The Beacon Spring 2019

Spring 2019 The Beacon

The Windward School

The

Beacon The Windward School Newsletter for Educators and Parents Spring 2019

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Statistical Learning: A Powerful Mechanism That Operates by Mere Exposure

By Richard N. Aslin This article was originally published in WIREs Cognitave Science, vol. 8, January–April 2017.

IN THIS ISSUE

Statistical Learning: A Powerful Mechanism That Operates by Mere Exposure

By Richard N. Aslin Page 1

Head Lines Kindergarten Teachers to the Rescue—Please!

By Dr. John J. Russell Page 8

News Around Windward Haskins Lab Partnership, WTTI Earns Perfect Score, and More Page 10

Q&A with Inspiring Leaders in the World of Dyslexia John Hoke, Chief Design Officer at Nike

By Stephanie Huie Page 12

2018 Fall Community Lecture Recap Beyond the Buzzwords of Grit and Resilience Page 15

Research Roundup Key Developments in Dyslexia Screening, Language, and Intervention

By Danielle Scorrano and Annie Stutzman Page 16

Alumni Profile Samantha Coppola ’17

By Stephanie Huie Page 18

H

ow do infants learn so rapidly and with little apparent effort? In 1996, Saffran, Aslin, and Newport reported that 8-month-old human infants could learn the underlying temporal structure of a stream of speech syllables after only 2 min of passive listening. This demonstration of what was called statistical learning, involving no instruction, reinforcement, or feedback, led to dozens of confirmations of this powerful mechanism of implicit learning in a variety of modalities, domains, and species. These findings reveal that infants are not nearly as dependent on explicit forms of instruction as we might have assumed from studies of learning in which children or adults are taught facts such as math or problem solving skills. Instead, at least in some domains, infants soak up the information around them by mere exposure. Learning and development in these domains thus appear to occur automatically and with little active involvement by an instructor (parent or teacher). The details of this statistical learning mechanism are discussed, including how exposure to specific types of information can, under some circumstances, generalize to never-before-observed information, thereby enabling transfer of learning.

THE ROBERT J. SCHWARTZ Whether one sees the newborn child as MEMORIAL LECTURE neurologically insufficient (Flechsig, 1920), cognitively confused (James, 1890), narcissistic (Freud, 1905), solipsistic (Piaget, 1927), or merely ugly (Hall, 1891), the Tuesday, April 9, 2019 distance between the new child and the 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. walking, talking, socially discriminating, The Windward School and perceptive person whom we see hardly Manhattan Campus 500 days later is awesome.—Kessen, Haith, 1 and Salapatek RSVP online at thewindwardschool.org/lecture

Richard Aslin, PhD

Introduction

See page 7 for complete details.

Two giants in the field of animal learning created paradigms that illustrated how behavior can be shaped by stimuli that are paired with primary rewards such as food.

Ivan Pavlov2 used classical conditioning of the salivary response in dogs to a tone that signals impending delivery of meat powder, and B. F. Skinner3 used operant conditioning in pigeons and rats to elicit pecking or bar-pressing behaviors when a cue signals the availability of a food pellet. In both of these paradigms, the associations among stimuli, responses, and rewards involve repeated exposure over many trials and a resultant slow time course of learning. How might such mechanisms enable the rapid learning that characterizes human (and non-human) development?

Two solutions were proposed. Edward Tolman4 suggested that animals rarely rely on

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The Beacon Spring 2019

primary reinforcers to learn about their environment, but rather engage a mechanism akin to problem-solving in which the causal relations behind the associations observed by the animal are the fundamental motivation for and product of learning. Albert Bandura5 suggested that learners gain as much information about the world by observing others as by actively engaging in the learning process themselves. There is no question that mature learners, across a wide variety of species and domains, use both of these alternative mechanisms to speed up the learning process beyond that described

by Pavlov and Skinner. But is it plausible for naïve learners, who are confronted with hundreds of potential stimuli each minute in their natural habitat, to determine which patterns of stimuli are worthy of their attention and likely to be informative for controlling their behavior without the guiding hand of a ‘teacher’ (i.e., rewards or punishments)? Research in the past 15 years has revealed that such a mechanism of learning ‘by mere exposure’ is both rapid and present in early development.

What is Statistical Learning?

In both the lab and the natural environment, we learn about distributions. For the pigeon in a Skinner box, those distributions consist of which stimuli (e.g., a green light) are present immediately prior to behaviors (e.g., pecking a key) that are followed by a reward. There are many other stimuli that are present prior to the pecking response that do not lead to a reward. Thus, any animal that successfully learns the contingencies established by the experimenter has, in an implicit sense, created a ‘list’ of what works and what does not work in that particular context.

Formulating such a list in the context of a Skinner box may seem fairly straightforward because the number of potential stimuli has been constrained and the relevant response has been shaped by the experimenter to simplify which aspects of the situation are relevant and how rapidly they are presented.

Now consider a more complicated situation in which there is no reward and the rate of stimulus presentation is greatly speeded up. Saffran, Aslin, and Newport6 chose a task that must be solved by all children as they learn language: determining in a sample of speech spoken by their parents where one word ends and the next word begins. Words are composed of syllables from an inventory of sounds (the phonemes) used in the particular natural language to which the child is exposed. We know that children begin to speak their first words at about 12 months of age, so the process of solving the word-segmentation problem must be at least partially accomplished by the end of the first postnatal year. Moreover, what makes the word-segmentation problem particularly difficult is that the acoustic cues that define a word boundary are unreliable: some multi-word utterances have no acoustic cues to word boundaries (‘Where are you?’) and many words have obvious acoustic cues within themselves (‘cookie’). If infants relied solely on these acoustic cues, they would incorrectly treat ‘Where are you?’ as one word and ‘cookie’ as two words.

Saffran et al.6 asked whether infants could use distributional information to solve the word-segmentation problem. They

eliminated all other cues that are present in natural speech, such as the pauses at the end of phrases and the modulations in pitch and duration that occur as syllables are put together to form fluent utterances (see Figure 1). It is important to note that the wordsegmentation problem is not solved by the child’s parents. Parents neither speak in one-word sentences (except for special words like ‘no’ or the child’s name), nor do they define by explicit instruction what a word is. Rather, parents speak to their children in much the same way they speak to other adults, except at a somewhat slower rate and often with more modulation of pitch and amplitude.

Thus, the naïve learner is confronted with an inventory of dozens of different syllables presented in child-directed speech at a rate of 3–5 per second, and must keep track of the sequential patterns embedded in a corpus of these sentences.

The task set up by Saffran et al. mimicked this situation by presenting 8-month-old infants with a continuous stream of speech

(a)

Word 1

Word 2

Word 3

Word 4

. . . pa bi ku go la tu da ro pi ti bu do . . . (b)

Test Word

TP’s = 1.0 and 1.0

Test Part-word

TP’s = 0.5 and 1.0

Figure 1. Illustration of the stimuli used by Saffran et al.6 to study statistical learning in 8-month-old infants. (a) The inventory of syllables and tri-syllabic words. (b) The statistical structure of the words and part-words. TP, transitional probability.

See Supporting information for link to sound file. syllables, without the benefit of pauses or intonation cues, and asked whether infants could ‘compute’ the distributions of how often each syllable occurred and how often combinations of syllables occurred. If infants could perform such computations, then in a post-familiarization test phase they should discriminate between sequences of syllables that varied in their statistical properties.

In particular, it was hypothesized and confirmed in a follow-up experiment7 that the probability of one syllable following another was a crucial source of information for solving the word-segmentation problem. The test phase presented infants with two types of trials: a triplet of syllables with a perfectly predictable order (i.e., a word) and a triplet of syllables with a less predictable order because they spanned a word boundary (i.e., a part-word). Infants exhibited longer attention, as indexed by looking-time to a blinking light, to the less statistically consistent part-words than to the words. Note that keeping track of these distributions — the relative frequency of pairs of syllables and the transitional probability from one syllable to the next — when the syllables were presented at a rate of 4 per second and when no feedback is provided to guide the learning process, was considered to be highly implausible for an infant.

Spring 2019 The Beacon

(a)

Inventory

Familiarization Scenes

Test Scenes

vs.

(b)

Base pairs

Noise

Scenes

H

Figure 2. The stimuli and design of the spatial version of the statistical learning task from Fiser and Aslin13 with adults. (a) The inventory of shapes and a sample of their arrangement in 3 × 3 grids. The shapepairs used during the post-test showing their joint and conditional probabilities. The stimuli and design of the analogous task used with 9-month-old infants by Fiser and Aslin.14 (b) The inventory of shapes and sample scenes presented during familiarization. The shape pairs used during the post-test and their underlying statistics.

