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Smart but Struggling – How to Help a Child with Weak Learning Skills

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Smart but Struggling: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense!

Recently, we have had parent after parent calling and saying virtually the same thing:

“My child is bright. He’s a good kid and wants to do well, but he’s struggling in school. He doesn’t qualify for help but he tests below state standards. How can this be?”

What most people don’t know is that about 30% of the children in school today have some degree of difficulty with reading or learning. In spite of caring teachers, supportive parents, good intelligence, and motivation, many students experience academic frustrations as a result of weak or inefficient underlying reading and/or learning skills.

If a child doesn’t qualify for special help at school, does it mean there’s not a problem? Only about 5-9% of children are formally diagnosed with learning disabilities, so that leaves roughly 7 million students who struggle but don’t qualify for help.What to do your child struggles with reading or learning because of weak underlying reading or learning skills.

What does it look like for these kids?

Aaron was a very bright high school senior who wanted to go into pre-med in college. He was at the top of his class in physics and chemistry, but close to failing English and History. He had such weak auditory processing skills that listening in class was exhausting. His teachers reported that he often fell asleep during lectures. Aaron’s poor auditory processing also affected a key skill for sounding out unfamiliar words when reading. He could read, but not well, so he often failed to complete reading-related homework assignments. Because he could do well in some areas, people often misunderstood and thought that he was not trying hard or not motivated.

Mark, at 12 years old, was outgoing, friendly, and confident—that is until it came to school. Mark was a terrific athlete and built fantastic Lego structures. He got As in math except for word problems but was beginning to fall behind in his other classes. Mark was a very poor reader. He’d been able to compensate pretty well up until 7th grade, but the reading and writing demands in junior high were becoming too much to keep up with or talk his way out of.

Kelsey could read well but struggled to completely comprehend what she read so her test scores were inconsistent, making it look like she wasn’t studying. Her biggest challenge was with math, which made very little sense to her and caused her a great deal of anxiety.

How can my bright child have so much trouble in some areas? 


When smart children and teens struggle in school it is perplexing and frustrating to all involved. They often excel in some areas, but do very poorly in others.

  • Sam knows all the baseball stats but can’t memorize his math facts.
  • Keely is a smart and savvy soccer player but gets poor grades on tests.
  • Casey is witty and clever, but can’t follow 3 directions.
  • Michael excels in math but reads slowly and laboriously.
  • Justin can focus on video games for hours, but gets distracted immediately when reading or writing.

Comfortable, easy learning requires strong underlying learning skills. These include such things as:

  • Body and attention awareness and control
  • Memory
  • Auditory and visual processing (how the brain perceives and thinks about things we see and hear)
  • Phonemic awareness (the ability to think about the sounds in words and critical to success reading)
  • Language comprehension
  • Processing speed
  • Logic and reasoning, strategizing, and mental organization and flexibility.

Children who struggle in school typically have real strengths and weaknesses within their underlying learning skills. Since different types of tasks or activities are supported by different sets of learning skills, these students can easily show perplexing inconsistencies in their performance.

Our child is getting tutoring. Why aren’t things changing?

Using the analogy of a tree to represent learning, you can think of academic skills as the top of the tree and underlying learning skills as the roots and trunk. If the root system, or the underlying learning skills are weak the top of the tree, or the academics will be affected.

Traditional tutoring works at the top of the tree with the weak academic skills. This may be helpful to students at the moment but is a bit of a “band aide” approach as it is not addressing the real cause, or root, of the problem and will not provide a permanent solution.

So Does My Smart Child Just Have to Live With this?

The Good News is that the brain can change. While weak or inefficient underlying learning skills are not likely to self-correct with time, discipline, or even tutoring, the brain can be retrained to process information more effectively. Underlying learning skills can be developed through specific and intensive training so that underachieving and struggling learners can gain the success and independence they are capable of and deserve.

Students Who Used To Struggle

  • Aaron went through an intensive summer program to increase his auditory processing and reading skills. His energy, stamina, and confidence for listening, reading, and writing improved greatly. He is now in college with a pre-med major.
  • Mark went through a program to develop his phonemic awareness so that he could learn and use phonics for reading and spelling. His visual skills for reading were also developed so that he didn’t have to feel disoriented and overwhelmed when he looked at a page of text. Mark is now functioning well in a private high school and playing quarterback on the school football team.
  • Developing underlying processing and language comprehension skills has helped Kelsey to become much more consistent in her test scores and much less afraid of math. She can now understand and follow directions in class and do her math homework independently.

