Scotland: Farming with Dyslexia

The inaugural meeting of the Farming with Dyslexia Working Group, led by NFU Scotland, took place earlier this week.

Chaired by the Union’s Vice President Rob Livesey, the group was established to ensure that Scottish farming stakeholders recognise the needs of dyslexic crofters and farmers in the most appropriate way.

Representatives from NFU Scotland, the Scottish Government’s Rural Payments Inspection Directorate, Forestry Commission Scotland, Dyslexia Scotland and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) along with four farming and crofting members of NFU Scotland who have dyslexia attended the meeting on Wednesday (3 September).

Steered by NFU Scotland, this group was borne from the recognition that dyslexia is a real, but often hidden, issue among the farming community.

With some 25 per cent of agriculture students at SRUC receiving support for dyslexia, it is believed this heritable condition is more prevalent within the farming sector than previously thought.

However, due to stigma and poor understanding, it can remain undiagnosed and can be problematic for those dealing with communications, regulation and form-filling within the agriculture industry.

The Union recently launched a campaign to raise awareness of dyslexia amongst the farming community, whilst engaging with the Scottish Government, Dyslexia Scotland and SRUC to see how joint work can be undertaken to better recognise the issue and support those affected.

NFU Scotland Vice President Rob Livesey commented:

“Today’s meeting was a constructive one and a sound starting point for those keen to recognise the impact of dyslexia within our industry and what action we can take to help their situation.

“I believe we have a great bunch of people with vision and determination to make a difference.  The contribution from those within the working group will be crucial to the success of this initiative.

“It’s now clear to myself and others that there is no one size fits all approach to helping those with dyslexia working within Scottish farming. However, there is a commitment to proactively help those that have or suspect they have dyslexia.

“As a group, our first objective is to continue to raise awareness and build on the work that we have started. The next task we have is to attempt to remove the stigma attached to dyslexia. We strongly believe as a group that there is huge potential to tap into the talent that dyslexic people in our industry have and help them recognise their own potential for the benefit of all.

“That ambition can be underpinned by engaging with all stakeholders to ensure the needs of those with dyslexia are taken into account and that all communications and regulations are available in a format appropriate for those with dyslexia.

“As a result we will be embarking on a campaign in the next few months to address those stated aims.”

Note to Editors

• The three key objectives agreed at the first meeting of the Farmers with Dyslexia Working group were:
• Raise awareness of dyslexia to reduce the stigma and promote the abilities of dyslexic individuals which are of great benefit to the agriculture industry
• Engage with the Scottish Government and other stakeholders to ensure measures to recognise dyslexia among the farming community are appropriate.
• Ensure systems of communication with regulatory bodies are more accessible for dyslexic farmers and crofters with a choice of delivery options
• A photograph of the working group is available on request, by contacting Bob Carruth: media@nfus.org.uk or by calling 0131 472 4006.
• NFU Scotland launched a campaign to get better support in place for farmers and crofters who have dyslexia in July to ensure there is suitable support in place to make the day-to-day running of their businesses easier and more efficient when it comes to form filling and communicating with farming organisations.
• The campaign has received the backing from former racing driver Sir Jackie Stewart and the Union has been working with Scottish Government, Dyslexia Scotland and SRUC throughout the campaign. For more information visit: http://tiny.cc/hisllx

Embracing Dyslexia - Video

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin. Individuals with dyslexia have trouble with reading, writing, and spelling despite having at least an average intelligence.

It is estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the population is dyslexic but most are never identified or diagnosed and left to struggle their entire life.

We know how to fix the reading, writing, and spelling issues that dyslexics struggle with. But there is a tremendous roadblock in the way and it is there because our governments, schools and educators are simply misinformed about what dyslexia is or they have no information at all.

By carefully weaving together interviews with parents, experts, and adult dyslexics, "Embracing Dyslexia" tackles the issues surrounding dyslexia like no other documentary film has before.

Parents share emotional stories of their anxiety and frustration over failing to understand why their children were struggling with reading, writing, and spelling and the life-altering impact the word dyslexia had on their lives.

