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The Scientific Basis for the Use of Vaudio Media Functionality for both Average and Challenged Readers What is Vaudio Media Format? Vaudio Media has taken written texts and paired them with their audio equivalents, placing these two modalities on easily accessed CDs. The texts are standard versions of literary works and have not been modified for a particular audience, thus exposing students to more complex grammatical and linguistic forms. It is, then, a program that uses mixed modality presentation to take full advantage of the well-known difference between reading comprehension and listening comprehension and may best be characterized as a very advanced form of ?books-on-tape.? The material is divided into phrases, with phrase being the default state of the program, making them the units of meaning so that words are fitted into contexts rather than standing alone. How to listen A major element of Vaudio Media format is the ability of the student to choose another manner of presentation: paragraph or word-by-word. This makes sense because there are times that the act of listening to either more or less information aids in comprehension. Paragraph listening serves the severely classically learning disabled youngster, while word-by-word listening permits overpractice by those who are new to the particular word or to the English language as in the English Language Learner (ELL) population. Phrases are better than words Another feature of Vaudio Media materials is that each phrase is numbered within a given work and thus helps the teacher to both make and check assignments. The use of a numbering system for the phrases sets up the potential for interaction between the teacher and the student during which the teacher sets expectations. The student can then return to the material and work independently until he can demonstrate mastery. This answer-until-correct approach is a significant change from the usual experience of being right or wrong. Expectations can range broadly from a demonstration of fluency to showing comprehension of the material in its narrowest sense where events can be ordered or concepts explained or most broadly to meta-comprehension where the material can explain or the material can be explained by broader life experiences. Teacher Instructional Options In setting teacher expectations for the students, it is also possible to make assignments of 1) spelling words, 2) compositions or summaries, 3) mapping of events or defining of concepts, 4) further research, 5) dictation into a word processing application, 6) memorization or dramatic reading (though these last two exercises are out of fashion at the moment of this writing). This list of activities is by no means exhaustive, but is mentioned only to suggest a subset of possibilities. Unique to Vaudio Media format is the ability of the teacher to ?fade? either the written text or the audio track for various purposes ? perhaps to leave limited cues for dictation or for reading aloud. Vaudio Media format encourages self-pacing. The student may repeat a word, phrase or paragraph any number of times in the service of mastering it. Because the student must ?mouse over? and press down to obtain the information, the format encourages attention. Should attention have strayed, then the mouse-down action can be repeated to the student?s satisfaction. Such functionality not only directly addresses attention problems for the item at hand, but also may represent a means of training attention in the same manner that more reading improves fluency and comprehension. The Broad Scientific Basis for Vaudio Media Format BF Skinner was a prolific, creative thinker who formulated questions about human behavior in ways that permitted obtaining answers through systematic experimentation. In an essay entitled A Brief History of Operant Behavior, he made the following observation that forms one basis for the construction of Vaudio Media material. Historically, people have been controlled primarily through negative reinforcement that is, they have been punished when they have not done what is reinforcing to those who could punish them. Positive reinforcement has been less often used, partly because its effect is slightly deferred, but it can be as effective as negative reinforcement and has many fewer unwanted byproducts. For example, students who are punished when they do not study may study, but they may also stay away from school (truancy), vandalize school property, attack teachers, or stubbornly do nothing. Redesigning school systems so that what students do is more often positively reinforced can make a great difference. For most students, school is a mixed bag of punishments and reinforcements and the question that arises in many educators? minds (though Skinner would have strenuously argued against the need for a conception of ?mind?) is how to maximize learning in the school environment. Given the contingencies of bureaucratic life in most school systems, the maximizing of the learning behavior of its students has turned out to be only one of many competing goals in the 20th century. Only now, in the 21st century, have school systems begun asking for science-based solutions, because ?accountability? has changed the mix of punishment and reinforcement schedules for school administrators, if not yet for teachers. The Matthew Effect Unfortunately, there can be no single formula for success because students come to the table (or desk) with widely differing reinforcement histories based upon both individual differences and group differences. Therefore, logic demands the sad but inexorable conclusion that instructional approaches that are monolithic or rigid, painting each student with the same brush, must fail at some level and require replacement. If the method, content, and demands are the same for each student, then the only result can be that the students will again divide themselves along the continuum of success based upon the differences that they already possess. This logical fact of life is enshrined in the Matthew Effect, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As applied to education, a resultant effect is that those who can read well, read more and those