New study about "fixing" dyslexia

She maybe referring to this week’s Time magazine cover story about overcoming dyslexia. I think someone on this bb may have posted a link to the site. If it isn’t here check on the teaching ld bb.

Yeah, there’s the Time article and one from a Neurology journal. All have to do with brain imaging. Nothing really new for those who’ve been reading LD Online for awhile! (There is a link to both articles I think under the teaching LD board. Also, a link to a summary of one can be found on the yahoo.com front page).

Janis

Thanks Lauriean & Janis….

I’ve read both and even had CNN send me a copy of the transcrip from today’s show. Nothing in there about a 3 week therapy. I don’t know where they hear this stuff (or just getting old and don’t hear correctly anymore!). I know they only want to help out. They are always telling us this or that. I guess they think we are going about this the hard way by putting our daughter in an expensive, private LD school that is over an hour away for 1st grade. I know she is at the right place. I had a good parent/teacher conference today. She did very well in Summer “camp” Thanks again for responding.

Suzi

Suzi,

You ARE doing the best thing for your child! Grandparents just want the problem to be fixed, and 3 weeks, hey, wouldn’t that be nice?! I think what she heard was that the brain images were taken again after 3 weeks of intervention, and the dyslexic brains were then functioning like the nondyslexic brains. That doesn’t mean all their problems were solved, though!

Keep us informed about Shelton. We’re all jealous we don’t have a great school nearby!
Janis

:idea: The study you are referring to is about Fast ForWord and before and after studies of brain functioning in dyslexics. This program uses language exercises (auditory processing) in their remediation process which takes about 6 weeks. It certainly doesn”t “fix” a child but data we have collected in our school district is very promising as far as levels of language functioning after doing the program. We already know that many reading disorders are linked to poor auditory processing skills.

This maybe what you are looking for.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/hsn/20030722/hl_hsn/dyslexiatherapygetskidsbrainsontrack

There are no bonafide three-week fixes for dyslexia. Indeed, there is little that totally fixes a TRULY dyslexic individual to the extent that he or she will read to a competency level, in accuracy, speed and comprehension, that is indistinguishable from a nondyslexic reader of similar age, background and ability. Improvements can be made and are made, however total fixes are not the usual.

I would also venture to say that apparent total fixes, when they appear to occur, were really not truly dyslexic people to begin with, but more likely were individuals who were suffering from what is sometimes termed “dysteachia.”

BEWARE of quick fixes for complex conditions!

I think this is the article your mother was referring to. I thought it was interesting. My experience with my LD son is much more like what Anitya talks about.

Dyslexia Therapy Gets Kids’ Brains on Track
Mon Jul 21,11:48 PM ET Add Health - HealthDay to My Yahoo!

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay is the new name for HealthScoutNews.)

In Yahoo! Health

Overcoming Depression

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More from Yahoo! Health:
• Check your symptoms
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MONDAY, July 21 (HealthDayNews) — After only three weeks of intense, specialized reading instruction, dyslexic children started to exhibit brain activity patterns that matched those seen in normal readers.

The significance of the findings is twofold: Not only does this particular type of instruction appear to be effective, but the study authors were able to see that children with dyslexia were using the same regions of their brains as other readers.

The findings appear in the July 22 issue of Neurology.

“We know the brain has to change when it learns, but to actually see the activation differences is quite striking,” says Gordon Sherman, executive director of the Newgrange School and Educational Outreach Center in Princeton, N.J.

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability and may affect 15 percent or more of school-age children in the United States. Children with dyslexia have difficult learning to read and spell words. Specifically, people with dyslexia have trouble understanding language sounds, recognizing the meaning of words and spelling. Researchers have believed these difficulties may arise because people with dyslexia process language information in a different area of the brain than people without dyslexia.

Recent research also points to the role of morphology (how the parts of a word contribute to its meaning) in dyslexia.

The current study was designed to compare how morphologic and phonologic processing activates the brain. Phonology refers to correlating the sound of a word with its written form. The authors also wanted to see if a specific type of instruction was associated with changes in brain-activation patterns as seen on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imaging.

Ten dyslexic children and 11 children with normal reading abilities underwent fMRI scans to map their brain activation patterns as they performed two types of reading tests. All the children were 11 or 12 years of age. At this point, the dyslexic children used the same areas of their brain to process language as the normal readers, but their activation levels were much weaker.

