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DSF conference – Day 2

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Here’s a sample of interesting things from Day 2 of the DSF Language Learning & Literacy conference. There were many other interesting sessions, and a great trade display, but I couldn’t get to everything.

Building environments that cultivate strong minds

Dr Tara Thiagarajan of Sapien Labs gave what I thought was the standout keynote of the conference. She talked about mind health as the emotional, social and cognitive capacity to navigate life’s challenges and function productively. She shared international research showing dramatically declining mind health in younger people in wealthy countries. Young adults in sub-Saharan Africa now have better mind health than young people in Australia, NZ/Aotearoa, the UK and the US. The red on pie charts above means ‘distressed/struggling’, blue is ‘succeeding/thriving’. Key contributors are smartphones, ultra-processed food, sedentary lives, disintegrating social bonds, and plastics and plasticisers, see this short video. The combined effect of these five factors explains 80% of the increase in distress. Kids need less screen time, fast food and plastic (no hot food in plastic!), and more outdoor time, sport and IRL relationships.

High-repetition reading/spelling games

The four pillars of learning according to Stanislas Dehaene are attention, active engagement, error feedback and consolidation. Disguising work as fun helps kids pay attention and engage. My colleague Elle Holloway is great at gamifying therapy activities, giving kids enjoyable, motivating, high-repetition practice of therapy targets, and giving us plenty of opportunities to provide corrective feedback.

Elle and I presented a workshop about our games targeting phonemic awareness, phonics, set for variability, syllabification and morphology. Attendees played a range of these games, and took home samples.

Is studying a foreign language good for maths?

Curtin University researchers studied PISA 2018 data to find out whether studying a foreign language is related to maths achievement. They found that sustained, culturally enriched foreign language instruction has a significantly stronger association with maths scores than extra maths time. It should be seen as a crucial partner to STEM subjects, not a competitor for teaching/learning hours.

Prewriting intervention

Occupational Therapist Berenice Johnston of Curtin University discussed a pilot RCT into the effectiveness of her Peggy Lego prewriting intervention. All the children’s prewriting skills improved, but there wasn’t a significant difference between the children doing Peggy Lego and the control group. Too many studies with results that surprise/disappoint the researcher aren’t talked about, so I thought this was impressive.

Creating supportive learning environments

Stuart Kime from Evidence-Based Education in the UK gave a keynote about creating learning environments that are high in trust, support, challenge and expectations. This means they draw on the best of both ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ educational ideas. His free, downloadable Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review outlines four priorities for teachers who want their students to learn well:

• understand the content and how it is learnt
• create a supportive environment
• manage the classroom
• activate students’ thinking

Reading fluency

Prof Kathy Rastle of Royal Holloway University, London said we need to read at 90+ Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) to begin to understand what we read. Children should read at 110+ WCPM by the end of primary school, but many English kids can’t. The strongest 25% of readers in England are almost as fluent at the start of primary school as the weakest 25% at the end of primary school (Hilton et al 2024).

Fluency means accurate, automatic reading with appropriate stress and intonation, not just reading fast. Fluency frees up cognitive resources for comprehension and enjoyment. To become fluent, kids need to read aloud often at school, rehearsing and performing texts, and discussing what they read. Prof Rastle’s slides for this talk are here, and include links to UK Research Schools’ classroom videos, and the free Unlocking Reading online training for secondary teachers.

Preservice teachers use of the Reading Ready program

SOLAR Lab researchers have also been investigating the feasibility of preservice teachers using the Reading Ready program by US Professor Katie Pace-Miles for 1:1 intervention with struggling readers in their first two years of school. 49 children in 2 schools were involved, and preliminary student data collected using DIBELS and MOTIF assessments are promising. Useful information has also been gathered about the practicalities of scaling up this intervention.

Early writing – from scribbles to sentences to stories

Drs Alison Madelaine and Anna Taylor from MultiLit discussed AERO’s summary of NAPLAN writing development data showing student achievement in writing has declined, and AERO’s writing instruction literature review, showing teaching writing is very complex. They are developing an InitialWrite explicit writing instruction program for F-2 which includes work on sentence construction and combining, a Daily Sentence, and other high-impact practices as described in AERO’s writing Practice Guides. It aligns with InitiaLit, is currently being piloted and will be available later this year (for F-Yr1) and in 2027 (for Yr2).

Tomorrow: Day 3 (the last day of the conference)

Alison Clarke