suggestions please

I suspect you will get some suggestions but I wanted to jump in first. These are not really weak scores- they are average and with a performance score of 115- which these subtests are a part of- do not indicate concern. 115 is a high average score. As long as his achievement scores are okay- I wouldn’t worry. You have a pretty bright kid with good overall balance in his strengths.

Robin

Thanks Robin, I was telling my husband the same thing. We do have a very intelligent son. The problem is that these areas of weakness affect his reading. The doctor who did the eval stated that we should consider average as 12 rather than 10 due to my son’s potential.

We are currently doing PACE and MTC which have really helped. I would love to, however, work on tasks that improve my son’s weakness as noted with the above, over the summer.

Thanks again. Donna

Donna,

Both coding and symbol search are measures of visual motor skill/speed so not clear to me how they would influence reading. But I am not an IQ test expert.

Picture completion measures alertness to detail and visual discrimination. My son is really lousy at this (I think he scored 4) and I see it showing up in his reading with slow to recognize words if the text is slightly different or in all caps. We haven’t directly tried attacking this very much but would think that anything that works on visual discrimination (which PACE does) would help. For example, the Set game and the visual logic cards in PACE. Also, try the where is Waldo or whoever (e.g., Pokemon) books and those find x in the picture games. The computer game Zoombinis (sp?) really works on visual discrimination as well as logic and would be something good to do. My 10 year old daughter loves it.

My 8 year old has been doing a computer program called Mazes that features Freddie the Fish (Homogenous or something like that Entertainment). I think is for 3-8 but my daughter likes it as well. It has lots of visual-motor stuff as you try to avoid being eaten by sharks and the like by making your way around mazes. Don’t know if it ties into reading but might help visual-motor skills, if that is what you are looking for.

I do wonder though with those scores if it really is something being measured on the IQ test that is interferring with his reading.

Beth

I guess I disagree with the psych then:) because I think that presupposes that all our various abilities are supposed to be equal… and that just ain’t the way it works. And- average is a range which describes a statistical sample of the population in this situation- not a meld of someone’s individual profile. We are a mix of strengths and relative weaknesses- it is part of what makes for unique human beings. Ah well… Regardless- even in your son’s profile, which is as I said, quite strong, these are relative weaknesses and would not make the gate as a processing deficit.

How does it affect his reading? My guess it is that he reads somewhat slowly because these are all rapid visual processing tasks? Lack of fluency may have an effect on comprehension if the reader never pauses to attend to the relevant punctuation, or goes so slowly that they are just reading strings of words.

Dear Robin,
Robin,
You are right, he does read very slow.

He also substitutes letters. Like yesterday doing PACE he said /help/ rather than /yelp/. Or he will put an /r/ in tap to read /trap/. We have done vision therapy with success which has helped him read the little words like /for/ and /of/ but occasionally he will still miss these words.

The other thing that makes me think it’s a visual memory problem or not attending to details visually is that we will go through a list of words where he can say them. Then one of those words will be used later on and he looks at it like he has never seen it before. He has to sound the whole word out again.

Lastly, my son has a very hard time with spelling. With the WIAT test, my son tested low in Spelling, Written Expression, and Writing Composite. He is getting better with his spelling with PACE but I wonder if it doesn’t go back to the visual memory, spacitial visualization, and attention to details visually.

Your thoughts are appreciated. Thank you.
Donna

Donna,

Another thing you might look at is Lindamood Bell’s seeing stars program. I bought it to work with my son and liked it. My son was not visualizing letters at all. We made substantial progress but then reached a point where he could consistently visualize the letters but didn’t always have the sound-symbol relationship down. The program is designed such that you can use with with any program teaching decoding not just LIPS.

Beth

Tufts University and Maryanne Wolf have been doing research into children who have multiple deficits in phonemic awareness, processing speed combined with weak orthographic knowledge. These kids score significantly lower on reading tasks that require rapid processing and recall. I would get my hands on two things this summer to improve his Rapid Automatic Naming and reading fluency… There are some charts called Rapid Automatic Naming Charts that you can use to improve his speed in this area. Another thing in addition to PACE would be to do Read Naturally. This will help with his fluency and pacing of reading..

