an analysis of corrective reading research

Corrective Feedback in Oral Reading

• Published: March 1998
• Volume 8 , pages 63–79, ( 1998 )

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• Joanne D. Heubusch 1 &
• John Wills Lloyd 2  

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We examined 24 studies to determine the effects on word recognition and reading comprehension of correcting errors during oral reading. Corrective feedback improved students' word reading accuracy on words in lists, and accuracy in reading words in passages. Some correction procedures had greater benefits than others. Successful error correction procedures share common characteristics, leading to recommendations about instruction: Teachers should (a) correct errors immediately; (b) require students to repeat the correct response; and (c) match correction procedure to the instructional situation and the learner. Several research recommendations are outlined.

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Heubusch, J.D., Lloyd, J.W. Corrective Feedback in Oral Reading. Journal of Behavioral Education 8 , 63–79 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022864707734

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Corrective Reading Program: An Analysis of Effectiveness with Learning Disabled and Mentally Retarded Students

• Special Education and Communication Disorders

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The Corrective Reading Program (CRP) was used with a group of learning disabled (LD) and educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents with data collected on the achievement of these students in the domains of reading recognition and comprehension. When compared to reading progress made in prior years, both groups showed significantly greater improvement. LD students experienced larger achievement gains than EMR students in both recognition and comprehension with differences in the former domain being statistically significant. Implications are discussed with regard to the two issues of possible benefits of a remedial orientation in curricula for adolescent students and of the validity of cross-categorical programming, respectively.

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• Mentally Disabled Persons Medicine & Life Sciences 100%
• Reading Medicine & Life Sciences 71%
• Learning Medicine & Life Sciences 59%
• Students Medicine & Life Sciences 56%
• Psychology Recognition Medicine & Life Sciences 35%
• comprehension Social Sciences 31%
• learning Social Sciences 27%
• adolescent Social Sciences 23%

T1 - Corrective Reading Program

T2 - An Analysis of Effectiveness with Learning Disabled and Mentally Retarded Students

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N2 - The Corrective Reading Program (CRP) was used with a group of learning disabled (LD) and educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents with data collected on the achievement of these students in the domains of reading recognition and comprehension. When compared to reading progress made in prior years, both groups showed significantly greater improvement. LD students experienced larger achievement gains than EMR students in both recognition and comprehension with differences in the former domain being statistically significant. Implications are discussed with regard to the two issues of possible benefits of a remedial orientation in curricula for adolescent students and of the validity of cross-categorical programming, respectively.

AB - The Corrective Reading Program (CRP) was used with a group of learning disabled (LD) and educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents with data collected on the achievement of these students in the domains of reading recognition and comprehension. When compared to reading progress made in prior years, both groups showed significantly greater improvement. LD students experienced larger achievement gains than EMR students in both recognition and comprehension with differences in the former domain being statistically significant. Implications are discussed with regard to the two issues of possible benefits of a remedial orientation in curricula for adolescent students and of the validity of cross-categorical programming, respectively.

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Corrective reading.

Corrective Reading is a literacy program designed to improve decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills for students in third grade or higher who are reading below their grade level. Corrective Reading can be implemented in small groups for 45-minutes four to five times a week. Assessments determine the level at which each student is initially placed. Students are expected to complete all lessons within a level before advancing to the next level. All lessons involve a scripted, direct instructional approach to implement the series of targeted exercises. The decoding component has four levels containing between 65 and 125 lessons each. The comprehension component consists of four levels with between  65 and 140 lessons. 

Beginning Readers - Alphabetics

Beginning readers - comprehension, beginning readers - fluency, adolescent literacy - alphabetics, adolescent literacy - fluency, adolescent literacy - comprehension.

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

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In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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by Marisa Wexler, MS | May 24, 2024

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The department of health (DoH) in Abu Dhabi — one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — is teaming up with Roche Pharmaceuticals Middle East to advance research that aims to use real-world data to investigate the burden of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) in the emirate.

The memorandum of understanding cementing the agreement was signed both by Asma Al Mannaei, executive director of the research and innovation center at the DoH, and by Mohamed Elshaarawy, general manager for Roche in the UAE. The signing took place during Abu Dhabi Global Healthcare Week , which featured more than 200 exhibitors.

While this partnership has as its focus SMA, and also Duchenne muscular dystrophy , the DOH overall has a much broader vision.

“Through international collaborations, Abu Dhabi seeks to lead research groups supported by global partners to explore the resilience and sustainability of the healthcare sector worldwide as well as expand access to quality care for patients around the world,” Al Mannaei said in a press release .

Elshaarawy said the new collaboration “is fueled by a shared vision of harnessing the power of data to drive informed decision-making within the healthcare system.”

“We are sincerely grateful for the trust, confidence, and empowerment the DoH has placed in establishing this effective public-private partnership with Roche in the UAE,” Elshaarawy said.

Newborns treated with Evrysdi sit unassisted after 1 year

Collaborators seek to improve collection of real-world data.

With this project, the DoH and Roche will be working together to support new frameworks for collecting real-world data from people with SMA.

