Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travellers out there on the road to evidence based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to the season three finale, episode ten and what a great show we have in store for you today.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit, and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
Along with this acknowledgement, and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of an Indigenous artist. And this week we are sharing the picture book The Giving Tree: A Retelling of a Traditional Métis Story, written and illustrated by Leah Marie Dorion, translated by Norman Fleury.
This charming story, richly steeped in Métis culture, focuses on the boyhood reminisces of Moushoom as her describes finding the "great giving tree" with his mother and father. The story emphasizes the Métis core values and beliefs including strength, kindness, courage, tolerance, honesty, respect, love, sharing, caring, balance, patience, and most of all, the important connection with the creator and Mother Earth. This resource also includes a Métis values chart and a digital download of the narrations in both languages.
Add this one to your home or classroom library today. And now on with the show.
[00:01:56] Kate Winn: I am so thrilled to introduce our guest this week here on our season finale of Reading Road Trip, Dr Amanda VanDerHeyden. She is a policy advisor and thought leader who actively conducts research focused on improving learning outcomes for students. She is credited with developing models of academic screening that are widely used in schools, conducting innovative research in mathematics screening and progress monitoring using mastery measurement, and the creation of Spring Math. In addition to publishing ten books and over 100 scholarly articles and chapters, she regularly delivers webinar, panel, and keynote sessions, including addresses to state school psychology associations and state departments of Education in 36 states, Singapore, China, Portugal, and Australia.
She has also served multiple times as an advisor and reviewer as well as a member of many panels and boards. Dr VanDerHeyden has authored a number of policy guides and position statements, and delivered testimony on the use of multi-tiered systems of support and response to intervention to identify students for special education. She is president of Education Research and Consulting in Daphne, Alabama, and has a faculty affiliation with the Wheelock College of Education at Boston University.
[00:03:06] Kate Winn: Wow. Welcome to the show. Dr Amanda Vanderhaden.
[00:03:10] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Thanks for having me, especially to talk about math.
[00:03:14] Kate Winn: I know, so exciting. So our podcast is Reading Road Trip. We focus on literacy. We thought for this last episode of the season we would broaden our lens a bit more to the science of learning. So certainly some of that literacy piece will be included in what we're talking about. But it's not just about literacy, right? You just mentioned math, and some of the things we'll talk about are applicable to many other areas of learning as well. So really excited to talk about this. We're going to dive in with some work that you have done related to the instructional hierarchy. And I read about this in an article that you wrote with Matt Burns for IDA’s Perspectives on Language and Literacy. So it's called the instructional connecting student learning and instruction. So I just want to give a shout out to Matt Burns first. You and I were just talking about him before we actually started recording one.
[00:03:58] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: One of my favorite people.
[00:04:00] Kate Winn: Yes, right. I would have just said he's Dr Matt Burns, a researcher that I follow, whose work I value. But we actually both spoke in Anchorage, Alaska, at the Alaska Science of Reading Symposium in April. So we met in person. We got chatting, we've chatted back and forth, and we actually just collaborated on something together that hopefully will be out in the world sooner than later. So shout out to Matt Burns, and I know he was your co author on this piece that we're going to be talking about.
So before we dig into, there are three phases of the instructional hierarchy. So before we go specifically into each of those three, could you first tell listeners what is the instructional hierarchy?
[00:04:38] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I think it is one of the most, if not the most important innovation in education in over 100 years. And it really first was written about in about 1978 and a little chapter and a little book called Research in the Classroom. The Fourth R: Research in the Classroom is a little white book that's out of print now and hearing. And Eaton wrote the chapter on the instructional hierarchy. And the reason it's important is because we tell teachers and we advise systems to use formative assessment, but what we fail to do is tell them how to do that. It's like they need the decoder pen to tell them if performance looks like this, then these are the instructional tactics you need to use. And if performance looks like that, then these are the instructional tactics that are important to use, and the instructional hierarchy gives us that. And it actually really came out of the research of curriculum based measurement and folks who were working in behavioural psychology to figure out how to improve instruction, particularly a field called precision teaching. And colleagues associated with precision teaching developed these techniques. So it's not a new idea, but it is amazing to me that every teacher in the world really should come out with mastery of this framework because it will change outcomes for children.
[00:06:05] Kate Winn: Absolutely. And I love that you mentioned that data piece. I feel like that's sort of a thread that has woven throughout this season. We've had people on talking about all sorts of different things, but it always seems to come back to the data. So, three phases in this instructional hierarchy. The first phase is acquisition. Can you please tell us about that?
[00:06:23] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah. So, and I will say the original chapter defined four phases, but we collapse phases three and four. So some of your listeners may have heard of the third phase and fourth phase as being generalization and adaptation. But adaptation is really a form of generalization. So as people like myself and Matt Burns and Robin Cotting has written about this a lot, Tanya Eckert and Daley, we have tended to talk about three phases of learning. Oh, Scott Ardwin, let me give him a little plug. So, acquisition is when a skill, an understanding, is brand new to a learner. So, you know, they are in the acquisition stage of learning because they have never been taught how to do this thing. They don't know how to accurately respond. The behavioural jargon for that, of course, is stimulus control or discrimination. So what that means in a defined, easy-to-understand way for teachers is that a child can understand, how do I respond correctly? What are the conditions under which this response is correct? And that response is not correct or not complete or not high quality. Okay. And once a child becomes independently correct, accurate, and they understand how to get there, then they are ready for the next phase of learning. Which, do you want to say it or do you want me to say it?
[00:07:38] Kate Winn: Doesn't matter. You can go right into phase two.
[00:07:40] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Is I talk about this a lot, so I can just roll.
[00:07:44] Kate Winn: I know, right?