Many children cope with their underachievement by putting on an attitude of not caring and resisting help from parents, teachers, and clinicians at a learning or tutoring center. Success can change bad attitudes, though, and gradually, as the foundation of underlying processing/learning skills got stronger, students become more confident and engaged. Here’s one child’s thoughts:

“This has also made me a better person. I am now a more thoughtful person. Before I came I got bad grades. Now I have improved in all subjects. My grades before were Ds. Now they raised to As and Bs. It makes me feel special to be known as a smart kid to other people.”  Brett…5th Grade

Accessibility Apps Help Students With Dyslexia

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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.

So your child is becoming a reader!

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As your child is becoming a reader – you want to be prepared for the changes so you can make it a positive experience for child and family.

It might never occur to some families to prepare themselves for their child becoming a reader.  What happens to a family when a non-reader becomes a reader?  The answer to this question seemed so obvious!  The family is overjoyed, proud, delighted. Of course!  But when a non-reader becomes a reader, it’s important to understand that the dynamics and relationships in the family may undergo changes — and to be prepared for those changes.As your child is becoming a reader - you want to be prepared for the changes so you can make it a positive experience for child and family.

At the Therapeutic Literacy Center, we work with children and adults with a variety of learning disabilities and a varying degree of severity. Our goal for students is always that they will leave us comfortable, independent learners.

For students with more severe reading disabilities, the road from being a dependent learner to an independent learner may bring with it some unexpected emotions or challenges. The following is a summary of some of the emotional issues that can challenge a child becoming a reader; the process of going from non-reader to reader. If families are aware of these, it may help make the way smoother and more efficient.

1.  Growing Independence
An individual who is a non-reader (or very poor reader) may, by necessity, become dependent on parents, siblings, or spouse to negotiate the world of print for him/her. As reading becomes easier, the help sometimes feels hurt by the new reader’s growing independence. Being aware that this may occur, helps the family to celebrate the changes instead of feeling threatened by them.

When a child is a non-reader, parents often do the reading for them or get books on tape for them so that they can still continue to participate in grade level curriculum at school. As these children begin to read, they must be encouraged to gradually take over more and more of the reading themselves, at the same time keeping in mind that reading will require a great deal of energy for awhile.

2.  Fear of success
An issue that we sometimes see with students either at the very beginning of their program, or as they are becoming more capable with reading and writing, is the fear of success. We have had students, both children and adults, who, while they truly desire to become independent readers, are fearful of the changes they might bring.

One very bright nine year-old non-reader expressed that he was afraid to learn to read because it would change him into somebody else. He might not be himself anymore. Maybe people wouldn’t like him or be willing to help him anymore. We took things very slowly. We encouraged him that we would never want to take away his thinking style; only give him tools that would make things easier. Gradually, he was able to get over that barrier and began to read.

Another, more common fear of success that we have seen with children and adults seems to happen a little later in the program when they actually have gotten to the point that they have some fairly solid tools for reading and writing. These students have expressed the concern that if they can read or write, people won’t help them anymore. They might be expected to do things that are too hard or too long. Just saying they can’t is often a more comfortable solution than facing the possibility of being overwhelmed.

To help students to begin to use their skills without becoming completely overwhelmed, it is helpful for parents to “share” the reading with them. Parameters can be set up such as: The child has to start reading at the top of each page or the beginning of each section, but is allowed to stop and switch with the parent when he gets tired.In this way, the student is using his skills, but the parent is still doing the bulk of the reading. As the child becomes more competent, the parameter could be changed so that the child reads a paragraph and the parent reads two, or the child and the parent alternate reading paragraphs or pages. As they become more comfortable and reading takes less energy, children become more willing to take over more and more of the reading.

3. Changing Expectations

Some students are so used to being non-readers or dependent readers that they continue to view themselves that way, even as their reading begins to develop and they’re becoming a reader. Family members, also, are used to thinking of the student in this way and may help perpetuate the low expectations. When an individual in a family has traditionally not been able to read or write, other members of the family take over those functions for him/her. The family members learn that they need to read menus, write checks, read signs, and/or give a tremendous amount of assistance on reading and writing homework. It is not uncommon for family members to continue performing these functions, and for the individual to continue to expect that, even after he has begun to develop tools that will allow him to do these things for himself.

