In “2-Year Colleges Help Learning-Disabled Students Break Into Math and Science,” Ashley Marchand reports about efforts to support students with Learning Disabilities succeed in post-secondary education settings. Ms. Marchand’s article appeared in the news source of record for higher education, the Chronicle of Higher Education.
For as long as he can remember, Robert T. Calloway has had a fascination with engineering and all things mechanical. He wanted to pursue an engineering career despite a diagnosis of dyslexia, which challenged both his confidence and his ability in the classroom.
Continue reading ‘Promoting success in college’
In an article slated to appear in Remedial and Special Education, Jeanne Wanzek and Sharon Vaughn reported that widely popular three-tiered approach to addressing did not significantly reduce the number and percentage of students identified for special education across seven elementary schools. Their study, which is limited to the response to instruction or intervention in the primary and early elementary grades and focused primarily on academic intervention, revealed no significant reduction in identification of children as having Learning Disabilities, even though this group would be the most likely to benefit from such prevention efforts. Similarly, there were no differences in the proportion of students identified for special education according to ethnic background.
Continue reading ‘Does RtI reduce numbers of children in special education?’
A research team in Professor Leo Blomert’s lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands reported that brain scans of children with and without dyslexia reveal differences when associating letters with sounds. Vera Blau and colleagues studied 34 9-½-year-old children, 18 of whom were identified as having dyslexia. While the children completed tasks under four different conditions (letters presented only visually; speech sounds presented alone; multi-sensory matching letter–sound pairs; and multi-sensory not-matching letter–sound pairs), the researchers obtained scans of brain activity. They found that in the brains of children with dyslexia there were weaker effects when letters and sounds matched than in the brains of children without dyslexia; these effects appeared most clearly in certain areas of the brain related to language function. In addition, the dyslexic readers’ brains showed weaker activation when speech sounds were the only stimulus (i.e., without accompanying letters).
Continue reading ‘Letter-sound correspondences: New scanning data’
On 5 February 1946, Kenneth A. Kavale was born in Brooklyn (NY, US). After graduating from college, Ken taught for a few years and then began graduate studies. In the 30+ years after he completed graduate work, he became one of the foremost contributors to the contemporary understanding of Learning Disabilities. As a journal editor, speaker, book author, and researcher, he assembled a remarkable record for scholarship. As an advocate, he encourage educators to think carefully about their words and actions. As a pal, he made lots of us laugh. Ken died in 13 December 2008. The phenomenon of Learning Disabilities is better understood because of the work he did.
Read the notice of Professor Kavale’s death on SpedPro.
At the Greenwich (CT, US) Time site, Colin Gustafson described a meeting where parents of students with disabilities expressed concern about the special education services their children received from the local schools. Under the headline “Parents voice rage over special education in meeting with Freund, Board of Ed chairman,” Mr. Gustafson reported some of the concerns parents raised and some of the responses from school administrators.
Parents’ frustration with the district’s handling of their children’s special education needs boiled over several times during a meeting with the school board chairman and superintendent Wednesday morning.
Many attendees said the families who strongly advocate for their children — even wage legal battles on their behalf — are too often labeled as “problem parents” and have their concerns dismissed by district administrators.
I wonder how many of these sorts of meetings occur but are not reported in the press. Perhaps some of the parents who read this blog can comment on how common these concerns are.
Read Mr. Gustafson’s report, “Parents voice rage over special education in meeting with Freund, Board of Ed chairman.”
Over on a Psychology Today blog, Robert Langston has a post about recognizing dyslexia early. He’s putting it through the filter of his own personal experience with dyslexia and the filter of a parent discussing a child’s problems with a teacher. Is dyslexia inherited? in the original.
Reporter Valle Dwight quotes LD Blog pal Liz Ditz extensively in “Searching for the miracle: Parents, in a desperate quest to fix what they’ve been told is broken in their children, are willing to try (or pay) anything to help their kids” available on Great Schools. Check on it. The article is worth a read. It fits right in with the emphasis on evidence-based treatments here on LD Blog.
Does anybody know what is meant by “audible delays?”
According to a newspaper report by Bethany Hart who writes for the Washington Court House (OH, US) Record-Hearald, a woman named Tanya Cottrell noticed her child “was learning things in school a bit slower than the other children. He was diagnosed [with] having audible delays which is considered a learning disability.”
Continue reading ‘New syndrome: Audible delays?’
Over on I Speak of Dreams, Liz Ditz posted an entry showing that the Canadian Pediatric Association understands the appropriate use of chiropractic procedures with children and youths. Jump to Liz’s post, read her entry, and follow her link to the statement: “Canadian Pediatric Society Position Statement: Chiropractic care for children: Controversies and issues.”
Update: NJ gov. signs law creating dyslexia task force.
As reported earlier on LD Blog under the headline “New Jersey task force on reading disabilities created, seventh-grader Samantha Ravelli, of Ocean City (NJ, US), is having effects on public policy. The Associated Press reported 17 January 2010 that the law she lobbied her legislators to pass has been signed by the Governor of New Jersey.
Now that this panel is law, let’s hope the folks who become members of the panel will take the sensible step of drawing from evidence-based practices in making recommendations for reading instruction in New Jersey. Read the Associated Press story, “ N.J. measure will benefit reading-disabled students.”