[00:07:45] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: It's fluency building. And I love to talk about fluency building because I remember when this was like a bad word in reading and now it's a bad word in math. And it has always been fascinating to me because only in the field of education do we act like fluency is a bad idea. So Ken Johnson, who is a wonderful behavioural psychologist and lives in Washington, the state of Washington, he says fluency is what you do when no one is looking. And I love the way he talks about it because it really has to do with ease of responding. When something is fluent, you like to do it. Fluency is defined as accuracy plus speed. So the only way we can build fluency is to give children timed intervals of practice and to track their growth. So apples to apples comparison. If you give them five minutes to do something, three minutes to do something, 1 minute to do something. If you keep the timing constant, do they show gains over time? And if they do, then what that is telling you is that the response is easier for them to give. The correct response is easier for them to give, which means they will be able to think about what they are doing. So fluency building is always the path to creative, flexible problem solving in math. It is always the path to generalization. It is always the path to comprehension and reading. And by the way, it's always the path to being able to successfully fly an airplane or conduct a surgery or play a musical instrument.
[00:09:19] Kate Winn: Yeah, you answered a question I was going to ask because of course, we're talking about the academic subjects like literacy and math. Right? But learning applies in a really broad context.
[00:09:29] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: And people are funny about that because at the end of the day, behaviour is behaviour is behaviour. And sometimes on Twitter, you will get some math ed folks who will sort of demean or diminish fluency. And what I will say to teachers is just be more pragmatic about that. You don't have to be philosophically biased to something that can benefit your students. Okay? And the thing about fluency building is it can be done in a way that is very engaging to learners. It is not your entire lesson. It is part of your daily practice. And you are really giving them a gift of making them, like working in that academic task and being more engaged in having a higher success rate. That's what fluency building is all about. Remember, we don't do fluency building with children who are not already accurate. So it is by definition, something that is going to be easy for them to do successfully. That's the goal. And to grow. You actually get your steepest rate of growth in the fluency building stage of learning. And once children reach sort of a plateau in how many answers correct they can give in a set period of time, or how many words they can correctly read in a minute, for example, then they enter what is called the generalization stage, learning. And in the generalization stage of learning, this is where maybe some of these tactics that math teachers have been taught to do and like to do should be used. So generalization is can I correctly answer something I've never been taught how to do specifically? Or alternatively, can I change my response that I've learned how to do to make it easier to solve a problem that I've already been taught how to do? So, for example, in math, stimulus generalization would be if you have taught me how to multiply and then you introduce division as finding an unknown factor, can I rapidly solve that without added instruction around how specifically to divide? Okay, that would be stimulus generalization, or what Haring and Eaton called generalization, and then the response generalization, which Haring and Eaton called adaptation. But we'll just call it all generalization for simplicity.
That is, can if I've been taught how to use a standard algorithm to add two quantities, but perhaps one of the quantities is really close to like 50, and let's say I'm being asked to add, or here I'll use an easier 187 plus 197. So response generalization would be can I convert 197 to 200 in my mind, solve that and then take away three, you see, to get to the correct answer, that would be an example of response generalization. We see that all the time with little kids finding a double, decomposing a quantity into tens and ones. Some kids will naturally do that. You can certainly teach and scaffold around helping children do that when they're in the generalization stage of learning. It's commonly called mental math activities. But the problem that the other part of this argument, the people who don't agree with what I say, more of the math ed community perhaps, the problem is they're trying to take these tactics. It's not that they're bad tactics, but they're trying to situate them in acquisition stage of learning. And acquisition stage of learning is not where you should let kids wrestle around and experiment and try to find answers to problems that they have not been taught how to solve because you have skipped over acquisition and fluency building. And what it means is you are inviting children to misunderstand and make errors. And in math we see these things really come back to haunt children in grades four and five, for example, when they cannot add and subtract, they don't understand how it works. All they know is a trick or two that they learned back in first grade, but it's still a trick. And it's such an irony, Kate, because the other side is really saying we don't want to teach the algorithm because that's rote and superficial learning. And it will feel like a trick that's easily forgotten, but they're replacing it with instructional activities that really are just a collection of more tricks.
[00:13:57] Kate Winn: Yeah, I think I want to go back to where you said, the people who disagree with you, and I just want to point out these aren't people who are disagreeing with some, like, wild philosophy you just came up with out of your head one day. They're disagreeing with the research that you have done or that others have done and that you talk about. Right, right. Yeah.
[00:14:15] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: I mean, these are folks that, you know, I would say, well, it's not personal. Let's look at the data, help me understand. Let's do a study. I mean, I think it is really important for people who care about evidence-based practice to always begin with curiosity, respect, and scientific skepticism. And I find this horrifically lacking in social media. It's stunning to me, and some of the most really ugly and disrespectful ways of interacting come from adults who claim to care about and serve as role models for children.
We really should all aspire to do better. It's not personal, but it's also not benign. When someone promotes an idea that lacks scientific coherence and merit, and then when it is systematically disproven again and again and again, I believe that the person who has promoted that theory has a moral obligation as a scientist, as a thought leader to look at that and say, am I doing more harm than good? Let me take a step back and look at this. So, like, in my work, you know, my work is mostly around spring math, which I built over about 20 years of my career. I say all the time we study it, we collect data every single day. And I always say to my team, if we find that something is not working, we will change it, and then we will evaluate it to make sure it is producing benefit for the children that we claim to bring benefit to. And we saw this unfold in reading. We saw the reactions of people who were more committed to their product than they were to the results that it could get for children. And then I think there was really a careless disregard that, well, what harm can it do, right? And some of what people promote maybe sounds pretty good at a cocktail party. I mean, inquiry-based learning sounds a lot better than direct instruction, right? Superficially. But there's one little tiny problem with that. If it's your kid whose future academic career possibilities depend on the success of that instruction, you better hope they get direct instruction, because it's way more effective. Yeah.