The results of Saffran et al.6 and Aslin et al.7 demonstrated that 8-month-old infants could, indeed, solve the word-segmentation problem only after a short exposure to a stream of speech whose words were defined solely on the basis of statistical cues. Importantly, as the stream of speech had never been heard by the infants prior to the experiment, and half of the infants were presented with a different stream that had the opposite set of statistical cues, yet all infants learned the relevant statistics, the overall pattern of results confirms that infants relied on statistical cues in these streams of speech to solve the word-segmentation problem in the lab. These results also demonstrate that months before infants have spoken their first word, and presumably before they know the meanings of all but a handful of words, they can utilize a statistical learning mechanism to extract those chunks of syllables that are most likely to become words in the language to which they are exposed (see Samuelson and McMurray, What does it take to learn a word?, WIREs Cogn Sci, also in the collection How We Develop). Finally, these results from infants confirm that statistical learning, like other implicit learning tasks,8 is accomplished without direct evidence of

conscious hypothesis testing or feedback from a teacher who identifies the problem to be solved or the means to solve it.

Language-specific or Domain-general?

One potential implication that could be drawn from the initial work on statistical learning is that it is a special mechanism employed by humans to rapidly acquire language. If that were true, then it would have limited relevance to the more general problem of enabling the naïve learner to rapidly acquire information in the environment that is relevant for solving any task. Two lines of evidence quickly refuted the language-specificity hypothesis. First, statistical learning operates over nonlinguistic stimuli including auditory tones,9 visual shape-sequences,10 and tactile patterns.11 Second, statistical learning of speech streams is present in nonhuman species (rats) who will never acquire language.12 But statistical learning is not limited to the temporal domain.

Fiser and Aslin13 created a family of visual scenes (see Figure 2) that were composed from an inventory of visual shapes, analogous to the composition of words from speech syllables, but now in the spatial domain. By placing constraints on how the shapes were positioned in the scenes, the spatial statistics could be manipulated. At issue was whether passive viewing of a set of such multi-shape scenes, where each scene contained a subset of the shape inventory but always following the rules of shape combination, would enable adults to extract the shape combinations that were more predictable.

A post-test after the 5-min exposure phase, in which 144 different six-shape scenes were presented every 2 seconds, revealed reliable sensitivity to the more statistically coherent shape pairs. Further studies by Fiser and Aslin15 showed that this sensitivity to spatial statistics was not limited to shape-pairs, but could be extended to whatever coherent structures (pairs, triplets, quadruplets) that were present in the family of scenes. Importantly, this spatial statistical learning ability is also present in 8-month-old infants. 14,16 Coupled with the voluminous evidence of temporal statistical learning in humans for nonlinguistic stimuli as well as visual statistical learning in the spatial domain, it is now accepted that statistical learning is modality-, domain-, and species-general.

Constraints on Statistical Learning The presence of a powerful statistical learning ‘engine,’ especially early in development, provides a path toward rapid learning. But unless statistical learning is constrained, it suffers from being too powerful: learners do not have sufficient processing resources to extract and retain in memory the vast number of potential statistics that are available in the natural environment. Four types of constraints have been identified that enable statistical learning to be tractable given access to highly complex stimuli.

(1) Attention that is manipulated by overt instruction to adults serves as a powerful ‘filter’ on what information is analyzed in a statistical learning task.17,18 Although infants cannot be instructed in a similar manner, they are constrained by implicit attentional cues, such as the direction of gaze exhibited by a parent.19 Moreover, Kidd,

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Piantadosi, and Aslin20 showed that infants appear to have an implicit sense when attention is likely to lead to further information and when it is likely to be a ‘dead end,’ either because information is too simple (already known) or too complex (unknowable).

(2) Perceptual biases that enable some stimuli to be encoded more readily than others act as a powerful constraint. For example, stimuli that are presented adjacent in time are easier to associate than the same stimuli when separated by an intervening stimulus. Adults have greater difficulty learning non-adjacent statistics than adjacent statistics unless some common feature binds them together. In the musical domain, this binding is accomplished by having tones come from the same octave21 and in the speech domain it is based on category similarity (e.g., vowels vs. consonants 22,23 ).

(3) Prosody is the large-scale variation in pitch and duration that overlays the individual words in an utterance. Prosody operates in a language-specific way at the level of words by dictating patterns of strong and weak stress (e.g., baggage in English vs. baguette in French). But prosody also operates in a language-general way by partitioning sentences into phrases [e.g., (The little baby) (drank her milk)]. Shukla, White, and Aslin24 showed that 6-month-old infants use language-general prosody, which signals a ‘gap’ between the two phrases, to prevent statistics from being computed across a phrase-boundary.

(4) Primacy and Familiarity also play a role in constraining statistical learning. Gebhart, Aslin, and Newport25 showed that if adults are exposed to a single stream of syllables that had one statistical structure in the first half and a different structure in the second half, they learn the first but not the second. Even a change in the voice of the speaker is insufficient to induce adults to learn the second statistical structure unless that change in voice occurs repeatedly. 26 Familiarity also plays an important role in statistical learning. When sounds are unfamiliar, such as arbitrary noises rather than speech, adults are unable to encode them efficiently and statistical learning is prevented unless the rate of presentation is slowed considerably.27

Mechanisms, Models, and Generalization The early work on statistical learning focused on extracting structured information from the input. But a hallmark of learning is the ability to go beyond the specific input to which the learner has been exposed. This process of generalization is crucial in many domains, like language, because a learner could never be exposed to every possible input. The ability to generalize to novel exemplars that bear some similarity to exemplars that have been experienced has been referred to as a process of abstraction or rule learning.

Marcus, Vijayan, BandiRao, and Vishton28 demonstrated rule learning in 9-month-old infants by exposing them to 16 different three-syllable sequences, separated by pauses, that each conformed to a uniform pattern (e.g., ABB, AAB, or ABA; see Figure 3). After familiarization, a new set of syllables was presented in a post-test, with half of the novel syllables forming the familiar pattern and half a novel pattern. Despite the fact that all post-test strings were novel, infants discriminated the novel pattern (e.g., a shift from AAB to ABB) from the familiar pattern.

Syllable A le

wi ji

de

di

le le di

wi wi di ji ji di

de de di

Syllable B

je

le le je

wi wi je ji ji je

de de je

li

le le li

wi wi li ji ji li

de de li

we

le le we

wi wi we ji ji we

de de we

Figure 3. The design of the Marcus et al.28 experiment on rule learning in which 9-month-olds were presented with a large inventory of syllables with a uniform ABB pattern. The test items presented after familiarization were composed of entirely novel syllables that either conformed to the familiar ABB pattern or exhibited a novel AAB pattern. The Gerken29 experiment used two subsets of the overall inventory of stimuli from Marcus et al. Blue highlight = broad generalization. Red highlight = narrow generalization.

As in the case of the original findings on statistical learning, these findings on rule learning could be interpreted as unique to language, but follow-up studies showed that this form of rule learning is present in the visual modality,30,31 for nonlinguistic auditory stimuli,32 and in nonhumans.33,34 Thus, rule learning is another example of a powerful mechanism that is both domain- and species-general.

Importantly, the categorical distinction between statistical learning and rule learning may be over-emphasized. Gerken29 showed that infants tested in a paradigm very similar to Marcus et al.28 shifted their response from a broad generalization (e.g., AAB) to a narrower generalization (e.g., AA ‘ends in a specific syllable’) depending on how the learning strings were constructed (see Figure 3). Thus, infants switched from attending to ‘abstract’ patterning to attending to ‘surface’ features of the input, suggesting that rule learning and statistical learning may lie along a continuum rather than acting as discrete and separable mechanisms.

Further support for this hypothesis comes from Reeder, Newport, and Aslin35 who conducted a series of experiments with adults and varied the patterning of how often certain nonsense words were paired with other nonsense words. The structure of this patterning defined the ‘grammar’ of sentences in this artificial language. In a passive exposure phase, adults listened to several hundred sentences containing the inventory of nonsense words, and in a subsequent test phase they rated whether the sentences were grammatical, according to the rules used to generate the sentences in the exposure phase.

