Posts

Pediatricians help identify learning disabilities in children

As many as 20% of people in the United States have a learning disability and in 2007, an estimated 2.7 million children aged 6 to 11 years were affected. Learning disabilities often prevent children from reaching their full potential. They can have difficulty learning to listen, speak, read, spell, write, reason, concentrate, solve mathematical problems, and organize information. They may also experience difficulty mastering social skills or motor coordination.

Learning difficulties are frequently associated with and complicated by attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For affected children, learning difficulties are not merely a source of frustration. Left untreated, these children may develop low self-confidence, poor self-esteem, and have increased risk of developing psychological and emotional problems.

Learning disabilities are complex problems with complex etiologies that are not yet fully understood. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities, including reading disabilities and dyslexia, frequently go undetected, misdiagnosed, or mistreated in children. Sadly, even in cases where learning disabilities are recognized, most children have already been experiencing years of academic difficulty in elementary school.

However research in brain function and learning has shown that learning and attention challenges can be permanently corrected. The American Academy of Pediatrics policy states that “early recognition and referral to qualified professionals for evidence-based evaluations and treatments are necessary to achieve the best possible outcome.”
Family Physicians  identify learning disabilities
The role of the child’s physician in identifying and managing a learning disability is one of vigilance and support. The child’s parents and educators may not fully recognize the symptoms of a learning disability in their children and it may be the child’s pediatrician that is first to suspect and inform parents of available resources for assistance. Some parents may already suspect that their child may harbor a learning disability and turn to the child’s physician for guidance. In any case, the child’s physician is an important partner with the family and educators in the diagnosis, evaluation and treatment for the child.

It is not the role of the pediatrician to diagnose learning disabilities but instead to inquire about the child’s educational progress and be vigilant for early signs of learning disabilities. Even if there is no apparent delay in speech or language development, a family history of learning difficulties should alert parents and physicians to this possibility in the child. With enhanced awareness of the pediatric community on early detection and referral we can do away with the traditional scenario in which the child must show persistent poor academic achievement for years before referral, assessment, and remediation. Early recognition and referral to qualified professionals means more effective treatment for more children.

Therapeutic Literacy Center:
Current neuroscience shows that learning “disabilities” do not have to be permanent. The brain exhibits enormous plasticity so the cognitive skills involved in reading and writing can be improved. (More about Plasticity)  At the Therapeutic Literacy Center we specialize in the cognitive processes behind learning to read, write and spell. Auditory and language processing, phonological awareness, visual memory and critical thinking can be strengthened, often significantly, in a relatively short time given intensive targeted instruction. Our network of clinicians, psychologists, and neuropsychologists have studied how children learn, and applied that research to Therapeutic Literacy Center programs and instruction. Through carefully researched and consistently effective methods, we help clients to develop control over their thinking processes to make sense out of reading, spelling, written language and math.

Accessibility Apps Help Students With Dyslexia

We need to remind ourselves that ‘Accessibility’ needn’t be a term reserved just for physically disabled. Those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities face real challenges navigating the world of printed words. It’s largely inaccessible to them because it’s often incomprehensible. However, new accessibility apps from Apple and others, are beginning to give these people the access that most of the rest of us tend to take for granted. While they may not have been the targeted market or driving force behind the design, it’s clear these apps benefit those with dyslexia and related disabilities.

Accessibility Apps help students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities overcome their learning problemsFor someone with Dyslexia, reading a simple paragraph or even a couple lines of instructions is a tedious and frustrating process. This makes everyday activities difficult and learning from textbooks or other dense, voluminous material is nearly impossible. Spelling and written expression can also be very difficult.

 Dyslexia does not impact intellectual ability but it will prevent these bright people from acquiring information as others do in the typical learning environment.

 So what do people who have dyslexia do when they encounter printed text? Sadly enough, some simply avoid it or give up. Others find or create methods to help them succeed.

Thanks to accessibility technologies built into Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and Mac, more and more people with dyslexia and other disabilities are finding they can readily access the information in books, newspapers, websites, email, and more. Using devices to help people adapt the world to their needs is not a new paradigm, but having inexpensive, easy to use, readily available tools (these apps!) is what success is all about these days. Below I’ll highlight a few of my favorite apps for use on Apple devices. Visit iMore to find out about these and others from Apple. Of course there are plenty of more universally applicable educational tools and resources out there that have been around for years. I’ll mention some of them as well because of their proven positive impact.

