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Dyslexia diagnosis

Term “Dyslexia” Not Used In Schools Per Federal Guideline Adopted by Florida

Nov 05, 2013

Panama City- Dyslexia makes it very difficult for children to read, write, and spell. According to the National Institutes of Health, it’s the most common learning disability in our country, so it might surprise you to learn that Florida Public Schools don’t use the term at all.

Just a few months ago 8-year-old Jakob Nelson couldn’t identify letters or numbers. “His problem was so huge he could not take pictures and keep them in his head of letters and numbers,” said Paula Nelson, Jakob’s mom. Now he’s reading. But the journey to get here hasn’t been easy.Why won't schools use the term dyslexia?

“After his Pre-K experience 13 people were ready to put him on a different track rather than regular ed. We stopped it and said not yet, we have much more to offer him and research before that happens. We found someone to test him and identify his major problem being dyslexia with a normal IQ,” said Paula.

The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook that healthcare professionals use to diagnose patients, dropped the term dyslexia when they published a revised edition in May. Now it includes the same title school districts use, “Specific Learning Disorder with Reading Impairment.” Dyslexia is noted as an alternative term, but does not have it’s own heading. “We never use that word in the school system,” said Bay District School Psychologist Dr. Mimi Bozarth. “Dyslexia is a medical term, a medical diagnosis. In the school system we use educational categories. The child has the same problem, we call it something different,” she explained.

The state says the terms are interchangeable. The Nelson family disagrees. Failing to recognize or regard a dyslexia diagnosis has dire consequences for the child’s future.  “Specific testing and intervention therefore is not complete and not individualized at times for those students,” said Paula. “C’s are the goal standard. If the child is making at least C’s then the teacher, and we have excellent teachers in the district, we’d most likely accommodate that child’s needs but that child would not qualify for an individualized education plan,” said Dr. Bozarth.

The Nelson’s would like to see the district use different curriculum to address a dyslexia diagnosis specifically and are trying to rally other parents for change. “It’s just like the parents of kids with autism. That is how they made a breakthrough and had a difference made for specialized intervention for their children,” said Paula.

In the meantime, they’ve hired a retired teacher to teach Jakob at home. They hope to one day return him to a normal classroom.

If you think your child might be dyslexic there are many resources on the web to help identify symptoms and how to address them, we’ve created a list for you.

And if you think your child might have a learning disability, you can request they be evaluated by the district. After they complete the response to intervention process, if the child is eligible, an individual educational plan will be developed.

http://www.wjhg.com/home/headlines/Living-with-Dylexia-230720031.html

 

Lazy Is NOT A Diagnosis – Clues To “Lazy” Students

recently sat down with the parents of a high school student who has managed to barely get by in school. When we finished an in depth testing process we discovered he has a serious learning disorder. His parents told me with aching regret, that in the past, they had punished their son and taken things away because they had been told that his poor performance in school was due to “laziness and a behavior problem.”

Have you ever seen one of these kids that look lazy?

Maybe they always have their head on the desk. Others just never seem to be able to get started. Or maybe they just seem tired all the time, moving slowly, working slowly, barely able to muster any energy until it’s time for recess, P.E., or lunch. When asked about homework, they might say they didn’t have time, or didn’t have the right book, or maybe even say they just didn’t feel like doing it.

When teachers have gone “above and beyond,” done all they can do and the student doesn’t appear to be trying, lazy is often the only obvious conclusion left.

What we know about students is that if they could do the work, they would do it.

Not doing work is really embarrassing, and no student wants to be embarrassed.

So what is it with these lazy-like kids? A Learning Disorder usually has its root in one or more areas of inefficient processing or thinking, which are interrupting expected academic development.

Believe it or not, the developmental foundation for learning begins in utero. There is a developmental continuum that depends on each skill/ability building on the group that develops before it. If there is interference in this development, even at the earliest levels, it can affect school performance.

Let’s take a look at just one of these interferences.

Primitive Reflexes
The Central Nervous System is the control center for all development and learning. Its job is to facilitate a person’s ability to move well, speak fluently, play, and develop skills for living and learning.

Primitive survival reflexes, or automatic movements that occur without thinking, begin as early as 9 weeks in utero and are fully present at birth. These reflexes are necessary to help the baby with the birth process and with survival during the early months of life.

As the nervous system and the brain continue to develop after birth, new neurological connections are made and higher functions in the brain take over. The primitive reflexes are no longer needed and in fact, get in the way of the child’s thinking and learning if they remain active.

Remember, these reflexes are automatic (like a baby becoming startled or grasping your finger). They occur without thought.

Efficient learning depends upon more complex voluntary controlled movements and higher thought processes, so primitive reflexes need to become integrated and inactive. This should occur naturally by about 9-12 months of age.