[00:16:22] Kate Winn: Okay, so we've gone through the three phases. So we've got the acquisition, we've got the fluency building, we've got that generalization adaptation. And you gave lots of great examples while you talked about those three. But just to really consolidate this for the listeners, could you walk us through a couple of little scenarios? So, first, let's start with a reader. How do you see a reader moving through those phases?
[00:16:43] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah, so, like in reading, and I used to do work in reading. It's been a minute, but I used to, I work mostly in math now because it was so desperately needed. But in reading, a good example would be like, when you are sitting with a reader, and maybe you are doing guided practice using an instructional level passage, and you might do some vocabulary passage preview, and then you would assist the reader to decode each word so they would read as they go. And then at the end of the passage, you would identify the errors that they made that they could not read or decode independently without your adult assistance, your guidance. And for those words, you would go back, maybe, and do something that's called phrase drill, which is a form of overcorrection, and it just involves having the child repeat the phrase that that word is embedded in three consecutive times. It's really funny with little kids because they think that you can't hear them. So by the third time, they're yelling at it. It's really funny. But it's a very powerful technique, and it reduces the probability of an error when a child encounters that sound pattern in the future. And there's really some pretty beautiful work that was emerging in reading years ago, and I think it's made its way into commercial products now, which is beautiful, where there is better control over the passage and how children are instructed, and then the types of words that they're exposed to during their guided practice and their independent practice. And that has been lovely to see in my lifetime. And that is part of why we see declining rates in learning disabilities identification. We have better interventions available to children in reading, and they are situated within multi-tiered systems of support, so children have better and more ready access to those things. In math, we're in a different boat, but in reading, that would be an example of an acquisition strategy that you might use. And then once children are sort of accurately reading, but they're slow, it's laboured, then they're ready for fluency building. And I know Matt will say his criterion, I think, is 92% accurate. Once they're 92% accurate independently on a timed reading, they are ready for fluency building. And fluency building, probably the most sort of famous example of that is repeated reading. So reading the passage multiple times.
And then I know Ed Daley had some wonderful work years ago where he developed a passage that he could do repeated reading on, and then he had a generalization passage attached to it where he calculated the percent word overlap. So it was basically the same words, but in a different order. That is a form of generalization, and he concluded that the child was really benefiting if they grew on the generalization passage. I always thought that was so beautiful, such beautiful work. And I know Scott Ardwin has done beautiful work in that space, too. So Tanya Eckert, other people. So that's an example of fluency building in reading. And, of course, generalization would be the stuff that we care about. This is sort of like, my buddy might call it a capstone skill. Ben Solomon is who I'm thinking of. But the outcome of children reading is that we want them to be able to think about what they have read, make predictions while they are reading. Right? So those would be generalization typebehaviours. And for generalization, what you do is you give the opportunity, and if it is not successful, then you help children. So, for example, if you ask them to summarize the passage and reach a conclusion or make a prediction, and that response is incorrect, you would help them go back to the passage and find, you know, solve those answers correctly. And that's, that takes you through an example for reading. I mean, that you could do this in other ways, too, with various sound blends. And often, I found when I worked a lot in reading, we would often target a fluency building intervention for a subskill, but we would also be providing a structured intervention for passage reading at the same time.
[00:20:58] Kate Winn: Okay, great. And then could you do the same thing with a student in math how we could?
[00:21:03] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: This is all I do.
[00:21:05] Kate Winn: Yes. Tell us about it.
[00:21:07] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yes. And actually, it's even easier in some ways, because math, my buddy Anna Stokke, who I just love, she's a Canadian. Yeah, you probably know Anna. Anyway, she says, and I quote her all the time, math is relentlessly hierarchical. And she's right, because she's working with college kids who arrive and can't do 8th grade math and often they’re math majors in college. So this is sort of criminal.
So, yes, in math, it's pretty straightforward. All of the skills are sort of predictable, and they do build. And if you cannot do sums to five, you're not going to be able to do sums to 20. And if you can't do sums. You're not going to be able to subtract because that's finding an unknown addend. Right. So it's very logical to sort of understand what is the sequencing of skills that must develop for children to be able to hit these milestone understandings in grades three, five, and eight, for example. So, in math, what that would look like is you take a grade level expectation, and if a child is not at mastery or is in, I guess we'll say, if a child is in the risk range on a grade level, expected keystone skill, then you can sample back using what used to be called survey level assessment and curriculum-based measurement. But it's a fancy way of saying you've got a skill sequence. You have a task hierarchy that you can logically sample back and identify.
What's the breakdown? Where's the prerequisite understanding that they did not get? And then you identify, do they need an acquisition lesson for that understanding, or do they need a fluency building lesson for that understanding? And then when you intervene, you are monitoring progress every week. And when children, let's say you have to start with an acquisition protocol, then as soon as they reach the bottom of the instructional range, and this is a very specific score range attached to every skill and grade level, then those children would move into fluency building intervention. So your intervention has to change. And then once they reach mastery for that skill, you would move them into the next skill, taking them toward the grade level skill in that sequence. Does that make sense?
Yeah.
[00:23:25] Kate Winn: Okay. I have an instructional strategy I want to ask you about. Incremental rehearsal. So I have heard you talk about that before. I think I tried it, sort of with a student who was struggling to get all of their letter-sound correspondences. Like, had some, didn't have all of them, and so, you know, working on some and then weaving in the ones that they didn't know and that sort of thing. But could you explain to listeners and me, so that I know how to do it properly, what is incremental rehearsal? What does that look like?
