Dyslexia: How long do you wait before you seek help?

It’s September! Your child is starting to struggle with reading. How long should you wait to get help? Should you wait until November, December, January? After all, his teacher needs a chance to help him. Will it pass if you just show patience and encourage him to do better?

Our Response
Usually, it won’t pass, so don’t wait. Make a formal request to the school to evaluate his reading and related needs and to provide whatever services he needs to become a successful reader. A good evaluation, supported by quality resources, should help your child and his teacher.

Our Reasoning

• “More than 88 percent of children who have difficulty reading at the end of first grade display similar difficulties at the end of fourth grade” (Juel, 1988; in Leipzig, 2001).
• “Longitudinal studies show that, of the youngsters who are identified as having reading problems in the third grade, approximately 74% remain reading disabled through the ninth grade. This appears to be true even when special education has been provided. It should be made clear, however, that interventions applied after a child has failed in reading for two or three years may not be effective for several reasons, including the student’s declining motivation and impaired self-concept” (Lyon, 1996, p. 66).
• “Three-quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school” (Shaywitz et al., 1997; in Leipzig, 2001).
• “Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Students who fail to reach this critical milestone often falter in the later grades and drop out before earning a high school diploma. Now, researchers have confirmed this link…. Results of a longitudinal study of nearly 4,000 students find that those who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers…. While these struggling readers account for about a third of the students, they represent more than three fifths of those who eventually drop out or fail to graduate on time” (Hernandez, 2011, p. 3).

More Information
Chapters 3 and 4 of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds (www.reading2008.com) will show you what to look for. They list the questions you need to ask the school to answer in its evaluation. If you don’t ask the right questions, you may not get the right answers.

Chapter 5 will show you how to evaluate the quality of the school’s evaluation and how to use it to help your child get a program that increases his chances of success.

References
Hernandez, D. J. (2011) Double Jeopardy: How third-grade reading skills and poverty influence high school graduation. The Annie E. Casey Foundation; Center for Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, State of New York; Foundation for Child Development, http://www.aecf.org/

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of fifty-four children from first through fourth grade. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80:437-447.

Leipzig, D. H. (2001). Top 10 things you should know about reading. NY: LDOline. http://www.ldonline.org

Lyon, G. R. (1996). Learning disabilities. Special Education for Students with Disabilities, 6 (1), 54-74, p. 66.

Dyslexia: Mother and daughter continue to triumph

A mother and daughter who have both battled with dyslexia to earn degrees, have enjoyed further success since their joint graduation this summer.

Sara Jane Williams and her daughter Ashleigh both received BA Honours degrees in contemporary applied arts from Hereford College of Art and Design in July.

Now Sara Jane, who left school with no qualifications, has had her work selected to appear in several galleries, with one - the Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, in Wales - selecting her as one of the top 13 applied arts graduates in the UK.

Meanwhile Ashleigh has also enjoyed success, with her work being selected for display at The Fold, in Bransford. She has also been asked by other galleries to produce some work for the Christmas period.

“It seems that our work is in demand, which is really pleasing for both of us,” said Sara Jane. “When Llantarnam Grange selected me as one of the top graduates I could not believe it. I was surprised and delighted and it made me quite teary when I saw my work up on the wall.

She added: “All my work is based on dyslexia and is, I hope, raising awareness of the condition. Maybe this will encourage someone else out there to have a go at doing something.”

Helping Struggling Readers Decode Unknown Words

Three common curriculum gaps that can intensify children’s reading problems are failing to teach them phonological awareness, automatic word recognition, and an alternative to single letter phonics.
Teach Phonological Awareness.

This is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds within spoken words. For example, say the word bat without the /b/ sound. Unfortunately, may struggling readers struggle with phonological awareness. To develop proficiency, they need instruction.

• Good phonics instruction should develop phonological awareness. The key to learning to decode words is the [alphabetic] principle that letters can represent sounds 
• The key to the development of the alphabetic principle, word recognition, and invented spelling is phonological awareness. 
• Phoneme awareness [part of phonological awareness] is the awareness of sounds in spoken words. As words are spoken, most sounds cannot be said by themselves.
• For example, the spoken word /cat/ has one continuous sound and is not pronounced “kuh-a-tuh.” 
• Children ordinarily concentrate on the meaning and do not think of the sounds in the word but, since letters represent sounds, a child must learn to think of words as having both meaning and sound in order to understand the alphabetic principle. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 340, references omitted)

Teach Automatic Word Recognition. Struggling readers who accurately identify words—slowly and laboriously—will likely tire of reading, resist reading, and become overwhelmed by the volume of all they must read.