When primitive reflexes are retained, they can cause neurological interference that affects motor control, sensory perception, eye-hand coordination, and thinking, producing anxiety and causing the person to have to work too hard and with less efficiency than would be expected. This is called neuro-developmental delay.

Dr. Lawrence J. Beuret, M.D., of Palatine, Illinois has developed an NDD checklist, clues that a delay may be occurring, which includes these risk factors:

Pregnancy and Birth:

  • Complications with pregnancy, labor,or delivery
  • Low birth weight (less than 5 pounds)
  • Delivery more than 2 weeks early or late
  • Difficulties for infant at birth: blue baby, difficulties breathing, heavily
  • Difficulties for infant at birth: blue baby, difficulties breathing, heavily bruised, low Apgar scores, distorted skull, jaundice

Infancy:

  • Feeding problems in the first six months
  • Walking or talking began after 18 months
  • Unusual/severe reactions to immunization
  • During first 18 months: Illness involving high fever, delirium, convulsions

Family History:

  • Reading/writing difficulties
  • Learning disorder
  • Motion sickness
  • Underachievers

The following learning challenges can be related to neuro-developmental delay:

  • Dyslexia or Learning Difficulties, especially reading, spelling and comprehension
  • Poor sequencing skills
  • Poor sense of time
  • Poor visual function/processing skills
  • Slow in processing information
  • Attention and concentration problems
  • Inability to sit still/fidgeting
  • Poor organizational skills
  • Easily distracted and/or impulsive
  • Hypersensitivity to sound, light, or touch
  • Poor posture, coordination, balance, or gait
  • Poor handwriting
  • Clumsiness/accident prone
  • Slow at copying tasks
  • Confusion between right and left
  • Reversals of letters/numbers and midline problems
  • Quick temper/easily frustrated/short fuse
  • Can’t cope with change/must have things a certain (their) way
  • School Phobia
  • Poor motivation and/or self esteem
  • Depression, anxiety or stress

Behavioral, self esteem and motivational problems are associated with this list.

Core Learning Skills Training
Movement is an integral part of learning. The kinds of movements needed for learning are intentional and controlled. For example, visually following an object with the eyes, holding a pencil, moving the mouth to form sounds and words, or kicking a ball all require intentional control of the muscles. According to Dr. Samuel Berne, O.D., “when this neurological control of the muscles follows an unconscious reflex instead of following intention, the movement pattern becomes confusing instead of becoming an automatic learned skill.”

In order for comfortable learning to occur, basic physical skills such as balance and being able to use both sides of the body (right-left and upper-lower) together in a coordinated fashion must be in place. With stimulation through specific kinds of movement activities, primitive reflexes can be integrated so that the neurological and motor systems are more available for higher level movement and thinking tasks.

We frequently have students who have great difficulty maintaining good posture while sitting in a chair. At first glance, it looks like a motivation or attitude problem, but our work with reflex integration and core learning skills training has shown us that these students simply don’t have the muscle control to do what is asked with any consistency.

What Can Be Done
In a clinical setting, we have developed a program called Core Learning Skills. It focuses on the integration of five primitive reflexes that are core to efficient learning and functioning. It also includes activities for vestibular stimulation, motor development, visual skills development, attention awareness and control.

As students participate in Core Learning Skills Training, we see that they begin to appear more mature, motivated, and attentive because they are no longer battling inefficient movement patterns and are gaining automatic motor control.

In a classroom setting, there is a series of movements you can use with your students. These can take as little as 5 minutes and help prepare the brain for learning. While these are not specifically for reflex integration, doing these movements will give students greater focus and ability to use the skills they have in a more efficient way.

The program is called Brain Gym by Paul Dennison. You can find this resource at www.braingym.org.

Becoming a Successful Student
Being a successful student involves many skills. When a child is struggling in school and a little extra support isn’t making enough difference, it is likely that there is something in the developmental learning skills or underlying processing skills and such a learning disorder is interfering with academic success. In most cases, these skills can be developed so that efficient and comfortable learning can take place.

Assistive Listening Devices in Classrooms for Children with Dyslexia

Two reports from the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, Northwestern University show that Bluetooth-style listening devices in the classroom can treat dyslexia.  Sounds suspicious I know, but if nothing else, trust the source enough to read on and you’ll be suitably impressed and hopefully inspired. Their research also uncovers a biological explanation which could lead to earlier diagnosis for this language disorder. The studies were published in Journal of Neuroscience and in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (links provided below).   These important findings further support an already large body of research pointing to a neural explanation for auditory processing in children with language learning problems, including dyslexia.

