US Congressional Committee Hearing on the Science of Dyslexia

In an age of gridlock and choking polarization, the yesterday’s Congressional Committee Hearing on the Science of Dyslexia evoked the best qualities of US governmental process: bringing elected officials to the table with ordinary citizens in non-partisan dialogue to solve a major societal problem.

For a two hours in Rayburn room 2318 on Capitol Hill, there were no Democrats or Republicans, just people concerned about the prevalence of dyslexia in our nation’s children and the fact that millions of families are struggling, and convinced that something huge needs to be done to help these kids read, learn and thrive.

What made the event most remarkable was its emotional richness. As data points from the vast body of dyslexia science were shared by leading experts, tears flowed and laughter filled the air.

At one point, Committee Chairman Lamar Smith of Texas commented that he’d never heard such eruptions of applause and enthusiasm in a Congressional Hearing.

Best of all, the event was made accessible for everyone: its live webcast was recorded and archived; and all of the testimony was transcribed.

Here are several highlights.

Clicking on the speakers’ names will bring up a full transcript of their remarks:

Rep. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana gave some of the day’s most compelling and heart-wrenching testimony, pausing several times to wipe away tears and collect himself.

“A couple of years ago, my youngest daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. Prompted by concerns about my daughter and my constituents’ children, I set out to learn as much as I could about dyslexia and was amazed at how much is known and yet, far too often, not incorporated into public policy and education. . ."

"If dyslexia is identified in elementary school and the appropriate resources are given to these children, America can produce more teachers, more scientists and more entrepreneurs.”

Brownley1Rep. Julia Brownley of California also shared personal perspectives as a parent.

“When my daughter Hannah struggled to learn to read, like any parent I was completely panicked about what to do next."

"It was Hannah’s dyslexia, and learning to navigate the school system, where I witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly, that led me to public service. . ."

"This spring, Hannah received her Master’s degree in International Studies, and is now overseas saving the world with a NGO in Kenya, Africa."

"She speaks three languages, and she still misspells in all of them! I could not be prouder of her. But for every success story like Hannah, there are countless others who do not succeed.”

Sally1Dr. Sally Shaywitz of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity made a passionate plea to policy makers that now is the time to translate science into action.

“In dyslexia, remarkably in America, in the year 2014, we have not a knowledge gap but an action gap."

"We have the knowledge but it is not being put into policy and practice and far too many children and adults, too, are suffering needlessly."

"There is an epidemic of reading failure that we have the scientific evidence to treat effectively and we are not acknowledging or implementing it. . ."

"I cannot look into the face of one more child who has lost faith in himself and the world, I cannot look into the face of a child’s father who is desperately trying to hold back tears; I cannot hear once again about how a school told a mother, ‘we do not believe in dyslexia.’. . ."

"It is our hope that hearing the depth and extent of the scientific knowledge of dyslexia will alert policy makers to act and to act with a sense of urgency. ”

Max Brooks, an accomplished author and screenwriter, electrified Committee members and the gallery crowd with his personal account of living with dyslexia:

“For me, dyslexia was nearly as bad as the feelings of anxiety, shame, and low self-esteem that it caused."

"For me, ‘learned dependency’ was the real enemy, the self-narrative that ‘I can’t do this’ that can destroy children’s learning potential for the rest of their lives."

"That was ALMOST me. I’ve spent the last 30 years unlearning the lesson that dyslexia taught me, that society has no use for me. . ."

“A little awareness and flexible teaching methods could unlock unlimited potential in these kids who now think they’re losers."

"If we already have mandatory racial sensitivity training for our police, why not have mandatory dyslexia recognition training for our teachers?"

"It’s so simple, so easy, and when you look at all the other government programs designed to help citizens help themselves, it’s probably the least expensive.”

Persusasive testimony was also given by panelists Stacy Antie, a mother and parent advocate; Paul Eden, president of Landmark College; and Guinevere Eden, Director of the Center for the Study of Learning (CSL) and Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Georgetown University Medical Center.

Later on in a Q&A session with Committee lawmakers, Max Brooks revived his comment about making dyslexia training “a mandatory part of every teacher’s certificate,” instantly sparking whoops of applause from the gallery crowd, including many members of the Decoding Dyslexia movement.

And those Decoding Dyslexia members, from states as nearby as Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and from as far away as Texas, graciously gathered for a photo op of their own before the day’s proceedings concluded.