Okay then…

If his reading is slow and his decoding is labored- and I think Patti is quite correct about the rapid automatic naming piece, then none of that is going to improve with a cognitive retraining program unless you are also addressing the reading issues. My personal bias is that it is entirely possible and feasible to do it all through good reading therapy- but that is another discussion altogether:)

Read Naturally is an excellent program for developing fluent reading. Great Leaps is another. Both are available from websites (greatleaps.com, readnaturally.com)

I would find a good Orton Gillingham tutor and have him spend a while with her/him. He certainly has the capacity to make good progress in fairly short time if the instruction is engaging,challenging, and intense enough, and a skilled tutor will address spelling, fluency and the rapid naming piece within the context of the lesson. Given a choice, were this my child, I would put my money in this, rather than continued cogntive therapy with no academic remediation. You can do both of course… but it is summertime and I am one of those parents who is wistful for play time that isn’t scheduled…

Robin

Isn’t there a link to an article about this? A fairly recent one? I shall have to search- just tossed a corrupted browser- and could export my bookmarks- arghhhh.

Robin

There are a lot of articles that I have found recently, researching into PA and Dyslexia for my program. Many are in the IDA Annals of Dyslexia, two issues I have noticed one in 1997 and 1999 RAN was becoming more and more prevalent.. Mary Anne Wolf at Tufts is one of the main researchers into this 3rd deficit, Rapid Automatic Naming and I read a study by Nathlie A. Badian, If I remember correctly it was Badian who mentioned a 4th deficit in orthography

I will go rooting. I recently tested a young lady (2nd grade) with this and phonological awareness problems along with word finding issue. It shows up very nicely on the WJ III. I hadn’t seen it quite a pronounced before so I am off on a search.

Thank you EVERYONE for your thoughts and suggestions. I would be very interested in reading more about rapid naming. I feel that that is a definite concern.

I scheduled my son for an appointment to get a tachistoscope evaluation next week. Apparently there is some connection to a persons ability to see and identify objects quickly with their ability to name objects quickly. I am also going to have them do the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) and the LET-II evaluation at the same time with this optomistrist. I guess the CTOPP specifically addresses phonological and phonemic awareness plus the rapid naming and auditory memory. I was told that the LET-II test evaluates to see if the child has problems with the visual or the auditory memory (or both I guess). Does anyone have any experience with these test? I hope that these more specific tests will tell us what direction to take rather than me just guessing.

I am VERY happy with the MTC program that teaches reading which is part of PACE. We still have not finish that program but I am planning to. Changing reading programs at this point would be too confusing for my son. I agree that knowing and understanding reading issues is important and that in itself could be contribute the the problem of labored reading. I just need to be patient and let him get throught this reading program.

In the meantime, I am checking into everyone’s suggestions. Your input gives me direction in my search to improve my son’s reading skills. Thanks!

There are just so many skills that are needed to be an effective reader. There is so much to learn. I appreciate everyone’s input. I continue to learn from you! I am so grateful for this board!

Any additional thoughts are appreciated.

Donna

Read Naturally would not interfere with PACE because PACE doesn’t have a fluency component like Read Naturally. With Read Naturally the child is listening and reading passages at the same time. We use both PACE and Read Naturally in tandem with kids who have reading issues at the learning center where I work.

Which subtests of the WJR-III did this show up on? I have a kid that I am going to be working with this summer that reads very slowly. I worked with him 2 years ago and got him reading but he is still having problems with RAN. He has never been assessed. I will be in the grad program and can use the speech and language tests there but I would like to get something like the WJ but I know the district this assessment and I don’t want to invalidate testing.
Any suggestions?

There are actually a couple of places where rapid retrieval issues come out on the WJIII- but the one that is closest to what we are talking about is actually called Rapid Picture Naming and it is in the cognitive battery. Picture Vocabulary lets you see this too- this particulat kiddo took a VERY LOOOOONG walk around her brain looking for the labels for common items- on at least ten we had complete functional descriptions before she found the word. It was really interesting.