Three keys to helping these children become fluent readers are to teach them how to quickly and accurately recognize words, to give them lots of daily practice in doing so, and to engage them in lots reading they find easy and enjoyable. This will help them to quickly identify words.

• Good phonics instruction leads to automatic word recognition. In order to read books, children need to be able to read words quickly and automatically. If a child stumbles over or has to decode slowly too many words, comprehension will suffer. 
• Although we want children to have a strategy for decoding words they do not know, we also want children to recognize many words automatically and be able to read them in context. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 343, references omitted)

Teach Word Families. Many phonics programs emphasize the sounds of individual letters and emphasize sounding out most words one or two letters at a time.

This helps many struggling readers to quickly and accurately identify unknown words. But many does not mean all.

Here’s a way that can help struggling readers who struggle with the sounds of individual letters, especially vowel sounds.

It uses word families, such ake: bake, brake, cake, make, quake, rake, sake, snake, take. Word families are also called phonograms or rimes.

• Recent scholarly inquiry into how children learn to decode words suggests that knowledge of certain sound and letter patterns in words may help readers figure out unfamiliar words.
• This is often called the analogy approach to word recognition, and a considerable amount of research supports its use as an instrument for word-recognition instruction.
• Predominant among such letter patterns are onsets and rhymes. An onset is formed by the individual consonant or consonant combination (such as pl, ph, st, sch, str, or th) that precedes the first vowel in a word or syllable. 
• Rhymes are another name for letter combinations that we have for years called “phonograms” or “word families,” the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and all subsequent consonants. For example, in the word bat, the b is the onset and the at is the rime; in slick, the sl is the onset and the ick is the rime.
• Fry (1998) has pointed out that just 38 common rime patterns can be used by readers to decode 654 one-syllable words. Moreover, these same rhymes can also be helpful for partial decoding of a much larger number of longer, more difficult, multisyllabic words. (Rasinski, 1999)

If your child struggles to identify unknown words when reading, ask yourself:

• Has the school assessed his phonological awareness skills? If they’re poor, are his teachers teaching him how to identify and manipulate sounds he hears in words?
• Are his teachers teaching him to recognize words quickly and accurately, or just accurately?
• If he struggles when using individual letters to sound out (decode) unknown words, can his teachers teach him to use word families (rhymes, phonograms)?

References
Rasinski, T. (1999). Making and Writing Words Using Letter Patterns. Retrieved 9/22/2011, from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/rasinski/MWW_LP.html.
Stahl, S.A., Duffy-Hester, A.M., & Stahl, K.A.D. (1998). Everything you wanted to know about phonics (but were afraid to ask). Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 338-355.

SIDS - Monitoring breathing wirelessly: Noninvasive

University of Utah engineers who built wireless networks that see through walls now are aiming the technology at a new goal: noninvasively measuring the breathing of surgery patients, adults with sleep apnea and babies at risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

University of Utah electrical engineer Neal Patwari reclines in a hospital bed surrounded by wireless transceivers like those used to connect home computer networks. In a new study, Patwari and colleagues show how crisscrossing radio signals from a wireless network can detect breathing -- a possible new, noninvasive way of monitoring postsurgical patients, adults with sleep apnea and babies at risk of sudden infant death syndrome. (Credit: Yang Zhao, University of Utah)

Catching a breath -- wirelessly: Noninvasive method to watch for SIDS, help surgery patients

Henry Winkler, the Fonz in Happy Days, Honoured with UK OBE

Henry Winkler, who played the Fonz in the classic US sitcom Happy Days, has been appointed an honorary OBE for his educational work on dyslexia in the UK.

Winkler received the honour at the British embassy in Washington DC.

The actor-turned-children's author, who was diagnosed with dyslexia as an adult, said he was "overwhelmed" to have his work recognised.

In the past two years, he has toured schools in the UK, talking about the learning disability.

Winkler told BBC Breakfast he was delighted with the "unexpected" honour.