Adult dyslexics courageously open up and speak candidly about their dyslexia, sharing their struggles and successes they have had in school and in their adult lives.

Experts define what dyslexia is, illustrate why early dyslexia screening for all children is vital, and share how effective tutoring, classroom accommodations, and fostering the natural strengths dyslexic's possess can take them from experiencing failure on a daily basis to believing in themselves and knowing that they can be successful.

Credit: www.embracingdyslexia.com

Learning to read involves tricking the brain

In the experimental sequence, a pair of identical animals (e.g. horses) is preceded on the screen by a pair of mirror-image letters (b and d), or, in the control condition, a pair of non-mirror-image letters (f and t). 

The participant must decide in each case whether the two items (letters or animals) are identical or not. 

Credit: CNRS /Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne-Paris-Cité /Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

While reading, children and adults alike must avoid confusing mirror-image letters (like b/d or p/q). Why is it difficult to differentiate these letters?

When learning to read, our brain must be able to inhibit the mirror-generalization process, a mechanism that facilitates the recognition of identical objects regardless of their orientation, but also prevents the brain from differentiating letters that are different but symmetrical.

A study conducted by the researchers of the Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l'Education de l'Enfant (CNRS / Université Paris Descartes / Université de Caen Basse-Normandie) is available on the website of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Online First Articles).

In recent years, many studies on the process of learning to read have been based on the neuronal recycling hypothesis: the reuse of old brain mechanisms in a new adaptive role - a kind of "biological trick."

Specifically, neurons that are originally dedicated to the rapid identification of objects in the environment, through the mirror-generalization process, are "repurposed" during childhood to specialize in the visual recognition of letters and words.

In this study, the researchers showed 80 young adults pairs of images, first two letters and then two animals, asking them to determine whether they were identical.

The readers consistently spent more time determining that two animal images, when preceded by mirror-image letters, were indeed identical.

This increase in response time is called "negative priming": the readers had to inhibit the mirror-generalization process in order to distinguish letters like b/d or p/q. They then needed a little more time to reactivate this strategy when it became useful again to quickly identify animals.

Learning to read involves tricking the brain

The reader must learn to distinguish mirror-image letters (b and d) on the computer screen separated by a target fixation cross (+). 

Credit: CNRS/Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne-Paris-Cité /Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

These results show that even adults need to inhibit the mirror-generalization process to avoid reading errors.

Children must therefore learn to inhibit this strategy when learning to read. A failure of cognitive inhibition during the recycling of visual neurons in the brain could thus be a factor in dyslexia, a direction worth exploring, in light of these findings.

More information: "The cost of blocking the mirror-generalization process in reading: Evidence for the role of inhibitory control in discriminating letters with lateral mirror-image counterparts." Grégoire Borst, Emmanuel Ahr, Margot Roell, and Olivier Houdé. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Online First Articles), 23 May 2014. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-014-0663-9

Beat synchronization in preschoolers aids learning and reading skills

A team of researchers with Northwestern University in the U.S. has found that an ability to synchronize with a beat may be an indication of how well preschoolers will later do when developing reading skills.

In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes a study they undertook that involved testing for beat synchronization and sound recognition in preschoolers and what they found as a result.

Devising a test for reading aptitude prior to teaching children to read, it is believed, would help children of all levels learn better.

If a teacher knew beforehand that a child was going to have a reading disability, for example, that child could be placed into a program developed specifically for their needs, hopefully offering a better long term outcome.

Likewise, children with an exceptional aptitude for reading could be put into an accelerated program to prevent boredom.

Unfortunately, there is no such test, thus parents and teachers are left to discover a child's reading abilities on their own.

In this new effort, the researchers devised a study to find out if beat synchronicity skills might be used as the basis for such a test.

Reading specialists have suspected that there is a link between beat synchronization and both language and reading ability, reading and speech are both timing based after all.

To better understand that link the researchers arranged to test preschool volunteers.

In the first test, 35 children were given a toy drum and asked to beat it in time with an adult beating on a similar drum.

Those that could do it well were described as synchronizers, those that could not, as nonsyncronizers.

