Perceptual Learning

Perceptual Learnng.

            Perceptual Learning has taken place when learning has occurred by exploiting the brain’s phenomenal natural ability to perceive patterns and relationships within a complex mass of visual and auditory information. The opposite of perceptual learning is rote learning.

            In order to read well, it is necessary to have acquired mastery of the grapheme- phoneme correspondences. It is not important HOW these have been acquired; only that they have been acquired.    Most infant classes ‘teach’ these forty-four correspondences using commercial ‘phonics’ exercises.    Key Stage 1 and 2 tests show that this rule-learning, training strategy is successful with some 80% of children, very similar to the outcomes of all previous strategies. A perceptual learning strategy avoids direct instruction of sound/symbol correspondences and relies instead on the brain’s ability to perceive these intuitively within routine experience of reading.  

            The most important feature of any teaching strategy is its success rate and we know from extensive national curriculum data, that the ‘success rates’ of most initial teaching approaches is about 80%.    The only strategy for which there is no formal data is the wholly natural approach that is perceptual learning and it is this fact which has prompted my research. Since it would not be possible for me to convince entire schools to adopt perceptual learning as their exclusive initial teaching strategy, I have had to focus my efforts on the 20% or so of children who have failed to acquire good literacy skills by whatever teaching approaches they happen to have been subjected to

            Over several years I developed and published an Electronic Library which made it possible for even the most vulnerable readers to gain lots of reading experience without adult supervision or intervention.  The impact of this 300 title library was so encouraging that I am able to confidently claim that many thousands of children who would otherwise have been consigned to the dustbin of illiteracy became literate and many teachers will be able to support this claim.

            I put a pilot project in place for the 2010/11 academic year which involved the Year 6 pupils in six schools, focusing primarily though not exclusively, on their vulnerable readers.  When the Key Stage 2 results were published, virtually every child for whom Level 3 English had been predicted, in fact achieved Level 4. The only exceptions were two children who had very specific learning difficulties. A Staffordshire primary school predicted that nine of their children would only achieve Level 3; in fact all nine achieved Level 4.   A large Norfolk junior school predicted that 75% in each of two classes would achieve only Level 3.   The class which did not use the perceptual learning strategy did in fact achieve 75% as predicted. The class which used the perceptual learning strategy achieved 100%.  In one Croydon primary school, not only did their KS 2 English results improve but the percentage achieving Level 5 increased very dramatically. After the project they spontaneously commented “ I would like to say ‘thank you’ for your inspirational idea to help children improve reading comprehension and hopefully give them a better love of different text and encourage them to read more.”    A Roman Catholic primary school in Lancs predicted only a 52% ‘pass rate in English. They in fact achieved a 92% pass rate with 45% at Level 5!  Needless to say, all six schools which took part in the pilot study are now committed to this approach and are using it across the entire school. These schools are now in a position of setting themselves a target in which virtually all children will achieve Level 5 English.  Their 2012 KS2 results will indeed be interesting!

            Encouraged by this success, I put together a larger sample of schools for the 2011/12 academic year and the early indications are that the results achieved in the pilot project will be repeated in this more credible sample.   Satisfying as this is, I am of course aware that literacy deficits should be resolved long before Year 6 and I am encouraging participating schools to start using the approach in Year 3.  I know that many are doing so.    Beyond that I developed a Perceptual Learning resource package for Year 2 children and succeeded in securing the co-operation of over twenty schools spread across the UK.  This project was designed simply to gauge the impact of this natural strategy on children judged by their teachers to be non or near-non readers. This is a limited intervention which started in January 2011 and will run until the end of June at which point I will expect teachers to complete a research proforma which hopefully will provide some indication of the effectiveness or otherwise of perceptual learning on such vulnerably young readers. I am developing an inexpensive application for the iPad based on the perceptual learning strategy which will become generally available in June 2012.

            I regard perceptual learning as more appropriate in an educational setting than the rote-learning, training strategies whose exponents go so far as proposing that the use of any alternative initial reading teaching strategies should be forbidden and that schools should deny children access to books until they have mastered the grapheme-phoneme correspondences.  Such a proposal in the absence of any respectable proof of effectiveness is frightening and completely unprofessional, especially in the light of the well established fact that the greatest changes in the human perceptual systems occur in infancy.

When each of the ‘euraka strategies’ which teachers have had foisted on them over the past seven decades failed to deliver universal literacy, their exponents always adopted the common fallback position of blaming teachers for not using them properly. Perceptual Learning has no need either for scapegoats or for proof of its effectiveness.  It is after all, the potency of perceptual learning that has enabled human beings to become the most dominant species in the universe.

            It is unacceptable that some 100,000 children should leave school every year unable to read or write confidently when there is a readily available means of avoiding this.  A society which expects its teachers to secure a good standard of literacy for all of its children must accept the responsibility for providing them with the means of achieving this objective.

Eddie Carron