[00:23:52] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah. Okay. So I love incremental rehearsal. And let me say, of course, I learned it from my buddy Matt Burns. And I'll also say sometimes there are more efficient ways to intervene, but it really does have a very special place in instruction. And so let's just take a math example. In an acquisition tactic in math is something like guided practice or cover copy compare. And what you're doing in acquisition is you're making the correct response easy for the child to get to you might model a strategy. You might. You're giving immediate corrective feedback. You are using a repetition loop to represent the task until they can get the correct response. So it's very hands on. You're preventing errors. You are promoting understanding, okay? And then once you move into fluency building in mathematic, you're going to do something like timed trials or response cards, something that allows them to have these kind of independent practice opportunities and try to beat their score from the day before. And that's effective because they are no longer making errors. So what you want to do is build the rate of responding, because then when you give them tasks like solving a word problem or solving for an unknown angle or something like that, they will be able to do it because the sort of component skills that are necessary for them to solve the applied problem are easy for them to do. Okay? So for me, incremental rehearsal is this beautiful little tactic that lives between acquisition and fluency building. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. If you start incremental rehearsal on day one in a math skill, and it only works for things that can be memorable, okay? Incremental rehearsal is not useful for something like multi digit multiplication. It's not useful for long division, but it is useful for anything that can be memorized. And in math, those are the math facts. In reading, those are letters, letter sound correspondences, sometimes whole words, whole language type words, high frequency words, right? There can be value in that. Okay? So in math, if we want a child to understand, and I'm drawing a five in the air, which your listeners can't see, but if we want them to understand that, that's called a five, they just have to memorize that. They just have to know that we can't give them a way to reason their way to that, right? So it's beautiful. For incremental rehearsal, it's perfect, okay? But children have to have enough skill proficiency to profit from incremental rehearsal. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean, like, if you're working on sums to five with a child, you want them to understand. The concept of sums is counting. It's counting up. It's combining quantities. It can be mapped on a number line. And when they can do that, which is not something that takes weeks and weeks to develop, this is a misunderstanding in the math space. And some teachers will say, well, we don't teach the algorithm at all in first grade. We don't introduce till second grade because we don't want children to be confused or constrained by the algorithm, that is a profound misunderstanding of the science of learning and how people learn, period.
So incremental rehearsal becomes really valuable within just a couple of sessions that a child does understand, okay, this is how this works. I am, I can count to this quantity. I can map it on a number line, but it's real. They just can't remember, and it's really hard, and they have to count laboriously every time I. They're kind of ready for incremental rehearsal. So incremental rehearsal can be very helpful as they go into fluency building because incremental rehearsal is a little more labor intensive. So it takes more trials to get kids to mastery because of the sequencing that's involved. And it is sometimes hard for teachers to do it, because if you are trying to do it with paper cards or something like that, the active ingredient is the order of the task presentation. So if you mix up your cards, you're out of luck.
Something I would ever suggest that you hand to children as a deck of cards and encourage them to do. So I use it, we use it in my tool, and the way we use it is it's all digital, so we control the order of the presentation. It cannot be messed up, and we actually do it whole class. So what we do is we use a lot of classified math intervention. We get a lot of tremendous growth for that close opportunity gaps. It becomes a second screening gate in MTSS. It is enormously effective. We get huge risk reduction effects in our randomized controlled trials. So class wide intervention is something, to me that everybody should be doing in math. Most likely, if you have a lot of risk in your system, you should be doing class wide math intervention. And most of us have a lot of risk in our system. So if you are working with children and you know you're headed to subtraction in your class wide math intervention sequence, the way we do that is we are already in class wide intervention working on the sums. Once we're working on sums, and we know these are first grade children, they've been taught how to subtract. They've had practice mapping it on a number line and counting with manipulatives. Then we start incremental rehearsal, and it is a way to sort of make them ready for faster growth during fluency building intervention. So we actually do it when we're working on sums, we do a three minute add on every day whole class, and we're using incremental rehearsal. And what incremental rehearsal is for your listeners is you take, it is an intermixing task where you are intermixing in a very systematic way, an unknown target for the day, which, for example, in sums to five, could be your unknown target could be three plus two, and that would be a great unknown target. And if you're working on three plus two for sums to five, then chances are your students have already mastered zero plus 1, 0 plus whatever, all the way up to five. And you can. What you do is you introduce, you teach the unknown. You say it three times with your student or your students as a whole class, and then you begin your session, and you produce the unknown target for the day, three plus two, which they just practiced the answer. So they give the correct answer. Then the next trial is the first known. Okay? So it could be zero plus one, then the next trial after that. So we're on trial. Three is the unknown target for the day. Again, three plus two. Then you give two knowns. Then you give three plus two the unknown. Then you give three knowns. Then you give the unknown again. Then you give four knowns. And then you give the unknown one more time, five knowns. And so if you think about how that works, what you're really doing is you're spreading the distance between repetition of the unknown target. And what's beautiful about that is then the very next day, and I usually go through that process three times, and it takes, it's very efficient. But on the back end of that, when children can accurately respond, the next day, that unknown, three plus two, becomes your first known, which means they get re exposed to that systematically in a number of trials. So why did I say it was inefficient when I just told you it takes three minutes per day? The reason I said that is many children can master sums to five without that level of control.
So you see what I'm saying? So to target one unknown per day, it's possible for children to master more than one unknown in a day. If you're not using a strategy that a great amount of your session is focused on known items. Does that make sense? Yeah.
[00:31:54] Kate Winn: Yeah.
[00:31:54] Kate Winn: Okay. No, that's great. I want to go back to the paper that you and Matt wrote and quote, you said a very common error is to provide students with inquiry or discovery based instruction when students are in the acquisition phase of learning. So I understand that to mean that you are not against inquiry or discovery based instruction.
[00:32:18] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Nope.
[00:32:18] Kate Winn: You want it to happen at the right time. Am I getting that right?
[00:32:21] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah. I mean, don't we all want to do what works for children as they are learning things? Yeah. I wrote that sentence, I say it all the time, I'll own it. And I think Matt would say the same thing. Obviously, he's a co author on the paper. You know, the thing about instructional tactics is it is a misunderstanding of science to say this is an effective tactic, this is an ineffective tactic.
