A critique of Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady's "Speech perception deficits in poor readers: auditory processing or phonological coding?"

A 1997 article by Mody, Studdert-Kennedy, and Brady claimed that their studies constituted a critical test of two hypotheses concerning students with reading impairment: (a) that they experience speech-specific failure in phonological representation, and (b) they display general deficits in auditory temporal processing. From these studies, the authors concluded that their findings were consistent with the first hypothesis but were not in agreement with the second. A critical analysis of the Mody et al. article leads to the conclusion that it makes no contribution to that debate because (a) the children in the Poor reading group did not meet the accepted reading-impairment criterion of being delayed by at least 1 year in their reading skills, (b) there were severe violations of statistical assumptions, and (c) their conclusions were based on the failure to find significant differences, thus compelling them to accept the null hypothesis as proven, in the absence of any statistical power analysis.     

Public library consumer health information pilot project: results of a National Library of Medicine evaluation

In October 1998, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) launched a pilot project to learn about the role of public libraries in providing health information to the public and to generate information that would assist NLM and the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) in learning how best to work with public libraries in the future. Three regional medical libraries (RMLs), eight resource libraries, and forty-one public libraries or library systems from nine states and the District of Columbia were selected for participation. The pilot project included an evaluation component that was carried out in parallel with project implementation. The evaluation ran through September 1999. The results of the evaluation indicated that participating public librarians were enthusiastic about the training and information materials provided as part of the project and that many public libraries used the materials and conducted their own outreach to local communities and groups. Most libraries applied the modest funds to purchase additional Internet-accessible computers and/or upgrade their health-reference materials. However, few of the participating public libraries had health information centers (although health information was perceived as a top-ten or top-five topic of interest to patrons). Also, the project generated only minimal usage of NLM's consumer health database, known as MEDLINEplus, from the premises of the monitored libraries (patron usage from home or office locations was not tracked). The evaluation results suggested a balanced follow-up by NLM and the NN/LM, with a few carefully selected national activities, complemented by a package of targeted activities that, as of January 2000, are being planned, developed, or implemented. The results also highlighted the importance of building an evaluation component into projects like this one from the outset, to assure that objectives were met and that evaluative information was available on a timely basis, as was the case here.