After the Committee Hearing, attendeees and panelists enjoyed a great luncheon hosted by the National Center for Learning Disabilities, featuring a preview look at the new Understood.org initiative and a website that will launch later this month.

This was followed by speeches by an assortment of guests, including Hal Malchow, President of the International Dyslexia Association, Robbi Cooper of Decoding Dyslexia Texas, and Kristin Kane of Decoding Dyslexia Virginia.

What will be the net impact of a day like this on our nation’s dyslexic children and the parents and teachers who support them?

It’s hard to say, but there was enough knowledge, passion and experience gathered there on Capitol Hill to move mountains.

With so many diverse players assembled at the table, it brought to life the vivid slogan Learning Ally has embraced this year: Together It’s Possible.

All credit goes to Learning Ally for the content of this article.

The boundaries of reading apps for children

A series of binary discussions has been plaguing early reading instruction for quite some time now: phonics versus whole language, reading for pleasure versus reading for learning, digital versus paper books and it seems that there is a new tug-of-war on the educational horizon: spritzing versus slow reading.

Spritz is a recently developed programme that brings speed-reading to the untrained eye. Its makers claim that users can ultimately read 1,000 words per minute.

Their goal is to have 15% of the world's texts available in Spritz format by 2016.

But a message is coming from the other direction too. Those who revere and often romanticise printed books argue that we need to slow down.

They warn that the digital age has made us shallow readers who flit from text to text without taking anything in.

We have a clear conflict here. On one hand, lots of people want to read faster, especially now that there is more to read out there than at any other time in human history.

On the other hand, we hear that children in the digital age do not read in depth and the often cited culprit is the device in their hand – the technology that distracts them from picking up a good book.

Is a middle ground possible?

Reading and writing always come hand-in-hand. If readers whizz through rather than engage with texts, this will ultimately be reflected in the type of texts made available to them.

Spritz certainly responds to the zeitgeist to read fast in order to cope in a text-saturated era. You can also see this tendency in the proliferation of listicles on news websites and contents pages that tell you how long it will take you to read an article.

Some say that the only way to cope with large email volumes, is to binge-read our inboxes. Spritz could be thus seen as another invention that panders to our growing tendency to read more but in less depth.

At the same time, readers, be they young or old,need to be given time to pause and think with the author of a text.

Slow reading is, for many, synonymous with deep reading and reading for learning and there are in fact technological developments happening to help readers improve their deep reading, almost the antidote to Spritz.

There are reading annotation systems with built-in interactive discussion to help readers, students in particular, to better understand what they are reading.

These slow them down in their reading by asking them questions or prompting them to pause and take notes.

Similarly for younger readers, there are read-to-learn apps that explain vocabulary and thus help with reading comprehension.

So which approach is better for the contemporary reader? We can now whizz through every page on the internet by installing Spritzlet on our web browser.

It may not be long until slow reading widgets will become available to help us highlight information in onscreen texts, underline unfamiliar words, unpick abstract metaphors and provide links to facts.

In thinking about how to teach children to read effectively in digital age, we need to stop thinking in terms of slow and fast.

There is a difference between reading an email or a chemistry textbook or a novel. We use different reading formats for different contents, and different contents & formats for different purposes.

These different purposes come with different personal investments and hence different reading techniques.

There is already a disturbing disconnect between the content and format of reading happening in schools and outside the classrooms. Let's not increase this gap with another fictitious dichotomy.

An extra hour of TV diminishes toddlers' kindergarten chances

Every hourly increase in daily television watching at 29 months of age is associated with diminished vocabulary and math skills, classroom engagement (which is largely determined by attention skills), victimization by classmates, and physical prowess at kindergarten, according to Professor Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine children's hospital.

"This is the first time ever that a stringently controlled associational birth cohort study has looked at and found a relationship between too much toddler screen time and kindergarten risks for poor motor skills and psychosocial difficulties, like victimization by classmates," Pagani said.

"These findings suggest the need for better parental awareness and compliance with existing viewing recommendations put forth by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)."

"The AAP discourages watching television during infancy and recommends not more than two hours per day beyond age 2. It seems that every extra hour beyond that has a remarkably negative influence."

Journalists are welcome to use the following responses in their own reports. Interviews and further information (including the original French text of this document) can be obtained by contacting media relations at the University of Montreal (Université de Montréal).

Question: Why did you conduct this study?

Pagani: Much of the research on school readiness has focused on how kindergarten characteristics predict later success.

