Developmental designs Flashcards
What are the 3 main problems with developmental dyslexia research?
1: Do reading difficulties cause dyslexia or does dyslexia cause reading difficulties due to reading experience?
2. Reading skill changes throughout development of the child and developmental trajectory
3. lack of a pure case
4. multiple possible causes at cognitive level
What multi-modal factors contribute to learning to read?
Auditory sounds of words, visual representation of spoken words (lips moving), motor information from learning to talk, visual input from reading words, attention to sensory inputs, retrieval graphemes and phonemes.
What are the challenges for causal theories in a developmental disorder?
Experience scaffolds skills- reading experience changes reading related skills. The better at reading get better and the worse get worse comparatively. Children with phonological difficulties have different sensory processing skills due to reduces practice of visual scanning, attention and phonologlical recoding. Early sensory deficit has varying effects across languages due to transparency affecting early reading practice.
How are dyslexic peers different from reading peers?
Different phonemic knowledge and segmentation skills meaning reduced written experience and find reading a more difficult task. This means that comparison of errors is meaningless due to different skill sets.
What is the third variable problem?
Skill influences reading, but a third variable may influence skill and/or reading while they also influence each other.
What methods are used to overcome challenges in establishing cause in developmental disorders? (citation)
Research with pre-readers, longitudinal studies, training studies, reading level matched designs, research with illiterate adults and cross-language studies. (Goswami, 2003)
What benefits do longitudinal studies have?
Help to establish cause, can look at predictions over time, can use ‘at risk; children, especially good for pre-readers as can test a variable e.g. phonological skills and then test reading/spelling at later times to look for links.
What benefits do training studies have?
Can study interventions. Train the skill of interest, train reading ability and not train other abilities as much e.g. attention. This is best with pre-readers and combined with longitudinal studies. Test a skill - perform an intervention/alt. intervention/no intervention then measure again at later time.
What should interventions be based on?
Evidence - theory of how a skill develops e.g. lexical skills, alphabetic knowledge, PA etc, and knowledge of how a skill is promoted.
What examples are there of evidence for evidence based interventions? (+3 citations)
Phonologial awareness vs letter sound knowledge vs both (Bradley and Bryant, 1983)
Early reading segmenting and blending vs oral language (bowyer-Crane et al., 2008)
Reading comprehension vs Oral language vs Both (Clarke et al., 2010)
What methodologies are used to test interventions?
True experiments/ Randomised control trials; quasi-experimental; naturalistic and AB-BA designs.
What must be considered before researching interventions?
Ethics- do all students get a potentially effective intervention otherwise deliberate hindering of education.
Practical- duration of intervention, control over intervention, classroom uptake if teacher-led so need teacher training, double blind is hard to do.
What is a true experiment?
Randomly allocate students in the same class to different intervention groups.
What are the advantages of a true experiment?
Extraneous variables are the same in the same classroom (controlled); groups can be carefully matched; selection bias and regression to mean are cancelled out.
What are the problems with true experiments?
Ethical- some students visibly don’t get intervention. Practical: Intervention cannot be led by class teacher, hard to maintain double blind, must negotiate long-term access.
