Intensive reading instruction can fundamentally alter the brain wiring of struggling readers, according to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University.

"Any kind of education is a matter of training the brain," said Marcel Just, senior author of the study, which will be published in the journal Neuropsychologia. "When poor readers are learning to read, a particular brain area is not performing as well as it might, and remedial instruction helps to shape that area up."

Specifically, that area of the brain is the left parietotemporal region, which controls the mapping of printed words to sounds. Before the reading instruction, the poor readers tested in the study had less blood flow in that region than good readers did.

But after receiving 100 hours of intensive remedial reading instruction, brain activity in that area increased significantly for the poor readers. The changed brain activity persisted even a year after receiving the instruction.

"To have something that is so concrete in terms of a measurement of a child's ability and the change in the brain is ground-breaking," said Donna Durno, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit. "It says to teachers, 'Yes, what you're doing, we can see concretely is making a difference.' "

The study tested 25 fifth-graders in Allegheny County schools participating in the Power4Kids Reading Initiative. That initiative, funded by the Haan Foundation for Children and done in cooperation with the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, gave each child reading instruction in one of four programs: Spell Read Phonological Auditory Training, Corrective Reading, Wilson Reading and Failure Free Reading.

Initially, the CMU study intended to test, using brain imaging, which program worked most effectively. Ultimately, however, the sample size was too small to draw conclusions between different programs.

All four approaches -- some based in phonics and some in whole language instruction -- seemed to be effective in improving reading performance, said Dr. Just, director of CMU's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging.

The emerging area of science of using brain research to improve education, known as "neuro-education," does have the potential to determine the most effective teaching methods, he said, possibly resolving the decades-old "reading wars" over phonics versus whole language instruction.

"It's absurd to have wars about things that have scientific answers," he said.

During the study, the children were tested using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were reading sample sentences. In order to test reading comprehension, the children had to indicate whether the sentences such as "the girl closed the gate" and "the man fed the dress" were sensible or nonsense.

To make the children comfortable with being inside an MRI machine, researchers first constructed a model machine and let the children play inside it.

Though poor readers had decreased brain activation in the parietotemporal region compared to good readers, they actually had more activation in the medial frontal cortex. Dr. Just speculated that that activity was a result of the poor readers "strategizing and problem solving" to figure out words that they had trouble reading and putting them in context.

"We're getting a grip on this like nobody's ever had before," said Dr. Just. "We are at the beginning of a new era of neuro-education."