“Abu Dhabi has a track record of excellence and fast-growing, future-forward, data-enabled services,” Al Mannaei said. “Serving as a hub for healthcare data, Abu Dhabi’s substantial computing power enables it to harness the potential within this data, transforming it into valuable information. This, in turn, allows us to innovate and develop novel approaches to shift healthcare towards prediction, prevention, and treatment, thereby accelerating the future of healthcare, not only for Abu Dhabi but for the global community.”

One of the major goals of the project is to monitor outcomes from SMA treatments . Roche is the maker of Evrysdi (risdiplam), an oral therapy that’s one of three disease-modifying treatments widely approved for SMA. Evrysdi and other disease-modifying treatments have been proven to slow or stop the progression of the neurodegenerative disorder, helping patients retain better motor function over time.

Through the generation, utilization, and realization of data, healthcare professionals and policymakers can unlock valuable insights, identify trends, and make evidence-based decisions.

According to Elshaarawy, “data-driven healthcare systems hold immense potential to revolutionize patient care and outcomes.”

“Through the generation, utilization, and realization of data, healthcare professionals and policymakers can unlock valuable insights, identify trends, and make evidence-based decisions. This data-driven approach enables us to optimize resource allocation, personalize treatment approaches, and ultimately achieve better patient outcomes,” Elshaarawy said.

In addition to SMA, the new project will work to improve collection of real-world data for people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which like SMA is a genetic disorder that’s characterized mainly by muscle weakness and wasting . The project also aims to bolster infrastructure for research and clinical trials, according to Roche and the DoH.

“By harnessing the full potential of data, we can improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system, ensuring that every patient receives the highest quality of care tailored to their specific needs,” Elshaarawy said.

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Summer 2023 Was the Northern Hemisphere’s Hottest in 2,000 Years, Study Finds

Scientists used tree rings to compare last year’s extreme heat with temperatures over the past two millenniums.

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By Delger Erdenesanaa

The summer of 2023 was exceptionally hot. Scientists have already established that it was the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since around 1850, when people started systematically measuring and recording temperatures.

Now, researchers say it was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature that compares 2023 with a longer temperature record across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The study goes back before the advent of thermometers and weather stations, to the year A.D. 1, using evidence from tree rings.

“That gives us the full picture of natural climate variability,” said Jan Esper, a climatologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and lead author of the paper.

Extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for most of the recent increases in Earth’s temperature, but other factors — including El Niño , an undersea volcanic eruption and a reduction in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution from container ships — may have contributed to the extremity of the heat last year.

The average temperature from June through August 2023 was 2.20 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between the years 1 and 1890, according to the researchers’ tree ring data.

And last summer was 2.07 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between 1850 and 1900, the years typically considered the base line for the period before human-caused climate change.

The new study suggests that Earth’s natural temperature was cooler than this base line, which is frequently used by scientists and policymakers when discussing climate goals, such as limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial era.

“This period is really not well covered with instruments,” Dr. Esper said, adding that “the tree rings can do really, really well. So we can use this as a substitute and even as a corrective.”

Trees grow wider each year in a distinct pattern of light-colored rings in spring and early summer, and darker rings in late summer and fall. Each pair of rings represents one year, and differences between the rings offer scientists clues about changing environmental conditions. For example, trees tend to grow more and form wider rings during warm, wet years.

This study compared temperatures in 2023 to a previously published reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2,000 years. More than a dozen research groups collaborated to create this reconstruction, using data from about 10,000 trees across nine regions of the Northern Hemisphere between 30 and 90 degrees latitude, or everywhere above the tropics. Some data came from drilling very thin cores from living trees, but most came from dead trees and historical wood samples.

Covering longer stretches of time results in more volcanic eruptions being included in the data. Big eruptions, at least on land, can cool the Earth by spraying sulfur dioxide aerosols into the atmosphere. Over the past 2,000 years, about 20 or 30 such eruptions have taken place and brought down average temperatures, Dr. Esper said.

(The recent Hunga Tonga eruption, by contrast, happened under the ocean and sprayed enormous amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas.)

Not everyone agrees that tree rings offer a more accurate picture of past temperatures than historical records do.

“It’s still an active area of research,” said Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at Berkeley Earth. Dr. Rohde wasn’t directly involved in the new study, but his organization’s data was used. “This is not the first paper to come out suggesting that there’s a warm bias in the early instrumental period, by any means. But I don’t think it’s really resolved.”

To some extent, slight differences between the stories thermometers and tree rings tell us about Earth’s past don’t matter for the present, said Zeke Hausfather, another Berkeley Earth scientist.

“It’s an academic question more than a practical question,” he said. “Reassessing temperatures in the distant past really doesn’t tell us that much about the effects of climate change today.”

Last year, those effects included a heat dome that settled over much of Mexico and the southern United States for weeks on end. Japan had its hottest summer on record. Canada suffered its worst-ever wildfire season, and parts of Europe also battled a series of destructive wildfires. 2024 is expected to be another hot year .

Delger Erdenesanaa is a reporter covering climate and the environment and a member of the 2023-24 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Delger Erdenesanaa

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