Teaching Children With Dyslexia

Unfortunately, the label of 'being dyslexic' is often seen as a negative one. One which can produce upset, limitations and hurdles to the students involved .

However, with the right training, teaching and encouragement it can also produce strengths, talents and creative gifts.

What are the effects of dyslexia?
Research suggests that individuals with dyslexia have great difficulties in fluent and/or accurate word identification, often resulting in a slower reading ability, poor concentration, difficulty with spelling and grammar and in some cases trouble with organisation and planning.

A key concern for people with dyslexia is the lack of confidence and the negative effect it can have on a student's self-esteem.

Low self-esteem leads to other challenges such as a lack of motivation, concentration, and self-belief and in some cases, anxiety.

Tips for teaching students with dyslexia:

1. Be Visual: Dyslexics are predominantly visual thinkers, so try to include diagrams, flow charts and pictures wherever possible.

2. Squash Distractions: Think about the level of distraction around the classroom and how you can reduce disruptions and distractions. Working in a quiet, comfortable room, with little to distract the brain, will allow students to focus and therefore improve their concentration.

3. Play to the Strengths: Really think about the positives - creativity, imagination and a hands-on approach; and integrate them into your teaching techniques.

4. Use Mind maps: Mind maps work the way the brain works, which isn't in nice neat lines. Mind maps are a very visual way of teaching, and because the brain best memorises keywords and images, they are ideal for teaching students with dyslexia.

5. Develop Organisational Skills: These will benefit students for the rest of their lives. Use colour-coded folders to separate different subjects or subject topics and encourage them to implement and stick to a daily routine. Schedules are very useful for individuals with dyslexia as they help them know what to expect and what is coming up next.

6. Use the Tools: Use approved specialist software to diversify teaching techniques and encourage willingness to learn. Software such as word and grammar based games; word processors as well as digital voice recording are useful for teaching dyslexic students. Get creative and make it fun, they will respond to new and exciting teaching techniques.

7. Short Term Memory Loss: Students with dyslexia may struggle with short-term memory and concentrating for long periods of time. Be aware that you may have to repeat yourself often and try to break up the lesson with short breaks such as learning games, chats and active learning techniques.

8. Focus on Verbal Reasoning: Don't just hand out sheets of paper for the student to read, as they may struggle to absorb and understand the information. Discuss the topics with them and engage them in conversation; it's a much more effective way of teaching.

Read more on this approach here

What is Working Memory?

Working memory is your brain's Post-it note, says Tracy Packiam Alloway, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida. "It makes all the difference to successful learning," she says.

You can think of working memory as the active part of your memory system. It's like mental juggling, says H. Lee Swanson, Ph.D., distinguished professor of education with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside.

"As information comes in, you're processing it at the same time as you store it," he says. A child uses this skill when doing math calculations or listening to a story, for example.

She has to hold onto the numbers while working with them. Or, she needs to remember the sequence of events and also think of what the story is about, says Swanson.

Brief by design, working memory involves a short-term use of memory and attention, adds Matthew Cruger, Ph.D., neuropsychologist with the Learning and Diagnostics Center at the Child Mind Institute in New York City.

"It is a set of skills that helps us keep information in mind while using that information to complete a task or execute a challenge," he says.

Working memory is like a foundation of the brain's executive function. This is a broad and deep group of mental processes. They allow you to do things like plan ahead, problem solve, organize, and pay attention.

"Working memory helps us stay involved in something longer and keep more things in mind while approaching a task," says Cruger. "And, how can you plan ahead if you don't use working memory to keep your goal in mind, resist distractions, and inhibit impulsive choices?"

But if you struggle with working memory, pieces of information may often evade your grasp like a quickly evaporating dream. You find yourself stripped of the very thing you need most to take action.

Read more about Working memory here

How to Help a Child with Weak Working Memory

Here are a few places to start to help a child with poor working memory.

Know your child's strengths and weaknesses.
As a parent, you want to support your children any way you can. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses can make a big difference, says Tracy Packiam Alloway, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida.

She says that sometimes teachers tell their students with dyslexia to just keep repeating the information over and over to themselves. "But this will be hard to do for students with dyslexia who have a verbal working memory problem," says Alloway. "It's really better to target their strengths -- to try to use visual aids to support their learning, for example."

H. Lee Swanson, Ph.D., distinguished professor of education with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside, agrees. Use your child's preferred way of processing information. For a child whose visual-spatial skills are strong, he suggests taking information from a math word problem and inserting it into a visual diagram. This uses a strength to help solve a problem.