Kindergarten entry characteristics predict long-term psycho-social adjustment and economic characteristics like income and academic attainment.

Being innovative, my focus has been to examine what predicts kindergarten entry characteristics. Adding further originality, I also wanted to focus on neglected yet crucial aspects of school readiness such as motor skills, which predict later physical activity and reading skills, likelihood of being "picked-on", which predict social difficulties, and skills at linked to doing what you are supposed to be doing when having been given instructions, which are in turn linked to attention systems that are regulated by the brain's frontal lobe development.

Question: Who participated in this study?

Pagani: 991 girls and 1006 boys in Quebec whose parents reported their television viewing behaviour as part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development.

Question: How did you come up with the figure of an extra hour of TV?

Pagani: The standard deviation is a commonly used statistic tool that tells us what is within a normal range compared to the average.

One standard deviation from the average daily amount of television viewed by the toddlers in this sample (105 minutes) is 72 minutes.

Some of the children who participated in the study were two or even three standard deviations away from the average, and their kindergarten indicators were correspondingly worse than those who were one standard deviation away.

Question: Where did you examine television viewing?

Pagani: This study only looks at the most common form of screen time, which is in the home. However, it may be an underestimate because many child care settings use television as an activity during care giving.

Question: Why would these results be important for everyday life?

Pagani: Because of kindergarten's power to predict future productivity, the identification of modifiable factors that foretell not being ready for the transition to formal schooling represents an important goal for a productive society.

By statistical standards, the results show highly controlled modest associations, yet these are net effects which suggest a developmental course which could ultimately compromise achievement, social relations, physical prowess, and preferences and habits toward a healthy lifestyle.

Teachers Using Social Media to communicate with Parents

Teachers are turning to twitter, blogging and Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with parents about their child's learning, and according to Queensland University of Technology (QUT) education expert Associate Professor Margaret Lloyd it is a trend which is meeting the needs of busy parents with time restrictions.

Professor Lloyd said contemporary teaching involved teachers' blogging with students to capture their learning, and tweeting and emailing parents with information about the school day.

"Gone are the days of finding a scrunched-up newsletter in the bottom of a bag, squished between the rotten banana and mouldy sandwich," she said.

"Parents are now able to find out what their children are doing, virtually as they are doing it." Professor Lloyd said in many families today both parents worked, meaning parents were not able to be as involved in their child's schooling as they perhaps would like.

Prof Margaret Lloyd

"This trend of using digital technology as a means of connecting with parents, essentially bringing parents into the classroom, is really taking off," Professor Lloyd said. "It also fits with the trend that the walls of the classroom are disappearing."

Professor Lloyd said the notion of classes fitting inside four walls was a thing of the past, with digital technology rapidly being used as a communication tool between teachers and parents, teachers and students, students and students and teachers and teachers.

"For example it is common for students in one classroom to work with students in another classroom halfway across the world using digital technology," she said.

"There is also a change in the relationship between teachers and students with teachers nowadays able to see the students' work as they are working and comment and provide feedback progressively.

"There is a huge change in the way we are teaching and communicating." She said universities were leading the way in this method of teaching.

"At QUT we model this teaching practice. Future teachers are working on collaborative wikis, they are talking about collaborative learning and they are being afforded that enhanced teaching experience," Professor Lloyd said.

"The classroom is changing and our teaching students have to be positioned to lead that change and once they get on board, it just clicks into place."

Comment
Firstly, one wonders if the schools and teachers would be open to enabling wider Social Media forums that would allow parents to discuss general school and education matters more openly.

Thus allowing parents to see and share difficult areas and comments on potentially bad teachers /pupils and to bring group thinking into the discussion.

Secondly, this is an excellent step forward in teacher /parent communications but unfortunately, in some areas and countries the teachers and parents can be less able to use and understand the Technology, reported here.

Online Learning: Regular demands on attention and memory needed

Somewhere between the traditional classroom and old fashion home schooling, online learning has emerged as the dominant educational resource.

Skyrocketing tuition fees, particularly at the college level, has sped the inevitable migration to online accreditation.

While the benefits are obvious, the loss of those seamless instances of micro-feedback between student and teacher makes attention the primary casualty of its rapid adoption.

Efforts to bridge this gap and reduce mind wandering among online students are underway at Harvard University, an institution well poised to be a leader in providing online content.

A new study in PNAS from their psychology department gives one possible solution to the problem. By making attentional demands in the form of brief quizzes on 5-minute intervals, student performance in online courses can be significantly improved.