We see this issue most often in the area of homework. Children are used to having a great deal of help and having someone “right there” with them while they do it. They may be used to using their reading or writing difficulties as an excuse not to do homework at all. Using their new skills can be time and energy consuming at first, and because working independently is a change, many children rebel against it. The students may continue to use “old habits” to get out of their work, or get someone else to do it for them. Old habits die hard for family members, too.

Parents are used to protecting their children from failure and poor self-esteem related to homework. The coping strategies that families develop are important and valuable, but must be let go of as the child’s academic abilities increase.We find that that is hard sometimes for parents to shift their view of their child from being severely reading disabled to being able to do some parts of their homework on their own. This is especially true because children often rebel most about becoming independent and doing their work at home. It is critical that as individuals are able to do more, they be allowed and expected to do so. This is the only way that their skills will really become independent tools for them, and even more importantly, that they will begin to view themselves as competent learners.

Turning Homework Over To The Student: Encouraging Independence
Adopt the motto that Homework is not an Option. It is not a personal issue. It is not a relationship issue. It is simply what school children do. It is not an option, so whether or not to do it does not bear argument or discussion.

  • Make homework as routine as possible. Have a specific time and place for homework to be done.
  • Find out from the teacher exactly what your child can be expected to do independently. Help your child get started if needed but have him complete the assignment on his own. Be available to help, but work with your child on asking you very specific questions as opposed to saying, “I don’t get this.”
  • Reinforce your child’s attempts at independence with praise and social or tangible rewards if necessary.
  • Calmly but firmly insist that the homework be completed. (If the amount or difficulty is reasonable, work with the teacher to make daily homework appropriate to your child’s independence level). Help your child understand that if he is procrastinating on his homework, he is choosing to give up play or TV time. However, parents do not need to choose for their own time to be wasted as well.
  • If your child is very dependent on your presence in order to work, wean him/her away from this by setting a timer and coming in to check on him every 5 minutes at first; then gradually increase the time. Or, have the child do one item with you, then complete the section on his own. He may come to you to get started on each new section as needed.

What happens to a family when a non-reader becomes a reader?
…With patience, firmness and encouragement, the parents get out from the homework burden.

…The individual becomes a more productive and confident student or worker.

…The relationship between the past non-reader and his/her family becomes less dependency-based, perhaps opening the door to some exciting new ways of relating.

As your child is becoming a reader be prepared for the changes in your family

What is Phonemic Awareness?

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Why is Phonemic Awareness  Important for Learning?

It is still happening everywhere. Colleges are still teaching it to teachers. Public and private schools don’t always preach it, but it is evident that many still believe it. What is it? It is the old time myth that there are some students who just can’t learn phonics.

Consider these examples:

  • Ryan is a 2nd grader, diagnosed developmentally delayed; not reading.
  • Paul is a brilliant surgeon.
  • Jenny is a gifted 6th grader; the fastest problem solver in the class, but failing.
  • Jim is a talented stunt man. He wants to act but leaves any audition that requires reading.

What do these people have in common? They all have phonemic awareness deficit that is keeping them from using phonics for reading and spelling. For Ryan and Jim, this deficit has left them non-readers. For Paul and Jenny, it has caused them terrible struggles throughout school. Years ago, the common belief was that there are simply people who can’t ever learn phonics.  Now, because of ongoing research in the field of reading and phonemic awareness, we  have yet to find students who can’t learn phonics.

How Does Phonemic Awareness  Affect Reading?

Why Phonemic Awareness is Important for Learning - Therapeutic Literacy CenterPhonemic awareness is a person’s ability to think about the number, order, and identity of individual sounds within words. It is the underlying thinking process that allows a person to make sense out of phonics, the sound system of our language. In a nutshell, the reading basic process is made up of three parts: Visual (Sight Word Recognition), Auditory (Phonics), and Language (Vocabulary and Content Cues).

In order to be able to read the words and sentences on the page comfortably and easily, all three processes need to be working efficiently together.

Research has shown that even with excellent teaching programs, 30% of any given population cannot learn or use phonics easily and because of a weakness in phonemic awareness. It is often said of children in this 30%, “He/She just can’t learn phonics. He/She will just have be to taught by sight.”

Unfortunately, these well-meaning statements doom students to be crippled readers and spellers.  At best they will come away with 2/3 of the reading process and 1/2 the spelling process to work with.  The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Auditory conceptual function can be taught! Through careful, sequential training that activates the auditory, visual, language, and feeling (tactile/kinesthetic) parts of the brain, children and adults can learn to think about sounds. This opens a whole new world to a person who previously could not read. As one adult student said, “You can’t even imagine what it’s like to be able to open a simple book and be able to read it yourself. You just have to experience it.”