Tactics are always situated in the needs of the learner, and that's what the instructional hierarchy is about. And my favorite experimental paper on the instructional hierarchy is one of Matt's and it's Burns et al. 2010. Robin Cotting is a co author on that paper. I cited all the time and what he demonstrated, and I've done some subsequent research. Robin and I just published a paper last year demonstrating a similar kind of effect, that when you give the child the wrong inter instructional tactic, it's not aligned with their learning needs based on the instructional hierarchy. Learning actually declines, it actually worsens. And Matt and Robin called this the skill by treatment interaction. So when you give the right instructional tactic, you can we see this in large data sets all the time. If you have, if you are giving a chill, a class fluency building intervention, and most children are in the frustrational range of performance, indicating they need an acquisition type strategy, learning will worsen if you give them a fluency building intervention when most of the children are in the instructional range of performance, learning will accelerate. And so Matt calls this the skill. You can see I'm making an x with my hand, the skill by treatment interaction, and first wrote about that, I think, in 2010, and has written about it quite a lot since then.
So it's very powerful. And Robin and I ran a study and demonstrated we were measuring also student anxiety. And I think Robin is my go to on math anxiety.
She is doing some of the very best work in this space, and she's doing it out of necessity because the misunderstanding of it is so prevalent. It gets in the way of us being able to actually help schools engage in evidence based practices. So she became very passionate about studying this question, and she is doing wonderful work. But she and I did a study and we measured student anxiety. And one of the things that we found is that for some students, when they were placed into the instructional tactic that was misaligned with their measured needs according to the instructional hierarchy, not only did their performance worsen, but their anxiety was worse.
Isn't that interesting? So when people say things like timed assessment causes anxiety or timed practice causes anxiety, that is an oversimplification of a more complicated effect. And we, and it matters because if we don't understand it, we will treat it incorrectly. And what teachers tend to do is go, well, if timed activities worsen anxiety, then I will just remove timed activities. And yet, we know you cannot build fluency without having timed practice and timed assessment. Because once children, you could have two kids, both of whom are 100% accurate. But the kid who can only answer two problems in two minutes or can only read two words correctly in 1 minute versus the kid who can read 130 words correctly in 1 minute. The kid who can read 130 is way more proficient. They both have 100% accuracy. Accuracy runs out of steam. When it hits 100%, it's got a ceiling. So the way you distinguish those, the proficiency of those two kids is to time the interval, give them the same amount of time. And it's true. The same effect happens in math. Ben Solomon and I published a paper in school psychology last year examining accuracy versus fluency as a metric. And we, we provided both a reading data set and a math data set. So, with, in math, it is the same thing. The kid who can answer two problems in two minutes versus the kid who can answer 20 in two minutes, both 100% accurate. The kid who can do 20 is way more proficient. And the danger of only tending to accuracy is they both are accurate. The teacher may say, oh, they're both ready for more challenging work. And the teacher would be wrong about the child who was 100% accurate, but only did a couple, only gave a couple of correct responses. So that is to say, you can't avoid having timed work if you want to build proficiency. And of course, the IES Practice guide, most recently released, named Timed Assessment in Practice, is one of the number one evidence based tactics that should be available to all children in mathematics in the United States and, you know, theoretically around the world. I mean, children learn, the brain works the way the brain works, right?
Yeah.
[00:37:26] Kate Winn: Yeah.
[00:37:26] Kate Winn: And I'm going to quote you to you right now, something I heard you say on another podcast, just because we're on this topic of the anxiety piece of. I think I wrote this down correctly, but you said something almost like, there's no effective treatment for anxiety in existence that doesn't include exposure. So even when you do have students who, you know, wherever they are in life, are experiencing some anxiety, you're not going to just never time them to solve the problem, right?
[00:37:52] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: In fact, avoidance of the stimulus that is arousing your anxiety can become a way to limit your life space and your adaptive opportunity in the world. And people do develop anxiety. Anxiety is a very. It's not. I don't it's not that I don't believe it exists. I very much believe it exists. But I believe we must actively mitigate that using what we know about psychology. And what I hear in the math education world most commonly is to basically engage in avoidance, give less challenging work, give less timed activities, and that will actually worsen math skill. And we do understand, in part because of some of Robin's excellent work, but other people's great work, too. Susan Levine had the first paper that I loved on this that demonstrated that skill proficiency and the experience of math anxiety are bidirectionally related. Now, some of Robin's more recent work and other people's more recent work is beginning to really kind of look like the first onset of anxiety is actually coming after weak skill proficiency. So, weak skill proficiency precedes the onset of anxiety, and then it's a bidirectional feed. And the reason that matters is because then, as teachers, as adults, as people who care about children, one of the ways you can prevent math anxiety in your classroom or in your children, in your own life is to build skill proficiency, make correct responding easier. It's actually one of the reasons we don't want to use productive struggle and inquiry based learning in the acquisition phase of learning. We are inviting anxiety when we do that. Okay, so, yes, I very much believe that. And it's not just me. I'm not an anxiety researcher, but I can read that research that if somebody developed a fear of, I don't know, heights, like, let's just say they had a fear of heights, and then they became sort of paralyzed about climbing stairs or getting into elevators or ever being on a second floor, that's a very life limiting anxiety. So we would find ways to mitigate that we could use. But for sure, part of the treatment package would always involve exposure. Supported exposure. Yeah.
[00:40:17] Kate Winn: You have also done some research around assessments, and as we've talked about today, that data piece, you know, to kind of direct our instruction, and so we know those are really effective to that piece of direction. And in one study, you and Matt Burns again found schools using as many as nine screeners. So, can you just, you know, kind of briefly share with listeners what's the best practice in terms of how many assessments?
