Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Another thread on discrepancies in scores?

Those pre-reading activities and active reading strategies are great ideas. Thanks.

Do you know anything about improving working memory, rather than just adjusting other areas to compensate? I feel like I've gotten a lot of conflicting messages about this.

I'm hoping this OG-based tutoring will help sooner rather than later. She really wants to read. A few weeks ago, I was laying next to her before bed, because we always have quiet "reading time" before bed, even my littles who can't actually read yet. After a few minutes, DD threw her book across the room and just spat out something like, "It's not fair! I have tried and tried and still can't read! It's just not fair that I'm stuck just looking at dumb pictures and still can't read! I'm just never going to be able to read!" I was so sad for her. I don't feel like a kid should be so discouraged about reading at this age. But I think that, to her, it does feel like she's been trying to learn practically forever. She's been asking to learn to read since she was three, so half her lifetime already! lol. Ah well. Eventually we'll get there!

Well, there is some research that suggests some brain training activities can improve scores on measures of working memory, but so far the effect sizes are negligible, except for literally improving performance on the exact tasks on which one trains. (E.g., one can practice memorizing longer and longer number sequences, which translates into improved ability to...memorize longer number sequences, and pretty much nothing else.) The data certainly don't, in my mind, justify the expense of the best-supported (and that's not really saying much) working memory interventions. You probably won't get better results than, say, playing concentration-type games with your kid. I think you'll get better payoff from using her existing memory strengths as an alternate route, than from trying to pour a lot of time and energy into stretching her working memory a little bit. For example, she has the kind of profile that will probably really enjoy something like "Times Tales" (https://timestales.com/) for gaining fluency with multiplication facts, when it comes time to learn them.

OG is generally considered the gold standard for reading interventions, and she has a focal deficit in the exact area of reading that is most responsive to remediation. I think you'll see some encouraging progress in a reasonably short period of time. I used AAS with my then-nearly-seven-year-old, after a year of evidence-based phonics instruction using a highly-respected structured reading curriculum moved us forward only a very small amount. (Also, accompanied by way more frustration shared between homeschooling parent and child than could possibly be considered acceptable.) AAR was not available at the time, but AAS uses OG techniques from the spelling/encoding side, which has good collateral benefits for reading. I won't say my child immediately became a fluent reader, but DC certainly improved dramatically within the first month, with respect to positive attitudes about DC's ability to read and write, and willingness to engage in literacy activities. There was a new expectation of success attached to reading and writing that had not previously existed.

AEH, I am wondering if this memory pattern you are describing would explain why a child might have much higher working memory scores on the SBV than a WISC? As I understand it the SBV uses a very different approach to testing WM?

Given your daughter's eagerness - and incredible frustration - I wonder if you might actually want to try supplementing your O-G tutoring with AAR at home? Twice a week is actually not much for that kind of tutoring (I believe five times per week is suggested). Talk to your friend to make sure you wouldn't be working at odds with the formal tutoring, though. Or maybe see if she can give you materials to work on at home to perpetuate the lessons in between the tutoring sessions?

I've had a daughter reach a similar state to yours, and her anxiety level and self-worth were both in scary places. The most wonderful thing about AAR for us was how, and how quickly, it had a huge impact on both. When DD started with AAR, I did my best to eliminate all reading (and writing) from outside the program: we read only the AAR books. This meant that I never asked her to read anything that included words she had not been taught how to decode, explicitly and systematically, in a way she could learn. Which meant, suddenly, for the first time in her life, every time I asked her to read something, she could succeed. There are just not words to describe what this did for her.

I will talk with the tutor about this. I don't know if I'd start her at level 1 or something else. Part of her struggle is that she doesn't like reading "boring" books (aka leveled readers). I'm not sure how much we can afford to drop right now, but I am pretty desperate to help her achieve some success as quickly as possible (for her sake, not mine).

This is good to know. She's odd with math facts: she seems to "learn" them relatively quickly, only to have completely forgotten them a week later. So we "re-learn" them... and usually forget them again. lol.


This gives me hope. Your "before" picture sounds a lot like our experience thus far. Thanks for this encouragement.

Totally personal 2 cents worth - start at level 1. The nice thing about AAR is that it's structured to allow you to build in as little or as much repetition as you need, and the repetition can be as targeted as necessary. (For instance, if there's 50 new words in a lesson and she struggled with only one, you keep out the card for that one and put away the other 49). You can move pretty fast if you need to.

What I experienced with my own DD was that she needed almost no repetition, ever. Once she'd seen it, she had it. But until she'd been taught it properly, she did not have it. This became increasingly obvious in later stages of the program when she started to read external material: her errors were almost exclusively in words she had not yet been taught how to handle.

It felt crazy - and crazy-making - to go back to pages and pages of three-letter words. But it was necessary. For one, she had to learn to look at the actual letters in the word, and all of the letters in the word, and all the words in the sentence, not just guess and jump to the big words as she always had. This was painful, let me tell you! But you can't fake context-free lists of three-letter words: you have to look at every single letter and put them together, and that was a painful but essential revelation. And secondly, as noted, she really needed every single phoneme taught properly, not just the more complex ones. She flew through level 1 (it took about a month of after-schooling), and gained both the necessary understanding for the rest of the program, as well as considerable new-found confidence in her ability to learn and read.