LiPS
Good Evidence of Relative Effectiveness
Summary: LiPS has been the subject of a number of educational studies, as well as some neurological studies. So far I have reviewed 5. Of these, ~80% had at least one measure where LiPS had a statistically significant positive result. However one study (20%) had at least one follow-up measure where the program performed worse than controls. Overall, the results are largely positive, but keep in mind that this is largely an articulation and phonemic awareness program, with phonics and decoding included toward the end of its scope and sequence.
I still have more studies to review.
LiPS: Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Research
(formerly Auditory Discrimination in Depth - ADD )
Lindamood-Bell has three core programs which target different aspects of reading. LiPS is its phonemic awareness and phonics strand which addresses things from a primarily auditory and articulation perspective. Seeing Stars approaches phonics and phonemic awareness using visualization techniques, and Visualizing and Verbalizing focuses on reading comprehension via visualization and schema building. Given that the programs are very different, I will keep them separate in this analysis. Here, I only discuss the research on LiPS. This program focuses primarily on articulation, phonemic awareness, and some decoding. In terms of intervention time, it is of middling length, and usually done in a burst of intensive intervention over the course of just a few months (20-100 hours).
Gunn 1996 (alt link) found that 20 hours of small group LiPS (then called ADD) intervention for readers with poor phonological awareness did not significantly improve reading measures compared to a control group who were given basal reader instruction. None of the students were able to reach average grade level on these measures. The researchers highlighted a high degree of variability in the results. That is to say, the intervention seemed to help some students quite a lot, and other students not much at all. This sort of result could suggest many things, including perhaps, that the intervention targets a specific underlying weakness which not all students share. This would not be surprising given that the intervention is designed to specifically emphasize phonemic awareness and articulation. Meanwhile Kutrumbos 1993 studied an adapted version of LiPS and found that when combined with an OG-derived phonics approach, the hybrid program had a significant impact on student decoding ability after 45 hours of instruction. Torgesen 2001 studied two interventions with students who had severe reading disabilities (the lowest 2%), and found that students receiving LiPS (then called ADD) instruction saw statistically significant growth in reading outcomes including word attack and word identification, though not reading rate. While students were still below average in reading rate at the end of a 2-year follow up, their decoding, accuracy, and reading comprehension were all in the average range. Pokorni et al 2004 carried out a small study of 54 students which examined the impact of three different interventions: LiPS, Earobics, and Fast ForWord. After a 4 week (60 hour) intervention, those who received the LiPS intervention performed significantly better than the other groups on phoneme blending measures, and also had higher PA gains, though the difference was not significant. All effect sizes were large. On a 6-week follow-up, this was not found to transfer to significant improvement on other reading posttests. While the intervention was associated with improvements on segmenting and blending phonemes and nonsense word reading, there appeared to be negative impacts on real word reading and passage comprehension with the intervention (Sidenote: this is perhaps unsurprising, given that the intervention was abbreviated and primarily taught phonemic awareness and letter-sounds, with "little exposure to decoding"). Toregesen et al 2010 examined two interventions: LiPS and Read, Write, Type (RWT). Both interventions are built on similar theories of reading. They were compared to a business-as-usual control. In two schools the control classrooms used Open Court. After approximately 80-84 hours of intervention, both the LiPS intervention and the Read, Write, Type interventions had substantial impacts. Unsurprisingly, given their similaritites, the two intervention programs had similarly positive results across the board. The interventions moved the students' average scores on two key measures from far below average to above average: from the 16th to the 73rd percentile on word reading accuracy and from the 5th to the 77th for decoding. Control students also improved but were only able to reach the 50th percentile. Both LiPS and RWT had significantly higher positive impacts compared to controls in all measures: in word accuracy, word reading fluency, nonsense word reading, nonsense word fluency, phonological awareness, reading comprehension, and spelling. Effect sizes were mostly moderate, though some approached large.
One study of LiPS meets What Works Clearinghouse Standards, and based on the evidence from this study, WCC rates LiPS as Potentially Positive. Similarly, Evidence for ESSA found that it had promising evidence and a moderate to strong effect size.
My takeaway? On its own, LiPS is a unique program which focuses heavily on articulation of sounds and phonemic awareness without letters, as well as some phonics. It’s an older program. Given that we now know it is best to do phonemic awareness activities WITH letters, the theoretical basis for some aspects of LiPS is a bit shaky. That said, phonemic awareness is important, and for some children, articulation exercises may be the exact intervention which helps them to distinguish sounds. LiPS did have statistically significant positive impacts in several of the studies. However, it performed no better than another phonics intervention in two studies and in another study, it was integrated with phonics exercises. There is some indication that due to its sequential design, LiPS may solve PA issues but not always phonics issues when the program is not done in its entirety. It also does not incorporate passage reading. Of note: LiPS has also been extensively studied in the neuroscience literature. While I have not had a chance to include these studies yet, I know that some of them (e.g. Simos 2002) have had very good results. Stay tuned.
For students who need a heavy amount of articulation practice and PA work, LiPS activities may be just the thing, but alone, this may not help all students and it seems wise to pair it with a full phonics and reading program, or choose a program that has these more deeply integrated. The Lindamood-Bell approach might use their Seeing Stars and Visualizing and Verbalizing reading comprehension program as followups. But these would add a lot of time onto the intervention sequence.
Research Studies:
Return to the Know Your Options Table of Contents
This Research Summary is a work in progress.
Leave me a comment if you know of other studies that I could include!
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