Even the most highly motivated student still battles the constant urge to search or click on a link to learn more—or less as the case may be.

Undoubtedly striking the right balance between freedom and oversight is the central challenge to giving students mastery over a given body of knowledge.

Various models have emerged that have garnered massive worldwide enrollment.

Free courses at edX.org, coursera.org, 2u.com, Udacity.com have all been highly successful.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the call for help in maintaining selective attention in the absence of the normal controllers has come from the students themselves.

Noval Khan
Schacter Memory Lab

The approach taken by the new Harvard study is based on what they call interpolated memory.

It is based upon the idea of interpolating the coursework or task with short memory tasks.

Students were given a 21-minute statistics video lecture which was segmented into four periods, each followed up with a 2-minute testing period.

The testing period involved brief review, testing, and even unrelated arithmetic. The perhaps predictable results were that students given the additional retesting at each segment, did much better on cumulative testing done after the lecture.

This formalisation of the obvious was corroborated by the student self-assessment in which they invariably reported reduced periods of mind wandering.

The study adds rigor to the idea that replacing a human lecturer with a human on a screen can work, provided appropriate considerations for the learning process are taken.

A useful analogy might be to consider running on a field compared to running on a treadmill. On your own on the field, you can control your speed at every step, and go in a any direction you choose.

On a treadmill your pace is set for you. The best performance seems to be somewhere in between, as on a track.

Here the goal is set, the student has some freedoms in getting there at their own pace, but is guided at every turn.

More information: 
Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures, PNAS, Published online before print April 1, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1221764110

Dyslexia: A New Synergy Between Education and Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract 
Reading is essential in modern societies, but many children have dyslexia, a difficulty in learning to read.

Dyslexia often arises from impaired phonological awareness, the auditory analysis of spoken language that relates the sounds of language to print.

Behavioural remediation, especially at a young age, is effective for many, but not all, children.

Neuroimaging in children with dyslexia has revealed reduced engagement of the left temporo-parietal cortex for phonological processing of print, altered white-matter connectivity, and functional plasticity associated with effective intervention.

Behavioural and brain measures identify infants and young children at risk for dyslexia, and preventive intervention is often effective.

A combination of evidence-based teaching practices and cognitive neuroscience measures could prevent dyslexia from occurring in the majority of children who would otherwise develop dyslexia.

Full Text

Matt Damon speaks before Save Our Schools March 2011 - YouTube video

"I had incredible teachers. And as I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself — my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity — all of these things came from how I was parented and taught.

And none of these qualities that I’ve just mentioned — none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success — none of these qualities that make me who I am ... can be tested. Matt Damon

Teachers declare: Boys suffer poor body image

Boys increasingly have low self-esteem about their body image, teachers warn.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers claims the promotion of ideal body images is reducing both boys' and girls' confidence in their own bodies.

Last year, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image recommended all children took part in compulsory body image and self-esteem lessons.

The union will discuss the issue of body image among pupils at its annual conference in Liverpool next week.

In a survey of 693 members across the UK, the union found 78% thought girls suffered low self-esteem and 51% thought boys had low confidence in their body image.

In addition, 59% of staff said that worries about body image made female pupils anxious and 30% said it caused anxiety in male pupils.

Some 55% said that girls were "ultra-sensitive" to comments about their appearance and 27% said boys took comments to heart.

Diets
Pressure to achieve the perfect body meant girls were likely to go on a diet, according to 54% of staff and boys were prone to start excessive exercise regimes, said 30% of those surveyed.

Asked where the pressure came from, 94% of those surveyed said they believed the media, including television, magazines, music videos, adverts and social media was the biggest influence on female pupils and also on male pupils (68%).

Peers of the same sex were also highlighted as a key cause of pressure on female pupils to look good by 83% of respondents and on male pupils by 54%.

A teacher at a secondary academy in Wandsworth, London, said: "I find that boys who are shorter than their peers are extremely sensitive and manifest either disruptive behaviour or are very withdrawn."

One early years teacher in England said: "I work with four to five-year-olds and some say things like, 'I can't eat cheese, it will make me fat!'"

A teacher at a secondary school in Northern Ireland said: "In my year 11 GCSE English class, the girls all openly admitted to feeling pressure about body image and many of the boys confessed to it too, although they said that usually they wouldn't admit to it affecting them.