As a result of auditory judgment training:

  • Ryan, once thought to be developmentally delayed, has been dismissed from Special Education and is functioning at the top of his regular 3rd grade class.
  • Paul, still a practicing physician, has found that reading and spelling have a system that make sense, that they no longer require a tremendous amount of time and energy.
  • Jenny’s written work is much more accurate and much less stressful. Her grades reflect the change!
  • Jim, previously unable to read at all now reads for parts and has been seen in popular T.V. shows…with speaking parts.

Phonemic awareness deficit has been found to be a key and often crippling factor in reading and spelling disorders. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Phonemic awareness can be trained. Reading and spelling disorders can be corrected.

Early Detection of Hearing Disabilities

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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

 

7 Things Every Parent Should Know About Learning Challenges

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Does your child have learning challenges? Here are 7 things you need to know in order to understand them, help them, and create a better future for them.

1. Attention problems are often a symptom, not the real issue…
In her book, Why Our Children Can’t Read Dr. Diane McGuinness says, “The worse you are at something, the more brain cells you need to do it, the harder it is to keep doing it, and the harder it is to keep your attention focused on what you’re doing” When it takes more effort to do something, the brain burns more glucose, using energy, which can eventually lead to exhaustion. In order for the brain to efficiently process information, it has to regulate levels of attention.The two major attention control systems in the brain involve:

  • attending for a certain amount of time
  • being able to keep out distractions in the surrounding environment

Learning things that are difficult makes holding attention to that task, over a considerable span of time a struggle. When learning is difficult, the ability to block out distracting background or peripheral noises is stressed or decreased.

When new things are learned, or concepts are still a novelty, more energy is required from the brain to pay attention. Over time, with an efficient processing system, this effort to pay attention diminishes as tasks become more innate and automatic. However, if a student’s processing system is not working efficiently, it may take longer for skills to get to that comfortable, automatic level, increasing the likelihood of attention challenges .

The inability to pay attention is very often a symptom of inefficient information processing.

2. “Try harder” is a dirty term… 
Believe it or not, trying too hard can be counter-productive.In order to be an efficient learner of anything, we need to be able to use all of our mental resources. Our two hemispheres in the brain each have unique thinking capabilities which compliment each other and work best in cooperation.The right side of our brain let’s us experience the whole or the “big picture.” It is more intuitive and less structured.The left side is logical, orderly, and verbal. It allows us to break information into small bits in order to learn new things and communicate.When both hemispheres of brain work together, learning can be easier and more fun. Telling a struggling learner to “try harder” may actually cause him to “over focus” with the left side of the brain. He will try and try to make sense of the pieces, but without the “big picture” support of the right brain, he will become more confused and frustrated. Dr. Paul Dennison of the Educational Kinesiology Foundation calls this “switching off.”The cycle of being stuck can often be broken by movement. Integrating movements for this purpose can be found in Brain Gym activities.
(www.braingym.com ) Our words can also help trigger clearer thinking for learning. Instead of saying, “Try harder,” try saying something like, “You got this part exactly right. Now let’s take a look at this.”

3. Respect the effort… 
Being smart but having to work harder and longer than anyone else in your class, or trying hard and failing anyway is painful for both the individuals with the learning challenges and their families.As we work with our children or our students with learning difficulties, we first need to respect the great amount of extra effort that is needed for them to perform. Constantly reinforcing that effort and celebrating each small success encourages them to keep going.

4. Coping is NOT the final answer… 
All of us have both stronger and weaker areas of ability, talent, and interest. WE naturally gravitate toward those things that are our strengths, and often find ways to get around the weaker areas.As an adult, if you am terrible at playing tennis, you may choose to cope with that by not playing tennis. But what if the area that is weakest for you is reading? “Getting around” it or just coping with a reading disorder is not easy or comfortable in today’s society.Those of us who work with the “learning disability” / dyslexic population, do them a great disservice if we do not seek to understand and address the underlying skills and differences in thinking that cause the learning challenges. Teaching them compensations and coping strategies is simply not enough. 