As expected, familiar sentences were rated as highly grammatical and novel sentences that violated the grammatical rules were rated as ungrammatical. But novel sentences that did not violate the grammatical rules were also rated as grammatical, thereby demonstrating generalization or transfer of knowledge from what adults heard in the exposure phase to novel sentences. Importantly, when the exposure phase presented sentences that had persistent ‘gaps’ in the way that certain words were not paired with other words, adults did not generalize to fill these gaps. For example, if the word ‘dax’ was

Spring 2019 The Beacon

followed by ‘lif,’ ‘neem,’ and ‘zilk,’ but the word ‘flug’ was only followed by ‘lif’ and ‘neem,’ the gap created by the absence of ‘zilk’ was judged as real and not accidental. Thus, depending on the patterning of words in sentences, adults shift the degree of generalization from an abstract rule (i.e., generalizing to novel sentences) to judging novel sentences as violating that rule (i.e., restricting generalization).

A critical issue in studies of statistical learning is the computational mechanism that enables extraction of structure and generalization to novel exemplars. It is possible that this mechanism is invariant over development, but it is also possible that new computational sub-mechanisms emerge as the overall statistical learning process expands to encompass more complex environmental input (see Oudeyer, What do we learn about development from baby robots?, WIREs Cogn Sci, also in the collection How We Develop). The original idea proposed by Saffran et al.6 was that learners rely, at least in part, on computing transitional probabilities between adjacent syllables (see Figure 1). But a variety of other models have been proposed over the past 15 years, including ones that extract ‘chunks’ of syllables using a form of discrete sampling as attention waxes and wanes,36,37 and ones that posit an implicit causal structure that generates the exemplars38 (see Frank et al.39 for a review of competing models). The causal structures approach has also been successfully applied to visual statistical learning in the spatial domain.40 Importantly, a variety of models exhibit the gradient property of generalization from specific exemplars (statistical learning) to abstract principles (rule learning) that is observed in human learners,28

including connectionist architectures41 (see review by Aslin and Newport42 ).

Acknowledgments

8. Perruchet P, Pacton S. Implicit learning and statistical learning: one phenomenon, two approaches. Trends Cogn Sci 2006, 10:233 – 238.

Preparation of this article was made possible, in part, by a research grant from NIH (HD-037082) to Richard Aslin and Elissa Newport.

What Develops?

One of the most impressive aspects of statistical learning in humans is that it appears to be functional from birth.43 – 45 Given such a powerful learning mechanism, it is seductive to conclude that there are no interesting developmental differences between the newborn and the adult. Although there is no compelling evidence for a qualitative developmental difference, there are certainly quantitative differences in how the statistical learning ‘engine’ gains access to structured information. For example, infants are notorious for having limited attentional skills, especially their ability to sustain attention.46 Infants also have limited working memory,47 have sluggish control over motor systems such as eye movements that sample the visual environment,48 and must be exposed to certain types of stimuli before those stimuli are familiar enough to be easily encoded.49 All these information-processing deficiencies limit the availability and/or quality of structured information upon which the statistical learning mechanism can operate. Thus, the development of statistical learning may be determined largely by the changes in ‘input systems’ that open a window to enable the extraction of higher-order structures that are initially ‘invisible’ because of low-level constraints. Future research on this issue will reveal how these quantitative efficiencies cascade to create qualitative changes in the organization of learning and memory systems over development.

References

9. Saffran JR, Johnson EK, Aslin RN, Newport EL. Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition 1999, 70:27 – 52.

1. Kessen W, Haith MM, Salapatek PH. Human infancy: a bibliography and guide. In: Mussen PH, ed. Carmichael’s Manual of Child Psychology, vol. 1. 3rd ed. New York: Wiley; 1970, 287 – 445.

10. Kirkham NZ, Slemmer JA, Johnson SP. Visual statistical learning in infancy: evidence for a domain general learning mechanism.

Cognition 2002, 83:B35 – B42.

2. Pavlov IP. Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. New York: Dover; 1927.

11. Conway CM, Christiansen MH. Modality-constrained statistical learning of tactile, visual, and auditory sequences. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 2005, 31:24 – 39.

3. Skinner BF. The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis.

Appleton-Century: Oxford, UK; 1938.

4. Tolman EC. Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1932.

5. Bandura A. Social Learning through Imitation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press; 1962.

6. Saffran JR, Aslin RN, Newport EL. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 1996, 274:1926 – 1928.

7. Aslin RN, Saffran JR, Newport EL. Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychol Sci 1998, 9:321 – 324.

12. Toro JM, Trobalon JB. Statistical computations over a speech stream in a rodent. Percept Psychophys 2005, 67:867 – 875.

13. Fiser J, Aslin RN. Unsupervised statistical learning of higher-order spatial structures from visual scenes. Psychol Sci 2001, 12:499 – 504.

14. Fiser J, Aslin RN. Statistical learning of new visual feature combinations by infants. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2002, 99:15822 – 15826.

15. Fiser J, Aslin RN. Encoding multielement scenes: statistical learning of visual feature hierarchies. J Exp Psychol Gen 2005, 134:521 – 537.

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16. Wu R, Gopnik A, Richardson DC, Kirkham NZ. Infants learn about objects from statistics and people. Dev Psychol 2011, 47:1220 – 1229.

33. de la Mora DM, Toro JM. Rule learning over consonants and vowels in a non-human animal. Cognition 2013, 126:307 – 312.

17. Toro JM, Sinnett S, Soto-Faraco S. Speech segmentation by statistical learning depends on attention. Cognition 2005, 97:B25 – B34.

34. Murphy RA, Mondragon E, Murphy VA. Rule learning by rats.

Science 2008, 319:1849 – 1851.

18. Turk-Browne NB, Junge J, Scholl BJ. The automaticity of visual statistical learning. J Exp Psychol Gen 2005, 134:552 – 564.

35. Reeder PA, Newport EL, Aslin RN. From shared contexts to syntactic categories: the role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes. Cogn Psychol 2013, 66:30 – 54.

19. Wu R, Kirkham NZ. No two cues are alike: depth of learning during infancy is dependent on what orients attention. J Exp Child Psychol 2010, 107:118 – 136.

20. Kidd C, Piantadosi ST, Aslin RN. The Goldilocks effect: human infants allocate attention to visual sequences that are neither too simple nor too complex. PLoS One 2012, 7:e36399.

36. French RM, Addyman C, Mareschal D. TRACX: a recognitionbased connectionist framework for sequence segmentation and chunk extraction. Psychol Rev 2011, 118:614 – 636.

37. Perruchet P, Vinter A. PARSER: a model for word segmentation.

J Mem Lang 1998, 39:246 – 263.

21. Creel SC, Newport EL, Aslin RN. Distant melodies: statistical learning of nonadjacent dependencies in tone sequences. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 2004, 30:1119 – 1130.

38. Goldwater S, Griffiths TL, Johnson M. A Bayesian framework for word segmentation: exploring the effects of context. Cognition 2009, 112:21 – 54.

22. Bonatti LL, Pena M, Nespor M, Mehler J. Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: the role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing. Psychol Sci 2005, 16:451 – 459.

39. Frank MC, Goldwater S, Griffiths TL, Tenenbaum JB. Modeling human performance in statistical word segmentation. Cognition 2010, 117:107 – 125.

23. Newport EL, Aslin RN. Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies. Cogn Psychol 2004, 48:127 – 162.

40. Orban G, Fiser J, Aslin RN, Lengyel M. Bayesian learning of visual chunks by human observers. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2008, 105:2745 – 2750.

24. Shukla M, White KS, Aslin RN. Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants.

Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2011, 108:6038 – 6043.

41. Seidenberg MS, Elman JL. Do infants learn grammar with algebra or statistics? Science 1999, 284:434 – 435.

25. Gebhart AL, Aslin RN, Newport EL. Changing structures in midstream: learning along the statistical garden path. Cogn Sci 2009, 33:1087 – 1116.

42. Aslin RN, Newport EL. Statistical learning: From acquiring specific items to forming general rules. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 2012, 21:170 – 176.

26. Weiss DJ, Gerfen C, Mitchel AD. Speech segmentation in a simulated bilingual environment: a challenge for statistical learning?

Lang Learn Dev 2009, 5:30 – 49.

43. Bulf H, Johnson SP, Valenza E. Visual statistical learning in the newborn infant. Cognition 2011, 121:127 – 132.

27. Gebhart AL, Newport EL, Aslin RN. Statistical learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies among nonlinguistic sounds. Psychon Bull Rev 2009, 16:486 – 490.

28. Marcus GF, Vijayan S, BandiRao S, Vishton PM. Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science 1999, 283:77 – 80.

29. Gerken L. Decisions, decisions: infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible. Cognition 2006, 98:B67 – B74.

30. Johnson SP, Fernandas KJ, Frank MC, Kirkham N, Marcus G, Rabagliati H, Slemmer JA. Abstract rule learning for visual sequences in 8- and 11-month-olds. Infancy 2009, 14:2 – 18.