Robin

My 9year old son(finishing3rd grade) has significant deficit in rapid naming. After much searching, there is but one program I have found that directly deals with this issue— Dr. Wolf’s program in Boston area (still in Beta testing last I heard). Their hopes for a public for sale version of this program for this spring are not happening — they’re not sure when the program will be available for sale. I got my son’s Resource Room teacher to obtain the 6 articles through the teacher resource library in our county.

But I have taken a lot of the teaching components from Dr Wolf’s program (RAVE-O) and am using it with my son. There are some articles in the 1999 Annals of Dyslexia, but the most comprehensive is the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Their summer 2009 issue (Aug 2000 I think) has six articles (including a couple from Dr. Wolf) that tells you a lot about this deficit and in detail about her program. Using the details about her program, I have rigged some of the tools she uses (sliders, word chunk cubes) and there are now some tools at the educational supply stores dealing with word chunks (onsets/rimes).

I am also happy with the Read Naturally program. (I was so happy I showed it to my son’s Resource Room teacher and she is now using it for some of her Special Ed kids as well as some regular students who are struggling with reading.

I personally have found it important to get my son READING…reading anything at any level, just to work on fluency. My current favorite is the High Noon Hi Low books (high interest, low level of vocab). These are the first “chapter books” he can read (and without too much grousing!) the first books without pictures on the pages. Currently we borrow them from Resource Room, but they’re for sale — someone else can probably give you more info on that. The series name Tom and Ricky Mysteries.

Hope this is of some help. I’d be curious to hear about the outcome of the optometrist testing of rapid visual.

KathleenW

Can you give me more information about the rapid naming charts? Who is the publisher or where can I get purchasing info?

Thought I would update everyone on my somewhat disappointing day. I took my 11 year onld son to an optometrist for a tachistoscope test, for the CTOPP and the LET-II test.

I found out that their tachistoscope test was an old manual one that the physician didn’t even recommend doing because it was so outdated. She did, however, demonstrate a computer program that offered training with a tachitoscope. My son tried twice to do that task and was unsuccessful both times. She recommended this computer program for my son.

The computer program is called “Computerized Perceptual Therapy System” which addresses the following: visual closure, visual motor intergration, tachistoscope, visual concentration, visual span, and visual sequential processing. I guess that the company has been around for a while but this program is just band new. They recommend doing the program up to 30 minutes 3 to 5 times a week. Has anyone had any experience with this program? I think that “Computerized Home Vision Therapy System” makes this program but I couldn’t find it on their web site.

I also found out, after we checked in, that they did not offer the CTOPP or the LET-II eval. So, no info about them. The school my son attends is going to purchase the CTOPP eval so I may just wait until they offer it.

Last but not least, I just read a very interesting article in the Journal of Learning Disabilities Volume 34, Number 2 March/April 2001 pages 107 to 118 called “Role of Visual Attention in Cognitive Control of Oculomotor Readiness in Students with Reading Disabilities”. The results suggests that there is a cognitive link amoung visual attention, oculomotor readiness, and reading comprehension. Interesting!

Again, thanks for everyones suggestions. Any futher info to help with rapid naming is appreciated.

Donna

Hi Donna,

NeuroNet is the only therapy I’ve seen that purports to address rapid naming issues. Have you checked out the website at http://www.neuroacoustics.com?

Mary

Donna,

I am not familiar with the program you asked about but one thing that strikes me is that a lot of it overlaps with PACE. Clearly, those sorts of exercises have not held the key (or at least the complete key) for your son.

We are doing Neuronet. One issue we are trying to address is the rapid naming. Interesting, according to her tests, my son isn’t as severe as the schools tests suggest. She says the basic neurological structure is there—it just isn’t efficient. She looks at the process as well as the results. We are working on the efficiency. I have seen great progress in the exercises but no clear transfer yet to other activities, although his reading fluency has improved. She says the transfer usually doesn’t happen until we have been through the sequence of activities six times—we are on time three. So I can’t personally claim that it is a cure for rapid naming problems. (We have seen some really neat results in other areas though.)

The audiologist views rapid naming as visual-verbal integration, which makes sense to me. The exercises you are talking about are entirely visual.