5. Look at the whole child… 
If your child/student is not performing to his potential academically, you may want to ask these questions to understand the variety of factors that affect a child’s academic performance.:

  1. Does my child enjoy learning?
  2. Is my child eating a variety of healthy foods?
  3. Is my child getting enough sleep and maintaining good sleep patterns?
  4. Does my child independently complete homework and follow through on responsibilities?
  5. Is it easy for my child to communicate what he needs and wants?
  6. Is my child able to be kind, considerate and compassionate in social situations?
  7. Does my child have self-confidence and experience social acceptance?
  8. In general, does my child feel safe and protected at home and school?
  9. Do I know my child’s strengths and weaknesses? Does my child lack skills to perform successfully at school?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, take a look at what piece of the learning puzzle they affect. If it’s a matter of changing dietary habits or improving sleeping patterns, these are things that can be worked out in the home.

However, if communicating is difficult for your child, or if s/he has low self-confidence, low social acceptance, or struggles to independently complete his work, there could be underlying factors to your child’s difficulties in school that need consideration.

6. Underlying processing skills MUST be addressed in order to make lasting changes 
The most common cause of learning challenges is inefficient mental tools, or processing skills.In order to have good information to learn with, individuals must be able to:

  1. Pay attention
  2. Remember
  3. Quickly and accurately process what they see and hear

When any underlying processing skills are weak, the individual will be a less efficient learner than she/he could be.

A person has a learning problem if he makes more mistakes than the average person or has to work longer or harder than the average person. Only by addressing the underlying issues can the individual become a truly independent learner. Underlying processing skills that affect learning are memory, attention, processing speed, auditory and language processing, visual processing, and logic and reasoning.

7. The brain can change… 
Recent brain research tells us that the brain has plasticity , or the ability to change with training. Through intensive training that “stretches” an individual’s thinking, chemical and physical changes can occur in the brain. Because we know this kind of “neuro-rehabilitation” is possible, we also know that with the right tools and strategies, new, higher functioning neuropathways can be developed to enhance a student’s overall processing and performance.Our brains are continually modified by our experiences. This implies that programs which target processing and motor skills can improve those areas in students with brain injuries or motor or learning disabilities.  (More about Plasticity)

 

The Upside of Dyslexia?

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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!

Auditory Connections – Is Your Child’s Learning struggle actually a Listening issue?

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If your child experiences reading difficulties,  you’ve likely been researching the issue hoping for understanding of their learning struggle.  If so, you may have become familiar with Auditory Connections - Is Your Child's Learning struggle actually a Listening issue?the link between auditory processing and reading.  

Indeed, you may already suspect that your child exhibits some level of disability in terms of auditory processing and are now trying to figure out  if:

1- the experts know enough about it to have developed successful therapies, and

2- whether your child is a good candidate for these therapies.

Studies are still being done, research articles published, and books are still being written that emphasize the importance of auditory processing in learning to read, communicating with oral and written language, and developing adequate social skills.  At TLC, I have seen this verified over and over in my clinical work with students.

As I have worked in this area, I have been continuously reminded of the wholeness of learning and of the learner. I have previous written about the auditory system, (“Breakthroughs in Auditory Processing” at www.learningdisability.com) and its connections not only with the language center of the brain, but with the vestibular system (our system of balance and movement), and the automatic functions of the body (respiratory, digestive, and eliminatory).

When we use sound therapy to stimulate the auditory system, we find the results to be more global than the original goals of increasing phonemic awareness, reading, or language skills. Improvements in handwriting, posture, sleep habits, communication, social skills, confidence, calmness and math are a few of the peripheral changes we have seen.

Dr. Alfred Tomatis, a French ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat specialist), discovered in the early 1950’s that the ay we listen has a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. He also discovered that many learning problems are the direct result of listening problems.  He distinguished hearing from listening, indicating that they are actually two different functions of the ear.

Hearing is the passive perception of sound.  Listening, on the other hand, involves the desire and ability to focus on selected sounds; to choose what sound information we want to attend to so that we can process it in a clear and organized manner.

Listening is closely related to attention and concentration, and integration, understanding and retention of auditory information, and therefore, critical to learning.

What happens when a person’s hearing is good, but their listening is poor?
Surprisingly, poor listening can affect a wide number of areas. Canadian Listening Therapist and author Paul Madaule has put together a checklist of abilities or qualities that relate to listening skills. There is no score, but this tool may be helpful evaluating an individual’s ability to listen, and therefore to learn. This checklist is reprinted here with the permission of The Listening Center, Toronto (www.listeningcenter.com)

Listening Skills Checklist
Development History: Our early years
This knowledge about our younger years is extremely important in early identification and prevention of listening problems. It also sheds light on possible causes of listening problems.