Speak Selection
Speak Selection reads aloud any text highlighted on the iPhone or iPad. Having the words spoken really improves understanding of students. The app can even be set to highlight words as they’re read to help the reader follow along. We also use it to highlight text so the highlighted part can be read back again to the reader to aid in comprehension.

Dictation
The Dictation feature allows students to get their ideas out so they can freely and fully express themselves; returning later to work on fine-tuning the written script. Writing can be painfully frustrating for students with dyslexia since they often end up forgetting their overarching thought or stream of consciousness as they struggle with the task of spelling and writing individual words.

QuickType
iOS 8 brings with it the option to activate this feature — a predictive keyboard that gets smarter as you use it. It helps with poor spelling by suggesting words based on the first few characters.
With these types of integrated technologies and apps, people with disabilities can have access so they can readily use their creative and intellectual abilities rather than being held back by their disabilities.

Apple device users can also enjoy services offered by third-party apps developed with the Apple devices as the foundation.

One of these services, Bookshare, offers over 280,000 books that can be downloaded directly and read with text-to-speech. The combination of text-to-speech and highlighting greatly improves readability and comprehension for qualifying students. Thanks to a grant from the United States Department of Education Bookshare is free to U.S. students.

Voice Dream Reader is a super-cool text-to-speech app for iOS. It allows students to input text from a variety of sources (Bookshare, web, clipboard, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Project Gutenberg, etc.) Once the text is loaded, it can even be read with a number of different text-to-speech voices (albeit at additional cost). The app includes highlighting, note taking features, and students can customize the look of their text as well. This app is a great pairing with Bookshare for reading books on the go.

Another service, called Learning Ally provides human-narrated audio books that can also be downloaded to a wide variety of devices such as Android, not just Apple. Learning Ally is a national nonprofit with resources designed to support students with learning disabilities and their families. Of note, the highlighting of feature of this service is not word by word as in Bookshare and Kurzweil (see below), but rather is paragraph by paragraph.

Prizmo is an especially powerful app that uses optical character recognition (OCR) to recognize and read back text in a matter of seconds from a picture of a text document. So if a student is having a tough time reading through something, they can take a picture and have Prizmo read it back to them. Though not the strongest OCR engine in the industry, it is ideal for use with mobile devices.

Individuals with dyslexia and other learning disabilities have already given these apps and services positive reviews – explaining that these apps level the playing field for them, and encouraging developers to come up with even more life-enabling tools. Hopefully, the increased focus on accessibility from sites such as iMore will help push innovation even further.

All the above are apps and services oriented to mobile users and more specifically Apple devices. With the school year already in swing, I’ll mention a number of other powerful applications and sites that are available for the home, office, and school and can be accessed and used across just about any platform, Mac or PC.

Kurzweil 3000
Kurzweil 3000 is a reading and writing program for scanned and digital documents so students can benefit from high quality text-to-speech and synchronized highlighting. Mrs. Kurzweil was actually the name of my sweet and wonderful teacher in first grade so I’m more than just partial to this one. Students can annotate documents with text notes, audio notes, highlighting and circle functions. Even test taking is simplified since students can fill in the blanks on documents – answering directly on the digital document. This powerful tool has additional writing help such as mapping and word prediction features mentioned above.

Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a fantastic free service providing video tutorials for students in just about any subject. Enthusiastic scientists and teachers walk students through difficult concepts step-by-step in a way that is easy to understand and follow. The video tutorials cover an enormous range of content ranging from algebra to zoology and is helpful for learning new subjects as well as reinforcing material that may not have been fully grasped in the classroom. And at the end of many lessons students can even take a short quiz to reassure themselves that they have understood the content. Visit Khan Academy at khanacademy.org.

The last items I want to share are devices that once again, help level the playing field for those with learning or hearing disorders.

Phones and tablets are convenient tools for recording classes and lectures but unless the speaker is consistently close to the device, the built-in microphone may do a poor job of isolating the speaker from surrounding noise. The resulting recording may be filled with background noice making it difficult to hear and virtually useless for those with hearing disorders. MightyMic from Ampridge is a discreet, compact microphone that plugs into the headphone jack on any portable device and then angled toward the part of the room that has the most important sounds to be captured. When recording in a classroom or lecture hall environment, it has the effect of reducing the nearby background noise resulting in capture of ideal recordings of the speaker.

