Teachers College: An Early Focus on Instruction

Abstract

I arrived at Teachers College in the fall of 1971, having been recruited to join the Learning Disabilities Institute. What an attractive opportunity that was--to work in a new field that offered both challenging questions for research and a chance to help a group of children whose problems had not previously been seriously addressed; a field, in fact, that had been established not only by scientists looking for new areas to study but also by parents who recognized the need for services for children who manifested difficulties in learning even though their intelligence was average or above. We were five principal investigators at the Institute, N. Dale Bryant, Jeannette Fleischner, Walter MacGinitie, Margaret Jo Shepherd, and I. Frances Connor was the director. I have no documents--no grant proposals, no minutes of meetings--to jog my memory, but as best I recall, we were all working on instruction for beginning reading, spelling, comprehension, and math. I remember spending a lot of time during my first year pestering some of the members of the special education department, demanding that they tell me how they knew that a child had a learning disability. They were clinicians, and they knew. But I was a researcher, and I needed reliable and valid measures. Unfortunately, the answers I got were not very satisfactory. I was assured, however, that a learning disability (LD) was short-lived. In reading, for example, it appeared that children with LD had a specific problem with decoding. Once we figured out what exactly was wrong, the difficulty could be remediated, and the children wouldn't have further problems. That optimism helped me a lot as I planned my research. I decided to concentrate on phonemic awareness, and developed a supplemental, remedial program for third graders who had been identified as having LD. I had never conducted an instructional study before, and I soon found out how much work instructional research entails. In the evaluation of the program, 40 classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment or control. My qualms about not being able to determine who had LD were assuaged by the fact that the schools decided the matter. And who was I, a mere researcher, to gainsay them? I told myself that if my program was successful, it was likely to help any child who was having difficulty with decoding, not just those hard-to-identify children with LD. So it would have some value even if the children I was working with turned out not to have LD. LD RESEARCH IN THE EARLY YEARS This stance--that my job was to study the process of instruction and to develop instructional programs, not to identify who had or did not have a learning disability--got me through question-and-answer sessions at meetings. But I was often discomfited by the fact that not only did I not know, but that the professional community as a whole did not know how to identify a child with LD. What was this field we were working in, if we didn't even know whom we were trying to help? I think now that I might have tried a little harder on this front, but plenty of people became involved in the question of identification. Substantial effort went into developing assessment strategies and diagnostic testing. Others of us continued on our merry way, drawing our samples from ill-defined, school-identified populations. My study was successful in that the children in the classrooms that participated learned to segment and blend phonemes, first without and then with letters. They were superior to the control children not only on words they had practiced; they were also able to transfer what they had learned to the decoding of short words and pseudowords that they had not seen in training. I never did any follow-up on those children, but if they were like most children who have been labeled as having a disability during their first years at school, they were not cured by my program. More to the point, if they had received the best decoding program in the world, implemented in the best way possible, and if that program had led them to the mastery of decoding, they might still have remained disabled with respect to later reading challenges. …