Education and youth crime prevention

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Earlier this week I was privileged to share a platform with Judge Andrew Becroft, Chief Youth Judge in New Zealand. Judge Becroft and I spoke at a Restorative Conferencing Forum auspiced by Griffith University's School of Criminology & Criminal Justice and Restorative Practice International. A key premise of restorative conferencing is that punitive approaches that are done "to" vulnerable young people are less meaningful and effective than approaches that are inclusive of the young person and those affected by their wrong-doing. Restorative conferencing also sits alongside diversionary approaches to youth offending (rather than net-widening and lowering the threshold for criminalising behaviour that many young people simply mature out of).

I was invited to take part in this forum to share some of our* research findings concerning the oral language skills of young people in the youth justice system. In a nutshell, our studies show that some 50% of young male offenders have expressive and receptive oral language skills that place them in a clinical range on standardised measures. Difficulties are present across the spectrum of language skills, and cannot be accounted for on the basis of low IQ, identified neurodisability, low socio-economic status, or anxiety and depression.

Of course such findings need to be viewed alongside the fact that young people in the youth justice system also have significant literacy difficulties and have typically exited school early, with very patchy reading and writing skills, many years behind their chronological age.

The critical link here is the fact that literacy skills ride on the back of oral language skills, right from the time of school commencement. The histories of young males in the youth justice system are characterised by both academic struggles and behaviour difficulties. In this context, it's relevant to consider the words of the former Chair of the UK Youth Justice Board, Rod Morgan, who said in 2007:

“It may be too much to say that if we reformed our schools, we would have no need of prisons. But if we better engaged our children and young people in education we would almost certainly have less need of prisons. 

Effective crime prevention has arguably more to do with education than sentencing policy”.

At the conclusion of the forum earlier this week, participants (senior education and youth justice practitioners and policy-makers as well as academics) were asked to consider what a world-class youth justice system might look like. This led to some interesting discussion, that very soon focussed on the challenges of engaging vulnerable young people in mainstream education.

For me, it raised some key questions concerning the growth of alternative ("flexible") school settings in Australia. While I have great admiration for the energy and commitment of the staff leading and working in such settings, it is a matter of concern that our response to the challenges of engaging at-risk youth is to exclude them from the mainstream and aggregate them together in alternative settings. In a recent study by my group** 87% of incarcerated young offenders had experienced school exclusion. The safety issues created by some forms of behaviour disturbance are non-trivial. However, the evidence on school exclusion as a response does not give rise to optimism with respect to keeping at-risk young people in touch with education and making meaningful academic gains.

While I don't have longitudinal data on this, I am often struck by the observation made by primary school teachers that so-called "problem boys" really begin to make their presence felt around Grade 3 (which in Victoria is the 4th year of formal schooling). How much does this reflect the well-known shift from learning to read to reading to learn that occurs at this time? We should also bear in mind the well-described "Grade 4 slump" that is most marked for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.The fact that this slump is most marked for low-SES children resonates with the fact that young offenders come overwhelmingly from low-SES backgrounds.

So this leads me to wonder then, if we might take Rod Morgan's wise words on the role of education and crime prevention, and translate them into effective early literacy instruction (i.e., that which draws on systematic synthetic phonics, as well as developing comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency), for all children, but most notably those who are starting from behind?

The Phonics of Crime Prevention perhaps?

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Readers who are interested in the nexus between literacy and behaviour might also be interested in this excellent 2012 piece by Dr Kerry Hempenstall, drawn to my attention by UK educator, Susan Godsland (thanks Susan!).


*My collaborator on this research is Professor Martine Powell of Deakin University
**Snow, P.C., Woodward, M., Mathis, M., Powell, M.B. (in press). Language functioning, mental health and alexithymia in incarcerated young offenders. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology.

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(C) Pamela Snow 2015

There's Peer-Review and then there's ....peer-review

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The term "peer-review" is an inherent aspect of academic life, but like so many terms that have highly specific meanings to certain groups, it is not necessarily widely understood outside the hallowed halls of universities and research centres. I try to be cognisant of this when I give presentations to audiences of practitioners such as teachers and welfare staff, as there is really no reason why we should assume shared knowledge or understanding of research-related terms. Such audiences have their own specialised lexicons which can be equally opaque to those of us working in academic contexts.