31. Saffran JR, Pollak SD, Seibel RL, Shkolnik A. Dog is a dog is a dog: infant rule learning is not specific to language. Cognition 2007, 105:669 – 680.

32. Marcus GF, Fernandes KJ, Johnson SP. Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. Psychol Sci 2007, 18:387 – 391.

44. Gervain J, Macagno F, Cogoi S, Pena M, Mehler J. The neonate brain detects speech structure. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2008, 105:14222 – 14227.

45. Teinonen T, Fellman V, Naatanen R, Alku P, Huotilainen M. Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials. BMC Neurosci 2009, 10:21.

46. Richards JE. Attention in young infants: a developmental psychophysiological perspective. In: Nelson CA, Luciana M, eds.

Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2008.

47. Blaser E, Kaldy Z. Infants get five stars on iconic memory tests: a partial-report test of 6-month-old infants’ iconic memory capacity.

Psychol Sci 2010, 21:1643 – 1645.

48. von Hofsten C, Kochukhova O, Rosander K. Predictive tracking over occlusions by 4-month-old infants. Dev Sci 2007, 10:625 – 640.

49. Kelly DJ, Liu S, Lee K, Quinn PC, Pascalis O, Slater AM, Ge L. Development of the other-race effect during infancy: evidence toward universality? J Exp Child Psychol 2009, 104:105 – 114.

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THE ROBERT J. SCHWARTZ MEMORIAL LECTURE The Windward School

Windward Teacher Training Institute

What Basic Research on Brain and Behavior Can Tell Us About Young Children with Learning Challenges Children grow and develop rapidly, showing remarkable changes in basic skills such as language during their first years of life. Many children with delays or deficits can be identified rather easily, but the vast majority of children who will eventually show differences are difficult to diagnose early in life. Why? In this talk, Dr. Aslin will describe the basic techniques that have been developed over the past 50 years to assess the cognitive, social, and language development of young children, especially at ages when they do not yet have the ability to speak using sophisticated language. Exploring the limitations of these techniques, as well as some solutions, he will present findings on the use of brain imaging to detect problems before they manifest themselves in behavior, thereby allowing for even earlier interventions. Armed with new assessment methods, as well as sophisticated data-analysis techniques, there are exciting new prospects for altering the trajectory of development to enable children to achieve their full potential.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

RSVP online at thewindwardschool.org/lecture

Presented by

Richard Aslin, PhD Distinguished Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories Richard Aslin is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, CT. Prior to joining Haskins in 2017 he was on the faculty at the University of Rochester for 33 years, where he established the Rochester BabyLab. Dr. Aslin has published widely in several sub-areas of infant development, including perceptual and motor systems, language acquisition, and a rapid form of learning that is based on the statistics in the environment.

The Windward School Manhattan Campus 212 East 93rd Street New York, NY 10128

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Head Lines

Kindergarten Teachers to the Rescue–Please!

By Dr. John J. Russell Head of The Windward School

A

study by Sverdlov and Aram (2015) found a significant difference between kindergarten teachers’ beliefs about kindergarten and the expectations of parents and education officials. Kindergarten teachers firmly held fostering children’s positive self-esteem as the most important goal and promoting literacy and mathematics skills as the least important.

At the same time, these teachers were certain that parents and education officials regarded children’s development in literacy and mathematics skills as the most important goal.

This dichotomy is the subject of the book, Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? (Bassok, Latham & Rorem, 2016), in which the authors explain that academic pressures have trickled down into the early elementary grades. Indeed, kindergarten today has a heightened focus on academic skills and a reduction in opportunities for play. They found that, in recent years, kindergarten teachers themselves had far greater academic expectations for children both prior to kindergarten entry and during the kindergarten year.

As a result, kindergarten teachers devoted more time to literacy and math content, teacher-directed instruction and assessment, and substantially less time to art, music, science, and child-selected activities.

Not surprisingly, these kindergarten teachers often have starkly divergent perspectives about the appropriateness of this trend toward an increasingly academic kindergarten.

While the correct balance between academics and nonacademics in kindergarten is vigorously debated, no one questions the critical role that kindergarten teachers can play in maximizing the potential future success of all students, especially those with dyslexia. This reality is underscored by the work of Landerl and Wimmer (2008) who found that 70% of the students who were below-average readers in first grade were still below-average readers in eighth grade. When struggling beginning readers are identified and receive intensive instruction, however, the clear

majority of them reach the average range of reading ability (Torgesen, 2004). By identifying struggling readers, kindergarten teachers can help prevent the cascading, debilitating effects of not learning to read.

What Kindergarten Teachers Need to Know About Dyslexia Reading problems and the multitude of negative consequences that result from them can be reduced by early intervention (National Reading Panel, 2000; Schatschneider & Torgesen, 2004). Longitudinal behavioral research and neuroimaging studies confirm that the early identification of dyslexia is possible before a downward spiral of poor reading, academic failure, and debilitating anxiety and depression set in.

As early as preschool, family history of dyslexia is a valuable predictor of literacy outcomes. Children of at-risk families experience language delays as infants and toddlers, and these delays manifest themselves as phonological lags in preschool (Snowling & Melby-Lervag, 2016). At primary school age, family risk of dyslexia is associated with significantly poor phonological awareness and literacy skills (Lyytinen, Eklund, & Lyytinen, 2005). Between 40% and 60% of children with a parent or sibling with reading difficulties will have reading problems themselves (Scarborough, 1990). More recent studies have provided additional evidence of the role genetics play in reading difficulties (Truong et al., 2017).

By identifying struggling readers, kindergarten teachers can help prevent the cascading, debilitating effects of not learning to read.

Kindergarten Teachers to the Rescue When students are identified early and receive research-based instruction, the results are consistently positive (Blackman et al., 1999; Foorman et al., 1998). To benefit from the potential of early intervention success, however, the children must be recognized as soon as possible. Knowledgeable kindergarten teachers are uniquely positioned to timely identify the telltale signs that are accurate predictors of future reading problems and dyslexia.

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Large-scale studies following children from age three have reported that early language skills predict individual differences in phonological awareness and letter knowledge, which, in turn, predict reading problems (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2005; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002).

Early signs of dyslexia include delays in speech and language development, with phonological memory (nonword repetition) and expressive language (naming) skills being particularly affected (Carroll, Mundy, & Cunningham, 2014). Phonological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal working memory are the strongest predictors of literacy acquisition that can be assessed when children start school in kindergarten (Fletcher et al., 2002; Fuchs et al., 2012).

Children who show persistent problems with speech and language at school entry are at high risk of difficulties with literacy, and they require systematic intervention (Rose, 2009). Late talkers frequently use only a few words by age two, and their speech often consists of monosyllabic words, even though their development in other areas is within normal range (Lyytinen & Lyytinen, 2004; Preston et al., 2010). Late talkers are almost four times more likely to be diagnosed with reading difficulties than those children who are not late talkers (Preston, 2010).

Before they will make a diagnosis of dyslexia, however, many school districts require that students experience reading problems after receiving what is deemed to be “adequate” reading instruction.

Educators who ascribe to this inadequate construct of dyslexia still tell parents that dyslexia cannot be diagnosed until children have failed to learn to read. This usually means that students must struggle and experience failure through second or even third grade before they are identified for services that could remediate their reading challenges.

Decades of research substantiates that the “wait to fail” model

is not only unnecessary for identifying students with reading disabilities but also unacceptably damaging to their social and emotional well-being. We at The Windward School know that the earlier students receive remediation, the more effective and less costly it is. Waiting until struggling readers and dyslexics go through prolonged failure before providing them with the instruction they need and deserve takes an academic, emotional, and economic toll.

Kindergarten teachers can readily observe difficulties with phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle. Similarly, students exhibiting expressive and receptive language issues frequently stand out among their peers. Kindergarten teachers who are aware of the correlation between these difficulties and future reading problems can alert parents and school administrators.

Simply sharing these types of observations can facilitate early identification of dyslexia and prevent a downward spiral of poor reading, academic failure, and debilitating anxiety and depression for the student.

Parents in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have too often experienced an insidious resistance on the part of school officials to early identification of dyslexia.

As a result, students endure years of failure before being found eligible for special education services. Failure to facilitate early identification of students with dyslexia is to deny them their rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It is not just unethical; it is illegal, and it must stop.

Whether the goal of a kindergarten program is to promote self-esteem or to develop academic skills, kindergarten teachers have the knowledge and opportunity to rescue students from a future of academic and self-esteem struggles simply by sharing their observations with parents and administrators. In fact, they have a professional obligation to do so.

