Inadequacy of Individual Educational Program (IEP) Goals for High School Students with Word-level Reading Difficulties, The

Annals of Dyslexia, Jun 2005 by Catone, William V, Brady, Susan A

This investigation analyzed goals from the Individual Educational Programs (IEPs) of 54 high school students with diagnosed reading disabilities in basic skills (decoding and/or word identification). Results showed that for 73% of the students, the IEPs written when they were in high school failed to specify any objectives regarding their acute difficulties with basic skills. IEPs from earlier points in the students' educations were also reviewed, as available. For 23 of the students, IEPs were present in the students' files for three time points: elementary school (ES), middle school (MS), and high school (HS). Another 20 students from the sample of 54 had IEPs available for two time points (HS and cither MS or ES). Comparisons with the IEPs from younger years showed a pattern of decline from ES to MS to HS in the percentage of IEPs that commented on or set goals pertaining to weaknesses in decoding. These findings suggest that basic skills deficits that persist into the upper grade levels are not being sufficiently targeted for remediation, and help explain why older students frequently fail to resolve their reading problems.

Key Words: Basic skills deficits, decoding deficits, high school students, IEP, older poor readers, reading disabilities, reading remediation

All too often, elementary school children with reading problems advance to middle and high school grades without resolution of their reading difficulties. Epidemiological data comparing growth in reading achievement between normal readers and poor readers indicate that while most children reach a plateau in basic reading skills by about the age of 12, deficient readers do so at significantly lower levels (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1994). The Francis et al. data reveal that 74% of children diagnosed as dyslexic in Grade 3 remain significantly reading impaired in Grade 9. Similarly Schumaker and Deschler (1988) observe that learning disabled students who are performing below the 10th percentile on measures of reading, written expression, and math in elementary school, demonstrate a leveling off of basic skills at about a fourth to fifth grade level, creating a considerable gap by the time they reach high school. Studies of both high school poor readers and adult literacy students show the persistence of reading deficits in both decoding and reading comprehension (see Greenburg, Ehri, & Perin, 1997; Shankweiler, Lundquist, Dreyer, & Dickenson, 1996). Reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) verify the prevalence of reading problems in older students (U.S. Department of Education, 2003). The 2002 NAEP for eighth grade students found that, similar to performance levels for elementary aged students, only 33% of the nation's eighth graders read at or above a 'proficient' level (i.e., solid academic performance for that grade), while 68% read at or below the 'basic level' (i.e., partial mastery of the requisite knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at each grade). Likewise, for 12th grade students, the minority (36%) read at or above the desired proficient level and many more (64%) scored at or below the basic level.

Given the apparent perseverance of reading impairment, one interpretation might be that the remediation of reading problems is not being properly addressed through regular education or special education, particularly for those students identified with deficits in the fundamental reading skills necessary for more advanced reading abilities. In turn, a potential factor in why the students' deficits in basic skills are not being corrected may be that the content of individual educational programs designed to address these reading weaknesses are lacking in relevant goals and objectives. To explore this issue, the current IEPs for 54 high school students who had been identified in the schools as having basic reading deficits were reviewed and scored with respect to acknowledgment and treatment recommendations pertaining to reading needs. In this study, the content of the IEPs for these students from earlier points in their educations (i.e., middle school, elementary school) also was critiqued, if these earlier reports were present in the students' files; an additional 66 IEPs were reviewed for the high school students from their earlier years. The purpose of this developmental comparison was to ask whether attention in IEPs to word-level reading deficits diminishes as students get older.

WORD-LEVEL ABILITIES OF SKILLED AND LESS SKILLED READERS

It has been established that the successful beginning reader gains an awareness of the smallest sound units within spoken words (phonemes) and learns to match these speech sounds to graphemes, eventually able to read both real words and pseudowords in a nearly effortless manner (for reviews, see Fowler & Scarborough, 1993; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Research from the past several decades offers persuasive evidence that the critical deficiency of reading disabled children is their poor ability to decode words or "apply letter-sound correspondence rules in the absence of word-specific memories and contextual cues" (Fowler & Scarborough, 1993, p. 32). While normally developing readers become fairly proficient in the mechanics of word identification before completing elementary school, those with reading disabilities often continue to exhibit basic skills problems beyond these years (Bruck, 1992; Leach, Scarborough, & Rescorla, 2003). Fowler and Scarborough (1993) point out that virtually every sample of older poor readers that has been assessed for phoneme awareness exhibits deficits in that area, compared to both age-matched and reading-level matched controls, regardless of either IQ or social class. In addition, these and other studies also show that adolescent and adult poor readers frequently have problems with the identification of real words and pseudowords in comparison to normal reading peers (Pratt & Brady, 1988; Shankweiler et al., 1996). When older poor readers are matched to younger, reading-level matched normal readers, word identification skills may be equivalent, but identification of pseudowords still falls significantly behind for the older students, suggesting that older poor readers rely more on word specific associations than on decoding skills (Blalock, 1981; Bruck, 1990; Read & Ruyter, 1985). It also has been found that older poor readers lack fluency; they are slower at reading paragraphs and lists of real words or pseudowords (Bruck, 1990; Gross-Glenn, Jallad, Novoa, Helgren-Lempesis, & Lubes, 1990). Accuracy without speed may create a bottleneck for the older poor reader that ultimately interferes with reading comprehension (Fowler & Scarborough, 1993).