The Sky Wifi Smartpen from Livescribe is a computerized pen for note taking. The way it works is that students take notes on special notebook paper their written notes are synchronized with an audio recorded from class. Revisiting this synchronized audio and written material helps students review and fill in gaps of information they may have missed. Many students within the spectrum of learning disabilities find it’s frustratingly easy to miss important content while trying to focus on writing everything down. Amazingly, the Sky Smartpen can also wirelessly synchronize notes to Evernote or even to other students who need audio and digital notes provided.

It bears repeating that while these tools and apps may not have been created specifically for those with dyslexia and related disabilities, the benefits for them are clear. What’s your experience? We hope you’ll share with us any discoveries you’ve made about technologies or resources that you’ve found helpful (or not!) for students facing learning challenges due to dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, or any other learning disability.

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.

How Children with APD Become Masters of their Own Ears

For many families, raising a child with APD or CAPD means coping, understanding, and finding the right accommodations to help the child throughout the day. No medication has been found to help, and so far cognitive research has not produced any promising treatments. However, for families that do not take “no” as an answer, there is still one course of treatment that carries promise.

Therapeutic Literacy Center is a small educational therapy center located in Solana Beach, California. The focuses is on addressing the root of an individual’s struggles and developing the building blocks of learning. Instead of providing an educational Band-Aid to get students through the day, we seek to help students develop the executive function, processing skills, and core learning skills they need to excel in life.

There is currently no one-size-fits-all approach to helping children with APD to improve their symptoms. For this reason, Therapeutic Literacy Center works individually with each child to create a step-by-step program of learning activities and games.

We help with:

  • Understanding speech in noisy environments
  • Discerning different sounds in speech
  • Learning to spell
  • Developing active listening skills
  • Enhancing executive function
  • Building memory for different sounds

A child’s brain is more elastic than that of an adult, meaning it is easier and more natural to learn unattained skills. As of now, Therapeutic Literacy Center has successfully brought 20 children out of special education and into the regular classroom. TLC also provides support for children enrolled in homeschool.

TLC is ideal for children who would otherwise require speech therapy, tutoring, and a variety of other treatments from multiple locations. The specialized one-on-one program approach covers every aspect of your child’s learning. If your child has been diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, or struggles in school, but has not been diagnosed, or if your child suffers from multiple disorders, TLC may be the ideal space to seek treatment.

We would love to sit down with you and discuss hopes, expectations, struggles, and successes. Your story can help to illuminate your child’s strengths as well as areas in which we may focus our efforts. We are interested in the best outcome, whether that means developing valuable new skills or leaving special education behind. If you believe we could be of help to your child and family, we would love to meet you and talk further about how we can help you reach your goals.

Early Detection of Hearing Disabilities

detecting hearing disorders in very young childrenEvery time my kids get a check-up, it strikes me that pediatricians are checking eyes and ears in the same way they’ve been checking for at least the last 50 years (yep, I just turned 50).  True, a general practitioner will typically only screen for evidence of deeper issues and then refer onward if something suspicious or ‘outside the normal range’ is found.  But in light of my 11 year old son being diagnosed with APD (Auditory Processing Disorder), it occurs to me that the current hearing testing conducted by schools and pediatricians is woefully inadequate because it is incapable of discovering the range of hearing disabilities we know to be present in the population today.  Instead, we end up waiting until these hearing disabilities manifest in children as inability to read, write, and learn at grade level, and often failing or borderline performance by older students who are unable to learn in a typical classroom environment and are likely suffering emotional and psychological harm.

To appreciate this difference let’s consider current vision testing. Children are asked to discern whether arrows are pointing up down or sideways, or whether a shape is a smooth circle or star with points, and whether one shape is bigger or smaller than another, and so on.  But what if the vision test merely involved flashing a dot in different areas of a screen and asking whether the person sees anything?  And they only need to answer Yes or No to determine vision health?   In that case, pretty much everyone except the most extreme visually disabled individuals would ‘pass’.  Fortunately that doesn’t happen and so we don’t have to wait until kids suffer numerous physical injuries from walking into tables and falling down steps, or flunk out of pre-school before we begin to suspect that there are vision problems.

Building blocks of speechSo why are we still simply asking kids to discern mere audiometric thresholds when we know that other attributes of sound such as rhythm, pitch, timbre, and localization are just as important to function well in our current environment?  The unfortunate truth is that the professional community cannot come to an agreed-upon set of cues that reflect appropriate hearing ability and fidelity.  Part of the frustration is that neurobiologists and neuropsychologists don’t really fully understand the mechanisms of how people hear and what the brain does with what the ear detects.  But the research is ongoing and our understanding continues to develop and deepen.  Findings in the last couple of years that I’ll share are truly exciting because they bring us closer to a time when some simple, early diagnostics will reveal a more detailed picture of a person’s hearing ability and alert parents and professionals of issues to be addressed early on in the child’s life.