As early as preschool, family history of dyslexia is a valuable predictor of literacy outcomes.

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s announced in January 2018, Dr. Russell will step down as Head of School at the conclusion of the 2018–19 school year. He will transition to the inaugural role of Executive Director of The Windward Institute, which will launch in January 2020.

The Windward Insititute will focus on serving as a resource for both Windward teachers and external constituents (e.g., non-Windward teachers, alumni, parents, and other research and educational institutions).

In his position, Dr. Russell will be working with the Board of Trustees and the administrative team to raise greater public awareness of language-based learning disabilities, the capabilities of Windward students, and the effectiveness of Windward’s instructional program. The initiative will enhance relationships with independent and public secondary schools and expand to include colleges and universities. The Windward Institute will formalize partnerships with research institutions, such as The Windward School/Haskins Laboratories Collaborative Project (read more on page 10). Dr. Russell will continue to be a featured columnist in future issues of The Beacon.

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News Around Windward

Windward and Haskins Laboratories Announce Collaborative Project Partnership the expertise in educating The Windward School in collabchildren with one of the best oration with Haskins Laboratories educational programs to remediate has announced The Windward children with language-learning School/Haskins Laboratories Collaborative Project as part of disabilities. We all need to be speaking The Haskins Global L2 (Language the same language to produce better & Literacy) Innovation Hub, an outcomes for students by understanding international and interdisciplinary how they interact with learning collaborative that brings together environments and the ways their researchers, practitioners, educators, genes, brain, and cognition work and education technology specialists. in learning environments.”

The mission of the Hub is to improve Dr. John J. Russell, Head of School; Dr. Kenneth Pugh, President An Overview of the Initial and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories; and Sandy language and literacy outcomes for Schwarz, Director of the Windward Teacher Training Institute.

Projects of The Windward children at risk for reading difficulties School/Haskins Global across languages and cultures. Haskins Hub Collaborative Project has an 84-year history of being at This partnership will establish the forefront of interdisciplinary state-of-the-art Windward Innovation neurocognitive research, theoretical (WIRED) Research and Education development, and technological Labs at each of The Windward advances that have led to important School’s three campuses. In-school insights into understanding the brain research using neurocognitive bases of speech, language and reading measures will be conducted by problems, and their treatment.

Haskins scientists and Windward Haskin’s formal affiliations with teachers to better understand which Yale University School of Medicine, instructional strategies work best Dr. Pugh announcing the partnership to Windward faculty and the Yale Child Study Center, the for which students, a critical step staff on February 1 University of Connecticut Institute in moving toward individuated for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, brain-based instructional programs.

Cognitive and brain imaging and its extensive national and international research partnerships, research will also be carried out to improve early diagnosis of positions the Global Language & Literacy Innovation Hub to language-based learning disabilities in at-risk preschool children. efficiently impact positive changes in language and literacy skills Finally, a joint Windward/Haskins training and professional and develop scalable solutions. development program will be created for educators, clinicians, The Need for Research/Education Partnerships researchers, and other stakeholders so that critical research-toThe Hub is committed to identifying leading educational practice goals can be achieved. Dr. Pugh announced the partnership providers with whom to partner to develop future generations to Windward faculty and staff on February 1, and he will share of educational researchers, providers and leaders who understand goals of the program with Windward parents and guardians on the science of reading and language and are trained to translate April 11 and 25. The next Windward/Haskins community event is the growing research in early identification and best practice. To a lecture by the foremost expert on infant language development, that end, the Hub leadership identified The Windward School, Richard Aslin, PhD, of Haskins Laboratories, on April 9 at The one of the preeminent schools in the country for children with Windward School’s Manhattan campus. language-based learning disabilities, as a key educational partner “This partnership marks a historic moment in The Windward in promoting research and training focused on realizing their School’s 93-year history,” remarks John J. Russell, EdD, Head shared goals of improved language and literacy outcomes for all of The Windward School. “I am proud that Windward will children. be joining with Haskins Laboratories at the forefront of the “There’s an acute need for both sides of the equation to be continuing efforts to provide all students with language-based teaching each other,” says Dr. Kenneth Pugh, President, Director learning disabilities with the research-based instruction they of Research, and Senior Scientist, Haskins Laboratories. “Our need and deserve.” scientists have the research tools, and Windward teachers have For more information, visit thewindwardschool.org/wired.

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WTTI Earns Perfect Score for Multisensory Structured Language Education This fall, a team of educators representing the International of Reading. Since 2007, WTTI has been an accredited training Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC), center for IMSLEC, enabling WTTI to offer national certification visited Windward Teacher Training Institute (WTTI) for three for teachers and clinicians in Multisensory Structured Language days to review files, interview administrators and faculty members Education. WTTI is one of only 96 IMSLEC-accredited training involved in the IMSLEC process, and examine WTTI’s facilities and professional development centers located throughout the as part of the reaccreditation process for IMSLEC certification.

United States. With locations in Manhattan and White Plains, As a result of this visit and many months of preparation by WTTI WTTI’s IMSLEC training program offers extensive coursework administrators, faculty, and staff, a perfect score for reaccreditation and supervision leading to professional certification. Those who in multisensory structured language education has been granted to WTTI. No recommendations or limitations were made, and the IMSLEC report stated, “Your program is the gold standard—a model of excellence.”

The IMSLEC accreditation team was impressed by WTTI courses, presenters, curriculum coordinators, and by Windward’s classroom teachers.

In their report, they commented that everyone they interviewed and talked with shared a passion for fulfilling the school’s mission. The team felt that the teachers showed great expertise in crafting engaging and effective lessons.

Conversations with Windward faculty supported the statement that embracing Windward administrators and the IMSLEC accreditation team: Betsy Duffy, Concha Wyatt, Susan Sidel, Dr. John J. Russell, Sandy Schwarz, Georgette Dickman, and Kathy Rose. continual professional development is certainly embedded into the culture of the school. Testing and other student data were powerful in are participants in WTTI courses can be assured of the highest proving the efficacy of the program. The report concluded that quality and effective training in IMSLEC. “The School and its teacher training program has set forth a Windward Teacher Training Institute not only trains The legacy of excellence in Multisensory Structured Language Windward School’s faculty members with its IMSLEC-accredited Education.” courses and workshops, but also offers this professional developIMSLEC’s mission is to accredit quality training programs for ment opportunity to teachers and school districts around the the professional preparation of multisensory structured language world. education specialists. IMSLEC-accredited training centers meet For more information on WTTI courses and workshops, the International Dyslexia Association Standards for Teaching visit thewindwardschool.org/courses

Betsy Duffy and Lydia H. Soifer Co-Author Chapters in Multisensory Teaching Textbook Windward’s Director of Language Arts and Instruction, Betsy Duffy, co-authored a chapter titled “Composition: Evidence-Based Instruction” in the fourth edition of the textbook Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills, edited by Judith Birsh and Suzanne Carreker. Pictured are Ms. Duffy and fellow WTTI Instructor and chapter author Lydia H. Soifer, PhD, during the book publishing celebration at The Palm in New York City. The chapter authored by Dr. Soifer is titled “Oral Language Development and Its Relationship to Literacy.”

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Q&A with Inspiring Leaders in the World of Dyslexia

John Hoke Chief Design Officer at Nike In this Q&A series, we interview individuals from the dyslexia community who are influencers in their respective fields. We hope this series will provide insight into how dyslexia impacts our world and will inspire our readers to see the potential that dyslexic children today can achieve in the future.

By Stephanie Huie, Associate Director of Digital Communications & Publications

As chief design officer of Nike, John Hoke leads an international team of designers in conceiving, creating, and advancing the design ethos of the popular athletic brand. Mr. Hoke joined Nike in 1993, and he has served in several leadership capacities at the company, including his previous roles of vice president of global design, vice president of global footwear design, creative director of environmental design, and global creative director of image design. Mr. Hoke holds a BS in architecture from Penn State University, an MArch in design from the University of Pennsylvania, and an SEP MBA from Stanford University. He and his wife reside in Oregon with their three children.

To begin, how would you describe dyslexia to those who are not dyslexic?

Well, I believe that dyslexia is a gift itself. It’s a different filter.

Dyslexics have a different way of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing language, mathematics, and learning. Dyslexia provides a lens for deeper perception, which I think is a strength.

It’s just a way of viewing the world that is slightly different than how individuals who are not dyslexic might.

Did you always view being dyslexic as a gift, even when you were first diagnosed?

