"coding"

Francine,
I’m new at the board so I know professional. But I do have a dyslexic son that’s 11 in 5th grade. The problems that you describe sounds the same as my sons problems. There are a lot of web sites that you can read to help you out. Maybe answers some of your questions.
I’ll try to answer your question on coding. I’m no teacher, but I’ll try. If there is a teacher out there. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Coding: Let’s say you can’t automatically look at the word READ and know what it is. So you have to be able to sound out the letters R-E-A-D to know. This is coding. I do believe. Lots of children with a learning disability have coding problems.
If you have any specific answers you would like to ask email me.

I believe what you are referring to is a DEcoding problem.

Karen

What’s the difference between coding and DEcoding? I want to learn the difference too.

Do you have written test results from these professionals? If not, I would request them.

I just went to the “LD in Depth” section of this website, clicked on “assessments”, clicked on the article “Understanding Tests and Measurements”, and did a search for “coding”. According to this article, the coding subtest of the Weschler measures decoding of visual symbols. However, the coding subtest of the WISC-III measures visual-motor coordination, speed and concentration.

What I would do as a first step is take the boy to a developmental optometrist for a developmental vision evaluation. If he is found to have deficits in visual efficiency skills (things like focusing speed, binocularity, tracking), then vision therapy is very likely to help. You can find certified developmental optometrists in your area at http://www.covd.org.

Once you are sure visual efficiency skills are in place, it’s a good idea to work on developing visual processing skills — things like visual short-term memory, visual sequencing, pattern recognition, etc. Visual processing skills are most efficiently developed via cognitive skills training. The best program available for cognitive skills training is PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement, http://www.learninginfo.com). PACE has many exercises that work on developing both auditory and visual short-term memory, sequencing, pattern recognition, speed, attention, etc. If PACE is too expensive, then I would try using Audiblox at home (http://www.audiblox2000.com), which also has some good exercises to develop visual processing skills.

A lot depends on exactly how much of the problem is neurological in origin and how much is developmental. Therapy won’t impact neurological problems much, although it may provide some compensating skills. Therapy can provide quite dramatic improvements when the problems are largely developmental in nature. Basically, you can’t tell whether it’s neurological or developmental until you see the results of therapy. If the therapy helps, you know it was largely developmental. If it doesn’t, it’s probably largely neurological in origin and the best you can do is teach coping strategies.

Mary

Hi Mary,

The Weschler and the WISC are the same test- WISC stands for Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children.

Coding measures fine-motor speed and goes into the Processing Speed cluster. The child has to copy designs from a legend into the corresponding number. These kids are slow to finish written work. They need extra time, and if it’s very serious, in the upper grades it can be helpful for them to learn to use a tape player with a notetaking strategy during class as well as other techie sorts of support (speech to text for example).

I would be really curious to see therest of the scores too:)

Robin

So it’s all about physically copying visual symbols? Nothing to do with decoding (reading) words?

I had never heard of a “coding” deficit before. Must involve more than dysgraphia? My dd can copy drawings just fine, but gets really slow when writing.

Mary

It is what they call a “predictor” of how fluently you will process various forms of information (abstract symbols). The WISC, like the WJIII Cog and any other measure of capacity for learning, doesn’t necessarily use academic sorts of tasks. In fact, they purposely do not, because then the intelligence part would be contaminated by the achievement issues more than it already is.

What they do is measure (or try to) are the cognitive factors that seem to be most relevant to learning different sorts of information. Typically overall capacity is measured, verbal abilities, spatial abilities, and reasoning as well as efficiency in all of the above. Some abilities correlate really highly with say reading/writing, and others with more math oriented tasks. Processing speed covers both, because you have to be able to process the visual stuff effectively to be a fluent reader. Phonological awareness, RAN and Processing Speed seem to be particularly relevant to basic reading skill development, while as students become older, vocabulary and abstract reasoning become more heavily involved.

This is not to say that training these areas will produce improved academic performance. (We have had these conversations before:) The research up to now says that cognitive therapy does not result in academic gains in any area- unless therapeutic remediation is in place. It may enhance the remediation- but it won’t work on it’s own. But it is clear that the remediation is key. And many abilities, auditory processing springs to my mind, are very sensitive to proper remediation and can show substantial gains. Now, I am willing to concede that there may be other answers- there is a lot of powerful anecdotal evidence on this board alone- but it is still anecdotal, not reliable research. Does this help?

Robin

Your daughter may have adequate graphomotor control/skill and good executive processing and still have processing speed issues that could impact her writing. Copying a drawing with no time limit is more a planning thing than a speed and efficiency thing. Processing speed is a “how fast” question, less that a “how accurately” question. It goes into recognition speed as well as copying speed.