A head of department at a secondary school in Exeter said: "Digital and social media are a nightmare with 'anonymous' sites that slate students in the most appalling terms on their appearance, personality and anything judge-able."

"Despite knowing about airbrushing, the girls still feel the need to aspire to unrealistic notions of beauty."

Read more of this article here

Dyslexia: Dr. Sally Shaywitz, Yale University School of Medicine

“It’s time to call things what they really are,” declares neuroscientist Dr. Sally Shaywitz, the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at Yale University School of Medicine, and co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.

She does just that in her best seller, Overcoming Dyslexia, detailing how to recognize and treat a disorder that now affects one in five children.

Subtitled “A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level (Knopf, Vintage),” the book lays out not only the latest research about recognizing this brain-based learning difficulty but does so in a compassionate and accessible way that has proven indispensable to parents, teachers, and policy makers.

Her book provides “tools” on how to identify dyslexic children and adults and empirical data on the kinds of resources that can make a difference at home and in school, including specific methods that can strengthen reading decoding and fluency.

Dyslexic readers can indeed “overcome” some difficulties and in the process, gain self-esteem, so essential a component in any pedagogy.

For sure, as Shaywitz notes, there’s confusion, if not downright denial, about dyslexia — but there need not and should not be.

While learning to read and accessing and retrieving a spoken word are often problematic, the ability to think and reason and have empathy are not affected, in fact, are marked strengths in those who are dyslexic.

As many role models out there show, dyslexic individuals can achieve because logic and reasoning are not adversely affected by dyslexia.

The list includes, for example, financial services innovator Charles Schwab, the writer John Irving, the renowned attorney David Boies (he didn’t learn to read until the 3rd grade!) and a host of well-known innovators, scientists, physicians, and even poets.

She emphasizes that slow reading should not be confused with slow thinking, nor should word retrieval difficulties and lack of glibness be misunderstood as lack of knowledge.

What is dyslexia? Shaywitz offers this definition: dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading, in relation to an individual’s level of intelligence, age, grade or professional status.

It emanates from difficulty in accessing the individual sounds of spoken words so that there is a predictable array of symptoms, including [difficulty with] spoken word retrieval, reading ease and speed, spelling and learning a second language.”

She emphasizes that awareness of the basic difficulty in dyslexia allows educators, evaluators and parents to know what signs to look for to recognize dyslexia.

Importantly, dyslexia is a clinical diagnosis based on a synthesis of an individual’s history, observation of his or her speaking and reading and test results.

Shaywitz reminds us that tests are only proxys, it is the reality of an individual’s real life experiences that are of primary importance in diagnosing dyslexia.

Read the full article here at Education Update

Dyslexia and education in the 21st century: Jorsen

This paper is an introductory article from the Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs (Jorsen). 

The Full PDF is available here

Abstract This paper both reviews the other papers in this special issue and puts them in the context of the current agenda of research in dyslexia education.

The pluralistic nature of the field is explored with reference to this special issue.

The paper suggests a way forward for the field in terms of a developing research agenda for dyslexia education as we progress further into the 21st century.

Introduction
There are important educational questions to be asked in relation to dyslexia. What does it mean for a student in the 21st century to be classified as dyslexic?

How is dyslexia constructed and understood and how do the different disciplines influence educational provision, and indeed how is this experienced by students?

Researchers generally agree that it is not a straightforward matter of discovering children with intrinsic, diagnosable cognitive impairments, which can be simply remediated.

It is recognised in current writing about special educational needs (SEN) that it is necessary to take account of a range of interacting factors and related values: biological, psychological, social and cultural – to understand and respond appropriately to children identified as having learning difficulties in school (Davis and Florian, 2004a, b; Norwich, 2009).

This paper reviews the other papers in our special issue and sets out an agenda for future research in the field.

The special issue sets out to extend current discussion and thinking about dyslexia and education beyond the current perspective.

The collection contains papers drawing on the themes of identification and assessment, training, emotional well-being, systemic support and development and narrative research (i.e., our papers do respond to the biological, psychological etc.).

Indeed, because dyslexia inspires a debate on a number of levels, and in a range of academic disciplines, much can be gained by the bringing together in one issue of alternative perspectives and paradigms.

Further, by including papers that draw on different traditions of research about dyslexia, we can offer the potential for teasing out new knowledge by exploring the tensions between perspectives.

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? 

New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behaviour, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.

