In spite of demonstrating average to above average intelligence, the students of concern were reading well below age and grade expectations. Also, while all read at levels below those typical for their tested IQs, few of her students could be considered unintelligent, and many were highly intelligent. In fact, their intelligence was often responsible for what reading and math skill they did acquire, by permitting them to develop a variety of tactics which simulated reading behaviour, despite their real, fundamental, disabilities.

Dr. Cooper noticed that visual memorization, subtle extrapolation of meaning from context or syntactical setting, and reference to illustrations were some of the ways in which her students were managing to extract meaning from written words without being able to read in the normal sense.

What all of these individuals had in common were significant problems with decoding individual words, or more basically - deciphering the series of sound/letter combinations, with either accuracy or automaticity. As a result, they experienced reading, at whatever skill level they had managed to attain, as a laborious chore.

The inability to phonetically encode and decode became a prominent pattern amongst her students despite having already been exposed to a wide variety of other phonologically-based programs.

Similarly, individuals struggling with math also could not go forward in spite of working through problems in the traditional methods.

Over eighteen years of subsequent development, the dEcode™; method was formulated and refined. It is a method that develops confidence through learning how to learn.