The same group of children then had electrodes pasted to their scalps to measure brain waves, as the researchers watched monitors, the children listened to sounds the researchers played, such as "da" and "ba" with no other sound, and then with background noise.

In studying the data, the researchers found that the children dubbed synchronizers in the first part of the experiment processed the played sounds with greater precision than did the nonsyncronizers.

Further tests revealed that the synchronizers did better on overall language abilities than the nonsyncronizers, which suggests that it might be possible to use the same process to test children as young as infants for later reading ability.

The researchers plan to continue monitoring the same children in the study for five years to see if their testing method is viable.

More information: Beat synchronization predicts neural speech encoding and reading readiness in preschoolers, Kali Woodruff Carr, PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1406219111

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.

Gesturing with hands is a powerful tool for children's learning

A recent study from the University of Chicago's Department of Psychology showed that use of abstract gestures is a powerful tool for helping children understand and generalize mathematical concepts. 

Credit: Goldin-Meadow Lab

Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to new research from University of Chicago's Department of Psychology.

Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn. This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action.

"We found that acting gave children a relatively shallow understanding of a novel math concept, whereas gesturing led to deeper and more flexible learning," explained the study's lead author, Miriam A. Novack, a PhD student in psychology.

The study, "From action to abstraction: Using the hands to learn math," is published online by Psychological Science.

The researchers taught third-grade children a strategy for solving one type of mathematical equivalence problem, for example, 4 + 2 + 6 = ____ + 6.

They then tested the students on similar mathematical equivalence problems to determine how well they understood the underlying principle.

The researchers randomly assigned 90 children to conditions in which they learned using different kinds of physical interaction with the material.

In one group, children picked up magnetic number tiles and put them in the proper place in the formula.

For example, for the problem 4 + 2 + 6 = ___ + 6, they picked up the 4 and 2 and placed them on a magnetic whiteboard.

Another group mimed that action without actually touching the tiles, and a third group was taught to use abstract gestures with their hands to solve the equations.

In the abstract gesture group, children were taught to produce a V-point gesture with their fingers under two of the numbers, metaphorically grouping them, followed by pointing a finger at the blank in the equation.

The children were tested before and after solving each problem in the lesson, including problems that required children to generalize beyond what they had learned in grouping the numbers.

For example, they were given problems that were similar to the original one, but had different numbers on both sides of the equation.

Children in all three groups learned the problems they had been taught during the lesson. But only children who gestured during the lesson were successful on the generalization problems.

Susan Goldin-Meadow

"Abstract gesture was most effective in encouraging learners to generalize the knowledge they had gained during instruction, action least effective, and concrete gesture somewhere in between," said senior author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology.

"Our findings provide the first evidence that gesture not only supports learning a task at hand but, more importantly, leads to generalization beyond the task."

"Children appear to learn underlying principles from their actions only insofar as those actions can be interpreted symbolically."

More information: Miriam A. Novack, Eliza L. Congdon, Naureen Hemani-Lopez, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. "From Action to Abstraction: Using the Hands to Learn Math." Psychological Science 0956797613518351, first published on February 6, 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0956797613518351

Learn basic facts about dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia and ADHD - Video

Learn basic facts about dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia and ADHD and visit LD.org for resources on how to get the most out of your relationship with your child's doctor.

Credit for video goes to the National Center for Learning Disabilities

Babies Cannot Read! NYU Study Confirms

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found.

"While we cannot say with full assurance that infants at this age cannot learn printed words, our results make clear they did not learn printed words from the baby media product that was tested," says Susan Neuman, a professor in NYU Steinhardt's Department of Teaching and Learning and the study's senior author.

However, Neuman adds, there was one undeniable effect of these products, on parents.

In exit interviews, there was the mistaken belief among parents that their babies were learning to read and that their children had benefited from the program in some areas of vocabulary development.

Susan Neuman

"It's clear that parents have great confidence in the impact of these products on their children," Neuman explains. "However, our study indicates this sentiment is misplaced."

In their study, which appears in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers examined 117 infants, aged nine to 18 months, who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups.