"The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as 'approaches toward learning,'" said Christopher Cornwell, head of economics in the UGA Terry College of Business and one of the study's authors.

"You can think of 'approaches to learning' as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization.

I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that."

The study, co-authored by Cornwell and David Mustard at UGA and Jessica Van Parys at Columbia, analyzed data on more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

It examined students' performance on standard tests in three categories—reading, math and science—linking test scores to teachers' assessments of their students' progress, both academically and more broadly.

The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favour girls.

In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.

The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or "how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills."

They even report evidence of a grade bonus for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts.

This difference can have long-reaching effects, Cornwell said. 

Read the full article here

Dyslexia: Merilee Grage Hearing the Voices of Dragon

This week we are looking at the story of Merilee Grage who struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia for years.

She is using Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking to help finish her Master’s degree in Special Education.

She is a believer in the use of assistive tech in the classroom, and has introduced Dragon to the students in her repsonibility, who face reading challenges.

She reports that the results have been “amazing.”

Grage dropped out of college in 1979 due to her undiagnosed dyslexia, but with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the tables have turned: "I bought Dragon to help with my typing and I ended up using it for everything: emails, papers, my online courses, and anything else that requires a keyboard."

"It’s about creativity and having a flow of work that’s not interrupted by worrying about spelling and grammar. Dragon is a major part of that."

More recently, Merilee has seen the transformation Dragon has had on students of all ages, including a 3rd grader with dyslexia who, for the first time, was excited about reading and was thirsty for more.

“When we were done,” Grage recalls he said, "There has to be a third book." His motivation was amazing.

This was a student who didn’t want to go to the resource room because he read at a first grade level and couldn’t write complete sentences.

"Dragon and echo reading during profile creation forced him to work on word pronunciation, and his comprehension and fluency greatly increased."

To read more of Merilee’s story, go to Nuance's website here.

Visual Learning for Hearing Impaired

As the awareness of the effectiveness of Visual Learning has grown, and the significant benefits of online educational video have become more widely accepted and understood, the availability and the amount of online educational video has started to increase.

However with the exception of one company, the needs of the hearing impaired child or student appear to have been largely ignored and forgotten.

While this may not have been deliberate, the fact remains that this has largely come about because the majority of so-called educational video available online, is film footage that was original recorded for other uses including general TV distribution, and was not developed specifically for the teaching of the school curriculum.

This means, simply because those videos may be of a general educational nature, does not mean that they adequately meet the requirements of the curriculum standards.

Zane Education however has taken a totally different approach, and as a result has a developed an online educational video library of over 1,500 online videos covering 11 school subjects and 240 topics specifically for the teaching of the curriculum.

They also have had the foresight to provide children with as many learning style options as possible, by adding subtitles to all of their videos.

In other words children with hearing impairments can now also enjoy the significant benefits of online educational video.

The issue of Dyslexia, there are those that would speculate that learning by using video rather than the use of textbooks, means that children’s reading skills will suffer.

Obviously with the addition of subtitles that is not necessarily the case. In fact a future article to be released in the next week will demonstrate and explain precisely, how video subtitles can be used to rapidly increase a child’s reading skills.

Research carried out by the Availll Institute over the last 5 years has demonstrated the link between the use of subtitles on video, and the improvement in children’s reading skills.

Unlike the child with special needs, the hearing impaired student will not require the attention of a parent, teacher or specialised tutor to make full use, and receive the full benefit’s from Zane Education’s comprehensive online educational video library.

They will be able to work on their on quite comfortably, and upon the completion of each topic, they will then be able to take full advantage of another of the significant features of Zane Education’s website.

Not only does Zane provide the use of educational video, they also support each of the 260 curriculum topics by providing online testing for each of those topics.

Interactive multiple-choice K12 curriculum quizzes containing a total of over 23,000 questions help to continue the learning process by revealing to the child not only whether their selected answer was correct or incorrect, in addition a further explanation is provided as to why the child’s answer was right or wrong. Hence the learning process continues.

So in many ways this approach to providing subtitles on each video removes virtually any distinction between the needs of the hearing impaired student and their peers, whether it is in the classroom or in the homeschool environment.

Locked Away: The Background - Seclusion Rooms

Seclusion rooms are enclosed spaces that are supposed to be used to calm or restrain children who become violent.

In Ohio, no state law governs seclusion rooms, and the Ohio Department of Education has provided little guidance and virtually no oversight to schools.