[00:40:41] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah, that was great. Okay. That was a reading data set that Matt and I collected in Minnesota. And I loved that study because what we were seeing out in the real world, you know, Matt and I were certainly part of the crowd of people, we were trained in the dark ages when you had no data on children teachers would just come to the room to talk to the team and would say, this child has a learning disability. And you would say, upon what evidence? Why do you think this? And they would say, I think so, and I am an expert. And we would say, well, okay.
That is part of why the learning disability identification rate skyrocketed and increased 300% at one time from its original evolution or appearance in IDEA. So this was problematic because we could not demonstrate better outcomes for students. So we had to question, is there real, are we really doing the right thing? Is there a cost benefit that makes sense to be giving all these children a learning disability label when we're not necessarily preventing reading failure by doing that? Okay.
And I kind of forgot what your question was.
[00:41:52] Kate Winn: What is best practice in terms of how many? Like, I mean, we don't want to screen kids with nine different screeners.
[00:41:56] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah. We began to advocate for, you have to screen everybody. Universal screening. And this was a novel concept. Nobody was doing that. And then it was so wonderful. But it was so wonderful, and schools could easily be trained to do it. It's easier than intervention. And then all of a sudden, Matt and I found ourselves all over the place, working in systems that were giving three and four reading screenings to every student in the school. My own kid, who's now in college, when he landed in first grade, he got in my car, and he said to me, oh, we didn't go to the library today. And I said, why not? My mother was a librarian. Why not? And he said, well, because all those adults have to do all those assessments. Well, assessment is a big word for a first grader. And I said, what do you mean, all these assessments? And so I looked into it, I asked about it, and discovered that he was, in fact, being exposed, and so were all of his entire grade was being exposed to multiple reading screenings at the same time, given concurrently. These are highly measures that yield highly correlated scores. They give us the same information in a school where the reading success rate by the end of third grade was darn near 100%. So everything about that, it's like, wait a minute. There's no logic here. Let's just do the math. Okay? So you're gonna close the library for three weeks. You're gonna do that three times a year for first graders in the name of preventing illiteracy in a school where illiteracy is not happening by the end of third grade? Like, there's a real thing here that is concerning. So, at that time, I was one of the advisors on the RTI Action Network for the National center for Learning Disabilities. And I just, I was invited to do a big presentation and paper in Washington, DC for an event that NCLD hosted. And I wrote my paper on prostate cancer screening and connected that to what we were doing in the space of reading screening. And I wrote several papers in the area of reading screening that really kind of connected some of these medical ideas around. When you overzealously screen, you're going to get false positives. And so one of the examples I used to use a lot is if you give enough males a pregnancy test, you're going to get a positive result. That does not mean that that male is pregnant. It means that no test is perfect. And so part of the testing decision is your decision to give it. And when you give it, when in the, in the face of no symptoms, when you give it in a way that you don't really, all it can do is confirm what you already knew or give you bad information. You're just inviting error into your decision process. So this is what happens when systems over screen in reading, then what they are doing is they're wasting instructional time, right. And they are inviting errors into their decision process. So certainly most systems, it's hard to beat oral reading fluency.
I sort of love that because that little metric has existed since the 1970s. Really, it's not a new concept.
Maybe even late sixties people were doing oral reading fluencies and precision teaching, 1 minute timed readings and correlating them with Iowa Test of Basic Skills, for example, in the Great Falls project. So this is not a new idea and it's hard to be oral reading fluency. So, I mean, I, I do say you need one screening in the fall, you need one screening in the winter. Generally, you don't need a spring screening score to make a screening decision.
You might want it for program evaluation, and you should get the best information in the shortest possible period of time to make a decision. So if you're looking at, and Matt and I put this in this article and I've written about it in other places, too, if you can get the same amount of accuracy and a 1 minute world reading fluency that you can get from something that takes 40 minutes, you should do the 1 minute.
[00:45:57] Kate Winn: Just makes sense, doesn't it?
[00:45:58] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Yeah.
[00:45:59] Kate Winn: I want to talk now just about a couple of areas where I think there are commonalities between the science of reading and the science of math. And we've actually covered a bunch of them that I had on my list already just in our discussion.
So a couple areas where I see overlap. And I'm hoping you can just speak to what you think that I see between both that there's been instruction based on philosophies rather than evidence. And I think we're in terms of lifting the curtain on that. I think with literacy, we're a little further ahead, maybe not so much with math, but do you see that both places, too?
[00:46:29] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Oh, my gosh, yes. Right. So in my early days of doing this work, you know, all I care about is, can we improve performance? And I believe we can measure that. And I think when we improve performance and we do it at certain sort of milestone occasions for kids, then over time, we are helping more kids have more adaptive outcomes. Okay. And the way I was trained is, as a behavioural psychologist, is behaviour is behaviour is behaviour. You know, it doesn't matter what behaviour you're trying to shape up, whether it is using specific language skills or adaptive other adaptive behaviours or reading or writing or solving math problems. If you can define it, you can operationalize it, you can shape it up, you can reduce the things you want to reduce with very systematic efforts. So I have always believed that what we're really talking about is just the science of learning, and I would call it even more specifically the science of human behaviour. And I do think math has that problem. And in the early days, for me, when I was doing this work, I would go and give a session, and I would share some of what we were learning and share protocols if you want to try this intervention. And here's a better way to measure this. And this is what we found. And people would come up to me in the breaks and say, oh, well, I follow this, the research of, and they would name somebody who is a very influential thought leader. And I thought, oh, I need to go, I've never heard of her. And I read the literature, and I'm submitting work for publication, and I'm so ashamed. I don't know who this is. And then when I went and read that work, I then understood, oh, heavens, this is not, respectfully, this is a very influential thought leader. These are ideas, these are, this is not experimental work. It's certainly not experimental work that could be published in the types of journals that I would want to publish in, which are rigorous research journals. And then it's interesting because I think it's so easy for me to understand, but it's so hard for people who are not researchers to understand that there really are differences between journals. So just because you published your work in one journal does not mean it is, you know, evidence based. Right? Well, it was published over here. No, some journals are more rigorous. And one of the things that is often said, and I bet this was said in reading, it certainly has been said in math, is that because something is published in a special education journal, it's not pertinent to general education students. So I always like to point out to people who might not be familiar. You know, for example, I have mostly in my career published in School Psychology or other psychology journals and special education journals. Special education journals are some of the most rigorous, fantastic outlets for the work. They reject more than 80% of what is submitted. I've been rejected many times.