I was diagnosed in first or second grade. I was a slow reader, and my writing was either backwards or upside down. At the time, dyslexia was conveyed to me as a disability in how I could process information. It wasn’t always a gift because, as a young kid, you don’t want to be different. I absolutely hated with a passion when I had to read out loud in class. It was anxiety inducing because I was in a public setting, trying to quickly absorb the material in front of me, then trying to have my brain process it into words that I’m using with my speech. I would think, “What is wrong with me?” I felt stupid because I couldn’t do what everybody else could do quite naturally.

Did your diagnosis have any effect on you?

I grew up outside of Providence, RI, and my parents were able to quickly get me to see a specialist from Brown University, where they were doing cutting-edge work with young kids who were dyslexic. Right from the beginning, the people there were saying dyslexia wasn’t going to be a burden. With the support around me, with my parents and the people that helped me, I quickly realized this could give me an advantage. My advantage was through art, design, and creativity, which is lucky because that’s where I landed.

Once you knew you were dyslexic, how did you navigate beginning to learn how to read and write?

I spent a lot of time with penmanship. I had blank sheets of paper and repeated drawing the alphabet letters over and over again.

That was one of the gateways for me to drawing because I was fastidious on exactly how the letters were drawn, remembering

Spring 2019 The Beacon

exactly what they looked like graphically.

I was able to begin to look beyond just what the letter was and see the graphic, compositional beauty of the letter itself.

That’s how I got started with art and design.

Do you have other memories from your schooling experience in which you faced challenges?

One fond memory I have is from ninth grade when I had to read the Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities. We were reading at a pace of 20 pages a night with comprehension reviews the next morning, and I just could not do the reading and then comprehend it. My mother, in great spirits, ended up reading it aloud to me. As it was being read to me, it would be like watching a movie, and I could comprehend every single nuance. I was lucky; I had parents who would do anything to help me learn the material. Any time I faced challenges, the adversity was tough, but I learned that it makes you more resilient and stronger.

You extended your schooling by enrolling in the Stanford Executive Program. While you were in the graduate program, did you recognize that your dyslexia made you think differently than others?

No doubt. I just offered a slightly different perspective—let’s call it a diversity lens of the material—which was always viewed as positive. I could look at things and find subtleties that others may have missed or overlooked. I would contribute less of the empirical data and more of an emotional narrative about the marketplace, such as a consumer idea or a market opportunity.

My study group’s willingness to work with me—by analyzing our case studies by talking out loud rather than referencing the reading material–helped us land together in a better place. I find this attitude to be true at my job at Nike, too. We are a company that loves to put diverse people around the table because that creates curiosity, and curiosity is the mother’s milk of innovation, which is our advantage. Bringing different opinions to the table and honoring all those perspectives helps make you better.

Have you found technology helpful in facing challenges due to your dyslexia?

Working at Nike, I’ve had wonderful opportunities to get to know lots of business leaders. I came to know Steve Jobs pretty well. We were talking on the phone one day, and I was telling him that I would have never graduated if it weren’t for his Apple IIc personal computer. I used it for graphics, but there was a word processing product that had the spell-check feature.

If I spell-checked anything I wrote, it was almost all red! The automation removed the burden of having to sit and look up

everything in the dictionary. So, on the phone, I thanked him for building an amazing tool that helped me graduate from college.

How did you first learn about The Windward School? During your visit to the Manhattan campus with Head of School Dr. Russell last April, what was your impression of Windward?

Dr. Russell reached out to me not too long after I was featured in a New York Times article in which I shared how my dyslexia was helping me become a better leader at Nike. I met Dr. Russell uptown and had a thoroughly enjoyable visit. It was wonderful because there was a certain familiarity with these kids and their struggles, but they have the right faculty and the right discourse to help them meet their full potential as students and as kids.

I think the Windward program is an incredible unlocking of learning for the students because the burden of anxiety and shame of being dyslexic fades into the background. Instead, the kids focus on: What can I do? How high can I go?

What’s possible with my experiences, my brain, my desire, and my ambition?

That’s definitely what I saw at The Windward School.

It’s not about what the kids can’t do; it’s about what they will do, how they will contribute, and how they will have an impact. It’s not a lesser-than education; it’s just completely tailored to what their needs are. Lastly, I was struck by how many smiles I saw on the kids’ faces at Windward. They were genuinely happy, and I left the school with a big smile on my face too.

Dyslexia provides a lens for deeper perception, which I think is a strength.

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After the New York Times article was published, did other members of the dyslexia community reach out to you?

For any young people who would like to be designers or follow a career path like yours, is there any advice that you would give them?

Remarkably, I had hundreds of people contacting me saying, “Thank you for being so vulnerable to tell people in a public forum that you’re dyslexic.” I didn’t really think anything of it because it is who I am, but it did draw my attention to the fact that maybe there’s not a lot of knowledge out there around dyslexia. Since then, I’ve also visited a couple of local schools in Portland, OR that deal with dyslexia, and I’ve done fundraisers. It’s great because I get to contribute and talk to students, faculty, and parents about what it’s like to be dyslexic and what I believe that experience can be.

The advice I give all young people is this: The future is unwritten, unknown, and unpredictable. The things that you can predict are your own persistence and your own dedication to yourself, such as through your education. There is no endgame to education; the endgame is having a hunger to question and to always be curious. I’m 54 years old, and I wake up with a sense of wonder about what’s coming and what’s next.

Staying agile and adaptable is important too because the world will continue to change.

The sheer willpower of wanting to have an impact and make a difference is key for any young person, dyslexic or not.

Career-wise, it’s hard to know exactly what you want to do as a kid, but I encourage kids to challenge themselves and look at adversity as a gift, not a burden.

You have said that being dyslexic has helped you be a better chief design officer at Nike. Can you describe what your work entails and how you lead a thousand designers?

My job is to set a standard for all our creatives because we have 30 different disciplines of design, from footwear to apparel to graphics to architecture and on and on. As a leader, I motivate and inspire the group to continuously find new problems to solve and then to solve those in ways that are unique and distinctive to Nike. Another big part of my job is to help communicate the overall vision of our company from a creative perspective and to have that be an inspiration and motivation, not just for our employees but for our athletes and consumers around the world.

After having been here nearly 30 years, I still get speeding tickets driving to the office because I’m excited by the creative ideas and restless curiosity that our designers possess about every season and every year. I savor that creative spirit that our company has.

Is there something surprising about your position that most people would not expect?

I still spend a lot of my time drawing in my sketchbooks. I’m a doodler. It’s one of the ways I work out things still. I like to draw my ideas because, as I draw them, it forces me to think about the relationships of how things are built–the compositional relationships or the aesthetic. In those quiet moments, my brain is really firing because I’m synthesizing my intuition, the problem in front of me, the context of the problem, and the consumer narrative, and I’m pulling all those levers with my pen.

Can you talk about any hurdles you have encountered in the workplace due to your dyslexia?

The main challenge for me has always been trying not to hide my own dyslexia but instead find workarounds in ways that can help me. I lead a thousand designers at Nike, and I am frequently in a public setting in front of many of them. I cannot read a speech because my brain doesn’t work that way. So, I’ve had to figure out how to be a personality on a public stage to deliver big messages, without reading. My workaround is finding key words, key images, and key triggers in the speech, so I can present without having to read it word for word.

I think the Windward program is an incredible unlocking of learning for the students because the burden of anxiety and shame of being dyslexic fades into the background.

For dyslexic children, what is a message you would wish to share with them?

Dyslexia is something that we are continuing to discover as a unique gift in the world. It’s critically important for dyslexic kids to know that they must be resilient because the world is aggregated for a learner who is not dyslexic. So, you must be an advocate for yourself. Do not accept things as they are presented to you, but create change and create opportunity for yourself. Remember, if you show vulnerability, it will come back to you as a strength. The world is not The Windward School, so be resilient and self-advocate to acquire the tools you need to navigate your future and to make the greatest impact as a kid and as an adult.

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2018 Fall Community Lecture Recap

Beyond the Buzzwords of Grit and Resilience

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lthough grit and resilience are essential strengths for children to embody, these words have become buzzwords in today’s popular culture, as Jon Rosenshine and Danielle Scorrano suggested in November’s 2018 Fall Community Lecture, Beyond the Buzzwords of Grit and Resilience: The Research Behind Motivation, Performance, and Well-Being. To more than three hundred Windward community members, Mr. Rosenshine and Ms. Scorrano explored these concepts. They offered evidence from research in character, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience and outlined practical strategies for parents and educators to foster these strengths in children.

Mr. Rosenshine first presented the context and foundation of grit and resilience by identifying a theoretical framework grounded in self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002). For any person or organization to thrive, Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan have determined that three essential elements must exist: autonomy, relationships, and competence. Mr. Rosenshine also emphasized the clear distinction between grit and resilience.

