Brainduck – It is odd that Dore does not publish even basic stats leaving me to assume the drop out rate is high, at least 50%.

There would be other ways for Dore to gather useful data. Say the SAT scores for the 3 years before treatment plus the 1 year after treatment. There should be a notable improvement on an individual level and this data set could use the national average results as a baseline / control. Not an ideal study as the nay-sayers would claim any improvement is nothing to do with Dore but any sensible person would see it as good evidence.

Similar problems come up in medical research all the time, and there are well established ethical & procedural ways to deal with it. As I understand it you’d want to show that the control group was not worse off than appropriate ’standard care’. So you could have one group getting the usual school support. To control for the effects of attention, expectation, etc., you’d need some treatment taking about the same amount of time & effort.

I was reading an interesting study today on dyslexia, where they had one group using whole-word reading, one group using a phonics approach, and one with no specific reading training but instead looking at ‘classroom survival skills’ such as organisation & planning.

Until you’ve demonstrated a disproportionate advantage of one treatment it is ethical to test them – the alternative is that every child is a guinea-pig to no benefit.
Medical trials will often have a separate ethics committee who will be the only people with access to un-blinded data, so if part way through the trial one treatment is already clearly much better, the trial can be stopped & all groups given the most effective treatment.

Finances – the Welsh Assembly are having a look at SpLDs just now, & I’ve written to them suggesting that the costs of doing a big head-to-head trial over a few schools would be outweighed by the benefits of Welsh children having the most appropriate intervention after the trial is done.

It is remarkable how little is scientifically proven.

Ritalin, because it was created in the 1950s, had no evidence of its effectiveness on ADHD before doctors started prescribing it in the 80s. I’m not even sure there was any evidence that Ritalin was safe to use with children at that point.

Education is even worse. Have you ever seen a scientific study on the effectiveness of schools? Our school days and lessons are no different than 1908 or even 1808. Its seems very doubtful that when schools as we know them first came into existence that they just happened to hit on the perfect way to educate kids.

If one would look at similar treatment therapies performed by OT’s and vestibular rehab specialists, physical therapists, other types of rehab specialists, (all whom are quietly doing their work without anyone screeming down their necks that it is not scientifally-proven), you won’t find much research and/or documentation out there concerning large groups either. As one could imagine, that would be impossible. Rather, you will find more individual case studies and documentaries of the more interesting or unusual cases. Dore should be regarded as no different because of the nature of the treatment, as you so well noted.

Your work here is very well-appreciated! :-)