Interesting Site, go visit

I think the jury is still out on this. The vast majority of the research indicates that cognitive therapy done in isolation (without solid academic intervention) does not impact progress. I am not going to go so far as to say that they are wrong- that would be foolish because I really don’t know- but this is not a new area in the LD field. Folks have been working with and investigating cognitive therapy since the seventies and the movement keeps dying because the results aren’t there to support it or the studies are flawed and can’t be replicated. Maybe, because we know more about how the brain works now, these folks have found therapies that work but I continue to be a bit skeptical. Even here, the people who achieve the greatest success with PACE etc. combine it with academic therapy. Without it, it sounds a lot like those ads for losing weight without work. If it sounds to good to be true…

Rather than bend effort solely in this direction, I would rather see us come to a place where individual differences are recognized and celebrated as part of our normal diversity as a species and a society. I am troubled by the thought that people feel conformity to some standard of intelligence is so important that they will invest huge amounts of money and time to improve things like digit span. It makes more sense to me to acknowledge how diverse we are and how wonderful that is. The system needs to acknowledge it and provide appropriate opportunities for all our charges to develop themselves- and lose the assembly line headset that requires and increasingly higher artificial standard to be met in order to qualify as a success. We are doing terrible things to our children when we require them to learn to read in kindergarten, for example- and define them as behind when they do not. Evaluation is a necessary piece- but when you give everyone the same test, they are going to distribute themselves along a bell curve whether we like or not.

Oh Anitya- this is getting too long and is morphing into a tirade on high stakes standardized achievement testing- arghhh- which wasn’t your question at all:)

Robin

The reason so much of the research into cognitive therapy has failed to prove its usefulness is because it (the research) has been terribly flawed. Most of it deals with a single repetitive task — for example, increasing speed circling letters in a text of nonsense letters — and, when there is no carryover into other tasks, cognitive therapy is considered useless.

In order to be useful, cognitive training needs to be broadly based. There needs to be a wide variety of exercises working on developing a wide variety of cognitive skills. This is because cognitive skills do not develop and are not useful in isolation from one another. The need for this approach is discussed somewhat in the book “Learning Problems: A Cognitive Approach” by Kirby, et al.

The reason a program such as PACE is so startlingly successful compared to prior research into cognitive training is that they are using two completely different approaches to cognitive training. The researchers need to wake up and design appropriate studies. It is not cognitive training that is useless! It is the research that is useless!

Unfortunately, the lack of positive results from this terribly flawed research is then cited as either proof that cognitive training doesn’t work or failure of cognitive training to prove that it works.

Mary

It may have “morphed” off-topic, Robin — but it was well-said and I for one applaud your second paragraph. The academic demands of school are only one part of my child’s development, and there are many many areas of his unique personality and pattern of ability that school totally ignores.

That’s OK — he’s getting theatre classes, art and sculpture classes, etc. outside school, he’s getting plenty of modelling and direct teaching of social skills and life management skills at home and in his extended family and out-of-school social groups. ALL kids should have this, or they won’t fulfill their true potential and grow to be well-rounded, successful human beings. School is not meant to raise our kids, but to teach them certain academic skills considered important for all citizens in our society.

In my local area, I see a great deal of pressure being put on teachers to get kids to “the standard”, which we parents are not immune to, and I believe that this attitude hurts us all. Conformity and uniformity are often useful and efficient, and sometimes necessary, as are “standards” and “benchmarks” of achievement, but they are NOT our most important goal! I really DON’T want a society designed by our “big-business” style government — does ANYONE?

The best teachers inspire, support, and empower their students, and those students make progress. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a FOOLPROOF way to ensure that this always happens, or to effectively measure the effectiveness of that teacher-pupil interaction for every child — but your comments remind us all to “look at the big picture”! Keep ‘em coming…

best wishes,
Elizabeth

According to an article I read only yesterday, the incidence of reading disabilities in Italy is MUCH less than what it is in the U.S., U.K. and in France. Is it perhaps because cognitive training and development receives more attention in Italy?

There are mainly two reasons why cognitive therapies fail, with the exception of Audiblox and PACE (and perhaps others I don’t know of). One is, as Mary states, that they are not broadly based. If you go to a gym and do only one exercise every night, your body won’t develop. Two is that they don’t increase the level of difficulty. If you continue to do the same number of push ups every night for two or three months, you are wasting your time. The same is true of cognitive development. One, you have to develop a wide variety of cognitive skills, and two, you have to increase the level of difficulty all the time.

