01 NRDC Dyslexia 1-88 update - Texthelp

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Research Report
dyslexic speakers of English as a first language. All took place in the USA. They are listed in
Table 2 below. It will be seen that most cells in the table are empty and that only three papers
report findings from studies in which the participants were not university students. Part of the
explanation for this is NRDC’s decision to include only studies published in peer-reviewed
journals (because these are likely to be the best-conducted studies); part is the decision to
include only studies that are explicitly and unquestionably concerned with developmentally
dyslexic adults (as opposed to ‘ordinary’ poor readers whose problems are largely if not
exclusively attributable to environmental circumstances) and part is the very great difficulty,
already noted, of designing robust evaluations in adult literacy acquisition.
Table 2. Selected intervention studies with adult dyslexics
Type of Study Adult Dyslexics Adult Dyslexics
in Higher Education in Further Education
and the Community
Randomised controlled trial — —
Matched groups — —
Single-group, pre/post-test Kitz & Nash (1992) Elkind et al. (1996),
Elkind et al., Studies 1,2, 3 and 4
(1996), Studies 1 and 2
Single group, post-test only — —
Multiple-baseline, unmatched Guyer & Sabatino (1989) Geiger et al. (1992)
groups Guyer et al. (1993)
Higgins & Zvi (1995)
Non multiple-baseline,
single-case studies — —
Observational single-case studies — Migden (1990)
The decision not to review intervention studies from the informally-published ‘grey literature’
was carefully considered. Such studies are typically the work of zealous but naïve investigators;
their methods are often flawed and their findings may be unsafe. While the peer review
process itself is not perfect, since seriously-flawed studies appear from time to time in peerreviewed
journals, it is a reasonable assumption that papers published in this way are the most
appropriate to analyse. The converse assumption holds for the grey literature.
Evaluation studies need to satisfy demanding criteria in order to meet the needs of
policy-makers.
There appear to be no studies in this field with specifications that would justify the use of
their findings as a basis for national policy.
Intervention studies on adults with dyslexia
A multisensory alphabetic phonetic approach with college students (Guyer & Sabatino, 1989).
This study sought to determine whether learners would make more progress with an
adaptation of the Orton-Gillingham approach than if they were taught by a ‘nonphonetic’
approach or not taught at all. The participants were thirty students aged between 17 and 24