A few years ago, studies by Ruggles, et.al. demonstrated quite elegantly the critical role of temporal cues on sound perception and analysis or decoding. What’s most exciting about the work is that they also designed and demonstrated a series of tests which detected temporal dysfunction.  Temporal cues are things like vowel sounds (long or short), articulation of consonants, stress or inflection in a word or phrase.  Researchers and clinicians have known for decades that temporal cues are important.  But reliable, definitive screening and diagnostic methods have been lacking.  The tests described in the Ruggles report were objective, uncomplicated, easy to grasp, and relatively easy to administer and interpret. In short, the team showed the feasibility and benefits of conducting more sophisticated auditory screening tests.

As parents and therapists, we’re always promoting awareness of the spectrum of hearing and learning deficits.  But this is the sort of work that helps arm us better to promote the need for developing and implementing proactive screenings that are reliable and feasible.  Now, ‘fast-forward’ a few years to September 2014 when another article caught my eye and it is exactly the kind of big news we need!  I say this because the research and its implications are so elegant that it’s easy for just about anyone to grasp the work and its implications.

Early Detection of Hearing Disabilities

Nina Kraus and her colleagues of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University study the changes in the brain that happen with auditory learning. The findings in some of their most recent work with very young children hint at another type of diagnostic for disabilities in speech processing.  The exciting thing here is that it’s for children that have not even begun to read or exhibit other higher level language skills yet!

Much of the laboratory’s work has centered on the idea that beat synchronization ability (i.e. matching a given rhythm or beat) is closely related to the ability to process temporal cues – just like the ability in encoding speech. In this way, poor neural precision may contribute to both rhythmic and phonological deficits.  Indeed, previous work has shown that beat synchronization and processing of speech have been linked to reading skills.  In their work published in September 2014, the group established links between beat synchronization and speech processing in children who have not yet begun to read. This is very exciting work because children this young are not often looked at for deficits in language development.

To do this, the researchers placed children in groups based on how well they could synchronize beating a drum in rhythm with the teacher.  It’s important to note that there were no differences in intelligence or vocabulary performance between the groups of synchronizers and non-synchronizers.

They recorded the brainwaves in response to specific syllable sounds like “ba” and “da”.  They also looked at brainwaves when the syllable sounds were mixed in with background noise to see if the children could discriminate the syllables despite the noise.  What they found was the children who could not synchronize well also did not perform as well on tests that measure abilities important for developing later reading and language language skills (for example, identifying rhyming words). They especially did not do well at distinguishing syllables played in background noise.  The children who were able to follow the beat successfully were not only better at discriminating melodies and rhythms in music, but they were able to process syllable sounds more precisely and performed better on the multiple tests of language abilities.

Although this summary may sound somewhat simplistic, the methods were rigorous and the results highly significant.  The results show beautifully that rhythmic ability is correlated with how precisely a child’s brain will decode speech syllables.  The findings also strongly indicate that a preschooler’s ability to follow a beat will predict how advanced their developing language skills are; that less developed skills could predict future reading disabilities.  To test this, they have set up a 5 year study to track the same children to see whether these early deficits predict reading and speech processing disorders.

What they find may mean that in the future, doctors and caregivers may have the means to assess the very young for risk of developing reading and related learning disabilities.  And intervention (such as music games to improve rhythmic perception) could in theory be highly successful since at such a young age children’s brains are most malleable.

Our job as parents, teachers, and caregivers is to continue promoting awareness of the spectrum of hearing disorders, and emphasize how important it is to recognize and identify them early on.  If we keep at it, then perhaps we won’t have to wait the typical 10 years it often takes for life science research to make it to the actual changes in the clinical and healthcare practices.  For more information check out the resources below.

References

  1. Normal hearing is not enough to guarantee robust encoding of suprathreshold features important in everyday communication. Ruggles D, Bharadwaj H, Shinn-Cunningham BG  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Sep 13; 108(37):15516-21. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174666/
  2. Hearing Impairments HIdden in Normal Listeners. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. Sep 27, 2011; 108(39): 16139–16140. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182733/
  3. Woodruff Carr K, White-Schwoch T, Tierney A, Strait DL, Kraus N (2014). Beat synchronization predicts neural speech encoding and reading readiness in preschoolers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1406219111
  4. Kraus N, Slater J, Thompson E, Hornickel J, Strait D, Nicol T and White-Schwoch T (2014). Music enrichment programs improve the neural encoding of speech in at-risk children. Journal of Neuroscience. 34(36): 11913-11918.  http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/

Reading Depends On... from Lab of Nina Kraus

 

The Upside of Dyslexia?