But the discussion about whether or how to regulate seclusion in schools has continued in the U.S. for nearly four decades.

In 2012, after accounts of inappropriate restraint and seclusion of Columbus students made news, the Ohio Department of Education restarted a 2009 task force that had drafted a state policy on the use of seclusion and restraint. The department says a new draft policy will be completed in August 2012.

Seclusion rooms can be crucial tools to keep students who may quickly spin out of control and become violent safe. Many educators say seclusion rooms should be used only when children are at risk of hurting themselves or others.

There is little evidence that seclusion helps children but plenty of evidence that it hurts them. Seclusion rooms do take children out of the classroom, where they could be learning.

Teachers and students can be injured forcing a struggling child into a seclusion room. Research shows that children have committed suicide, hurt themselves and even died inside seclusion rooms.

Locked Away: Moving Away From "Mainstreaming" | StateImpact Ohio

Locked Away: Moving Away From "Mainstreaming"

The use of special rooms to isolate students for behavioral problems is in some ways an outgrowth of a longstanding movement to integrate special needs students into “regular” school.

For three decades, federal law has required “mainstreaming” of students with disabilities and behavioral problems.

Before that, schools didn’t have to accept special-needs kids, leaving them out of public education.

Parents revolted, arguing that their children deserved the same schooling as anyone else and that mainstreaming would benefit everyone: Special-needs kids could learn to act like the other kids, and those kids could learn a bit of empathy by going to school with students different from them.

Seclusion rooms evolved as a way to handle disruptions in class. They were intended to be used when students posed a physical threat to themselves or others.

Now, many parents of special-needs students are opting to move away from mainstreaming their children in public schools.

Read the full article here: Locked Away: Moving Away From "Mainstreaming" | StateImpact Ohio

Dyslexia: Reading Program ineffective for Students with Learning Difficulties

A new report from the What Works Clearinghouse questions the effectiveness of a longstanding, widely used reading program, developed by McGraw-Hill, for students with learning disabilities.

In a report this month, the WWC found that there is evidence that Reading Mastery has "no discernible effects on reading comprehension and potentially negative effects on alphabetics, reading fluency, and writing for students with learning disabilities."

Looking at the 17 studies about Reading Mastery Classic and Reading Mastery Signature, specifically for students with learning disabilities, the WWC found two of them met its research standards.

Reading Mastery is used in all 50 US states and internationally, and more than 6,500 schools across the country use Reading Mastery Signature, McGraw-Hill said.

The cost per student, the WWC said, during the first year of implementation ranges from $200 to $300 and pays for materials including storybooks, textbooks, workbooks and textbooks. Buying a full set of teaching materials costs between $650 and $1,000 per grade level.

The research in these studies included 113 students with learning disabilities in 2nd through 5th grades from schools in the southeast.

In a typical Reading Mastery lesson, there are seven to nine short activities that address skills such as phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondence, sounding out words, word recognition, vocabulary, oral reading fluency, and comprehension.

Teachers get scripted lessons to keep students on task, and students who struggle get remedial lessons.

McGraw-Hill cited other research that it says supports its confidence in Reading Mastery's effectiveness.

"For more than 40 years, Reading Mastery has supported the development of struggling readers in grades preK-5 through Direct Instruction," McGraw-Hill spokesman Brian Belardi said.

"The vast majority of anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that Reading Mastery has a positive, meaningful impact on improving student learning."


Contact:Brian Belardi
McGraw-Hill Education
(212) 904-4827
brian_belardi@mcgraw-hill.com

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education | Video on TED.com

Dyslexia: Online games and Apps

Below is a list of apps and online games for enjoyment (and a little educational value)!

Apps for Apple

• Words with Friends
• Hanging with Friends
• Scramble with Friends
• Draw Something

Apps for Android

• Words with Friends
• Hanging with Friends
• Scramble with Friends
• Draw Something

Online Games

• Word Whomp
• Chicktionary
• Scrabble
• Draw My Thing (online version of Draw Something)
• Boggle Bash
• Anagram Scramble
• Word Ruffle
• Word Stone

Websites

• BoxerJam
• PBS Kids

Inside of Chinese High Schools - An Exclusive Interview (Full) - YouTube

Many factors play into China's booming economy - one of which is its education. So, how do the Chinese do it? I found out through this interview with several students in two Chinese high schools. See the difference in the education of the other side of the world.

Dyslexia-Ville by Peggy Stern - Video

 
Visit Dyslexia-Ville here