"I got a letter from the Queen saying she graciously agreed to confer on me the OBE," he said.
'Inspiration'

He is the author of the Hank Zipzer children's book series, which features a young dyslexic protagonist.
Undated file photo of the cast of the television series, Happy Days Winkler shot to fame playing Arthur Fonzarelli (centre) in Happy Days

Zipzer's adventures are based on Winkler's own childhood struggles with school and the resulting bullying.

The author said visiting UK schools was "one of his favourite things to do".

"I walk into the room and ask if anybody has trouble in school and maybe one or two people raise their hands. By the time I've read to them from Hank Zipzer... everybody wants to be dyslexic.

"We say our goodbyes just hugging. It's very touching."

British ambassador Nigel Sheinwald presented the OBE to Winkler during the ceremony at the embassy.

Mr Sheinwald said: "Through [Winkler], thousands of young people have seen a role model and an inspiration for overcoming their learning challenges."

Winkler shot to fame playing Arthur Fonzarelli - a leather-jacket clad, motorcycle-riding, ladies' man, who was the epitome of "cool" - in Happy Days, which ran over a decade from 1974.

The Queen makes honorary awards to non-British citizens on the advice of the UK Foreign Office. It is not clear whether she is a fan of the Fonz.

Why Current In-the-Ear Hearing Aids Fail

Hearing aids have improved greatly over recent years, but they continue to be a surprisingly frustrating experience for new wearers.

Clearly, today’s hearing aids are tiny, nearly invisible in fact, and they amplify sound and are able to present a higher range of frequencies, but they have not yet completely solved the problem of amplifying the peripheral sounds we just don’t want, or don't need to hear.

For new wearers the crumpling of a paper bag on the other side of a room can sound like a jackhammer.

This is a huge challenge for technology because it is dependent on how the brain perceives sound and how we have learned to filter peripheral sound out of normal hearing. Andrew J. Oxenham is a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota and an expert in psychoacoustics.

Oxenham explains: The ear works by analysing sound and breaking it into different frequencies and with many forms of hearing impairment it’s this frequency selectivity that is impaired.

What that means is that the ear doesn’t filter as well as it did before. So instead of having very sharp tuning to filter out different frequencies the filtering becomes much broader and there is no real way of compensating for that.

You can’t sharpen the filters or you can’t pre-process sound so it’s sharp. It’s like a broken TV set. You can process the signal going into the TV as much as you like but you still won’t get a clear picture of the output.

Recent hearing aids have made a lot of progress, like being able to present frequencies of up to 6000 Hz as opposed to limited frequencies up to about 4000 Hz, by using digital signal processing, and a lot more computing power on a lot smaller chip.

Another big leap forward has been made with directional hearing. They can focus the microphones toward the front and filter out a lot of the sound coming from the side and back. And although that is a fairly simple technique, it involves signal processing that wasn’t possible with earlier hearing aids.

Ambient or peripheral sound is horribly distracting for hearing aid wearers. A paper bag being crumpled across a room sounds screechingly loud.

This is common complaint of people who recently start wearing a hearing aid. Their hearing has deteriorated, often without them being completely aware of it, over a period of time.

When they are suddenly fitted with a hearing aid, they hear sounds they’ve got used to not hearing. The sounds are suddenly annoying and distracting. It’s a contrast effect.

It’s more to do with perception i.e the brain’s ability to analyse and prioritise different sounds.

It’s a complex interaction between the ear and the brain. The ear sends signals up to the brain; the brain does an awful lot of processing on top of that; then sends signals back down to the ear. These signals change the way the ear accepts input.

This is partly why hearing aids are not perfect because the hearing aid is not part of that natural feedback loop. There’s no way with current aids that the brain can interface with a hearing aid directly to change its characteristics.

Hearing Loops
To deal with background noise there are things called “hearing loops.”

These are systems that are set up within places like concert halls and churches that interface directly with the hearing aid. It’s like sending a radio signal to the hearing device.

The idea is that this hearing loop picks up the sound directly from the microphone in front of a speaker.

If you are in a conference and the speaker is talking into a microphone. Normally we hear the sound acoustically through the airwaves.

If you are wearing a regular hearing aid the microphone will pick up the sounds on the airwaves but that is together with all the background noise and reverberation in the room.

With a hearing loop it sends the signal directly from the microphone to the ear and bypasses all the acoustics in the building itself. So the ear is getting a much better, clearer and cleaner signal of what’s coming into the microphone.