So these days I try not to simply make passing reference to the fact that a particular practice does or doesn't have an evidence-base that can be located in the peer-reviewed literature when I talk to such audiences. If time permits, I take a moment to try to unpack what this means, and also outline its importance, as well as some of the traps for young players concerning peer-reviewed publications.

I have mentioned the peer-review process briefly in a previous blogpost, but will cover it in a little more detail here.

What is "peer review" and who are these "peers"?

One of the most important considerations when assessing new research findings is their source. If I were to tell you about a new cancer treatment that seemed to be achieving unusually positive results, but the only place it was described was in a popular women's magazine, you'd probably be a bit skeptical, and would want to know that it had been published in a medical journal. And rightly so.

Peer review refers to the process of subjecting one's academic work to the scrutiny of one's peers in the scientific community - other academics who have both content knowledge (e.g., of a particular disorder) and methodology knowledge (i.e., of how to go about rigorously studying a disorder and/or its management). It also helps when the reviewers have some knowledge of the existing literature, so they can say "The answer to this question is already known", or "There's important studies missing from the literature review" (hopefully not just their own.....that's an aspect of peer review for another day).

By the time researchers have spent many, many hours working on a study manuscript, they typically have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. They are tired of having to edit it to meet journal length limits, frustrated by challenges of resolving statistical and other analytic challenges, and driven to distraction trying to locate references that support passing assertions that cannot be stated without some kind of back-up (I often remind students that we can't even say "the sky is blue" in a research paper without providing supporting citations).

Eventually, the research team decides that the manuscript is ready to be tested in the crocodile-infested waters of peer review.

To do this, the researchers who have conducted the study select an appropriate academic journal that they think might be interested in publishing on their chosen topic. Historically, academic journals were published by professional bodies, and in many instances that is still the case. Some of these links are quite obvious - the British Medical Journal, for example, is the official research publication of the British Medical Association. Academic publishing, however, is a big, competitive business, so international publishing houses create new titles where they think there will be an adequate market. Consequently knowledge generation and dissemination is a rapidly proliferating enterprise, and there is a quality-hierarchy of journals, based to a large extent on the laws of supply and demand.

In disciplines such as health, education, and psychology, there are hundreds, if not thousands of journal alternatives from which to chose. So you might ask, "If they're all peer-reviewed journals, what does it matter?"

It matters because the bar is set much higher in some journals than others. A highly-ranked journal in medicine, psychology, social sciences, or education might receive hundreds of article submissions per week, and be in a position to publish only 5-10% of these. That means they can be very fussy about the originality, rigour, and scope of papers they anoint (whether they are original research or a review of existing studies).  Meanwhile the Journal of Acme Research down the road might be scraping to find sufficient material to fill a forthcoming issue, and so will gladly receive submissions and be less discerning about their quality.

Does this mean "peer-reviewed"  isn't an important standard?

No, it doesn't mean that at all, but it does mean that some knowledge of the rankings and status of a journal is helpful when gauging the quality and importance of papers published within its covers. Knowledge of the ideological stance of the Editor and members of the Editorial Board can also add to these insights. There are many instances of the peer-review process not working as well as it should (e.g., the famous and catastrophic case of The Lancet publishing a fraudulent study purportedly showing links between MMR vaccines and autism).

Sir Winston Churchill famously said of democracy that "It is the worst form of government, except for all the others".

The same might be said of peer review as a research quality-control mechanism.

(C) Pamela Snow 2015

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Renovating the Language House

This is just a very brief blogpost to say that I have again updated my schematic "Language House" that I use when talking to primary school teachers about the role of early oral language competence in both the transtion to literacy and the development of prosocial interpersonal skills.

I've blogged previously about how this schematic representation came about, and have it updated here in response to my reflections on discussions with colleagues at the recent Speech Pathology Australia Conference in Canberra.

