Children catching up
May 9th, 2008 by Dr. Michael Merzenich
I just read a report from the Everett, Massachusetts school district that illustrates what CAN be achieved in helping children catch up, in a very short time. Everett is a north-Boston suburb that was once rated as a top Massachusetts district, but a change in its demographics over the past 40 years has greatly increased the challenges that it faces. 55 languages are now represented in its approximately 6,000 students; 44% of its children are ELLs. A large proportion of its students are from low SES households.
In the 2006-2007 school year, 1290 of the District’s children were enrolled in the intensive brain-plasticity-based Fast ForWord language and reading training programs, in 6 Everett schools. As a result:
1) The percentage of the enrolled students who scored as proficient in reading in these schools jumped from 16 to 38%.
About 30% of American school-age children are proficient readers. Think of what it means, kid by kid, to convert so many children to this higher status with only one year of special effort. Think what it means for each of these schools, to shoot up from a below-average academic training environment to a significantly-above-average environment in a single year. It shall be exciting to see how many MORE children cross this threshold in 2007-2008! It shall be fun to see how far these schools can progress in achievement, across the landscape of Massachusetts public schools!
2) Unprecented gains in State of Massachusetts test scores were recorded for both reading and math in these 6 schools. One school site (Parlin) at which FFW was employed applied was especially impressively transformed, in one year, from having the lowest state test achievement scores in both reading and math in the District, to having the highest.
3) Overall reading comprehension scores over this one year advanced for the average kid by about 2 years. It continues to be fascinating to me that most educational authorities still do not recognize this intensive brain science-based language training (FFW) as a “reading” program. ENABLING successful reading by ‘fixing’ a neurological resource that crucially supports it is just not good enough, for the keepers of the “science of education” or “reading science” flame!
This is a fairly typical story for a school district in which this brain science-based training program has been well-administered. Children do not have to be “left behind”. Kids can catch up. You can see many equally compelling examples of this at
2 Responses to “Children catching up”
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I was wondering, out of curiosity, whether a major factor of the efficacy of the Fast ForWord program is that it is a computer program, and also, one that is new and interesting, exciting, visually and auditorily appealing, etc, and much more so than personal instruction (by teachers, etc). As such, it is highly motivating to students and others. They love using it, and continuing to use it. It is exciting, and a cool technology, people love new technologies, they engage with new technologies; and being a new technology that is really exciting, creative, and stimulating, and on their computer, they are highly motivated to use it, in sharp contrast to personal instruction by teachers, which, for many students, is very un-motivating, boring, distracting, old, uncool, not exciting, etc.
If this is a major factor in the efficacy of the FFW program, and other programs for other conditions, then wouldn’t the efficacy be more due to the motivating aspects of the technology, rather than the scientific aspects of the technology?
For many students, learning through standard teaching is fundamentally un-motivating. Learning through the computer has been shown to be a new approach to reach countless students who otherwise were left fairly unreachable and left to lay waste through the school system.
I wonder if teachers, also, like the computer approach, as it eases their challenging burden - the great and valuable challenge of reaching their students through creative means. Not just 30 of their 40 students, but closer to all of them. Not leaving the 10 out because they failed to respond to the teachers teaching, but instead, taking other measures for these 10 students, such as adjusting the teaching for them when warranted.
But actually, maximizing the quality of education of most students in the US is not a part of how this country operates politically and economically. Most of the people of this country are left waste to do jobs that are highly uninteresting, unchallenging, unstimulating, and unhealthy (mentally and physically). Most of the jobs in this country are as such, and there is an immense and critical need for people to do these jobs, and maximizing the quality of education of students in the US is contrary to this purpose. But, this issue is taken care of itself for the most part: Parents are already in these “dirty-work jobs”, and as such they live in economically impoverished areas; generally they are rather uneducated and, comparatively, have impoverished values; their children generally are subject to comparatively radically less and lesser quality compassion, empathy, communication, parental-guidance and teaching, healthy food, healthy life style, etc. These are the people that do the dirty-work jobs, and the dirty-work jobs are conducive to these people, and the political and economic system in the US is organized such that “people are constructed” to be available for these jobs.
Can your brain plasticity exercises be done in a non-computer-based way?
Of course, computer technology permits many other things compared to using physical mediums (pictures, pencil and paper, etc). Animation isn’t possible without technology. So in this sense, I suppose your exercises can’t be reproduced outside of the computer. But I wonder if there would be something essentially the same, and if this could be used in an efficacy comparison. If the computer exercises were more efficacious compared to the same (but non-computer) exercises, then it would seem that the main factor for the efficacy was the psychological appeal of the computer medium.
Sometimes I find the reliance on computer technology to be unfortunate. I try to think of it like the advancements in medical technology (medicines, etc), but still it seems different in some way. But I suppose not really, as none of the medicines and medical physical devices and medical procedures would be possible without computers.