It's tough. But the other side of this is, I really only work in general education. I never exclude children who are on IEPs for the most part. I can't really think of times that I have done that. But I am very interested in whole school populations of learners, and that is all that I study. So it is a misunderstanding of the science to say that if an article is published in a special education journal, it is only pertinent to special education learners. Okay, so I always like to point that out. But, yes, what I discovered was, and then I learned to say when people would come up to me in the breaks and say, well, I follow the work of so and so. And now there are other names on that list who every time they come up, I go, look, I read what has been set forth as evidence. I make up my own mind, and I would just encourage other people to do the same. But I have learned to say, respectfully, I think that is an idea piece. That is a thought piece, that is a book of ideas. It doesn't mean those ideas don't have merit, but they certainly don't have demonstrated merit. And I also believe that it is a really important tenet of science that any idea can be tested. Yep. Yeah.
[00:50:40] Kate Winn: Another area of overlap I see between science of reading and science of math is I think that there's a misunderstood role of explicit or direct instruction, or a misunderstanding of what that even is or the value of it. Would you say you see that in both areas, too?
[00:50:55] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Oh, my goodness. And it's so interesting because to me, and I don't know if Anita Archer would agree, you know, and Doug Carnival would agree, and, you know, but to me, explicit instruction was a makeover of direct instruction. Little D, little I, not big D, big I. But, you know, it's the idea that when you are teaching somebody how to do something, you show them how to do it. You explain step by step how to do it. You give them practice in doing each step. There are beautiful, experimentally demonstrated, powerful learning tactics like chaining backward, chaining forward, chaining, the way you deliver prompt hierarchies, very specific intervals of prompting. Like, there has been really excellent experimental research on animals and humans demonstrating the effects of these tactics, and they really all live inside a philosophy of explicit instruction and direct instruction. The idea of both of those, and I think it's such a, unfortunately, it's just maybe a bad name, but it invites this misunderstanding. Direct sounds heavy handed. It sounds like. You don't ask children to think it sounds like it's an adult, you know, kind of heavy handed speaking at children. Well, if that's what it looks like, it's not direct instruction. Somebody is not doing it right. Direct instruction, well, I'm going to say explicit instructions because to me, I think they. Little D, little I and explicit instruction are equivalent.
It is. What you should see is a very high level of engagement in the classroom with children all actively responding. Ideally, you want children, all children responding and participating every time. There should be a pretty high success rate because task difficulty is yoked to student responding. So it is only advanced in difficulty as children are experiencing more and more success. And it is sequenced in this sort of acquisition, fluency building, generalization opportunity framework that we've already talked about.
So to me, it's often like explicit instruction as presented or direct instruction as sort of the enemy of creativity. And it's actually its best friend because you can never sit down and create a musical piece on a piano or, you know, I don't know. You can't really cook a novel recipe, like modify a recipe to arrive at something that's interesting that wasn't already in your recipe. If you're not a really proficient cook, just ask. Ask a baker, because you know what substitutions work, and you know what substitutions don't work if you're really proficient. But if you're not, you can't do that. And the thing is, I think we have a little impatience as adults because we are not novice learners, that we tend to want to teach the fun part, which is the outcome part. It's fun to go into a kitchen and cook and not have to laboriously follow the recipe most of us can maybe think of. Like, for me, that was my grandmother's. There was a pinch of this and a pinch of that, and it was delicious. But when I was learning to cook, if I did a pinch of this and a pinch of that. It didn't come out right, you know? So I think that we have to have more patience for and more appreciation and more humility that we are helping novice learners become expert learners. And there's a real difference there. And of course, I want to give a shout out to cognitive psychology that has written about this so much. And, you know, it's interesting because they. They're not different in what they are saying from behavioural psychology. So to me, it's a beautiful kind of saying this at a conference. I went to the Research ED conference in Toronto and was having this conversation with Carl Hendrick that somebody needs to really write like a translator piece, you know, I wish I had more time. It'd be fun to do. I'm not sure I'm qualified to do it, but it would be actually really fun and intellectually interesting to do this because I think you can translate it. So some of the things that we have a behavioural psych term for, they've just got a cognitive psych term for, but they're very much bridgeable. They're the same sort of ideas. Does that make sense? Yeah.
[00:55:01] Kate Winn: Yeah. Okay, I have one last question for you. We're going to turn to kindergarten now, my world that I live in. So back in January, our Ministry of Education here for the province of Ontario announced that changes were coming for our kindergarten program. So it was still very balanced literacy, very inquiry, all of that before. And I actually got to provide remarks at the press conference that day when we announced it, which was really exciting. So we're still going to maintain a play base at times through the day, which we know is important, but we're going to have that explicit instruction piece for literacy and for math. So, I mean, I teach math. I love math, I feel good at math, all of that. But I'm more. I'm better versed in the science of reading. So I'd like to pick your brain in terms of the math piece. If you could wave a magic wand or somehow be consulted on this project, what do you think we should see in kindergarten? So in terms of what the standards should be approach, tell me about what kindergarten math would look like if you could decide.
[00:55:58] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Okay, so we're kindred spirits.