Two hearing aids better than One?
It’s only recently that people have routinely been fitted with two hearing aids. Often people only got one.

Directional hearing and the way we localise sound: To know where the sound is coming from the brain compares the signals coming into the two ears. So if it’s slightly louder on one side then the brain knows the sound is coming from that side.

More importantly it’s the time of arrival difference between the two ears. If you think about a sound coming from the right. The sound will reach your right ear a little bit before it reaches your left ear.

Although we are talking about millionths of seconds, your brain needs two ears to make a distinction. If you only have one you lose that ability to localise sound and tell which direction it is coming from.

It’s also an important part of filtering out sound and noise. The brain can determine if there is speech right in front and background noise in back of and to the side. The brain can use those differences in localisation to help to make the speech more intelligible.

So the biggest technical challenge is developing hearing aids that can focus on what we really need and want to listen to. This is the current problem.

The Solution
We are hoping through even more sophisticated signal processing schemes that we’ll be able to work on artificial source segregation; i.e. analysing the signal that is coming in and figuring out what is speech and what isn’t, and only presenting to the ear the wanted signal.

Distinguishing between speech and noise
The assumption is that what you really want to listen to is speech, and so there are certain acoustical aspects of speech that we can recognise and there are certain acoustical aspects of noise that are different from speech.

So, we need to establish a suitable algorithm to be able to distinguish between speech and noise that will help you towards filtering the unwanted signal.

A more complete solutiion could mean that brain-computer interface may be part of the hearing aid systems of the future. Where the hearing aid is tapping into brain responses to pick up the specific signal the person wants to pay attention to.

This is an ongoing process with incremental steps and we will continue to see improvements over the next 15 years.

Laugh & learn: Put your iPhone in the hands of your baby

Placing an expensive bit of electronics in the hands of an infant is never a good idea, but with its Laugh and Learn Apptivity Case, Fisher-Price appears to disagree.

The $15 colorful plastic contraption acts as a cradle for the iPhone or iPhone Touch, allowing young ones aged from 6 months to 36 months to poke and befoul the devices’ pristine facades without the risk of destroying them.

The device also features coloured rattles on its handles and a mirror on its back, allowing it to retain its status as a somewhat entertaining (albeit not as exciting) children’s toy even when the iPhone isn’t present.

Fisher-Price will start selling the Laugh and Learn Apptivity Case this October.

Darren - assistive communication technology case study - YouTube

The ProxTalker: This exciting device recognises the sound tags to produce the appropriate stored word or phrase. Ideal for picture exchange system users of any age, for communication or as a classroom tool.

Just pick a tag, place it on a button and press - the LOGAN ProxTalker will say the appropriate sound, word or sentence. It extends the world of communication for picture exchange users, taking them beyond the classroom.

Features

Adjustable volume for different environments.
Runs on 4 standard C size batteries for months of operation between charges.
Built-in microphone for adding custom words easily.
Unique programming tags.
Five location buttons allow word or sentence level use.
Rugged construction with shock and water resistant features.
Easy access to vocabulary that can grow with need.
USB connectivity for data exchange and web based downloads and upgrades.

For more information on the Logan ProxTalker, please visit www.logan-technologies.co.uk/.

Dyslexia: Online Audio Library

For some students, trying as hard as they can just isn’t enough. These students may be at a disadvantage because of widespread learning differences such as dyslexia or because of disabilities like visual impairment. Studies show that for these students to succeed, an online audio library of core curriculum textbooks and literature titles can make all the difference.

Research by Johns Hopkins University and case studies in the Baltimore City Public Schools showed significant improvements in students who use audiobooks. Reading comprehension improved by 76 percent, content acquisition by 38 percent, reading accuracy by 52 percent and self-confidence by 61 percent.

Scott Bartnick was diagnosed with a severe learning disability in 1st grade. His parents were told he might never be able to read, yet the 19-year-old recently graduated from high school with a 4.35 GPA-no easy feat given his disabilities in reading, decoding, fluency and spelling. Bartnick relied on a service called Learning Ally, which offers the most advanced library of accessible audiobooks in the world.

“Learning Ally helped me achieve academic success,” said Bartnick, who is now thriving in his junior year at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In fact, his elementary school awarded him the “Disney Dreamers and Doers Award,” an honor presented to just one student every year for “curiosity, courage and constancy.”

