PACE and auditory procesing

My son has auditory processing problems and the AP part of PACE is really good. He is finally getting automatic. I was confused by the jargon you used though. Why does your son have problems when his auditory memory was average and visual was above average? I am not clear on what your son’s problems are enough to help.

As a special ed teacher for 20+ years, we always taught through the strong skill. If your child is strong in visual skills, then he needs to be taught visually i.e. letters soundsaccompanied with pictures. Other things can be taught with using hand gestures etc.

The reason I wanted my son to do PACE was because PACE philosophy is to improve weak areas. My son was in Title for a year and a half and they tried to work only with his stonger skills. His reading skills improve only 6 months during that time. (They thought that that was progress, but I don’t.)

In any sport, the coach will work on the skills that the team is weaker with. They don’t try to improve something that the team is already good at! I am a big believer in the cognitive and perceptual pyramid that MaryMN always talks about and I believe that working on the weak areas to improve overall function will build life-long changes.

We got great results with PACE because of all the work we did working on my son’s weak areas!

Donna in MO

Beth, I too,an aud am confused by the jargon. The words I used were the ones used to explain our son’s problem to us. The testing psychologist told us to think of his brain in terms of a file cabinet where all the information is stored but none of the files are labeled. When asked a question about recently stored information obtained by reading ( as opposed to experiencing or visualizing) he cannot go directly to the appropriate “file” but must search through them all until he finds what he needs to answer correctly. He is able to recognize the information when he finds it but this process is obviously a long and frustrating one. Multiple choice questions are easy; essays and book reports with “why” questions are tough. Unfortunately, the psychologist was not able to tell us how to work on getting those files labled or at least speed up the search process except to find a reading specialist. The child can read - he has no trouble decoding words and has quite an extensive sight word vocabulary. He also comprehends what he reads as evidenced by multiple choice tests taken after reading - although if he delays taking the test by a day he will do less well. One of his problems appears to be in retreival of recently read information paticularily fiction material. He prefers non-fiction books and usually has less trouble recalling real facts than events or particulars of a story. Because his IQ is in the upper half of the Superior range, an auditory short term memory performance in the Average range shows significant impairment in that learning process. Is this helpful to your understanding? Please feel free to e-mail me directly. Thanks for your interest. Susan

The only therapy I know of that might be helpful with this is NeuroNet, http://www.neuroacoustics.com.

Mary

I wonder if translating auditory information to a visual form would help. Lindamood’s visualizing and verbalizing program teaches students to do that. It is a comprehension program. There are some discussions on this board about it.

Neuronet does assist with word retrieval problems, but I am not sure still from your description if that is the problem.

I had to come back to this to give myself time to think. Your psyche’s definition of what retrieval is like is a good one, but I am going to have to disagree that it is a problem. What you have is a child with some very significant learning strengths who takes in information at the same rate as the vast majority of the population. I think you need to be very cautious about interpeting average range performance as a deficit. It isn’t. It is a facet of his profile that may or may not have an effect on the way he learns- it is quite likely that he utilizes his other strengths to compensate and their is nothing inappropriate about this. It is what we all do. There is no law that says that the different facets of our learning capacity have to be equal- or balanced. As long as they are adequate to the job and we are learning- our brains generally do a remarkable job of taking care of this stuff without a lot of outside intervention. You need to keep the idea of significant discrepency in perspective. The fact that something is not a strength does not make it a weakness.

That being said- how is his performance in school? That is the place where the rubber meets the road for most kids- and is far more valuable in determining the impact of a cognitive profile than IQ scores alone.

Robin

Robin, thanks for your thoughts. To answer your question, my son is actually doing quite well in school this year (Gr3). Perhaps he is older and therefore more mature about things,perhaps the academic tutor over the summer and the first two months of school has helped him become more organized. There is a different mix of children in his class and the teacher treats him with respect and kindness. I believe that the right teacher can bring out the best in a child. I know that 2nd grade was the year from hell. He was miserable at school - he truly felt that the teacher and everybody in the second grade hated him. He actually was presented as a behavior problem to the psychologist who did the testing (teacher was sure he had an attention disorder because he seldom finished his work on time, didn’t take responsiblity for his actions and generally aggrevated her). This battery of test revealed the reading disorder. We were surprised because he had no obvious difficulty reading or spelling and his comprehension was generally good. Since we were never given the scores from the tests, I sometimes wonder at the interpretation of the results. Several educators I have spoken to are not familiar with some of the specific subtests done to determine the retrievsl disorder. We are not sure where to go from here. He is quite happy now and it occurs to me that the circumstances under which these tests were given could have influenced the results in some way. Susan

You were never given the test scores? That is not legal. Ideally you should have had them before you ever sat down to meet with the team about the results, but at the very least you should have gotten a report at the meeting. That would be the first thing I would take care of. It should be in his file. Go get it. You are entitled. If they refuse, request them in writing.

It sounds like he might have been given the Woodcock Johnson III, which was just put out last year. If that is the case- when you get the scores, post them. I give this assessment all the time. Maybe I can help clarify it for you.

Students who are very bright often present challenges to teachers because they are easily bored- logically so- because they do not require the same amount of instruction or practice as most of the group and it is difficult to keep their brains engaged. However, last year’s teacher sounds like a pill. I am glad things are going better for you all this year.

Robin