Most importantly, I thought it was important to show that language, literacy and social skills development is dynamic and ongoing throughout childhood and adolescence (and of course across the whole life-span, but this diagram focuses on the developmental period). Hence the brick pattern on the pillars in this version, as a nod to the vertical progress that needs to occur in both the literacy and interpersonal skill domains, as manifestations of continued language development. Note too, that the walls in this model are more visibly sunken into their granite-like foundations - not just sitting on top of them.

I'm particularly indebted to Dr Ros Neilson for inspiring me to come back and do some renovations.

Please feel free to use this for professional development and related discussions, but I would appreciate being acknowledged as its source. I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts and to take further suggestions/comments.

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(c) Pamela Snow 2015 

Why not everyone is enthusiastic about the Arrowsmith Program

Recent media reports such as this one in The Age have again drawn attention to the Canadian-based Arrowsmith Program for addressing the needs of struggling learners.

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What could possibly be wrong with a program that

"....is founded on neuroscience research and over 30 years of experience demonstrating that it is possible for students to strengthen the weak cognitive capacities underlying their learning dysfunctions through a program of specific cognitive exercises"?

What parent or teacher would not want children to be able to strengthen "weak cognitive capacities", particularly if this occurs via a program of "specific cognitive exercises"? This sounds a bit like the process undertaken in pathology labs, where microbes in a particular bacterial infection are isolated under a microscope, so that antibiotic sensitivities can be ascertained, and targeted drug therapy can be prescribed.

If only that was how learning worked!

The Arrowsmith program makes liberal use of the kinds of words that are designed to hook parents and teachers and get them believing that this is a rigorous, scientifically-based intervention, offering something unique over and above what can be offered in a well-organised, evidence-based classroom curriculum.

Have a look at the Arrowsmith website, and put a dollar on the table every time one of the following terms appears:

• cognitive
• neuro
• brain-based
• neuronal
• synaptic
• neural sciences
• cognitive-curricular research
• brain imaging
• targeted cognitive exercises
• neuroplasticity

You'll certainly be a lot poorer at the end of this exercise! But perhaps you're not yet convinced of a need to activate your inner sceptic? Well have a listen to the videoclip interview with Dr. Lara Boyd, discussing neuroimaging studies of children and controls undergoing the Arrowsmith program (see homepage link above). Dr Boyd describes what sounds like a rigorous scientific study into the "changed brains" of children who have undergone Arrowsmith training, compared to those who have not (the control group).

What's the problem here?

The problem is that the good folk behind the Arrowsmith program have reduced an incredibly complex (and to a large extent, poorly understood) phenomenon (human cognition and its representation in the cerebral cortex) to a highly over-simplified narrative that mums and dads can "understand". It's a narrative that has strong face appeal, and encourages those without specialist knowledge or training to make a link between supposedly "known" activity in the brain and certain learning exercises.

If you were a parent of a child with learning difficulties, what would best motivate you to enrol your child in an expensive 3-4 year intervention (yes, that's right, 3-4 years)? Would it be the expectation that s/he would be performing at expected levels across the curriculum, or the reassurance (irrespective of academic outcomes), that s/he now has a thicker cerebral cortex and/or more myelinated neural pathways? I know what I'd be wanting as a parent.

To the best of my knowledge, the "evidence" in support of Arrowsmith comprises in-house research reports, conference poster-presentations, and satisfied client testimonials. Studies "in process" (as at 2014) include Effects of the Arrowsmith Program on Academic Performance: A Pilot Study - University of Calgary. One would have to wonder why a program that has existed for some 30 years, is only now at the point of collecting pilot data - yet it has been charging parents thousands of dollars over three decades, in the absence of robust, independent empirical data.

It is also notable that the first-listed publication at the link above is described as a "case study". Case studies are useful tools in elucidating the impact of a condition and also the response of a small number of individuals  ("cases") to an intervention.  Case studies are often an attractive marketing tool, as they are typically devoid of pesky statistics and other "dense" concepts that reduce their accessibility to lay readers.

In this case, clicking on the case study link reveals a PhD dissertation, which looked at 5 students, and concluded:

"Four of the five students experienced large and significant increases in cognitive, academic, emotional, and/or interpersonal functioning following their participation in the LDAS Arrowsmith program. One of the five students had much smaller gains in cognitive and academic functioning and experienced difficulties with emotional and interpersonal functioning following participation in the program".