The dyslexic children then received three weeks of phonological and morphological instruction. With regards to morphology, for instance, the children were taught how to make a distinction between a family of words (such as “build” to “builder”) and words that were not a family (such as “corn” to “corner”), explains study co-author Todd Richards, a professor of radiology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

While the interventions were based on recommendations from the National Reading Panel, the way the pieces were put together is unique, adds study co-author Virginia Berninger, director and principal investigator of the multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. The center is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Both sets of children then underwent a second brain scan while again performing mental tasks. As with the first fMRI, they were asked to make a judgment about two words and whether certain letters within the words made the same sound. They were also asked whether letter patterns in words created meaningful relationships.

The second scan showed the brain-activation patterns in dyslexic children essentially matched the levels of the normal readers.

Language skills in the dyslexic group had also improved.

“It doesn’t mean that in three weeks you can teach a dyslexic kid how to read or even make a significant effect, but they do see that the brain sets change,” Sherman says. “It continues the momentum in trying to understand what is going on in dyslexia. It adds additional support that structured language programs that contain the components they talked about in the study are the absolute best way for teaching dyslexic children how to read. The caveat is that the earlier those programs are used, the more efficient and the more powerful they are, although they will work throughout a lifetime.”

While the results do not represent a cure, the rapidity of the changes did surprise the study authors. “There was drastic improvement in the brain after only three weeks,” Richards says. “I wouldn’t have expected such a large improvement.”

Imaging techniques are heralding in a whole new era of research into learning disabilities. “With fMRI, we are allowed to watch the brain work as they are thinking about language,” Richards says.

One day, imaging may help with the toughest cases. “If we have a group of people with dyslexia and we see that one subset of this group is resistant to remediation, we could image their brains and see what is it that’s different about these kids,” Sherman says.

Berninger emphasizes that the results do not represent a quick fix. “I drew on a lot of knowledge about what’s going on in the brain while kids are being taught how to learn and a lot of knowledge about language and reading systems,” Berninger says.

It has a scientific foundation and a practical aspect. “The practical aspect is how do you go from that knowledge to implementing?” she adds. “We in the field have to do a better job of teaching teachers about these methods … We as researchers have a huge job ahead of us to get this information out.”

More information

For more on dyslexia, visit the International Dyslexia Association. For information on the wider field of learning disabilities, visit LDonline.

I think people tend to oversimplify things we can’d truly understand. We want a simple answer and a quick “fix”. You know, like taking a broken car in for repair. Human brains/bodies are not like that. I think we are closer in understading and have identified some good possibilites of what remediate helps but to say we know exactly waht dyslexia is and how to cure it is a leap.
I have worked in the medical field for a long time, specifically with people who have neurological disabilities - brain injuries, strokes, alzheimers, dementia, cerebral pausy, spinal cord injuries, autism, trisomy 21, ALS, MD, MS etc. So far - I have not witnessed many miracle cures, that’s not to say we should not keep trying, but we have a long way to go before we figure our how the brain interacts with the rest of our bodies!

This report is being rewritten in the same form in a number of places this is yet another:

From Science Daily 7/28/03
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/07/030724083846.htm

Source: American Academy Of Neurology
Date: 2003-07-28

Short-term DyslexiaTreatment Strengthens KeyBrain Regions

ST. PAUL, MN – After only three weeks of reading instruction, brain scans in
children with dyslexia develop activation patterns that match those of normal readers, according to a new study published in the July 22 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Academy Of Neurology.

The American Academy of Neurology
http://www.aan.com/professionals/

Looks to me like gosh, when we are trained in something and give it a lot of intensive practice, our brains more readily perform that task. (And the lucky nondyslexic brains already knew how to do the task.)
One of many quesitons is, of course — when the brain does get confounded with other schooling, will it still do the reading stuff as well?

The key is that you can change the brain.

This is just one more piece of evidence that moves us closer to understanding that fact. The sad part is that many schools, my district included, are no where near understanding this. There is a scary article in the New York Times about month to month phonics (should be called month to month whole language)set to be used by schools in New York City this year. Here is part of the article that discusses the views of Diane Lam the chief policy advisor for New York Public schools.

She is a strong proponent of the proposition that children should be permitted to direct their own learning more that they typically do. You need to have debate and arguing and discussing,” she says. “It’s in those kinds of circumstances that students actually get smarter.” She says the the more scripted programs “treat students or the adults teaching the students as people who are incapable of thinking for themselves,” and she worries about the prevalence of “mechanical learning.” Ms Lam says she believes in phonics but that its elements should be “embedded” in reading and writing exercises rather than explicitly taught.

All the wonderful teachers from this board who actually know how to teach a child to read will be much in demand in the New York City area. The saddest part to me is that most of the kids who go to New York’s public schools usually are in the lower middle class, working class or poor. They don’t have money to hire tutors to learn to read and it looks like the school system is just going to ask them to figure this out for themselves. “Go ahead kids debate your way to literacy.” This is a sham!