Help compensate for weaknesses.
One way to compensate for poor working memory is to break up or chunk information. This way, it takes up fewer "slots" in working memory. Give one or two, not a long string of, instructions, says Swanson.

Encourage children to ask for this kind of "information management." Then they are less overwhelmed and have learned yet another skill -- self-advocacy, says Matthew Cruger, Ph.D., neuropsychologist with the Learning and Diagnostics Center at the Child Mind Institute in New York City.

Other ways to compensate
Use audiotapes or write things down, says Cruger. "If auditory working memory is weak, don't depend on it for important things." It's far easier to write down homework in a planner and access it later. After the tenth time you've reminded your child to check his book bag, it may finally dawn on you that there is an easier way: Create a checklist with pictographs and put it on the outside of the bag for easy reference, he says. Rituals and routines are also helpful, says Cruger, who puts his cell phone in the same place each day to be sure he won't misplace it.

Reinforce what works
Of course, learning how to compensate doesn't mean simply letting working memory atrophy, says Cruger. Just as with building a muscle, using the skill will strengthen it, making it easier to use in the future.

Likewise, you and your child's teacher can help your child develop knowledge of his or her own working memory, says Alloway. You can congratulate a child on any success right away. Then ask probing questions to help a child identify what worked well in a certain situation: "Did you think of a song or an image? Did you repeat it to yourself? Or, did you use a rhyme to help you with your multiplication tables?" If something works, suggest that your child try it again.

"This really encourages students to become aware of the strategies they're using," says Alloway. "Otherwise, they don't know what they've done, so they can't apply it again."

Use working memory as a floodlight to plan action
Parents should teach children to use available working memory to be more efficient, instead of focusing on multitasking, Alloway advises. With our busy lifestyles, many of us put a premium on multitasking. But it's not all it's cracked up to be, she says. "The great, great majority of us can't do it well."

"Instead, use working memory like a spotlight to focus on one thing at a time and shift between activities," says Alloway. "Do one activity and stop and shift to the next and maybe come back to the first, and so on. Do this instead of trying to do many things at once."

Alloway says that mindfulness training has been shown to help adults create a space in working memory to allow them to focus on a single thought, rather than being overwhelmed by a number of different things at once. See if you can find ways to help your child learn how to reduce distractions and compartmentalize in a similar way.

Train working memory
For a long time, psychologists thought that working memory was fixed, says Alloway. But evidence is beginning to show that you can train your working memory. One example is a home-based method of strengthening skills, called CogMed. It can improve your ability to remember numbers in forward and backward order, for example, a signature skill of working memory. But does this transfer to learning and better grades? "If all you do is biceps curls, you would expect that your arms would be stronger, but not that you could run faster," suggests Alloway.

Swanson agrees. "You can certainly make changes in working memory, but it doesn't necessarily translate to getting a whole lot better in math and reading comprehension," he says.

Even so, some working memory training programs are beginning to show promise. The bottom line is buyer beware, says Swanson. He is researching a program that is showing promise, one that uses working memory tasks to improve math. "But," he says, "there is no magic bullet." If you try a program, watch how your child progresses with tasks in the classroom to see if it is making a difference.

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Children's Under-achievement Could Be Down To Poor Working Memory

Children who under-achieve at school may just have poor working memory rather than low intelligence according to researchers who have produced the world's first tool to assess memory capacity in the classroom.

The researchers from Durham University, who surveyed over three thousand children, found that ten per cent of school children across all age ranges suffer from poor working memory seriously affecting their learning. Nationally, this equates to almost half a million children in primary education alone being affected.

However, the researchers identified that poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence.

Working memory is the ability to hold information in your head and manipulate it mentally. You use this mental workspace when adding up two numbers spoken to you by someone else without being able to use pen and paper or a calculator. Children at school need this memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks such as following teachers' instructions or remembering sentences they have been asked to write down.

Lead researcher Dr Tracy Alloway from Durham University's School of Education, who, with colleagues, has published widely on the subject, explains further: "Working memory is a bit like a mental jotting pad and how good this is in someone will either ease their path to learning or seriously prevent them from learning.

"From the various large-scale studies we have done, we believe the only way children with poor working memory can go onto achieving academic success is by teaching them how to learn despite their smaller capacity to store information mentally.