Robin

Robin,

My son has been doing Neuronet therapy since January. His therapist, the developer of the program, made an interesting comment to me a couple weeks ago that speaks to your comments about cognitive therapy programs and academic progress. She said that in January my son “couldn’t do, couldn’t learn” but now he “couldn’t do, could learn.” Neuronet is not a cognitive therapy program—it is closer to OT in that it works on the sensory system. But, depending on the child, I would think the same thing would apply to cognitive therapies. Sometimes you can realize the full potential of previous academic remediation. For example, my son’s reading fluency has improved when his small motor skills improved but he had already been taught decoding. Other things are just easier for a child to learn after sensory/cognitive skills are more firmly in place. Personally, this is my hypothesis of why cognitive therapy has not been shown to improve academics. It doesn’t teach academics. It reminds me of my very smart 4 year old (who usually uses his smarts against his mother). He is ahead of his age in all the prereading cognitive skills. But that doesn’t mean he knows how to read. He still has to be taught.

Beth

You are surely one of those anecdotal records- I know you have been working really hard to find solutions for your son and I am glad that you have found some success. I do wonder though- sometimes- how we would separate the growth attributable to the cognitive therapies from a developmental surge- which also happens in a documentable way. You son is relatively young isn’t he- nine or so? If I am remembering that correctly, he is still in a place where his cognitive development is fairly labile and prone to fits and starts. I am not saying you guys are wrong- I am just strongly on the side of “the jury is still out”. I do- for the record- have the same sort of mixed feelings about vision therapy- lots of anecdotals and not a lot of hard evidence. I am a cautious soul…

Robin

“Coding” is one subtest on the WISC — so I would ask the person if that’s what she’s talking about, or if she has some other meaning for the word… like “decoding.” I’ve seen a lot of test scores cross my eyes (in more ways than one :)) and coding is quite often *the* low score even if other things are hanging around average… seems any of a number of problems will knock that score right down. If you have trouble copying *or* if you have trouble with arbitrary meanings for things *or* flipping from up and down on a page (eye tracking kinds of problems)… *or* you’re just overwhelmed by complicated directions… oh, nad by the way it is timed…

Fortunately it’s the kind of complex skill that in real life even students are rarely asked to do. That’s why it’s important to figure out just what the specialist means. You can’t really predict how a kiddo’s going to do in school or thinking from knowing a kid got a low coding score, b ecause you don’t know where the breakdown was. Do you have WISC subtest scores?

Sounds like problems with the frontal lobe of the brain where the exective functioning/ADD/processing issues come into play. Kids with epilepsy have this issue too. Does medication help minimize the tics and misfiring of the brain?

Robin,

I certainly know that growth and maturity is a plausible alternative hypothesis to the programs we are doing. He is eight. (I teach research methods at an university). I remember back in K, for example, my son’s speech made a big jump for no apparent reason other than development. The things we are seeing with Neuronet, in particular, are clearly tied to progress in the program, making me think that they are not attributable to development alone. A lot of the things we are seeing are not academic either. For example, my son recently took off on stilts at the therapist house. She was impressed, as was I. Balance has been a big issue for my son because of vestibular system issues. He now can ride a bike slow—before he took off like a bat out of hell. Interestingly enough, he learned to ride a bike at 4 but always rode fast, which is why I would never have suspected a problem.

We have had mixed success with vision therapy. He can handle worksheets easily now but reading remains a problem. We recently had him reevaluated by a different therapist who said he is still isn’t automatic at fixating. In other words, he can’t do it, if he is distracted at all. This seems to be an issue for him because he still doesn’t track correctly—skips lines ect when reading. The NN therapist is now incorporating fixating work into what she gives him (she had referred us to the second developmental optometrist who she does work with). She says that the problem is that he can do it when he isn’t doing anything else but this single focus on vision is a weakness of much vision therapy. Do you have any ideas from your experience of what works with kids who persist in skipping lines?

We also have been doing PACE since June. I was hoping it would solve the skipping line issue but it hasn’t. He now can read large text without skipping lines but not grade level text, so I guess there has been progress but not enough. The most clear transfer to academics I have seen is in the auditory processing work. PACE uses a “drill and kill” approach and we are finally making progress (but not without numerous consults with PACE people, which speaks to the severity of his problems). He has CAPD. I see him more automatically reading new words and sounding out words correctly. Before he often mixed up the sounds, skipped a sound, or gave the wrong sound, despite having been taught decoding. Now I would think that such AP work might be a part of academic programs but our experience at school and with privately with PG is that there simply isn’t enough drill for my son. We are planning to do another PG intensive after finishing the PACE AP work. When we took him a year ago, he came back reading but his AP scores were still dismal. Nothing we or the school did, short of PACE, made any difference. He actually got all the items right on the Reading Reflex pretest a week ago. Three weeks earlier he got 3/10 right.

Frankly, I turned to alternative types of programs after reading the Reading Bulletin Board. My son fit the profile that Anitya talks about—severe multiple deficits. Anitya seems a skilled and dedicated teacher which made me think that pure academic remediation really didn’t offer him much hope of ever overcoming his disabilities. Certainly, the vanilla type offerrings at his school were never going to make a difference. I have several friends with teenage LD kids who have had tremendous problems. Both have been on Prozac or equiv. and both barely made it through high school. I have felt that anything I could possibly do now would pay off in the long run.

