervention oriented assessment and basically to show a different angle to show why it could be beneficial. The whole point of intervention oriented assessment isn't to say, yes, this kid qualifies as having a learning disability or no, this kid does not qualify. It's not about that. It's about why is this child struggling, and that why is going to help us take an approach to helping them. Why is this kid a lousy basketball player? Well, he's actually a really good shooter, but he can't pass. Then you know what to work on. So it's really geared towards school psychologists, speech pathologists, reading, evaluators, math evaluators. It would really cover all three of them. And I have been doing some of the groundwork to prepare for that. But whether that ends up happening, I don't know.
[00:51:37.750] - Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I hope so, because it seems like that's a real space where we really have a need for that, and I really hope you do that. David. Thank you. So I can't let you go without asking you is a totally different topic. But how did you get into magic and what's next with that?
[00:52:02.990] - Speaker 2
Well, I first got exposed to magic by attending Cub Scout pack meetings and blue and gold dinners as a kid, and they always seem to have a magician come in. And so my brother got out of the back of Boys Life magazine, which is the scouting book. He sent for a catalog of magic tricks, and he never got into it. But I was eleven years old. I was home sick one day and his bed was there and there was like a desk in between and then mine or whatever. And I was sitting on the desk and I'm sitting there sick and I started reading to his catalog. I'm going way cool. So my interest started at age eleven. I did my first public shows at age 13, and I dropped out of it for a few years and later high school and College, and I got back into it in grad school. So I've probably done about 2500 shows over the years. And in the future I did lots of birthday parties. Okay. This was like her second income for many years back in the early two thousand s. I think I'm not going to be doing birthday parties so much anymore, but more bigger venues.
[00:53:14.590] - Speaker 2
I've done those two. I actually did performance in front of 3000 people one time. That's the most I've ever done.
[00:53:25.030] - Speaker 1
That's awesome.
[00:53:26.410] - Speaker 2
I'm working with that and I'll keep doing as long as I can. Sure.
[00:53:29.910] - Speaker 1
Yeah. And see, look at what happens with a curious little boy homesick from school. Look what happened from there. Right. So, Dave, what are the hopes that you have for the work that you've done?
[00:53:43.330] - Speaker 2
Interestingly. I'm trying to convince fellow researchers to pursue this issue of Phonemic proficiency because it's a new concept in the literature. I thought I came up with it okay. Only to find out I did okay. There was an article back in 97 was the first one that I could identify. They didn't use the term fitting proficiency, but what they did is they took an item level measurement of the speed with which individuals are responding. And they found that out of 15 different reading related issues with College students that struggled in reading, the phonemic proficiency was the biggest distinguishing factor among those. It was back in 97. 97. Yeah. Okay. I didn't come up with the concept separately until 2002, where I have been giving the untimed version of it, McGinnis's version of Rosen and Simon, what eventually became the past. I was giving it the fourth, fifth, and 6th grade struggling readers. And I'd say, you get to some hard items like, say sky. Now say sky and change the tool. And they think and they think and they think some couldn't get it, but some got it. After four or 5 seconds, I was like, okay.
[00:54:51.200] - Speaker 2
And I gave him a one. And I'd go back to the table and I'd say, they don't have chronological learning problems. I got them. All right. Okay. And then I screened a whole class of third graders at the request of a teacher. She just wanted to know. I gave them the test of word reading Efficiency. I couldn't believe. Now this school did almost no phonics teaching and definitely no phonological awareness training. So these kids I get to the harder items, and I'd be like, say, Sky, Sky. Now say it again. Instead of saying I'm like, Whoa, where did that come from? So I'm like, wait a minute. How come these third graders that are on target for learning to read are coming back instantaneously? They only been exposed to this starting back with the easier items. They never had done this type of task before. They start out with baseball. They'll say base five minutes before this. Right? And so this really caught my interest. And so I started doing a few studies, and then I found out there's some other studies, and one of the biggest studies was from 2010, which I could kick myself.
[00:55:51.650] - Speaker 2
I was at the stage with the essentials book where they said, you can make any changes like typos, but you can't do anything that goes on to the next page. And I see this study that lays it all out so nicely. From 2010, I was only able to squeeze it into some references here and there. But if I have the opportunity for an updated edition, which they want, but I don't find the time for that, I would be able to spend more time on. It was 1400 kids from first grade to 6th grade, from first to fifth grade, 1400 kids, over 200 kids each grade level. And they showed they did what I'm trying to do. They did phony and deletion. I do deletion substitution, but they did phony deletion. And they did a per item timing. And they showed that the correlation remained strong right up to 6th grade. Normally, the way we do things with segmentation, as I said, the most popular approach, the correlation with reading, drops off the map after first grade. So people assume that financial awareness isn't important after first grade. And that's not right. But something even better than that study with 1400 kids is the new Wechler Individual Achievement Test, fourth edition.
[00:56:58.970] - Speaker 2
They have the fungi and proficiency subtest on there, and they have four reading word reading subtests on the new Wyatt, basically timed and untimed real word reading and nonsense word reading. So that comes up to four. And the phonemic proficiency, which is basically a norm version of the past, came out strongly correlated with all those word reading tasks throughout the entire age range from kindergarten right through adulthood. And we just haven't seen that before. So adding that proficiency thing. So what that's saying is you're in 8th grade, if you respond instantly those items, you get more words on those subtests than kids that don't respond as quickly. Now, one reaction that I got was, well, but that's just correlational information. How do you know that the kids that became good readers just happen to have refined those skills as a bye with proficiency is a byproduct of becoming a good reader. There's a flaw in that logic. Okay. And the flaw is this based on if Aries theory is true, then you need to be able to pull apart those phonemes and do it quickly and efficiently to be a good reader, because a good reader only needs one to four exposures, and they do it.