Children in the treatment condition received a baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and flip books to be used daily over a seven-month period; children in the control condition did not receive these materials from the researchers.

Over the course of seven months, the researchers conducted a home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development.

To test children's emerging skills in the laboratory, the researchers examined the capacity to recognize letter names, letter sounds, vocabulary, words identified on sight, and comprehension.

A combination of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each stage of development.

Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases.

The results, which included criterion and standardized measures of emergent and early reading skills, showed no differences between the infants exposed to baby media and the control group on 13 of the 14 assessments.

The only assessment that showed a difference was parents' beliefs that their child was learning new words despite countervailing evidence from a standardized measure indicating no differences between groups.

More Information: Can Babies Learn to Read? A Randomized Trial of Baby Media. Neuman, Susan B.; Kaefer, Tanya; Pinkham, Ashley; Strouse, Gabrielle Journal of Educational Psychology, Feb 24 , 2014, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0035937

Reading before a nap benefits learning for toddlers

Reading before a nap benefits learning for toddlers.

A connection between sleep and learning has already been identified as beneficial for adults and older children.

Now University of Sussex psychologists Dr Jessica Horst and PhD candidate Sophie Williams have shown that three-year-olds who take a nap after having stories read to them will also perform better later in word-learning tasks.

Their study, published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology today, involved 48 British children, half of whom took afternoon naps, and half of whom didn't.

They were read either the same story, or three different stories, but were exposed to the same number of unfamiliar words.

When tested two and a half hours later, 24 hours later and a week later, those children who had been read the same story before their nap performed significantly better than those who hadn't had a sleep.

Significantly, those children who had been read three different stories before their sleep performed 33 per cent better than those who had stayed awake after hearing those stories.

On subsequent tests, the researchers found the wakeful ones never caught up with their peers in word recall.

Jessica Horst

Previous studies by Dr Horst have shown that being read the same story rather than different stories was more beneficial to learning new words.

But the new study shows that sleep can have an additional significant advantage, especially when the children are exposed to different stories.

Dr Horst says: "Overall, all of the children in the study did very well—reading is always good, at any age and any time.

But, children who were learning something particularly difficult (new words from several stories) especially benefited from hearing the stories right before sleeping.

In fact, these children ended up learning the words as well as the children who had heard the same stories again and again, which we knew would be easier."

Dr Horst points that many studies have shown young children are now sleeping less than ever before and consistently less than recommended guidelines.

Chronically short sleep is significantly related to poorer vocabulary scores, childhood obesity and externalising behaviours, such as tantrums.

"Many preschool children take an afternoon nap, yet classroom naps are increasingly being curtailed and replaced due to curriculum demands," she adds.

"Given the growing body of evidence that sleep consolidation has a significant effect on children's learning, such policies may be doing our children a huge disservice."

"In fact, findings like those from the current study indicate we should be encouraging young children to nap and should take advantage of the period right before they nap for instruction in key academic areas such as word learning and arithmetic."

More information: "Goodnight Book: Sleep Consolidation Improves Word Learning via Storybooks." Sophie E. Williams and Jessica S. Horst. Front. Psychol. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00184

Dyslexia: Action video games help people with Dyslexia learn to read

In addition to their trouble with reading, people with dyslexia also have greater difficulty than typical readers do when it comes to managing competing sensory cues, according to a study reported February 13 in Current Biology.

The findings suggest that action video games might improve literacy skills in those with dyslexia, which represent five to ten percent of the population.

"Imagine you are having a conversation with someone when suddenly you hear your name uttered behind you," says Vanessa Harrar of the University of Oxford.

"Your attention shifts from the person you are talking to—the visual—to the sound behind you. This is an example of a cross-sensory shift of attention."

"We found that shifting attention from visual to auditory stimuli is particularly difficult for people who have dyslexia compared to good readers."

In fact, researchers already knew that people with dyslexia had some challenges with auditory processing in addition to their visual impairments.

New evidence had also begun to link multisensory integration and dyslexia to the same parts of the brain.

That evidence, together with Harrar's own personal challenges with reading and writing, prompted her and her colleagues to conduct one of the first investigations of how people with dyslexia process multisensory stimuli.

