Education

 

Improved Woodcock Reading Mastery Scores

Infinity Walk Topics
For K-12 Instructors

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Improved Reading Scores
Scientific Brain Exercise

The benefits of a K-12 Infinity Walk program are always specific to what the educator includes in the Infinity Walk practice.”

While facilitating Infinity Walking, the educator is continually active in using their expertise to customize the Infinity Walk method to each student’s needs. The benefits of an Infinity Walk program are always specific to what the educator or clinician includes in the Infinity Walk practice. This reason for this may be more obvious in health care because it is easier to observe Infinity Walk’s direct impact on the physical body than on mental processes. For instance, Infinity Walking while looking at the floor would not be a good use of the Infinity Walk method as an ocular-motor exercise.  However, adding a visual focal point at the correct “point of sensory focus” (Sunbeck, 2002, pp. 53, 93-94) turns Infinity Walking into an excellent vision therapy exercise that is recognized by occupational therapists and developmental optometrists. The same is true for educational uses of Infinity Walk. What is added to a student’s Infinity Walk practice should be based on specific goals and desired outcomes.

Woodcock Reading Mastery Scores Before and After Infinity Walk Training

Close examination of the raw data from two sub-categories of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests helps to clarify what educators can expect from Infinity Walk training, based on how they design the intervention. The pre-post scores reflect changes in reading readiness (visual-auditory learning) and word identification (visual, phonetic and risk-taking) accomplished over weekly individual sessions during  summer vacation. Improvements were very highly significant for reading readiness. These students had all been referred by a Learning Disability Association and had much room for improvement in learning-readiness skills that are integral to Infinity Walk training. Hence, both Infinity Walk and the students did very well when put to this challenge.

In contrast, word identification change scores were less dramatic, because these skills are not automatically built into Infinity Walking and the students were given no extra help with phonics or word-decoding as part of their Infinity Walk training experience. When looking at just the older students’ scores, however, they did show significant progress in word identification. This may be explained by increased risk-taking as a result of improved self-esteem, combined with more years of visual exposure to written words, which were now being looked at with renew motivation. (Risk-taking is represented in the word identification scores.)

 

VISUAL-AUDITORY LEARNING (READING READINESS)

Student

Actual Grade

Pre-Test
Grade Level

Post-test
Grade Level

 

 

 

 

1

4.9

K.8

15.3

2

5.9

3.0

11.3

3

5.9

6.2

16.9

4

5.9

11.3

16.9

5

5.9

15.3

16.9

6

9.9

6.2

11.3

7

10.9

5.0

16.9

8

10.9

16.9

16.9

 

WORD IDENTIFICATION (VISUAL, PHONETIC AND RISK-TAKING)

Student

Actual Grade

Pre-Test
Grade Level

Post-test
Grade Level

 

 

 

 

1

4.9

2.5

3.2

2

5.9

4.0

4.1

3

5.9

6.1

8.1

4

5.9

4.4

4.0

5

5.9

7.1

7.8

6

9.9

12.9

16.3

7

10.9

8.7

13.5

8

10.9

8.1

12.0

All pre- and post-testing by Shelly Hassall, NY Cert. Special Education; tested 6/93 and 9/93.

 

NEXT TOPIC: Infinity Walk: Not a Quasi-Scientific “Brain Exercise”

To learn more about introducing Infinity Walk to preschoolers, the companion video to the 2002 text, The Complete Infinity Walk: BOOK I The Physical Self is recommended

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