who read less well, read less. Raising all Students The only hope standing against this observation is that a rising tide raises all boats. From a behaviorist perspective, if expectations are raised and the consequences of failure are made both sufficiently onerous and the consequences of success are made sufficiently rewarding, then many individual students will exert themselves to avoid the failure experience.1 However, this observation still begs the question about how to maximize the individual learning potential for each student, which is a more interesting question to begin with. Schedules of Reinforcement Vaudio Media formatted material addresses the more interesting question of individual maximization by leaning heavily on rich schedules of reinforcement for its effectiveness. With the presence of an auditory model of the written text, a student is able to receive feedback and/or dispel uncertainty immediately. Each of these is mildly rewarding and encourages continued effort. Auditory feedback is available on demand, thus placing control in the hands of the student. Control represents a strong form of reinforcement. Technically, this form of reinforcement is best conceptualized as a variable ratio schedule (VR), as opposed to a lean variable interval schedule (VI) as is found in the average classroom. In the classroom a student cannot count on having his questions answered except rarely and then only after a considerable delay. It is a well-established understanding in the field of experimental analysis of behavior and documented in Ferster and Skinner?s Schedules of Reinforcement that ratio and interval schedules produce different work outputs, namely, that a ratio schedule produces about 30 percent higher response rates than does an interval schedule. Thus, Vaudio Media format will produce more sustained contact with the material, the essential condition for improved reading success. The Family Shaywitz and Brain Change Another area of scientific pursuit has been that of brain function, dyslexia and reading-ability development, with Bennett and Sally Shaywitz of Yale University School of Medicine making significant contribution over the past two decades to this field. In a recent study (Shaywitz et al)2 that extended over a year and exposed the experimental group to an average of 105 hours of systematic phonologically-based reading interventions under the tutelage of 12 certified teachers who had been trained in the special intervention techniques, the intervention resulted in significant improvement when compared to a group that experienced ?standard? intervention. (The ?standard? intervention included tutoring as well as special education placement or resource room activities.) The main point of the Shaywitz intervention was to demonstrate that brain areas that were active in the challenged readers of the experimental cohort changed in a manner that made them more similar to the non-challenged control group. The ?standard? intervention group brain function remained significantly different from the non-challenged and the experimental intervention group at the end of the study. Temple and Brain Change This finding was seen as well in a study done a year earlier than Shaywitz. Temple et al3 found that specialized tutorial interventions directed at language-processing deficits both improved reading and changed neural mechanisms in a dyslexic population in the direction of normal readers? brain function. The disparate nature of these tasks that Temple applied to the experimental dyslexic cohort included the slowing of linguistic speech, forced choice auditory discrimination tasks, identification of consonant and vowel combinations, and following instructions of various lengths. As in the Shaywitz study, these therapeutic interventions conflated tasks that required the participation of many areas of the brain not highly associated with language or reading, suggesting either that only a subset of the tasks was effective in changing brain function or that it was generalized directed effort and attention that was the effective factor. Brain Mapping Nonetheless, what is relevant to the Vaudio Media approach in both Temple and Shaywitz is that educational interventions changed brain function, moving it in the direction of patterns associated with successful readers. Both studies reflect the concept of the mapping of one area of the brain onto another by the creating and strengthening of neural connections through the operation of external interventions. This essentially defines learning as the process of increasing the number and quality of the connections between individual neurons. Because the Vaudio Media format presses the individual student against the material for increased amounts of time, it is likely that it qualifies as a vector for improving reading and brain function - not a small claim, but one that seems justified based upon earlier work that relates the pairing of visual text to its auditory equivalent. That work is summarized below. ?Context Counts? is an Understatement Vaudio Media format, like ordinary books, places new material in a meaningful context. It is well established that learning novel material in context produces a superior outcome to learning from lists (See Ehri et al).4 However, the context of paired visual and audio material is still richer and sometimes the only way in which unique English language vagaries can be addressed. ?The soldier wound the bandage around the wound? is a sentence that speaks volumes for the advantage of Vaudio Media format. Keep it Simple or Else Vaudio Media format that concentrates on the text alone reflects findings in cognitive development research that explore the effects of distracters ? like games and characters that pop up during the use of most ?educational software? packages. Deloache5 addresses the interaction of real-world objects and their equivalent symbols: a chair and a picture of a chair. In young children objects and their equivalent symbols are frequently conflated, one being completely confused with the other. In older children Deloache finds the use of symbols and related real-world objects retards learning, so that the use of manipulatives in learning math for instance is less effective