Participants in the study were asked to push a button as quickly as possible when they heard a sound, saw a dim flash, or experienced both together.

The speed with which they pressed the buttons was recorded and analyzed.

While everyone was fastest when the same type of stimuli repeated itself, the data showed that people with dyslexia were particularly slow at pressing the button when a sound-only trial followed a visual-only trial.

In other words, they showed "sluggish attention shifting," particularly when asked to shift their attention from a flash of light to a sound.

While the researchers say further study is needed, they suggest based on the findings that dyslexia training programs should take this asymmetry into account.

"We think that people with dyslexia might learn associations between letters and their sounds faster if they first hear the sound and then see the corresponding letter or word," Harrar says.

Of course, traditional approaches to reading, in which letters are first seen and then heard, do just the opposite.

Harrar's team goes on to propose a unique, nonverbal approach to improve reading and writing with action video games.

"We propose that training people with dyslexia to shift attention quickly from visual to auditory stimuli and back—such as with a video game, where attention is constantly shifting focus—might also improve literacy.

Action video games have been shown to improve multitasking skills and might also be beneficial in improving the speed with which people with dyslexia shift attention from one task, or sense, to another."

More information: Current Biology, Harrar et al.: "Multisensory integration and attention in developmental dyslexia." dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.029

Parents: Reading Picture books to children is good for them

Parents who read picture books to their two-year-olds could improve their children's language skills, regardless of whether the book contains long sentences or just one or two words, according to new research.

Dr Thea Cameron-Faulkner and Dr Claire Noble from The University of Manchester say simple books with just one or two words per page, like Jez Alborough's Hug, are as beneficial as more traditional storybooks, such as Kipper by Mick Inkpen.

And the key to success, they find, is as much about talking about the books with children as the text itself.

The child language researchers' study of 23 parents reading both books with their children is good news for mums and dads who struggle with reading themselves.

Parent less likely to read books to their children themselves because of poor literacy skills, they say, will still help their children even if they use books which are easier to read.

When the researchers looked at the language in the books in combination with the language the parents used when discussing the books, both simple and more traditional storybooks were equally valuable sources of linguistic input.

Kipper's more complex dialogue was stimulating, so less discussion was needed ,whereas the more simpler text of Hug stimulated more complex discussion.

Both books generated more complex language than a free play situation in which the parent and child played with a toy kitchen, they also found.

Dr Cameron-Faulkner, who is based at the University's School of Arts, Languages and cultures, said: "It's pretty well established that sharing books with young children improves their vocabulary and literacy development, and that language skills are linked to academic attainment generally – including maths.

"Recent studies indicate that one of the key predictors in children's mathematical skill is early language experience, and so the rich linguistic experience associated with shared book reading may have benefits above and beyond language development.

"But what hasn't really been understood is how it impacts on children's ability to learn grammar – a hugely important part of their language development.

"Our research shows quite clearly that books are a valuable source of language input: the language used when sharing books contains more complex, structurally rich constructions than everyday child directed speech.

"And because a simpler book is just as valuable as a more complex one, this is good news for parents who may struggle with their reading."

A previous study by the team of twenty picture books best selling on Amazon,aimed at 2-year-old children, also revealed the types of utterances found in children's books It compared the books to utterances used in everyday speech to children, and is just published in the journal First Language.

The books contained many more utterances important in the development of children's grammar than everyday speech to children, showing the value of reading books to young children.

Dr Noble, who is based at the University's Max Planck Child Study Centre said: "The overarching message of our study is that reading to kids is a good thing to do – and gives children a rich language experience which may not be found in other situations."

"Young children's books often consist of a predictable story, with illustrations acting as cues to aid understanding of the language in the text.

"There's a strong debate in child language research between those who believe language development is innate and those who think it is learned.

"Our view is that language isn't innate, which is why reading to children is such a crucial way to develop their language.

"But children have a range of cognitive skills which in combination with exposure to their native language helps them to learn grammar. This research provide strong evidence for the value of book reading in language development."