Assistive Listening Devices in Classrooms for Children with Dyslexia
Dyslexia is the most prevalent learning disability among children. Contrary to widespread public teaching, it is not only an affliction of the visual system; merely causing the eyes to rearrange written words.  Dyslexia stems from problems with auditory processing, a skill necessary to accurately interpret speech. Dyslexics typically have poor “phonological awareness”.  This means they struggle assigning the right sounds to the right letters. For example, they might confuse the words “bean” and “dean” because they cannot clearly distinguish the “b” and “d” sounds. Moreover, many children with poor phonological awareness suffer distractions from background noise, making it even harder to pay attention and focus on what a teacher is saying.

In the J. Neuroscience report, the authors show that poor readers have less stable auditory nervous system function than do good readers.  In the children with inconsistency in response to sound the data point to a biological mechanism and it may contribute to their reading impairment.  The authors proposed that assistive listening devices (classroom FM systems) may enhance acoustic clarity and thus reduce the auditory processing variability so elegantly described in the J.Neuroscience paper.

In the PNAS classroom study, they assessed the impact of classroom FM system use for 1 year on auditory neurophysiology and reading skills in children with dyslexia.  The results were clear and dramatic. Children with dyslexia who used classroom assistive listening devices (FM systems) had more consistent auditory brainstem responses to speech after 1 year.  This improvement was linked to increases in reading and phonological awareness. These changes were not seen for children in the same classrooms who did not use the assistive listening devices. The thinking here is that the enhanced signal-to-noise ratio provided by the FM system improved auditory brainstem function by providing the nervous system with a clearer acoustic signal. This would be particularly true for children with dyslexia who are more adversely affected by background noise than their classmates. It is important to note that the FM systems were not used during testing. The brainstem function had undergone a lasting change by enhancing signal-to-noise ratio over the course of the school year.  (Read more on Brain Plasticity)

Aside from the obvious practical implications of these findings for the home and classroom, they have provoked many questions and lines of inquiries for the research community.  Stay tuned!  Both articles are available as free full text for a closer look at the study set up and data.

J. Hornickel et al., “Assistive listening devices drive neuroplasticity in children with dyslexia,”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 32:14156-64, 2012.

J. Hornickel, N. Kraus, “Unstable representation of sound: a biological marker of dyslexia,”Journal of Neuroscience, 33:3500–04, 2013.

Is there a difference between hearing and listening?

I spent Easter weekend with my parents, siblings and nieces and nephews. It was a crazy time full of fun and laughter. As the Easter egg hunting came to an end, the excitement over the yummy treats they had just received was overwhelming. Candy wrappers were being opened, sticky fingers were everywhere and sugar began to take its toll as it replaced the sweet smiling faces with grumpy faces.

“No more candy until after dinner…” rang in my ears as I saw my niece lunge for another piece. She stopped for a second and then proceeded to place the chocolate egg in her mouth. She had heard the instruction, but didn’t really listen to what was asked of her. The temptation of the creamy chocolate was just too much and she let herself indulge in it despite the repercussions.

There is a distinct difference between being able to hear and being able to listen. Sometimes it has to do with whether or not we want to listen and follow directions, other times it may deal with an auditory processing issue. Hearing and listening are two very distinct abilities.

Hearing is a passive process wherein the ear is able to hear incoming sounds at a normal threshold. It is a process that is based on one’s biology. The ear is complicated and in order to function properly it needs all of its pieces. Hearing is based on having all the pieces and having them work together. When a sound enters the ear, it is considered hearing. Just because a sound enters the ear does not mean that it is understood. This understanding deals more with an individual’s listening skills.

Listening on the other hand is an active process. An individual has to be able to focus on the sound entering the ear while tuning out any distractions. It is a focusing activity that requires an individual to tune out distractions and tune in to relevant sounds. It deals with one’s ability and motivation to listen. If something is not working properly for hearing, it will affect an individual’s listening skills. Being able to hear sounds is the precursor to being able to listen.

Listening requires concentration and an individual has to focus on certain sounds in order to understand words. If a child is sitting in class, surrounded by other kids making noise, and has an auditory processing issue, they are unable to pick out what the teacher is saying. It is no wonder that they would struggle in a class full of distractions and sounds. Being able to identify a child’s auditory issues can change the way that they perform in class and in every other environment.

Ideal listening occurs when the ear is able to lessen the lower frequencies and background sounds while being sensitive to higher frequencies that are associated with language. Due to this it is so important to understand that an individuals ability to listen is affected by their ability to discriminate and distinguish sounds in different contexts. When a child cannot discriminate sounds, it leads to difficulties in class with following directions, reading, spelling, attention, concentration, and cognitive overload.

The difference between being able to hear and listening is so important because it transfers to every area of a person’s life. The good news is that there are ways to help with any auditory issues that a child may have. Here at TLC we have different listening programs and therapies to help a child deal with any deficits that they may have.

Give us a call today to learn more about our programs and how we can help your child deal with listening issues!

Understanding the Difference between Hearing and Learning