than using the symbols alone. While this may seem counterintuitive, since manipulatives have been a presumptive foundation of educational instruction for decades, evidence in limited contexts points to the contrary position. Deloache compared two groups of six and seven year-olds who were taught the borrowing procedure for subtraction using symbols only or using manipulatives, finding that those using manipulatives took three times as long to learn the same task. Similarly, teaching the visual alphabet to a group of 30 month-olds using three-dimensional letters and varied exercises was less successful than using an old-fashioned two-dimensional workbook with pages consisting of a limited format of type ?A is for apple and B is for boys.? Quantum Physics and Information Entropy As a final general point in favor of the extensive use of Vaudio Media Sunshine Readers, Weiss shows that it is possible to calculate the entropy of short-term memory capacity by multiplying mental speed by memory span. (Weiss)6 The information entropy of short-term memory then becomes a limiting factor in academic progress, as well as intelligence. If information entropy can be partially circumvented, then progress in reading decoding and comprehension can be extricated from the correlation of intelligence and skill development. Sunshine Readers accomplish this feat by providing for the constant refreshing of short-term memory. The poor showing of other methods of instruction can be laid at the failure to compensate for the negative correlation of the rate of information entropy and academic progress. This point is of such weight that the reader may wish to peruse the abstract, which has been inserted immediately following the Weiss reference; though it is quite a complex perspective, it will at least convey a flavor of the insight, so that it may be appreciated by the reader. Findings with Regard to Pairing Visual Text and its Audio Equivalent The pairing of text and its audio equivalent has been attempted in various formats ever since the first parents read to their child while having them keep pace with a finger. Talking Books have proved their worth in numerous early studies. Olson, Foltz, and Wise7 established that there were advantages to ?disabled readers? in both comprehension and word recognition when using talking books. Olofsson8 found advantages for older students (grade 4 and up) were greater than for younger readers. McKenna et al9 state without hesitation, ??our studies of beginning readers have made clear that extensive exposure to talking books can lead to impressive sight word growth once a foundation of decoding ability has been established.? Early Talking Points Refinements in the talking book technique began early. Carbo10 recorded paragraphs of a chapter book on individual cassette tapes for a challenged reader and then went on to divide the paragraphs further by reading them in distinct phrases separated by brief pauses. Her anecdotal results found that one student improved 15 months in 3 months of practice, while others in her treatment group showed gains that were significant, but more modest. There was no attempt to instruct her students in phonics or the rules of decoding, but she was gratified at the results, noting that aside from skill improvements, the students? attitudes toward reading changed so that they engaged the material rather than fled from it. Computers Enter the Instructional Scene Soon computers replaced talking books, increasing the functional power of the pairing approach. In some studies, touch screens were used to access the audio stimuli (Cummings et al)11, while in others, mainframe computers tied to screens were able to supply human voice equivalents of the stimulus words, while in still others, attempts were made to determine the effectiveness of rather stilted synthesized speech. Sometimes only single words were utilized in the remediation process (Wise et al)12; in other studies, full stories were made available where a mouse-click over a word brought its audio equivalent to the student?s earphones. Davidson13 used relatively primitive multimedia presentations so that pictures and text appeared on the same screen, while the student could ?mouse-down? on the text to retrieve the audio portion. The program also contained a ?back end? so that data were kept on each child as to which words he had accessed over the course of his sessions. Davidson?s findings were interesting in that the significant difference between the experimental and control group was to be found on words that were not presented to either group during the learning portion of the experiment, but rather on standardized reading post-tests. The implication here is that skills generalized for the experimental group. Had this been a lone finding, it could have been ignored, but Davidson cites Wise et al (ibid) as showing the same pattern of new words being more successfully decoded by the experimental group than by the control group as well. Teasing Out What Works Van Daal and van der Leij14 looked carefully at how computer access to words with paired visual and audio availability affected spelling in challenged readers. Training conditions consisted of 15 consecutive school days with 10 minutes per day devoted to learning 42 "hard" words in sets of 24. Three separate experimental conditions were structured: reading of the target words from the computer screen, typing the words directly from the computer screen, and typing the words from visual memory when presented in the auditory mode. It was found that copying from the screen was superior to either having read the words or having typed the words from memory. Additional findings included a reduction of requests over time for speech feedback in later practice sessions and reduced time for review in later practice sessions. Of practical importance was the observation that some subjects persisted in misspellings and misreadings in spite of the availability of the audio model. The authors saw this finding as an indication of underlying weak phonological recoding skills. Their recommendation for this circumstance was that the teacher should correct persistent errors. Van Daal and Reitzma15 addressed the instruction of kindergarten children using a multimedia program with access to audio equivalents of the presented visual stimuli. Exercises included sound matching, picture and word matching, forced discrimination tasks including "which written word" when given its audio representation, visual dictation, and word building. Their experimental subject sample was found to be above-average on a standard IQ test (avg.