<<She says the the more scripted programs “treat students or the adults teaching the students as people who are incapable of thinking for themselves,” and she worries about the prevalence of “mechanical learning.” Ms Lam says she believes in phonics but that its elements should be “embedded” in reading and writing exercises rather than explicitly taught. >>

Hi Linda,

Thanks for mentioning this article. Here is the link for those of you who want to read it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/edlife/03EDTRAUB.html

As one who thought I was used to all the BS that takes place in this world, this article absolutely has me speechless. I’ll make this one comment though.

If I remember correctly, Ms Lam also said that they didn’t want to destroy a kid’s love of learning. Uh, Ms. Lam, if the kid doesn’t learn how to decode through systematic phonics instruction, he/she is going to despise reading because it will be too hard and frustrating.

PT

Hi,

I forgot to mention that free registration if you haven’t signed up is required to read any NY Times article.

PT

Hi PT,
It is good to see you posting. Hope all is well.

The article also discusses Klein’s complete lack of education experience. He seems to be just another politician.

[quote=”Linda F.”]Hi PT,
It is good to see you posting. Hope all is well.

The article also discusses Klein’s complete lack of education experience. He seems to be just another politician.[/quote]

Hi Linda,

Thanks. When I get a job, hopefully, as a teaching assistant working with special needs kids, I will be alot happier. Of course, since it seems that most of the schools in my area use Reading Recovery, I’ll have to bite my tongue real hard for awhile until I prove myself.

Regarding politicians, even though I definitely have a preference for one party over the other, I don’t like any of them. Speaking of Joel Klein, sixty minutes did a story a while ago about his efforts in helping the Bloomberg Administration revise the NY City school system. But nothing was said about the program and I was very curious at the time. Unfortunately, now we know.

It sounds like from reading your posts that your son is making alot of progress. That is a credit to his mom.

PT

He really is doing well. He is still inconsistant so I haven’t completely stopped holding my breath.

Vision therapy has really done some amazing things for him. At the most recent family party one grown relative was there who always sparred with my little mister hyper. When he saw my son he said, “Oh no, here is he is.”
My son just walked by and said, “Hi, xxx.” Later the relative commented that my son wasn’t tackling him.

I joked, “Looks like he grew up even if you didn’t.”

That is just it. All the work we have done has helped him to mature in a variety of ways. It hasn’t just been about school.

I am glad to hear you hope to be working with kids. They would be lucky to have you.

Thanks to PT for posting the NYTarticle on New York City’s forthcoming curriculum. My husband’s comment: “So they want to bring down all of civilization.” Our “top” school district uses Everyday Math and some unstructured reading program that sounds very similar to what NYC has in store. A horror. We had a hard time understanding when any actual instruction was occuring (and we actually thought well of the classroom teachers).

Some personal theories/predictions/observations:
-Theory: The schools don’t want to actually teach, hence programs like NYC is introducing. Teaching is hard.
-Re: giving the kids books easy enuf to read. Well, what if no book is easy enuf? What if the other kids make fun of you for reading “baby books” so you don’t want to read the books you actually can read? Been there.
-“Reading by osmosis” After a couple weeks in his summer ld program, our son spontaneously articulated why he liked his new school. “I like the way they teach reading and math.” Me: how so? Son:”Well, they teach me.” Went on to explain that at his elementary school, they “just give you books; here they teach you.” Wow - what a concept - teach the kids to read. ” Regarding math, he liked how they give work sheets with 1 type of problem so he could learn it. He said the Everyday Math mixed different kinds of problems (so he had to constantly switch gears w/o any true mastery).
-Prayers for the parents in NYC who will now have homework every night with Everyday Math. And pity the poor immigrant parent with weak English or reading skills. Have they actually looked at the Everyday Math work in NYC? Several times we had to send the 2nd grade Everyday Math
homework with our son to his tutor, who would help decipher, i.e. “I think they want you to do this…” Even she often was sometimes befuddled.
Often my son would say, “I don’t know how to do it. We didn’t cover in class.” This in a community/home environment that would be considered extremely fortunate.
-Theory: ld kids especially hit the wall harder, earlier because of the utter chaos in classrooms using such programs as those coming to NYC. They have nothing to “hang their hat on.” These hard working kids (like mine) are bewildered. Talk about losing the joy of learning!
-Thought: Since we’ve made the decision to bail on the ps, I’ve thought much about the families/kids without the resources to make such choice. What are their options? I swear I’m becoming an activist.