  • A stressful pregnancy
  • Difficult birth
  • Adoption
  • Early separation from the mother
  • Delay in motor development
  • Delay in language development
  • Recurring ear infections

Receptive Listening: Our external environment
This type of listening is directed outward to the world around us. It keeps us attuned to what’s going on at home, at work, in the classroom or with friends.

  • Short attention span
  • Distractibility
  • Over-sensitivity to sounds
  • Misinterpretation of questions
  • Confusion of similar-sounding words
  • Frequent need for repetition
  • Inability to follow sequential instructions

Express Listening: Our internal atmosphere
This is the kind of listening that is directed within us. We use it to listen to ourselves and to gauge and control our voice when we speak and sing.

  • Flat and monotonous voice
  • Hesitant speech
  • Weak vocabulary
  • Poor sentence structure
  • Overuse of stereotyped expressions
  • Inability to sing in tune
  • Confusion or reversal of letters
  • Poor reading comprehension
  • Poor reading aloud
  • Poor spelling

Motor Skills: Our physical abilities
The ear of the body (the vestibule), which controls balance, muscle and eye coordination and body image needs close scrutiny also.

  • Poor posture
  • Fidgety behavior
  • Clumsy, uncoordinated movements
  • Poor sense of rhythm
  • Messy handwriting
  • Hard time with organization, structure
  • Confusion of lefts and rights
  • Mixed dominance

Level of Energy: Our fuel system
The ear acts like a dynamo (a powerful motor), providing us with the “brain” energy we need to not only survive but also to lead fulfilling lives.

  • Difficulty getting up
  • Tiredness at the end of the day
  • Habit of procrastinating
  • Hyperactivity
  • Tendency toward depression
  • Feeling overburdened with everyday tasks

Behavioral and Social Adjustment: Our relationships skills
A listening difficulty is often related to these qualities of interacting with others.

  • Low tolerance for frustration
  • Poor self-confidence
  • Poor self-image
  • Shyness
  • Difficulty making friends
  • Tendency to withdraw or avoid others
  • Irritability
  • Immaturity
  • Low motivation, no interest in school/work
  • Negative attitude toward school/work

At the Therapeutic Literacy Center in Solana Beach, we use Samonas Sound Therapy, Auditory Stimulation Training system,  metronome and audio-vocal training to stimulate the auditory system and improve listening and listening-related skills. As students become better listeners, they have also become better learners.

Here is one story:
John came to the learning center as a 7 year old. He had been diagnosed with apraxia, which affected his gross motor coordination, graphomotor skills (handwriting), and oral motor skills. When he started, John showed extreme difficulty with any fine or gross motor movements, organization, or coordination. He had difficulty articulating sounds and words and difficulty expressing himself in a way that others could understand. He was obviously very bright, but had difficulty with social and language comprehension. He had huge amounts of uncontrolled energy and serious attention problems. He could attend to a task for only 10-15 minutes with re-direction. He was a non-reader, had trouble making friends, and had poor self-esteem.

After 4 weeks of sound therapy, John had better control in swimming; more eye contact; clearer, more controlled language; and had begun asking questions about conversations and other things in general.

After 6-7 weeks of sound therapy, John was using larger words and more mature sentences and questions. His sentences were no longer fragmented. He showed dramatic Listening and Learning - Not always as straightforward as it seems. Find out about Auditory Processing Disorderimprovement in artwork (from scribbles to drawings), and showed better motor coordination. He started doing front and back somersaults in the pool, with control. He wrote a note on his own for the first time and posted it on his bedroom door. His self-esteem was reported as high!

John’s learning skills improved dramatically as a result of his listening therapy. His increased attention, motor coordination, articulation, communication, and auditory and language processing abilities allowed him to be ready for further processing skills development and academic skills. John is now reading at grade level!

Samonas Sound Therapy is a music and sound stimulation method that focuses on re-educating the ear and auditory pathways for increased attention, communication, listening, and sensory integration. This is accomplished through the use of specially modified classical music and nature sounds that stimulate the hearing mechanism to take in a full spectrum of sound.

Samonas was developed by German sound engineer, Ingo Steinbach. With his background in physics and music, Steinbach combined the principles of Dr. Alfred Tomatis with advances in technology and physics to develop the Samonas recordings.

Find out if your child’s learning struggle may actually be a listening issue.  Call or contact us today to talk about your child’s needs and how we and our tailored programs can help them overcome the challenges they are facing!