=117.9). With this sample, it was determined that the children progressed 3 months in skills with 16 hours of practice. Moreover, off-task behavior of these youngsters decreased during the computer sessions and during classroom time as well. The Practice of Rereading Rereading is a strategy that has been researched extensively and found to be useful in the acquisition of content and concepts (See Millis et al).16 The proper use of Vaudio Media formatted material encourages rereading, making it easier for students, challenged or average, to return to the critical portion of the material to acquire more information. However, students do not necessarily take advantage of access to information at their disposal that may improve their outcome on the task. Poskiparta17 found that students were highly selective in when they sought audio feedback, with half of her experimental group never accessing the extra help. Decoding AND Comprehension While Poskiparta worked with individual words as stimuli, Gillingham18 built his study around average children?s success at answering synthesis questions. He, too, found that students when left to their own devices frequently decided against using available information. Therefore, when his experimental group had its choices prescribed, those students that were directed as to how to proceed did better than those students did who had the same information and choices available, but who were not directed to make those choices. Poor cognitive monitoring by youngsters is a strongly entrenched trait and perhaps even defines an aspect of being a child, but adults also overestimate their performance and thus ignore additional sources of information. Both children and adults use limiting metacognitive strategies such as thinking, ?I did well enough? or use poor cognitive monitoring skills by saying prematurely, ?I probably got it right,? without actually checking their answers. It would seem though that only the presence of the audio text might be necessary to make strides in comprehension. The addition of an audio track made a major difference for learning disabled youngsters at the secondary level in a study by Boyle et al19 who used a CD that contained the sound track of a standard high school history text, which was of ninth-grade difficulty with a student sample that varied from ninth to twelfth grade. The experimental procedure included training the students in how to navigate the CD so that the same page of the written text could be matched with its audio equivalent and so that chapter headings and subheadings could be searched. Measures of teacher compliance with the methodology were taken, but none for the compliance of the students using the procedure. Nonetheless, no matter what permutation of the experimental procedure was implemented, the presence of the supporting audio text yielded about a 38% improvement in mastery for the final test scores over the control group. This was a gratifying result and the authors wrote of extending the methodology by further training the students in organization skills and prompting procedures. Characteristics of Challenged Readers Based upon the foregoing analysis it would seem fair to conclude that the Vaudio Media format, properly used as a tool for encouraging student-teacher interaction, will improve decoding and comprehension no matter if the population is composed of normal readers or are in some way categorized as disabled. The interaction with the teacher will especially aid the challenged student, since in terms of comprehension Millis (ibid.) noted that the challenged reader was more likely to attend to irrelevant portions of the text. Thus, the teacher may set high expectations for accuracy as long as he is tolerant of the processes that lead the disabled student astray. With Vaudio Media format, it is possible to redirect the student so that he may ?try again.? (?You have not gotten the answer yet. Look at lines 34 to 36.?) In this way, the teacher will require success, but will bring it more within reach of attainment without simply giving away the answer. Requiring directed attention is the most successful strategy in eliciting improvement in all reading behaviors, from word recognition all the way to strategic thinking: ?I went back to get more information.? ?I did not understand that word, so I listened to the definition a couple of times until I got it.? Those are the kinds of strategic thoughts that a teacher can elicit using many types of instructional material, but the ease with which this can be accomplished with Vaudio Media formatted material is astonishing. Summary A review of the literature is highly positive with regard to the pairing of written text and its audio equivalent, though caveats have been defined. There can be no reliance on the technique as though it was the ultimate gadget in a gourmet?s kitchen. However, important contributors to the field of reading research have concluded that there is much value in supplying an easily accessed audio model of the written text, because of the specific benefits that it brings to the student. As early as 1988 Reitzma20 noted, ??a computer-based speech-feedback system could well be a promising and useful tool in reading instruction.? However, he also concludes, ?The findings suggest that increases in reading efficiency depend largely on the amount of independent, self-propelled reading activity of the young readers.? That is the goal of Vaudio Media, to increase the time spent with reading material that is of significant difficulty and sufficient interest to permit the recognition by the student that challenging tasks give satisfaction in their accomplishment. Vaudio Media format is a simple tool that can build complex reading response patterns in students of all levels of ability. Return to For Educators Index
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