[/i]

Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/01/nyregion/01PUSH.html

On high school kids in NY getting “pushed out” so they don’t negatively affect the school’s stats/test scores. When I read this last week, I saw a lot of kids who probably weren’t properly remediated in the early grades. With the new curriculum coming on board, they can push out even more of these kids. What a perfect system! Let’s just never teach them -that’s the ticket.

Not to stray too far off topic but…

There appears to be a philosophical schism in the whole language educational policy.
Dressman, McCarty, and Benson (1998) observe that we should recognize that a Whole Language approach embraces cultural, political, and economic biases within it’s philosophical and professional arguments of the “best way “ to teach children. In essence presenting the child with an “amorphous set of principles” (Dressman, 1995, p. 231).

From my research and personal experience it’s beginning to seem clear that children and adults need - Training, and Teaching.

Training is not overlooked in the industrial sector when preparing a worker for a specific task within a job; and this comes with good reason. If a worker is not properly trained the employer is held liable for any injury that comes from lack of training. This could be analogous to the personal damage that can ensue from an inadequate basic education. Of course we do not just want to train, we also need to teach.

The training comes into ingrain rudimentary tasks into long-term memory, and the teaching comes into instilling a students strength of self confidence so that they can knowingly, from an established skill base, challenge themselves, and the system that thought them, i.e., ask, seek, and find constructive questions and answers that build themselves as individuals and us at large as a society.

Feedback from parents indicates that the teachers who rely on a whole language “teaching on an as needed basis,” do not address the scope and need of training in education. I’ve heard examples such as: “because it’s “boring,” “kids don’t like it,” and thus “it’s not interesting for us [the teachers] to sit and watch the students do those repetitions.” Repetitions that I would say are necessary to proper training.

These laments may be of fashion, yet there is a better way to get the information across than falling back on a strict blocked training method.

Blocked training is only beneficial up to a point and only proves to serve as a way to get students to pass tests that are given shortly after the blocked training sessions are given (sounds like current policy..?). What has proven to be more effective is something human performance teachers and researchers have coined as “Contextual Interference.” This method takes a bit longer but the benefit is that it sets the rudimentary information deeply into long-term memory.

From experience, I can say that if an instructor approaches a bright Ld child with a fashion of Whole Language “as needed” methodology the teacher will most likely miss what the child needs most. I say this because the child will shield their disability for fear of exposing a failing. (Don’t we all in some way or another?)

I think I’m straying now, however, i wanted to bring up a point that education should incorporate both -training and teaching.

The three week study that Suzi was asking about was fascinating, in that it may parse what Anitya noted as “dysteachia” (poor basic education) from organic neurologic dyslexics. From reading the research paper I believe this was the studies finding, not the truncated media headlines of fixing a Childs dyslexia.

Sue the Web mistress had an interesting comment when she said, “One of many questions is, of course — when the brain does get confounded with other schooling, will it still do the reading stuff as well?”
By this I think she is saying - that there is a need for ecologically valid testing of educational programs.

Contextual interference methods are being tested and used successfully in schools for human performance, and by all accounts should be transferable to rudimentary academic course work. I think that this would be especially attractive to LD kids who may be especially aware of contextual links to new and learned information. Yet, there seems to be an educational bias to intertwining kinesthetic training methods with top-down learning systems.

Ok, I think I’ve strayed too far as a newcomer now, -time to sign off…..

Bill G

Dressman, M., McCarty L., and Benson J. (1998.) Whole Language as Signifier: Considering the Semantic Field of School Literacy. Journal of Literacy Research 30,(1), 9–52.

One thing I have had tremendous difficulty with it this; Schools spend an inordinate amount of effort to diagnose problems in children. It seems as though the emphasis is on the child’s problem. For surely if they are not figuring this out for themselves they have a problem.

Imagine going into the hospital with a problem, any problem. Imagine then that they do numerous tests to diagnose your problem. Then imagine that once they decide what your problem is they give it a label. Then they put you in a home for people with problems. They try all matter of inteventions (nothing of course related to science or research). Everyone gets basicly the same intervention no matter the diagnosis. A little of this, a little of that. If it is a good institution maybe there are some specific guidelines on how to work around but certainly not treat this diagnosis.

Diagnose, treat, cure or at the very least move along the continuum toward cure. If a child lacks phonemic awareness teach them phonemic awareness. If a child has severe issues with visual perception work on this specific area. It isn’t as hard as many make it sound. Numerous studies like the one discussed here suggest that the brain is capable of change. My son has severe visual issues and we are treating those specific issues. I am not asking that the school even do this for us but just a little help would be nice.

Instead it seems that schools are moving further away from a model that allows for treatment of actual problems. Schools are moving backward.

What’s next, reading the bumps on their heads?