So notwithstanding the very small sample size (not in itself inappropriate in case-study methodology), we have a scenario in which 20% of the sample not only failed to derive a benefit, but may have been adversely affected.

It should be stressed that case studies, though accepted in the scientific and academic communities as a form of evidence, are regarded as "weak" alongside other readily available, more robust methodologies that enable to us to accept or reject an intervention with far greater confidence, e.g., cross-sectional studies, randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews of well-controlled studies, etc. (See this link for a quick summary of the evidence hierarchy). Case studies are a useful starting point, and need to be followed by larger, more rigorous, and independent evaluations. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this has occurred in the case of the Arrowsmith program.

What needs to happen?

In order for academics in education, developmental (neuro)psychology, speech-language pathology etc to be able to give unbiased, accurate advice to parents, schools, and policy-makers, peer-reviewed research is needed that controls for the fact that children in programs such as Arrowsmith receive a great deal of intensive, 1:1 time. That in itself should result in improved knowledge and skills.  Well-conducted studies that control for variables such as socio-economic status, comorbidities, and prior instructional environment are needed. It is important that gains made are tracked over time to see if they are maintained, or are an initial halo-effect. Bear in mind that when a child is significantly behind academically, interventions need to accelerate their progress relative to their typically-developing peers. Otherwise they will never catch up, let alone maintain their gains in the face of an ever-more demanding academic curriculum. We also need studies in which those carrying out outcome assessments are "blind" to which study arm a child was in. Not ensuring this opens the findings up to a range of overt and covert biases.

In the absence of such empirical data that people such as myself can draw on, it is disappointing and worrying that two Victorian education sectors have succumbed to (understandable but regrettable) consumer pressure to countenance an introduction of the Arrowsmith Program in a small number of schools (at this stage in only one of the sectors as far as I am aware).

Consumers should expect providers to go to the market with already-tested, replicated, and high-level evidence before they ask people to sign-up to an expensive intervention. We don't expect cancer patients to organise their own randomised controlled trials of new treatments, so why should it be left to schools (who don't typically have the appropriate expertise on staff) to stumble around and try to work out whether an education intervention is an appropriate investment above and beyond what they are already doing
(or could be doing)?

So - how will it be determined that the adoption of Arrowsmith mentioned above (and others that are popping up here and there) has been successful (or not)? What pre-determined criteria will be applied? Will there be any evaluations by independent and appropriately qualified researchers, or is this yet another education-intervention cul-de-sac?

Postscript, September  4, 2015: Interested readers should also check this blog post about the Arrowsmith Program by Professor Dorothy Bishop (University of Oxford).

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Dr Louisa Moats in Australia - the agony and the ecstasy

Last Saturday I joined around 160 other language and literacy enthusiasts (predominantly teachers, both primary and secondary, and speech pathologists) to hear Dr Louisa Moats speak in Melbourne on the science of reading instruction. I was well primed for this event, having read rave reviews of her presentations in other states, and also having re-visited some of her published work in the week prior to the workshop, most notably this one from 2007: Whole Language High Jinks – highly recommended if you haven’t read it. 

Dr Moats was in Australia as a guest of LearningDifficulties Australia (LDA). LDA celebrates its 50^th birthday this year, and in a generous and inspired piece of gift-giving, brought Dr Moats and her expertise to Australia so that we might benefit from her wisdom on matters pertaining to teacher training, literacy instruction, Response to Intervention, and management of children with dyslexia.

I’ll focus in this blog on Dr Moats’ comments on reading instruction in particular, though I will also mention some of her reflections on Whole Language and on teacher training.

Dr Moats impresses as an under-stated highly knowledgeable scientist, who also has the benefit of many years’ experience as both a teacher and an educational psychologist. She has personally assessed thousands of struggling readers of all ages, as well as conducting rigorous research on optimal teaching methods and teacher training regarding language constructs relevant to reading instruction. 

Much of the Saturday workshop was devoted to the science of teaching reading. Here, Dr Moats drew on Hollis Scarborough’s 2001 “reading rope” (see below) to drill down on the specifics of reading-related subskills such as 

•       What is a phoneme?
  How do voiced and voiceless phonemes differ? How does place of articulation influence phoneme production?