Early intervention can deliver dramatic results. When Leslie H. was in 2nd grade, teachers informed her mother, Lisa, that her daughter was only reading at a kindergarten level. A friend of Lisa’s told her about the Learning Ally website. Within 24 hours of signing up for the program, Leslie, who has severe dyslexia, had read three books. Lisa reported that her daughter’s speech pathologist noted a major difference in her daughter’s fluency and self-confidence. “She embraced words and books in a way she never had and that was really exciting.”

Originally founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, the nonprofit Learning Ally has grown to serve a complete spectrum of individuals from kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as college students and working professionals.

Learning Ally’s digital library of audiobooks has special accessibility features for readers with print disabilities, and can be played on popular devices like the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as MP3 players, Mac and PC computers and CD.

Students with a certified print disability are eligible for an individual membership from Learning Ally, allowing them to work on assignments at home as a supplement to their school’s membership. Institutional memberships are available for schools and districts to accommodate students with IEP and 504 plans. To learn more, visit www.LearningAlly.org

Word association: Study matches brain scans with complex thought | ScienceBlog.com

To understand what happens in the brain when a person reads or considers such abstract ideas as love or justice, Princeton researchers have for the first time matched images of brain activity with categories of words related to the concepts a person is thinking about. The results could lead to a better understanding of how people consider meaning and context when reading or thinking.

The researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience that they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify areas of the brain activated when study participants thought about physical objects such as a carrot, a horse or a house. The researchers then generated a list of topics related to those objects and used the fMRI images to determine the brain activity that words within each topic shared. For instance, thoughts about “eye” and “foot” produced similar neural stirrings as other words related to body parts.

Once the researchers knew the brain activity a topic sparked, they were able to use fMRI images alone to predict the subjects and words a person likely thought about during the scan. This capability to put people’s brain activity into words provides an initial step toward further exploring themes the human brain touches upon during complex thought.

“The basic idea is that whatever subject matter is on someone’s mind — not just topics or concepts, but also emotions, plans or socially oriented thoughts — is ultimately reflected in the pattern of activity across all areas of his or her brain,” said the team’s senior researcher, Matthew Botvinick, an associate professor in Princeton’s Department of Psychology and in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

“The long-term goal is to translate that brain-activity pattern into the words that likely describe the original mental ‘subject matter,’” Botvinick said. “One can imagine doing this with any mental content that can be verbalized, not only about objects, but also about people, actions and abstract concepts and relationships. This study is a first step toward that more general goal.

“If we give way to unbridled speculation, one can imagine years from now being able to ‘translate’ brain activity into written output for people who are unable to communicate otherwise, which is an exciting thing to consider. In the short term, our technique could be used to learn more about the way that concepts are represented at the neural level — how ideas relate to one another and how they are engaged or activated.”

The research, which was published Aug. 23, was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Depicting a person’s thoughts through text is a “promising and innovative method” that the Princeton project introduces to the larger goal of correlating brain activity with mental content, said Marcel Just, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. The Princeton researchers worked from brain scans Just had previously collected in his lab, but he had no active role in the project.

“The general goal for the future is to understand the neural coding of any thought and any combination of concepts,” Just said. “The significance of this work is that it points to a method for interpreting brain activation patterns that correspond to complex thoughts.”
Tracking the brain’s ‘semantic threads’

Largely designed and conducted in Botvinick’s lab by lead author and Princeton postdoctoral researcher Francisco Pereira, the study takes a currently popular approach to neuroscience research in a new direction, Botvinick said. He, Pereira and co-author Greg Detre, who earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010, based their work on various research endeavors during the past decade that used brain-activity patterns captured by fMRI to reconstruct pictures that participants viewed during the scan.

“This ‘generative’ approach — actually synthesizing something, an artifact, from the brain-imaging data — is what inspired us in our study, but we generated words rather than pictures,” Botvinick said.

“The thought is that there are many things that can be expressed with language that are more difficult to capture in a picture. Our study dealt with concrete objects, things that are easy to put into a picture, but even then there was an interesting difference between generating a picture of a chair and generating a list of words that a person associates with ‘chair.’”

Those word associations, lead author Pereira explained, can be thought of as “semantic threads” that can lead people to think of objects and concepts far from the original subject matter yet strangely related.