And don’t forget the funding the ps is collecting to NOT teach my kid to read. Gosh, the more labels we give, the higher the $$ amounts x 13 years of ps and then send them out with a “thanks for coming” diploma.

Sure is a beautiful courtyard we have out there by the lunchroom, isn’t it?

Sorry for the sarcasm.

The only SMART thing we did was say to the ps “YOU accommodate and WE’LL remediate”.

Too bad the teachers on this BB can’t be cloned.

So how were you so smart Leah to start with? I didn’t start work with my son until the school failed. Now, in his case, that was early. It was clear by the end of first grade that they had no idea what they were doing!!! My son had started school classified because of speech and language delays (a perfect profile for a LD child but I didn’t know that then) so was in resource room in first grade. A very useless activity and when I suggested maybe he needed to be taught differently, the school psychologist suggested that maybe his overeducated parents had not accepted they had a child with a disability. Couldn’t be them, had to be our unreasonable expectations that our child could learn to read!!

Beth

My guy was one of the ‘who’d a thunk it’ types — no language delays, instead we had simple sentences at 14 mos and complex by 18-20 mos, very clear, highly advanced speech by age 2 — since he is tall, people often thought he was a full year older than he was. Seemed he’d be a ‘hyperlexic’ early reader just like his Mama…NOPE! BAD kindergarten experience with an overworked, overstressed teacher who was way burned out (quite understandably) but who made things worse — and becuz of her shortcomings, I missed the valuable advice that WRITTEN language was not developing smoothly. Turns out that DAD struggled through early school, and is definitely a ‘successfully compensating’ dyslexic who makes a great living using his V-S talents as an automotive technician.

Next came grade 1 — watched my son sink in a whole-language classroom — by March, he was exhibiting stress tics and anxiety habits (my family is ‘on the tourettes spectrum’) and my happy, sunny child had seemingly disappeared. School said ADD (NO, tho he is a gifted artistic and finds school boring) and could NOT understand that my response was to get him into a summer program at a local private school…where they use SPALDING.

We had discovered how he was using his memory to fake reading the whole language primers (You read it to me, first, Mum!) and I now knew enough to realize that he was just NOT able to learn ‘if, and, or, but,…etc! Having some experience as an adult literacy tutor, I did not buy the party line ‘But some children just CAN’T learn to read well! — red flag to a community literacy volunteer who has seen the fallout from that attitude!

When he got to summer school, I watched him blossom once more into the little boy I sent to grade 1 — the first week, he brought home his Spalding Primer and PROUDLY read ‘Bob and Tom got on the sled’ FIRST…no tears, no bargaining — just the glow of pride and accomplishment. By the end of 6 weeks he was ‘really reading’ and we were doing ‘Frog and Toad are Friends’ and other easy readers — with ease!

Didn’t solve our school problems, but he is now entering Gr. 5 in the fall and reading Animorphs avidly — needs lots more work on decoding and spelling, but we’re working away at home.

Reading comments like those of the NY educator who is advocating a return to whole language just makes me BOIL…

Beth thanks for the “compliment”, but if you read my post on Teaching reading” (the LONG one on dysylexia that has broadened into Autism/SID) you will see that you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know something was very wrong.

Jami is adopted “with a family history of dyslexia”. Me? being clueless, said “Gosh, I was a great reader - no problem - I’ll teach her”. (Not realizing that words just came naturally to me and I had NO CLUE how to teach someone to read - I just did it)

By the end of 1st grade, I had a child who was struggling, couldn’t identify the word cat in 2 consecutive sentences, couldn’t sing a song, couldn’t rhyme, couldnt tie her shoes, ride a bike, took 3 hours to do homework and I was going INSANE, etc.

I “remembered” the family hx of dyslexia. I asked the school “How do you if a child is dyslexic”? They just looked at me blankly (Never told me I should write a letter and ask for an evaluation).

FORTUNATELY, I knew a psychologist from church who referred me to an evaluator who happened to be head of ESE in another county. SHe said I had a very bright child, etc., LD everywhere and to go to SI OT and LMB.

I did. SHe also told me about 15 min consult, etc. So, I was very fortunate that I had the right people at the right time.
She’s the one who told me do NOT put her in resource. Write on the IEP “Parents will provide all remediation at this time” (Meaning I could change it at a later date, if necessary).

They didn’t like it, but I pulled her out of class in 2nd grade 2x wkly to go to 1:1 LMB.

Personally, I consider it a God-thing re: how Jami came to us, we found the right people at the right time and now she tells me, “Mom, I think I was meant to be your daughter, b/c I think if you could have grown a baby in your tummy it would have been ME”. I’m cool with that :0)