Hi all-
I am the Principal of a private 1-8, and I am researching vision therapy this summer. It has been recommended to many at my school by our learning specialist, and the responses have been very black and white. Some see it as a great help, while others think it is snake oil. I have been reading threads on this message board, and I have been finding much the same thing.
Here is where I could really use some help: I have found lots of articles on VT that describe its effectiveness, but not much on the other side. If anyone has any books/articles/websites that give a clear picture of the arguments against VT, I would appreciate it greatly! My goal is to be as educated as possible about the whole issue for the good of my students and their parents. Thanks!
As in most medical issues, the arguments for are that something works, while the arguments against are that it doesn’t work i.e. not much happens.
So except in cases of massive malpractice, the arguments against are not showy but statistical — we tried therapy X on this group of kids, and we did nothing or some old program for this other matched control group, and when we tested them both after there was no big difference. No big difference is no texciting news, but thatèsa what a negative finding will be.
The problem I am seeing in trying to read up on things is that there are few good controlled tests, there is apparently little agreement on what is to be trained before the testing, and some tests (the one on FFW noted on this board for example) are applied to the wrong group in the first place and so are designed to fail. For an analogy, try penicillin out on people who *don’t* have an infection, and no, you won’t see any results, because they were not a group that needed that treatment in the first place. Well, try FFW on kids who *don’t* have an auditory processing problem, or try Vision Therapy on kids who *don’t* have a visual organization problem, and naturally you will get null results.
You could consider making yourselves a test case — offer Vision Therapy as an option, and keep very good records of the progress made by your students who chose to take VT compared to those who were judged suitable and offered it but chose not to take it. Then you would know, and could let the rest of the world know, if there was any difference between the two groups.