My son is Dyslexic and I admit that I all too often fall into the mode of lamenting that he (and my family) must ‘deal’ with his condition.  I wallow and worry about how he struggles in school and at home.  Together we suffer through the standard approaches to learning and doing things, and we spend time and money for targeted therapy and remediation.  I muse to myself that it sure would be nice to spend time and money on other endeavors instead.

People are always talking about the need to find the upside of situations, of pointing out strengths instead of weaknesses, of celebrating achievements instead of noting shortcomings.  This is supposed to be the ‘new age’ of appreciating differences and lauding what the differences bring to the table, right? At the smorgasbord of humanity should we really be complaining that all the burgers don’t have the same shape and taste?  That someone is ‘doing it wrong’?  Most of us ‘get’ this but we still fall into societal expectations (limitations?) about performance and achievement.  We keep finding ourselves spending too much time lamenting the inability to measure up.

Consider the situation of the dyslexic child who is having academic difficulties in school.  You know they’re not lazy so you get help and do everything you can to help them struggle less and feel good more often.  So What’s the Upside of Dyslexia? Is there anything else besides waiting for results to celebrate?  Waiting to say “Hooray, you’re fixed.â€

In all that waiting, I forget to remind him and myself of his unusual strengths and gifts. I KNOW Dyslexics experience the world differently and I need to find a way to appreciate that – and believe it.  But I always end up immersing myself in literature and other venues to figure out how to ‘fix’ that.  I gotta step out of that kind of thinking more often.  We all do and maybe what I found can give you a boost as well.

I recently came across the work of Dr. Matthew H. Schneps, a founding member of the Science Education Department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astrophysics?  Yes. But wait, it gets better.

Schneps founded the Laboratory for Visual Learning (LVL) to carry out research on how individual differences in neurology such as those associated with dyslexia, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders, affect how people learn science.  His work has led to a number of spinoffs such as the development of an innovative technique for reading for people with dyslexia using mobile devices, but what I found most rewarding were the descriptions of visual advantages that dyslexics have in our world.

Dyslexics get the whole pictureFor example did you know that that many people with dyslexia have sharper peripheral vision than others?  The brain processes separately the information from the central versus the peripheral areas of the visual field.  And the brain seems to trade off on these capacities. The key to reading is being adept focusing on details located in the center of the visual field while being less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the periphery.  As it turns out, people with dyslexia have a bias in favor of the periphery and so can quickly take in a scene as a whole; they get the “visual gist†more readily.

As an astrophysicist, Schneps and other scientists in his line of work must make sense of vast quantities of visual data and accurately detect patterns or anomalies.  He suggested that a condition of dyslexia may actually enhance the ability to carry out just such a task.  Indeed, one study he conducted showed that astrophysicists with dyslexia outperformed their non-dyslexic colleagues in assessing visual data (radiographs) to identify distinctive characteristics of black holes.  In another simple experiment, he blurred regular photographs to the extent that they resembled astronomical images.  Dyslexics easily caught on whereas typical readers failed to do so.  Still more studies demonstrate enhanced peripheral capture and whole scene capture by dyslexics as compared to non-dyslexics .

I’m only scratching the surface here and I certainly don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that we should simply ‘celebrate’ the gift of dyslexia and leave it at that.  Reading and other academic pursuits remain a real challenge for those with dyslexia and other related disabilities.  We have lifetimes of work ahead of us as we work to remediate weaknesses. But identifying the distinctive aptitudes of those with dyslexia helps us understand the condition more completely.  I plan on keeping an eye on Schneps’ work and LVL to increase my understanding and help me appreciate my son and other dyslexics for their unique abilities – not just their ability to overcome certain learning challenges.

Happy New Year!

Diagnosed with Learning Disabilities? Now What?

What do do and how to find help when your child is diagnosed with a learning disability

“Help!   My Child Has Just Been Diagnosed With Learning Disabilities.   Tell Me What That Means.   Where Can I Get Help?   What Should I Do?”

With e-mail becoming such a widespread tool, I am getting the opportunity to hear from parents all over the nation, and even, sometimes, other parts of the world. Many of the feelings and questions seem to be universal, no matter where they come from:

  • My child has a learning disability. How can I learn more about this?
  • Where can I go to get help?
  • Is there hope?