"Currently, children are not identified and assessed for working memory within a classroom setting. Early identification of these children will be a major step towards addressing under-achievement. It will mean teachers can adapt their methods to help the children's learning before they fall too far behind their peers."


Read more here Children's Under-achievement Could Be Down To Poor Working Memory

Dyslexic Advantage - Memory and Dyslexia

Dyslexic Advantage - Memory and Dyslexia

A recent study from Norway shows what people with dyslexia have known a long time...that working memory is affected in dyslexia. In the picture below, control subjects trying to keep letter sounds in mind vs. subjects with dyslexia.

One of the most common mistakes we see in educators approaching the subject of dyslexia is to think the only issues is phonological awareness. Some students have both, but for most, the memory is a problem as big or even bigger than distinguishing sounds.

Problems from Working Memory Challenges

•Hard time following conversations in background noise
•Trouble learning a foreign language
•Problems following a foreign language speaker
•Dismissed as 'inattentive ADD'
•Have to write auditory information down to remember

The importance of realising that working memory issues are affecting dyslexia is that working memory seems to be highly trainable.

Some of greatest leaps in IQ's we've seen over the years have been in students who acquire more strategies to organise their ideas and who work hard at tasks to train up their working memory.

It doesn't always have to be expensive software programs to train up working memory - it can involve persisting at difficult working memory tasks like mathematics, writing, or acquiring an 'easier' foreign language.

Working memory problems also highlight the need to employ multisensory approach to learning sounds. Making images, humorous, or other more interesting information to forgettable facts or sounds can help the data to 'stick'.

Improve Your Memory - No Guarantees but it may help

If you’re looking for a way to increase the capacity of your memory or pass a test, you don’t need to memorise 23,000 words but the technique used to memorise large amounts of data can be used to memorise anything.

Below is the simpler version of a memory improvement system, developed to help pupils pass history, psychology, and other information-heavy tests.

• First, use a pencil (or word processor, it’s faster) to type in complete sentences, any fact you think might appear on the test.
• Use short sentences because they’re easier to remember.
• Take your printed notes into a quiet room, shut the door, and eliminate all distractions.
• Look at the first sentence in your notes and read it out loud. Then, close your eyes and say the sentence without looking at it.
• Repeat the step above, this time with the first 2 sentences.
• Next, try it with 3 sentences. Then 4. Repeat until you have memorised every sentence in your notes.

After a study session, take a quick nap. New memories are very vulnerable, but studies have shown that sleep helps your new memories stick. After your nap, repeat the memory technique once more for maximum retention.

The person who provided this system became so good at the technique that they could complete all studying for any 'information heavy' mid-term or final exam, in less than 6 hours.

Whatever you do, do not ignore all your classes until the last minute, but it’s good to know there is a way to save yourself if you do.

Does it Really Work?
This memory technique isn’t the newest, the prettiest, or the most interesting technique on the market but it should worked for most people, even people who claim to have the “worst memory in the world.”

Dyslexia Untied - Mixed Dyslexia

Mixed Dyslexia
(Also known as Dysphoneidetic dyslexia). This term refers to a combination of phonological and visual dyslexia.

Not surprisingly, people with mixed dyslexias have severe defecits in reading as well as cognitive functions such as visual motor integration, visual perception and working memory.

Working /Short Term Memory
Working memory or short term memory, affects all types of dyslexia and assessors will tend use poor memory as an indicator of dyslexia. This is more difficult to assume when examining people in later life because of possible confusion caused by early-onset of Dementia, CJD and Alzheimer's Disease.

If you examine the arguments surrounding this perception, you will find that people with dyslexia may spend a great deal of time and effort engaging with their 'working memory'. This is thought to be because they cannot recall words, phrases and sentences from their long term memory.

They are expending a lot of time and effort building words from letters and trying to make sense of them in their 'working memory' and frontal lobes. This requires greater levels of consciousness and reduces the capacity for short term recall of other recent memories.

Fatigue
There is also an underlying level of fatigue that all dyslexic people experience, partly because of the high level of concentration required to sustain their coping mechanisms and partly because of their undergoing greater brain activity.

Recent scientific MRI research (American Journal of Neuroradiology) reveals that their brain activity is 5 time greater than non-dyslexic people, performing the same reading /writing tasks.

This clearly has a draining effect on the body's resources and the ability of the brain to function as expected. Can we really expect to get the best from people who are unfairly burdened by their different perspective