Reading with your Child: Poster

Child Poster: Children Need and Deserve Patience

If it takes a poster to help you remember that children need and deserve your patience and understanding to help them learn, then use this poster to help you.

Here are some more quotes to amuse and inform you.

"School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity."

Jules Henry

"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school." 

Winston Churchill

“School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.” Ivan Illich

Autism: Autistic Children omit inefficient actions

When a child with autism copies the actions of an adult, he or she is likely to omit anything 'inefficient' or "silly" about what they've just seen.

In contrast, typically developing children will go out of their way to repeat each and every element of the behaviour even as they may realise that parts of it don't make any sense.

The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 8, are the first to show that the social nature of imitation is very important and challenging for children with autism, the researchers say.

They also emphasise just how important it is for most children to be like other people.

Antonia Hamilton

"The data suggest that children with autism do things efficiently rather than socially, whereas typical children do things socially rather than efficiently," says Antonia Hamilton of the University of Nottingham.

"We find that typical children copy everything an adult does, whereas autistic children only do the actions they really need to do."

The researchers made the discovery after testing 31 children with autism spectrum conditions and 30 typically developing children who were matched for verbal mental age.

On each of five trials, each child was asked to watch carefully as a demonstrator showed how to retrieve a toy from a box or build a simple object.

Importantly, each demonstration included two necessary actions (e.g. unclipping and removing the box lid) and one unnecessary action (e.g. tapping the top of the box twice).

The box was then reset behind a screen and handed to the child, who was instructed to "get or make the toy as fast as you can." They were not specifically told to copy the behaviour they'd just seen.

Almost all of the children successfully reached the goal of getting or making the toy, but typically developing children were much more likely to include the unnecessary step as they did so, a behaviour known as over-imitation.

Those children copied 43 to 57 percent of the unnecessary actions, compared to 22 percent in the children with autism.

That's despite the fact that the children correctly identified the tapping action as "inefficient", "silly," or simply not "sensible."

Hamilton says the researchers now want to know precisely what kind of actions children copy, and how that tendency to copy everything might contribute to human cultural transmission of knowledge.

She says that parents and teachers should be aware of the social value in going beyond the successful completion of such tasks.

Reference
Children with autism do not overimitate. Current Biology, 2013 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.02.036

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

Sleep Reinforces Learning: Children’s Brains Transform Subconsciously

During sleep, our brains store what we have learned during the day a process even more effective in children than in adults. 

Credit: Monkey Business / Fotolia

During sleep, our brains store what we have learned during the day ‒ a process even more effective in children than in adults, new research shows.

It is important for children to get enough sleep. Children's brains transform subconsciously learned material into active knowledge while they sleep -- even more effectively than adult brains do, according to a study by Dr. Ines Wilhelm of the University of Tübingen's Institute for Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology. Dr Wilhelm and her Swiss and German colleagues have published their results in Nature Neuroscience.

Studies of adults have shown that sleeping after learning supports the long-term storage of the material learned, says Dr Wilhelm. During sleep, memory is turned into a form that makes future learning easier; implicit knowledge becomes explicit and therefore becomes more easily transferred to other areas.

Children sleep longer and deeper, and they must take on enormous amounts of information every day. In the current study, the researchers examined the ability to form explicit knowledge via an implicitly-learned motor task.

Children between 8 and 11, and young adults, learned to guess the predetermined series of actions -- without being aware of the existence of the series itself. Following a night of sleep or a day awake, the subjects' memories were tested.

The result: after a night's sleep, both age groups could remember a larger number of elements from the row of numbers than those who had remained awake in the interim. And the children were much better at it than the adults.

"In children, much more efficient explicit knowledge is generated during sleep from a previously learned implicit task, says Wilhelm. And the children's extraordinary ability is linked with the large amount of deep sleep they get at night.

"The formation of explicit knowledge appears to be a very specific ability of childhood sleep, since children typically benefit as much or less than adults from sleep when it comes to other types of memory tasks."

