A host of current and soon-to-be educators heard from a renowned reading expert as part of a Literacy Suite Workshop held recently at SUNY Fredonia.
The hour-and-a-half-long discussion by Dr. David Kilpatrick was coordinated between Fredonia’s College of Education, Health Sciences and Human Services, School of Business, and Erie 2-Chautauqua-Cattaraugus BOCES.
Dr. Kilpatrick is a professor emeritus of psychology at SUNY Cortland and a New York state-certified school psychologist. He is the author of two books on reading, “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties,” and “Equipped for Reading Success.”
At SUNY Fredonia, attendees learned how word-level reading works, why some students struggle, specific skills needed for efficient word-level reading, and to identify the underlying skills that need work in struggling readers.
He also shared his expertise on reading development, broken down into three stages: letters and sounds, phonic decoding, and orthographic mapping.
“We do not remember written words based on visual memory,” he said. “It’s based on orthographic memory. There’s a difference. That letter order is familiar because I’ve seen it before.”
According to SUNY Fredonia, Dr. Kilpatrick’s presentation was made possible by the Sean Ryan Memorial Fund through the Fredonia College Foundation to support literacy education.