Beth

Beth, The input with these tasks is visual but the output is motor. When doing the tasks on the computer you answer by typing the correct letters/numbers in thus it requires motor skills. I guess it if I asked my son to verbally answer it would be truer to the rapid naming task.

The way I understand it is that in some kids, the visual input is impaired thus the brain doesn’t get the message properly. Thus the output, like with rapid naming, is affected. Improving the visual imput will improve rapid naming due to the clearer message recieved by the brain. So, in this computer program, they are trying to address just the visual path as that is were they think the breakdown is.

Thanks for your comparisons with PACE and Neuronet. I think that I will go back and do more of the PACE tasks. We stopped them when we got to level 9 to do MTC but I think that they would benefit my son. His processing skills have improved with PACE which has transfered to tasks such as math. Of course his reading skills have improved but it just seems like something is holding him back. I think that his weakness in visual skills may be causing problems.

Please keep us update on how your son is doing with neuronet.

Donna

Donna,

Here is an interesting short discussion from NN website on retrieval problems. Nancy Rowe, the developer, defines retrieval problems fairly narrowly with other processing problems being the cause most of the time. You are right—there can be an input problems. My son has done visual-motor tasks on the computer and his visual motor skills have improved but not his word retrieval but, for him, the visual input doesn’t seem to be the problem. The key, I think, is to figure out where the process is breaking down.

Alternatively, you could just try some of the reading therapies that address fluency such as Read Naturally and see what kinds of gains you can get. Since my son’s retrieval problems are in speech as well as impacting his reading, we decided to try to reduce his processing deficit first. We also were going to do NN anyway for auditory processing and sensory integration problems.

In any case, this answer shows you how complicated some of the things we take for granted are!!

We’re seeing really neat things in other areas with NN. The latest thing is the changes to his vestibular system. He always rode a bike really fast, to compenstate for vestibular system deficits, according to the OT who evaluated him for sensory integration problems last fall. Two days ago he rode his bike along side me really slow while I pushed a stroller. I was amazed.

Beth

QUESTION: Could you please define “true” retrieval problem and how that differs from the processing problem? —

I envision the fast naming task, very oversimplified, to comprise:
a) auditory input from eardrum to primary auditory projection area of cortex = auditory perception
b) visual input from cornea to primary visual projection area of cortex = visual perception
c) interneuron system linking auditory and visual primary cortex areas =visual/verbal integration
d) interneuron system linking primary cortex areas to motor intention and motor execution areas (parietal pre-motor; frontal motor) = ability to say what you hear(no meaning attached) and do what you see (copy movement with no meaning
attached)

— Any or all of these areas can be problems. NN specifically deals with neuralsynchrony problems, or poorly synchronized neural firing leading to poor quality of
neural representation of perception or movement. NN specifically and directly addresses quality of neural representation of minimal perceptual and motor units.
Visual/verbal integration can be targeted only indirectly, and should be addressed only after symmetrical and reciprocal timing of interhemispheric function is established.

Beth,

Thanks for the information. It’s sure complicated!

My delemma now is to do more testing to really eval the problem ($50.00 minimum) or just do the computer program (about $150.00) My son has had enough of it all even though he is seeing gains. He just wants to do fun kids things and I don’t blame him.

Thanks again for your posts. Great news about your son! Now he is in control of his bike. That should boost his self esteem! Tell him we are all proud of him.

Donna

Donna,

Just a few ideas:

There are two books in Critical Thinking series available on their website and cheaper on the Rainbow Resource Center. The first is probably too easy for your son but the second may not be. They have visual exercises in them like visual-closure, visual motor ect. You might try them. They are cheaper than your CD (maybe $15) and probably would take less time. They have an OT orientation to them and have pretests and posttests.

Other than that, I’d probably try something like Great Leaps or Read Naturally before pursuing the vision route (evaluation and computer program) more. You have done a lot of visual work already and just seems to me the chances of you seeing further gains through more vision therapy are relatively low. As you can see from what I sent you, there are all sorts of reasons for the same sorts of problems. Also, at some point, it may make sense just to try some things that work for a lot of kids, regardless of what is really causing the problem.

Beth