•       What is a grapheme?

•       What does phoneme-grapheme correspondence mean?

•       What is morphology and how does it inform the teaching of reading and spelling?

•       How can children’s vocabulary be strengthened?

•      What do syntactic knowledge and understanding contribute to reading proficiency and how can they be developed?

•     The importance of comprehension and the role that oral language skills play in this.

 


For a self-described “Phonicator” Dr Moats’ approach to reading instruction richly reflects the cognitive psychology evidence on early reading and goes way beyond the necessary but not sufficient role of early phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Dr Moats also stressed that while poor decoding skills play a large part in reading difficulties in the early years, by secondary school, the picture is more complex, and deficits in early decoding skills are now compounded by decrements in vocabulary, syntactic understanding, and reading comprehension. If the foundations of a house are not sound, then we can’t expect the walls and roof to be strong either. 

Some of the exercises Dr Moats asked the audience to do (like determining the number of phonemes in common words) proved a little challenging on a Saturday morning, even for this highly motivated and more-knowledgeable-than-average audience. This took me right back to first year linguistics when I was studying to be a speech pathologist, and it struck me that if I was teacher who had not been schooled in these concepts (a la most Australian teachers in recent decades), I would have been feeling out of my comfort zone. That’s a comment on teacher training and not on teachers, and it also reflects the truth behind the title of one of Dr Moats’ most well-known texts: Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science.

While there was much intellectual ecstasy in listening to Dr Moats (OK, yes, I’m a bit of a nerd) bringing the science of reading instruction to life and seeing its teaching illustrated with clear and theory-based examples, the metaphorical agony lay in the fact that Dr Moats was preaching to the choir, albeit in ways that gave the choir stronger, more in-tune voices. I doubt there were many Balanced Literacy advocates in the room, nor Reading Recovery teachers, nor, perhaps most critically, teacher educators who (in the main) persist in their promotion of non-evidence-based approaches to early literacy instruction. On this, Dr Moats observed that “…we need to be outraged and less tolerant”. Dr Moats also observed that there’s no point telling teachers that “phonemic awareness is important” if teachers don’t know what phonemes are (as indicated by the research evidence on teacher knowledge). 

As a first-time visitor to Australia, Dr Moats expressed humility at the reach and influence of her work here, but also some incredulity at our preponderance for following in the footsteps of our UK and US neigbours with respect to changing tack, and adopting approaches ahead of the science being adequately accounted for. It’s too late to put the Whole Language/Reading Recovery genie back in the bottle, but I wonder what cliff we’ll jump off next if we don’t abandon our lemming ways?

Dr Moats noted that reading is one of the most studied human skills, yet we persist in failing to apply the hard-earned science in early years’ classrooms, and instead accept high rates of suboptimal literacy levels in first-world nations such as the US and Australia. I’m not the first to observe that such willingness to look the other way would result in riots in the streets if interventions that treated a potentially chronic medical illness were being withheld from small children. Low literacy, however, is such a condition, yet we have allowed a confluence of social and political factors to force evidence to take a back seat, in favour of allowing ideology to drive the literacy instruction bus.  

As an important aside, at Dr Moats’ workshop, I also met Berys Dixon, whose work I became aware of when she contributed to the discussion forum following this piece on The Conversation that Alison Clarke and I recently co-authored. Berys is a primary school teacher who had her own phonics epiphany in 2008, having been using Whole-Language based approaches such as the Three Cueing System. You can hear Berys telling her story at this link on the Spelfabet website. There’s also more information about Berys’ work at this link and here's information about sourcing her fabulous little Pocket Rockets.  So this added a bit more ecstasy to the day.

In addition to a dozen or so workshop and seminar presentations, Dr Moats also met with senior state and federal education bureaucrats and ministers during her visit. In the interests of preventing us from having to replicate other nations' expensive mistakes, I hope some of those people listened carefully to what this very measured scientist had to say. 

Thank you LDA, for bringing Dr Louisa Moats to our shores.

(C) Pamela Snow (2015) 


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