Citing Angela Duckworth, he defined grit as requiring proactive strength for sticking to long-term goals and resilience as a set of responsive characteristics based on belief systems that an individual uses to interpret adversity.

Mr. Rosenshine further offered a comprehensive explanation on the crucial link between an individual’s cognitive style (Achor, 2010) and resilience cultivation based on research in positive psychology and positivity. He also highlighted the centrality of purpose for encouraging children to live more fruitful lives, and he discussed the importance of trust and interpersonal support for motivation and overall well-being.

To provide more context and research application, Ms. Scorrano outlined research about stress resilience. Parents and educators, she suggested, can create environments that integrate optimal stress through challenge and engagement, while proactively helping children to respond to and alleviate the kind of stress detrimental to development. She also clarified misconceptions and misapplications of mindset theory (Dweck, 2006). Citing the latest research by Carol Dweck, Ms. Scorrano explained the

Dr. John J. Russell, Head of The Windward School, and Sandy Schwarz, Director of the Windward Teacher Training Institute, with Danielle Scorrano and Jon Rosenshine, the 2018 Fall Community Lecture Presenters.

importance of process-oriented feedback that emphasizes the strategy, time, and effort required to either sustain goal-achieving efforts or employ alternative strategies following a setback.

At the end of the presentation, Mr. Rosenshine and Ms. Scorrano outlined practical suggestions for cultivating grit and resilience.

Parents and educators can manage environments that integrate high expectations and high support, limit distractions, and provide healthful nutrition and sleep. They can encourage children to develop a sense of purpose by supporting their commitments and giving them a voice in the passions they choose to pursue. Finally, they can model and practice a growth mindset with gratitude, positivity, and effective feedback.

While the research on fostering grit and resilience is extensive, parents and educators can build these strengths through small, intentional shifts to help children thrive both academically and personally. They can mindfully create supportive environments, understand how these strengths can be cultivated, and provide opportunities for children to take positive risks and problem solve. Most importantly, the research into grit and resilience offers insights for promoting growth and well-being in our children, in our own lives, and in our communities.

About the Presenters Jon Rosenshine is the Associate Head of School at The Windward School. He has been an educator for more than 25 years as a middle and high school English teacher and as a school administrator. His research interests include ethical leadership and character education, especially issues of motivation, grit, and resilience. Mr. Rosenshine presents grit and resilience workshops at local and national conferences and is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Danielle Scorrano is the Research Associate at The Windward School and a Middle School Teacher at Windward’s Manhattan campus. Her specific interests in research include reading and language development, executive functioning skills, grit, and resilience. Ms. Scorrano presents grit and resilience workshops at local and national conferences and is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

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Research Roundup

Key Developments in Dyslexia Screening, Language, and Intervention

By Danielle Scorrano, Research Associate and Manhattan Middle School Teacher and Annie Stutzman, Assistant Director of the Windward Teacher Training Institute

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s part of its mission, The Windward School maintains a commitment to educating the community in continued research on reading, language, child development, and best practices in teaching. Last fall, several Windward teachers and administrators attended two important conferences that shared research in dyslexia and education. In October, The Dyslexia Foundation hosted the Dyslexia and Literacy: Language Connections to Reading conference in Boston, MA, and the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) hosted the 69th Annual IDA Reading, Literacy & Learning Conference in Mashantucket, CT. Here are highlights of the latest research in dyslexia and language disabilities and the implications for educators and parents.

Two Noteworthy Dyslexia Screening Apps Provide Promising Tools for Early Identification Without effective instruction, many children do not develop the essential reading skills for academic success. As Dr. Russell states in this issue’s Head Lines article “Kindergarten Teachers to the Rescue–Please!” (page 8), research has shown that the early signs of reading difficulties can be identified well before children fail to read. Decades of behavioral and neuroimaging research supports early universal screening for all prereading children.

Did You Know?

Across the United States, student achievement data in reading portrays a grave depiction of reading education in our elementary schools. n Only

37% of fourth graders scored above proficient in the 2017 Nation’s Report Card reading assessment. Just 12% of fourth graders with learning disabilities scored above proficient in the same assessment (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2017). These results have remained stagnant over the past 15 years.

n Without

proper identification and effective remediation, reading challenges experienced by younger children could develop into more significant difficulties as students age (Stanovitch, 1986; Torgeson, 2004).

n Evidence-based

reading interventions for students with dyslexia benefit all children (Hoeft, 2018).

Advances in neuroscience and technology have enabled scientists and developers to create screeners, or interactive tablet apps, that screen and identify children who demonstrate risk factors of reading difficulties. With several in development, two noteworthy screener apps in the validation phases will soon be available.

Dr. Nadine Gaab, Research Associate and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, presented her findings on early screening and identification at The Dyslexia Foundation conference. She has conducted research to better understand the early correlates of dyslexia and reading difficulties, including a longitudinal study that investigated development in children as young as infants.

The results from this study have provided valuable insights for developing literacy assessments for the Early Literacy Screener app (Boston Children’s Hospital, 2018). Once this app is available, it will enable educators and parents to assess a child’s overall reading development and identify risk factors across eight domains (Boston Children’s Hospital, 2018; Gaab, 2018). Dr. Gaab plans to disseminate the app to educational facilities and community centers, such as preschools, libraries, and museums, in order to provide more children with access to validated screening tools (Gaab, 2018).

At the International Dyslexia Association conference, Dr. Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, Professor at University of California San Francisco and University of Connecticut, Neuroscientist at Haskins Laboratories, Director of the Brain Imaging Research Center at University of Connecticut, Director of the Hoeft Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and Executive Director of Precision Learning Center, presented her research and development of a validated interactive screening app. Creatively named AppRISE (Application for Readiness In Schools and Learning Evaluation), this universal screener app will assess the early markers of reading and other cognitive measures across thirteen domains (Hoeft, 2018). Dr. Hoeft is currently completing her validation phases with the Precision Learning Center and partner schools in California and Connecticut.

While universal interactive screener apps for prereaders may offer a promising solution in how educators and parents screen and identify at-risk readers, it is important that the app meet appropriate criteria to be effective. Dr. Gaab explained that screeners should be accessible; incorporate effective, evidence-based measures; and provide appropriate resources (Gaab, 2017). Apps from Dr. Gaab and Dr. Hoeft, for example, will provide accessible and scalable screeners that are grounded in extensive research and address key neurological markers for reading.

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Universal screening, however, is not a comprehensive solution to mitigating reading difficulties. Early identification must be followed by early, research-based intervention and remediation.

While screeners may address gaps in the identification of reading difficulties, educators also must ensure that they effectively meet the needs of these at-risk readers.

Universal Interactive Screening Apps n www.dyslexiaida.org/its-a-myth-that-young-

children-cannot-be-screened-for-dyslexia n www.bostonearlyliteracyscreener.com n www.precisionlearningcenter.org/research-app

Gaining a More Comprehensive View of Language Disorders The Dyslexia Foundation’s conference focused predominantly on screening, assessment, and intervention. Expanding upon Dr. Gaab’s presentation, Tiffany Hogan, PhD, CCC-SLP, highlighted the link between early screenings and appropriate interventions.

Dr. Hogan, Director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab and Professor of Communication Science and Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute of Health, focused on an unassuming idea: Not all poor readers are the same. In order to best serve children with learning disabilities, quality assessments must exist in order to implement explicit instruction.

In an age of so many tailored solutions, children’s education ought to be treated with this same precision.

To examine the various areas where children may struggle with reading, Dr. Hogan posed the question: What constitutes reading? Is it decoding words off a page? Or passively listening to an audiobook? Or is it more nuanced? As a complex, multitiered ability that requires practice, reading involves an integration of skills. A proficient reader must first be able to hear intricate differences in spoken language and manipulate those sounds.

That reader then must be able to assign the sounds to graphic representations in print.

Dyslexia, often referred to as a “word-reading level disability” (Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007), can result in difficulty with integrating these skills to read; however, a child may experience difficulties across different domains due to a specific reading

disability. Educators must recognize and identify these domains in struggling readers, lest they be undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.

Research from Catts, Hogan, and Adlof (2005) has compared listening comprehension and word recognition scores of poor readers in second grade to show the considerable individual differences in their strengths and weaknesses. The grouping of struggling readers that brought to light these differences follows.

