Progress in the battle against reading disabilities has taken a large step forward, and a professor from Syracuse University is leading the way.

A teaching program developed by Benita A. Blachman, trustee professor of education and psychology at SU, sped up activity in areas of the brain that do not function properly in children with reading disabilities, as shown by a study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

An article detailing the work that she and other researchers did will be in the May edition of the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Blachman’s teaching program, called an intervention, focuses on alphabetic instruction, a method that puts emphasis on syllable recognition in text, she said. Children who have reading deficiencies usually lack brain activity in the syllable recognition area of their brain, she said.

‘(Intervention is) an explicit systematic instruction to help children understand that spoken words have parts that are represented by letters,’ Blachman said.

This method allows children to connect spoken words with written words, which differs from the usual teaching method in schools. Intervention explains the connection as opposed to allowing the children to figure it out independently, she said.

‘We know that at least 25 percent of children need explicit instruction in the alphabetic instruction to learn how to read and that’s not part of every kindergarten through third grade reading program,’ Blachman said.

In the study, children in second and third grade with reading disabilities participated in Blachman’s intervention for one year, going to 50-minute classes every day they were at school, she said.

After the year, students were given a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging exam, which measures blood flows in their brains as they read, Blachman said. Intervention students experienced increased levels of normal blood flow in areas of the brain associated with syllable recognition while reading, Blachman said.

The most exciting part about the study, Blachman said, was a follow-up fMRI taken on the same children one year later. The follow-up fMRIs showed that the normal blood flow in the brain had increased, Blachman said, showing that her program could help children fight their reading disabilities on their own.

‘What it showed was that Dr. Blachman’s intervention was much more effective than other types of interventions,’ said John Gore, director of the Institute of Imaging Science at Vanderbilt University and one of the lead authors of the study. ‘No one before has ever shown that this type of intervention produces a change in the way a brain (works). This gives you a physical picture of why this works.’

Many times students with disabilities will compensate for their deficiencies with activity from other areas of the brain, Gore said. This compensation means that children with reading deficiencies never achieve normal reading patterns, which usually results in permanent reading problems such as slow reading speeds.

‘You can compensate, but there are usually residual problems,’ Blachman said. ‘Slowness is one of them. We hope that if we get to children earlier and they don’t have these failure experiences, then the normalization will happen more readily.’

The study was a joint effort between SU and Yale University, Blachman said. Blachman provided the program while the imaging of data analysis took place at Yale.

Sally E. Shaywitz, another author of the study, and professor of pediatrics and co-director of the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention which funded the study, said the study’s results were part of a series of conclusions needed to finally overcome learning disabilities.

‘I think it is progress, and it is a good point to do more,’ Shaywitz said. ‘Certainly this is exciting because it shows that by using these types of methods you can really make a difference in children.’

This study was especially important, Shaywitz said, because it shows the results that can come out of interdisciplinary work. Experts in neuroscience, education and pediatrics contributed to the research, and such integration of disciplines will be necessary to continue to battle learning disabilities.

‘There are so many intersections now,’ Shaywitz said. ‘It is so nice that we can bring together all these strands to strengthen our battle against children learning disabilities. It seems trite but the sums truly are greater than the whole.’

Published on April 22, 2004 at 12:00 pm