Learning disabilities and attention disorders are perplexing because they may cause very “able” individuals to be unsuccessful or “disabled” in certain situations. There has been a tremendous amount of work done in this field in the last twenty years. This is by no means an exhaustive list of references, but here are a few of my favorites that I think will give any parent or teacher some new insights into learning disabilities, or better stated, learning differences.

Learning Disabilities / Dyslexia / Language Learning Disabilities

  • Conway, David. Help!!! A Handbook on Solving Learning Problems . Gander Publications (800) 554-1819.
  • Davis, Ronald. The Gift of Dyslexia . San Juan Capistrano, CA: Ability Workshop Press, 1994.
  • Hannaford, Carla. Smart Moves . Arlington, VA: Great Ocean Publications
  • LaVoie, Richard. How Difficult Can This Be? P.B.S. Video. 1994. (800) 344-3337.
  • LaVoie, Richard. Learning Disabilities and Social Skills . P.B.S. Video. 1994 (800) 344-3337
  • Smith, Joan M. Learning Victories . Sacramento, CA: Learning Time Products, Inc. 1998.
  • Directory of Facilities and Services for the Learning Disabled . Novato, CA: Academic Therapy Publications.
  • Smith, Joan M. You Don’t Have To Be Dyslexic . Sacramento, CA: Learning Time Products, Inc. 1993
  • Tallal, Paula. Fast ForWord . Reference: Scientific Learning Corporation, Berkeley, CA 1998.www.fastforword.com

To find help in your area:

  • The International Dyslexia Association (410) 296-0232 FAX – (410) 321-5069 www.interdys.org
  • Learning Disabilities Association (LDA) (412) 341-1515 www.ldanatl.org
  • CHAADD (Support Group for Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder)

Attention Challengers / ADD and ADHD / Tourette’s Syndrome

  • Dornbush, Marilyn, Ph.D. and Pruitrt, Sheryl K. M.Ed. Teaching The Tiger – a Handbook for Individuals in the Education of Students with Attention Deficit Disorder, Tourette Syndrome or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder . Duarte, CA: Hope Press
  • Hughes, Susan. Ryan, A Mother’s Story of her Hyperactive/Tourette Syndrome Child . Duarte, CA: Hope Press
  • Hallowell, M.D., Ed and Ratey, M.D., John. Driven to Distraction . N.Y. Simon and Schuster, 1994
  • Silver, Larry B. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder . Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1992.
  • Hartman, Thom. Attention Deficit Disorder…A Different Perspective . Underwood Books, 1997.

Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities

  • Thompson, Sue. The Source for Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities . East Moline, IL Linguisystems, Inc. 1997.

Learning / Study Skills

  • Amen, M.D., Daniel. Secrets of Successful Students . Mind Works Press. Fairfield, CAwww.danielamen.com 
  • Archer, Anita and Gleason, Mary. Skills For School Success . Curriculum Associates, Inc. (800) 225-0248.
  • Healy, Jane. Endangered Minds . New York: A Touch Stone Book, Simon and Schuster, 1990.

To the question, “Is there hope?”… Absolutely! 

Individuals with learning disabilities generally have something different or perhaps not completely developed in the way that they process or think about information. The way that they process is not wrong, but it may not be efficient, particularly for academic tasks.

Give the future back to your child. Dyslexia isn't a terminal illness.Because they are obviously intelligent and generally do some kinds of tasks very easily, parents and teachers may, at first, see the learning disabled student as lazy or unmotivated. With very few exceptions, learners of any age want to be successful and would if they could.

While we never want to take away a student’s thinking style, the key to teach the learning disabled student is to help him or her to develop the underlying thinking processes that will allow him to take-in, remember, and use information efficiently.

Creating a solid foundation of basic skills is a critical piece of the picture, but only when the brain has been prepared to understand and hold onto those skills.

Students are often taught compensating strategies to help them cope with their learning disabilities. These are helpful and important but they are not enough! Students with learning differences need to be taught in a different way, because these students can learn.

Individuals with learning and attention challenges often have wonderful talents or abilities in other areas. These may tend to get overlooked in the confusion and frustration of poor school performance. Many of the outstanding artists, musicians, actors, athletes, and inventors of our time have had differences in thinking that caused “learning disabilities.” Yet, it was precisely those differences that were the key to their success.

As we seek to help students work through and remediate their inefficiencies in learning, it is also important to notice and encourage their areas of strength and uniqueness.