Individual Differences in Struggling Readers Good Listening Comprehension + Poor Word Recognition = Dyslexia Poor Listening Comprehension + Poor Word Recognition = Language-Based Learning Disability or Mixed Reading Disability Poor Listening Comprehension + Good Word Recognition = Hyperlexia or Poor Comprehenders Good Listening Comprehension + Good Word Recognition = Nonspecific *While these guidelines provide important insights, difficulties may present along a continuum.

These individual differences present diverse educational opportunities. By identifying these distinctions, educators can deliver the most suitable instruction for each child. Assessmentinformed instruction, in conjunction with standardized screeners, results in a more sophisticated method of examining the science of reading and facilitates a greater chance for success in reading for the student.

References Boston Children’s Hospital (2018). Early Literacy Screener.

Retrieved from https://www.bostonearlyliteracyscreener.com.

Gaab, N. (2017, March). It’s a myth that young children cannot be screened for dyslexia! Examiner, 6 (1). Retrieved from https://dyslexiaida.org/its-a-myth-that-young-childrencannot-be-screened-for-dyslexia.

Gaab, N. (2018, October). The developing brain, language, reading, heredity. Session presented at the Dyslexia Foundation’s Dyslexia and Literacy: Language Connections to Reading Conference, Boston, MA.

Hoeft, F. (2018, October). Application of research to the development of a school readiness and dyslexia screener. Session presented at the 69th Annual IDA Reading, Literacy & Learning Conference, Mashantucket, CT. National Assessment of Educational Progress (2017). Reading Report Card. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.

Torgesen, J.K. (2004). Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28, 6-19.

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The Beacon Spring 2019

Alumni Profile

Samantha Coppola ’17 The Relationship Between Dyslexia and Privilege

By Stephanie Huie, Associate Director of Digital Communications & Publications

S

amantha Coppola ’17 has been passionate Samantha in her role of about the performing arts her entire life.

Ariel in Footloose at The It was not until she began to speak about Masters School in 2017 her experience with dyslexia and equitable education for all dyslexics, however, that she would give one of her most meaningful performances. She posed the thought-provoking question: If reading is a basic human right, why is it treated as a privilege?

Diagnosed with dyslexia in kindergarten, Samantha recalls her first years in school as meaningless. “It was just the place my parents dropped me off at every day,” she says. “I was so bored in class, and I couldn’t focus. I had no understanding of what was going on; it was as though my teachers were speaking a different language than me.”

Samantha would enroll at Windward in the second grade at the Westchester participated in the campus drama club Lower School. Finally able to grasp the and fondly remembers two musicals in It was a life-changing lessons taught in class, school began to which she performed during her fifthmake sense to her. experience for me to be and sixth-grade years.

“It was a life-changing experience for me “I look back on those times, and I able to go home at the to be able to go home at the end of the day am astounded by how creative we were and tell my parents something I had learned end of the day and tell encouraged to be as middle schoolers,” at school,” she recollects. “I remember that Samantha says. “Any crazy idea we wanted my parents something I the months of the year were something I to do, we incorporated it into the show. For wanted to learn so badly. In third grade, had learned at school. example, I insisted that I play a 90-year-old Ms. Lipton taught us a song to learn them. woman in fifth grade. So, Ms. Hooper Singing that song was something I was so proud to show everyone, [Windward’s current performing arts chairperson] cast that including all of my family members.” role for me because it was my dream.”

Samantha’s newfound knowledge motivated her to put more With Samantha’s completion of the Windward program after effort into her schoolwork. The educational environment at sixth grade, she outplaced to The Hackley School. Although the Windward encouraged her to reach her full academic potential. next two years of middle school were challenging, Samantha “I never felt rushed or pressured, which is unique to my kept up with her classmates and felt more engaged in her studies. educational experience and a feeling that I have not felt since She enlisted the help of a math tutor who would not only help then,” Samantha states. “Because I knew everyone else at her academically but also significantly inform her understanding Windward was going through the exact same journey with of societal misconceptions of dyslexia. dyslexia, I never felt self-conscious about reading aloud. I was Her tutor, a vice principal in a Bronx public school, inspired never embarrassed. Patience from the teachers and the other Samantha to have further conversations about dyslexia and students at Windward is so normalized. I never felt judged or equitable education for dyslexics. Curious about others’ made to think that I was different.” experiences in educational settings different from those with A sense of confidence and thirst for knowledge carried over which she was familiar, Samantha was disturbed to learn that at to the stage once Samantha moved up from fourth to fifth grade her tutor’s school dyslexic students were placed into one large at Windward’s Westchester Middle School. Samantha actively special education program. Due to the level of school funding,

Spring 2019 The Beacon

Samantha playing Joanne in The Masters School’s 2016 production of Rent

all students classified as needing special education, regardless of experience of speaking about dyslexia to teachers and elementary their disability, would be grouped together. school students at multiple private schools across Westchester “I was struck by one story about a girl who was the same County, she was one of eleven individuals chosen to present her age as me, and no one ever knew she had dyslexia,” Samantha talk, “Dyslexia: Can You Afford It?” reflects. “She didn’t know how to read or write. No school or “I wanted to give the TED Talk because it came from a mix teacher ever noticed something was wrong because she was of my own frustration with myself and my own privilege, as well moving from foster home to foster home. as the frustration that so many people don’t understand that “I remember feeling like I had every opportunity in the dyslexia is such a common and solvable issue,” shares Samantha. world because my parents could afford services and schools to “If we believe reading is a basic right, then why is it being treated teach me how to learn to read. I believe reading is such a basic as a privilege? We’ve lost so many contributors to society due to human right that it felt so unfair that some their learning disabilities combined with their cannot afford the programs they need.” lack of financial resources. With dyslexia, If we believe reading After completing middle school, Samantha we can’t afford not to afford it.” enrolled at The Masters School for high In addition to her speeches discussing is a basic right, school. During her time there, Hackley her experience as a dyslexic, Samantha then why is it being invited her to speak to their third- and also continued to take center stage in the fourth-grade students to provide an accessible performing arts. In her four years at The treated as a privilege? view of what it means to have dyslexia. She Masters School, Samantha participated in gave a speech about some of the struggles she 16 productions. She served as president faced with dyslexia, such as how she could not open a locker of the Drama Society, director, playwright, actor, costumer, and did not like to read something aloud that she had not read screenwriter, stage manager, filmmaker, and casting director before. Although most of the audience did not have dyslexia, in addition to other roles so that she could explore the broad many could relate to her challenges. spectrum of opportunities in the theatre industry. In many of these “I remember one teacher came up to me after my speech, and productions, Samantha performed alongside two close friends she was in tears because she was dyslexic, too,” Samantha says. from Windward, Laine Philipps ’18 and Dylan Douglas ’18.

“She had never told her students she was dyslexic because she Many more significant performances await Samantha’s artistic was embarrassed and afraid that she would be judged, or they and intellectual prowess as she pursues a drama degree at New would think she’s not qualified to teach. But the way I explained York University’s Tisch School of the Arts under the Atlantic dyslexia made this teacher feel proud, and she said she couldn’t Acting School. In her next two years of college, she will continue wait to tell her students that she was dyslexic. That was the best exploring where to focus her talents—acting, directing, or writing. compliment anyone has ever given me.”

Through more formal speaking engagements, Samantha also As she continued to have conversations about education for intends to further her advocacy work for dyslexic students, dyslexics, Samantha began to do more research on the economic particularly those in public schools. Hopeful that all children ramifications of raising a child with dyslexia. When The Masters with dyslexia will receive the specialized instruction they need, School announced it would host a TEDx event using the TED no matter their socioeconomic status, she will continue to be a conference form during her senior year, Samantha auditioned to vocal proponent of equitable educational opportunities for speak about the topic of dyslexia and privilege. Thanks to her dyslexics everywhere.

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The Windward School Newsletter for Educators and Parents Spring 2019

Dr. John J. Russell Head of School Jonathan Rosenshine Associate Head of School Board of Trustees 2018-19 Executive Board Ellen Bowman President Timothy M. Jones 1st Vice President Mark A. Ellman Treasurer Mitchell J. Katz Secretary Dana Canedy Arthur Ceria Thomas J. Coleman Elizabeth A. Crain Peter D’Avanzo George Davison Nicholas Finn David Friedland Alexander A. Gendzier Jeffrey Goldenberg Gregory D. Kennedy Stacy Kuhn Joseph Lorono Staci Marlowe Janice Meyer Denis O’Leary, III Jenny Price Maria Reed Eric Schwartz Jon Steingart Nicholas Van Amburg Patricia L. Wolff Devon S. Fredericks Trustee Emerita Editor Heather Pray Director of Communications Managing Editor Stephanie Huie Associate Director of Digital Communications & Publications Design The Blank Page, NYC

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