Except for the summer we did Fast Forward after first grade, we have paired academic approaches with other therapies. What we have found is that it has just become easier for him to learn over time. He is actually reading grades 1-3 books fairly easily now and can read grade level books with assistance. He isn’t there yet but he would never be this far without the help and assistance of people like you on these boards. I will always be grateful. Now he can’t spell at all…..

Beth

Rather than a specific subtest, I believe “coding” is a term of art, used to refer to a processing skill. That would be simple if there were only one processing skill, but there are several. The same skill may be referred to as coding, or de-coding, or en-coding. It essentially means the transition from something natural — like hearing — to something man-made, like written words. Or, it means the transition from something man-made, like written words, to speech or understanding. A child can have trouble with one or more of the transitions, but usually there is one main problem.

If you focus very specifically on what the child cannot do, then you have the best chance of picking the best remediation.

For example, my son could not look at written symbols (letters) and make a word out of it. The reason why he could not was that he could not connect the sound a letter represented to the letter, so he had no was to break the code that letters represent.

Another child might not see those letters in the order we think he can see, or he may see them doubled or on different lines. The result will be the same as my son, but the problem will be different, and the remediation has to be different.

It is very hard to get testing professionals to speculate about what is going on inside a child, but without knowing that, you cannot pick the best treatment, so you may have to “diagnose” the problem yourself. Find out what the intervening step(s) is or are that he cannot make. The “internal” steps are what, I believe, your person means by coding.

Carol

Well, as I said, I am glad that you feel what you are doing is workng.
Re: skipping lines

This is one of those skills that frequently responds well to practice-and may get into the frustration he was having with the repeated reading. Pick a short passage that he is able to read, in a font size that doesn’t pose problems for his tracking ability.When he reads aloud, track for him with a pencil, lightly above the line he is reading. When he makes an error- circle it and have him start the sentence again. When he is working fairly smoothly- 90% acuracy and reasonable speed and inflection, change one variable, either the level of text difficulty or the size of the type. Try not to change them both at once. If you change the text level, you may want to echo read with him first- kind of like they do in “Read Naturally”. At the very least, go over any words that you think he may not be able to read fluently first. Then spot check him by pointing to a word and having him read it. We want this to be an attainable task- since the goal is to stop skipping lines:) I wouldn’t spend more than 10 minutes or so a day on this- it can as you know, be really tiring and frustrating. However, it does work- and my experience is that any frustration kids feel soon disappears as they become more skilled.

Robin

I had my son read a first grade reader to me this morning. He can easily read this—only made one error—read his as this but still made a few tracking type errors. He caught himself skipping two lines, skipped another one, and repeated one line, he also skipped words a few times. We have been doing every other page but I made him read every page for 10 minutes to a timer. He read a complete story.

This was very doable. I think part of his problem is endurance. After doing PACE this summer (which we are still doing), he started tracking correctly but at his reading level that only lasts for about 4 lines and then he goes for the finger. He tried for the finger today but I told him no and he seemed to be able to do this.

I was going to have him read the entire first grader primer to me this way and then start on the second. He has actually read both of these before. I can see how this could help. The problem we had before was that there really was no comfortable reading level for him except picture books with little text on each page.

I didn’t use a pencil over the text. I thought it would give him too much help. I used a closed pen last spring , per Victoria’s suggestion. It helped us move along his fluency but seemed to do nothing for his tracking.

I wouldn’t worry about too much help at this stage of the game. But I would pick text that he is able to be successful with for more than four lines. So your moving back to easier text was a good idea. Remember- you are not teaching decoding stuff here- you are practicing fluent text reading- so it follows that he has to be able to read all the words independantly.

Lots of stuff can interfere with this besides decoding- which is why I suggested watching the size of the type and spacing and only changing one variable at a time- appearance or level of text difficulty. I like the pencil thing because while kids are learning this the circle cues them to a word they have passed over once before. But- you can use a closed pen- as long as you stop right there, point out the word and have him go back to the beginning of the sentence.

Thanks Robin. I think with my son the problem has been that so many things have interferred with his reading, decoding being only one of them. He is already fluently reading (in terms of not pausing excessively) this level of text so it does seem like a good way to work on tracking. This way we are only do one thing at a time with the text.

We were doing the AP drills with PACE this morning and my son started jumping columns as opposed to just reading straight down. Now the PACE people suggest this to work on fixation skills but with my son’s AP problems I haven’t wanted to add to the work. But he was able to do it, so I think I will try adding this to our AP work as well.

BTW, yesterday my son was spontaneously reading signs. We were going to a colleague of my husband’s from work’s house whom we had never visted. He saw the name of the subdivision “Forest Lakes”. He then started on about whether this meant there were both forest and lakes here. We were driving so this was very fast recognition. Some days it does seem like we’ll get there.

Beth