I published the first set of math curriculum based measures in, for kindergarten students, and I love that work. And then Ben Clark was right behind me a year later, and he's got wonderful work in the same kind of space and has done even more work developing a curriculum that is called, called Roots, which I think is just fantastic. So, yes, I do have ideas about this, and I'll say, so we do. My tool is Spring Math, and we do class wide intervention from kindergarten through grade eight. And we see easily the most success in kindergarten. I mean, this is across thousands and thousands and thousands of children. And I love that. And I have a hypothesis about that. My hypothesis is that kindergarten systems and classrooms often have less formalized expectations around math instruction, fewer materials, fewer expectations from their leaders about what skills they will target, when, what types of instructional opportunities will be provided. We see a lot more of that moving into first grade, but yet teachers want to know how to teach math to kindergarten children, and our system is very scriptural. So what I would do is I would give you a list of 15 skills that are essential for kindergarten children to master with associated assessments that will tell you, are they frustrational, instructional, or mastery? This is what we do inside my particular platform, and we run classified math intervention in kindergarten. We do it all the time. It's happening every day around the US when school's in session.
We will be back in Canada this fall. I'm excited about that. And anyway, again, we have had so much success with kindergarten teachers finishing that skill sequence that we are now moving them into five challenge skills in kindergarten. So the easiest thing for me to say is, you know, and maybe not satisfying for listeners, but, like, I'll send you a list of what we target in kindergarten. I'll be happy to send you some video of class wide intervention in kindergarten. But they are going to be things like, let me think. So we will start with counting activities so children count and identify a correct answer. We were, then we work on counting and writing the correct answer and the kinds of games that we play to build proficiency with that, which they're very game like in kindergarten, is we might have, we might have children get together and shake out counters. One kid is the worker, and then the helper shakes out the counters, and the worker counts the counters and then points to the correct number and says the correct number from an array of answer choices. And I have a video of this I could show you. And then once, and we measure their performance every week. And when the median reaches mastery, we move the whole class up into the next skill. We then would go from, you know, counting and identifying object quantity. We work on quantity discrimination, so identifying the greater quantity. And we embed some distractor cues around size that are intended to, we want children to ignore size because it doesn't matter its quantity.
We work on ordinal positions. So sequencing of numbers, filling and missing numbers, we work on.
Let me see, what did I miss? Oh, changing quantities to make ten. So we give a starting quantity, and then they have to add to the quantity or take away from the quantity to make a set of ten. And then eventually we move to our pinnacle skill, sums and subtraction. Zero to five for kindergarten. Now, as I said, we've had so much success with that. The vast majority of kindergarten teachers in our system complete the sequence, and then we tracked what happened to those children when they went to first grade because we're in year ten. So we've got a lot of data, and what we saw is those children specifically had much better outcomes in first grade. And we see it not just on our measures, but on other measures, like the Acadience math measures. So that's very encouraging. So then what we did is we said, okay, we're going to. Because they've got more bandwidth, they are all finishing it. We see the benefit. We're going to give them a little more. And so now we are moving, adding some new skills this year that we're very excited about for kindergarten. I'd be happy to share any of that with you. It's so easy to do, and it's very game like for kids and takes, you know, 15 minutes per day and things that people will say, oh, kindergarten children can't do that. Of course, you're a kindergarten teacher. You know, they can.
[01:00:32] Kate Winn: Oh, yes. High expectations over here. Yep.
[01:00:35] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: You can teach them how to follow the routine. Yes. But you'd be amazed at how many school psychologists even would say, well, we can't do that in kindergarten. I'll go. Let me, let me send you a video. Yes, we can.
[01:00:46] Kate Winn: Yeah. Oh, I've heard that a lot. Even with literacy over the past couple of years, like, oh, well, the kids can't sit that long, or the kids can't do that. They're not. Come and watch my class if you want to, because, yes, they can. Before I let you go, is there anything you want to share with listeners just to kind of wrap this up? What a great way to end our third season. This has been such a wonderful conversation, but all these, you know, a lot of frontline classroom educators and many other people who work in education listening right now. Any last words?
[01:01:12] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Well, I think people listening to you appreciate science, and they see what the science of reading has done for them. And we see this all the time in the real world, too, that teachers almost become tearful when they discover that there's a real science to how children learn. And they say, why didn't I get this? I feel so guilty because I didn't give what my children needed all these years. I could have prevented these learning problems. And it's true. And I just want to say to your people, your listeners, that behaviour is behaviour is behaviour. So whether you're building reading behaviours and repertoires or you're building math behaviours and repertoires, you know, the science is the same, so you don't have to go out and learn a brand new science. And yet there really is a science to how children learn. So please don't make the mistake of thinking, well, there's the science of reading and it lives over here. And then there's this thing in math and do all the wrong things that are like the the whole language, running record, leveled reader equivalence in math. Because when you're doing things like productive struggle, inquiry learning in acquisition, you're making a mistake that you are misaligning the instruction with what the learners need, just like we saw happen in reading for all those years. And really, it is our stewardship obligation to do the things that work for children. So we know how to do a lot. We know how to help children master what they need to in math. We just have to have the willingness and the heart to do it.
[01:02:37] Kate Winn: Yep. Thank you so much for this conversation. Dr Amanda VanDerHeyden. It's been such a pleasure.
[01:02:44] Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden: Thank you.
[01:02:49] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season three, episode ten with Dr Amanda VanDerHeyden. And now it's time for that typical end of the podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and your review might make it onto an episode. Of course we welcome any social media love. You feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is thismumloves on Twitter and Facebook and katethismomloves on Instagram. Make sure youre following the Reading Road Trip podcast in your app and watch for new episodes in season four. We couldn’t bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind the scenes support from Katelyn Hanna, Brittany Haynes and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario. I’m Kate Winn and along with my co-producer Dr Una Malcolm. We hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun. Join us next season when we bring another carload of fabulous guests along for the ride on Reading Road Trip.