Mary is familiar with PACE, I am familiar with Audiblox. Audiblox is broadly based, and the intention is to increase the level of difficulty all the time.

The analogy with exercises at the gym is terrific!

Actually, one of the reasons Italy has fewer reading difficulties is because Italian is a strictly phonetic language — one letter stands for one sound, one sound stands for one letter, and that’s that. It’s an easier language to learn than English.

Mary

Hi Mary,
I am certainly not uncomfortable with the fact that the research was flawed- much research in education is. That is why I am on the fence with this one. I am frankly delighted that it is coming up again so that new research can be done that is hopefully more reliable and able to be replicated. Until it is in place however, the issue of the effectiveness of cognitive therapy remains somewhat of a gray area.

Robin

Sometimes my personal soapboxes just become too much for me to ignore:)

Mary, if that assumption is valid, why is the incidence of reading disabilities in the Netherlands not also low? Dutch spelling is highly phonetic. What you see is what you pronounce. Yet, the incidence of reading disabilities in the Netherlands is high. See as an example www.kun.nl. “According to a recent international comparison, achievement in reading of children in the Netherlands between the ages of 9 and 14 continues to be lower than that of children from other western countries. Our country is presently somewhere around the 20th position.”

What you might find interesting is that Chinese children seem to learn to read English quite easily. In one study, of Chinese children in Vancouver, British Columbia, who were learning to read simultaneously in both English and Chinese, the surprising finding was that there was such a small percentage of the children having reading problems by the end of third grade. Of the children in the study, only 3% had problems with English, 5% with Chinese, and 2% in both languages. An explanation: Learning Chinese develops cognitive skills, such as facial recognition, pattern perception, visualization and memory (they use mnemonics to memorize their pictographic system), et cetera.

The information I got was from the newspaper accounts of a study which showed a very low incidence of reading disability in Italy compared to the U.S. According to the newspaper accounts, this was most likely due to the fact that Italian is a strictly phonetic language, whereas English is not. It could be that the “experts” cited in the newspaper accounts had it all wrong. The Netherlands was not mentioned, other studies were not mentioned, and cognitive therapy was not mentioned.

Mary

Well, I ordered Audiblox for my classroom this coming year. I am anxious to see the results.

I believe it was briefly mentioned, but how reading is taught was not given a lot of consideration in those studies. They focused on differences in the nature of the language being taught. Would there be fewer “dyslexics” where reading is taught differently — can you see it, an even bigger “whole language” where oral language skills are taught? Someone was telling me that things like relative pitch change the meaning of words in some languages.

I would not assume that lower reading achievement necessarily means more “Reading disabilities” than in other countries, any more than I would assume that it’s the nature of the language that does or does not “cause” more people to have difficulty reading it.

When research is profit driven it tends to be flawed, but good marketing to people who don’t know from good research means they don’t have to care whether it’s flawed or not.

I agree with you. The Cyril Burt episode should always be in your mind when you study research findings. However, not all research studies are flawed. In many cases the statistics are simply misinterpreted. For example, if you do research on what language children of English-speaking parents speak, you’ll find that close to 100% of the children speak English (the exception will be children who are deaf and mute). The question now is, how do you interpret your statistics? Do they speak English because the ability to speak English is hereditary?

You’ve convinced me. Let’s all move to Italy and drink wine!

I don’t know too much about the reading disability levels in Netherlands, however I just took a driving trip to Holland last Friday and it is definitely not reader friendly. They have words such as rice spelled rijs.Or better yet, Neejamegesweg.It’s a road. My brother goes to classes on a regular basis for his job with Philips in Holland, he says if you get rid of a lot of letters that are silent you could actually see the english(or German in my case) parts of the words(which English is such a combo of so many languages).In German all the letters are spoken, there are no silent letters and the combo vowels are the same every time you see or hear them.I haven’t read up on the reading lds, I just wanted to putin my 2 cents about Dutch not being all that easy to read since there are so many silent letters in their words.I can imagine that there would still be some reading lds in most countries since there are variations on why the person has the reading ld, different disabilities I mean, causing the reading problems.This is an interesting topic though.