Journal Reference: Ines Wilhelm, Michael Rose, Kathrin I Imhof, Bjöern Rasch, Christian Büechel, Jan Born. The sleeping child outplays the adult's capacity to convert implicit into explicit knowledge. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3343

Dyslexia: Learning to Read Music

Dyslexia can be more than simply a problem with words. Music students often find it difficult to understand musical notation, especially when they are trying to read sheet music and play their instrument a the same time.

Dyslexia can be more than just a problem with letters and words. Many talented music students run into problems when they try to learn to read sheet music.

Just as they experiences problems with words in print, the dyslexic musician may see a baffling array of lines and circles, with note symbols jumping around and the lines of the staff wavering and shifting.

Confusion about letters leads to disorientation and frustration; confusion about musical notation has the same result.

The people of Davis Symbol Mastery, the process of modeling symbols in clay, believe they can provide an effective solution.

Their solution is to form each musical symbol in three dimensions, using clay.

Thus, the participatory and sensory input will help the student develop a full understanding of the meaning of each symbol.

NB: Read more about this at The Dyslexic Reader

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

Olive Hickmott: Empowering Learning New Year message

Let me first wish you, my valued reader, a very prosperous and highly successful New Year in 2013.

I am sure you have spent some time in the last week reflecting on your life and family in 2012 and are planning a whole set of new adventures for 2013.

This week I received a message from my original guide and mentor, Olive Hickmott, from Empowering Learning, which may me reflect on how we got started on this path.

I would like to share this message with you and to let you know that Olive has Dyslexia herself but with great fortitude and determination, pursued a very successful career in engineering, before her retirement.

She is herself an example of a talented person with dyslexia developing into a self-determining, success story but not content with her own success she has spent the last 7 years coaching and mentoring dyslexic children.

Her aim; to help children break through their barriers to education and overcome their low self esteem; use the talents they have to learn in their own way, one that makes perfect sense to them; set them on a life-changing path of self discovery and development.

I invite you to read Olive's message. It says a lot of the progress being made in overcoming Dyslexia and other cognitive processing disorders and, I hope it will give you some more cause for optimism in 2013. It may even spark some new ideas and paths for you to follow.

"It is a very different world than when I (Olive) started work back in 2005 on literacy challenges. 

People are much more open to seeing different perspectives, identifying the exceptional talents of learning differently and overcoming the challenges. 

In 2013 we want all our exceptionally talented children and adults, who learn in a different way, to think about how they are being taught, to excel in their chosen areas, that are often very creative.

As our contribution to this, we are looking:

• to reach as many children and adult across the world as possible, so they can learn how to simply improve their literacy, numeracy, concentration and so much more, even when they have a diagnosis of Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia, ADHD, Asperger's or Autism. - These new skills will further develop their exceptional (mainly visual) skills and eradicate many of the negative symptoms associated with these challenges.
• to assist families and Practitioners to be as successful as they can be in their communities.

To achieve this we are building a larger and stronger international community of people with the skills to teach people who learn differently. 

The level 1 Practitioner programme is now available as a single day in Hertfordshire, UK, as a set of live weekly tele-seminars and as a home study programme that you can access whenever is convenient for you, plus on-line coaching to answer any questions. 

Recently, we have trained Practitioners and parents on-line in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe, USA, throughout the UK and in January we will be adding a Dyslexia school in Kenya plus our first practitioner in New Zealand. 

These are exciting times to join the team, you don't need previous qualifcations, just an enthusiasm to make a difference to others.

In 2013 we will see the results of the Practitioners' research projects in Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland plus my literacy and numeracy research through the International Association for Health and Learning for a community of nursing undergraduates in England.

I also hope to have several practitioners replicating my work in different Universities across the UK. 

In addition we expect to get the level 1 programme its first international accreditation.

When you become a Practitioner, you will have all the tools you need to succeed:

• Free monthly Continuous Professional Calls
• Workbooks for literacy, numeracy and more in development
• An accreditation process and product discount
• Commission for referrals
• Free Youtube video introductions for your clients
• Access to an on-line training platform
• Low cost upgrade training for those trained before September 2011.

This is a readymade business that can give you immense personal satisfaction and make a real difference to peoples' lives."

I hope that was of interest and you can read more about Olive's work with Empowering Learning here.