[00:58:15.190] - Speaker 2
Think about what we said earlier behind the scenes automatically. So to be a good reader, you have to be able to pull apart the phonemes behind the scenes automatically. So you can't say that the phone with proficiency is a side effect of a process that requires phonemic proficiency. Makes no sense. That correlation on that test, which is very strong .5 to zero, six or higher, is telling us the strength of the causal relationship between phonemic proficiency and reading. And so those that develop the phonemic skills much higher, even in 8th grade, 12th grade adulthood, the norms go up to age 50. Those that have more proficient access to the phonemes can read more words on the word reading subtest.
[00:58:59.590] - Speaker 1
Yeah. It's so fascinating. I've heard you speak multiple times, David, and every time I have the opportunity to hear you speak, I learn so much. And I know that all of our listeners today really share that. So thank you so much for all of this. What a rich discussion this has been and really shedding light on things that I think are just so important for us in the educational community. Thank you.
[00:59:26.150] - Speaker 2
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:59:27.690] - Speaker 1
And I can't let you go without some rapid fire closing questions.
[00:59:31.780] - Speaker 2
Okay.
[00:59:32.080] - Speaker 1
Are you ready?
[00:59:33.080] - Speaker 2
Yeah.
[00:59:33.740] - Speaker 1
All right. Who was your favorite teacher growing up and why?
[00:59:38.930] - Speaker 2
Probably Mr. Benzene in social studies, 11th grade, because I thought he presented information very well and he was funny and he was very personable and he really seemed to like being with us.
[00:59:51.590] - Speaker 1
That's cool. Okay. And what is your favorite book or one of your favorite books, either as a child or as an adult?
[00:59:59.810] - Speaker 2
That is so hard. I don't even want to tell you how many books I have. I would say what? I'll use this as an opportunity because it is one of my favorites to tell people about if you ever get your hands on it. It's called The Social Animal by Elliot Erinson. Elliot Arrinson, The Social Animal. You can get an old copy and get it cheap for $3. You don't have to get the most current one. And it is an eye opener in terms of it will help people understand why people are resistant to, say, the research on reading, et cetera. And it'll help with a whole bunch of other things. All this issue about racism is going to be exactly clear about what leads to that. Just so many things. It's basically the psychology of the normal, why we normal people behave the way they do, even if sometimes it's not such as so good. Okay. And even good stuff. Altruism. Why are some people altruistic so insight into us? Great book. Local Animal by Elliot Arrison.
[01:00:53.460] - Speaker 1
Very good. Okay. What are you reading right now?
[01:00:57.530] - Speaker 2
Lost their science in the little Oxford.
[01:01:01.370] - Speaker 1
University Press, another light read by David Cameron.
[01:01:04.850] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, no, this is kind of Oxford University Press has a whole series they call very short introductions and they're all about 120 to 150 pages. They're actually small, little small books and they cover all kinds of topics in science and things like that. You name it, they've probably got 100 different topics. I have two others that I'm working on rereading. Thomas Cohen Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which we need right now in reading. We need a revolution in terms of how people look at it. That's kind of what he talks about.
[01:01:38.690] - Speaker 1
Very cool. Okay. What do you have on your desk that symbolizes you or is dear to you?
[01:01:45.770] - Speaker 2
I got a little magic trick sitting right here.
[01:01:49.190] - Speaker 1
What is it?
[01:01:50.130] - Speaker 2
I said I got a little magic trick sitting right here. Actually, dear to me, right here. This is a paper weight American Airlines. It was on my dad's desk. He worked for 34 years for American Airlines.
[01:02:03.410] - Speaker 1
Very cool. Something from your dad. Okay. And last question. What are your greatest hopes for today's children?
[01:02:11.270] - Speaker 2
I think that every kid gets a fair shot. Let me put it this way. The vast majority of struggling readers can become decent readers, and even our absolutely not all kids are going to become great readers even if we do all the best things that we can do. But even our worst readers can become functional readers. They may not be top notch readers, but they can become functional and so every kit should get a fair shot in that regard.
[01:02:34.860] - Speaker 1
Great. Yes. Totally agreed. Thank you so much for all of this, David. I really appreciate that you could join us today. Sure. And my best to you. And thank you for saying all these nice things about the Reading League. I know that you were with it right from the start and we just appreciate your support always. Always. So thank you so much, David.
[01:02:57.290] - Speaker 2
Okay. Thanks for having me.
[01:02:58.800] - Speaker 1
All right. My brain is full. Thank you, Dave, for all you bring to us as educators and thank you all for listening today. You know, we at the Reading League are committed to bringing you important conversations like this as well as resources to help you on your journey and in your practice. So if you haven't already checked us out, please do www dot the readinglead.org, check out our knowledge page, our professional development, our YouTube channel with lots of great videos. And we also encourage you to join us and join our Facebook community where you can really interact with other educators on their journeys as well. So thanks again for joining us and we look forward to seeing you again. Bye.