In the notes from the popular press section: Seth Slabaugh of TheStarPress.com reported that lead poisoning can cause or add to learning disabillities. Slabaugh recounts the story of a family in which three children “have learning disabilities, such as a writing problem and difficulty communicating and remembering things” and also discusses some evidence about lower IQ, sources of lead, and etc. See the story.
Archive for January, 2005
Judge Geraldine Hines of Middlesex (MA, U.S.) Superior Court ruled that Brad Crandall, a student who has dyslexia, should be eligible to play hockey for his home school even though he attends a different school. Crandall attends a vocational-technical high school but will be able to play for a local high school. Read the story from the MetroWest Daily News.
Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)–”second-hand smoke”–is associated with mildly to moderately depressed scores on tests of math, reading, and visuospatial skills as compared to children who lacked such exposures. Even low levels of exposure to ETS were associated with lower scores on the reading and math sections of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) and the block-design subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III (WISC-III) (but not with scores on the digit-span section of the WISC-III).
A team led by Kimberly Yolton of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center analyzed data about 4,399 6-16 year olds from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They excluded some children, especially those who reported smoking. Rather than counting on subjective reports of smoke in children’s environments, they correlated levels of cotinine in the children’s blood with their performance on the tests. (Cotinine is a metabolite of nicotine.)
Yolton and colleagues adjusted for childrens’ sex, race, region, poverty, parent education and marital status, and blood levels of iron; the correlations between ETS and performance on the WRAT and WISC-III emerged even when these factors were taken into account. It’s possible that some other factors, especially parental cognitive abilities and quality of home environment, play a role in the lower WRAT and WISC-III scores. The research team was not able to control for these latter factors.
- Report of the study by Yolton, Dietrich, Auinger, Lanphear, & Hornung in Jan 2005 Environmental Health Perspectives, 113(1).
- News story in Jan 2005 Environmental Health Perspectives.
In a letter to the editor (title: “Defining inclusive schools“) of the Melrose (MA) Free Press, a writer who signs as Bob Desmond and identifies himself as “Former Administrator of PPS,” writes about definining inclusion. Overall, Mr. Desmond presents a reasonable discussion of the ideas, arguing that “it was my belief that no categorical considerations should determine placement of children with special needs, and that all decisions would be made by the child’s team on an individual basis.” The letter appears to defend Mr. Desmond’s record from charges that the schools provided too little inclusion during his tenure.
There is much to be said about inclusion, but another topic in Mr. Desmond’s letter caught my eye. He wrote, “Research indicates that a child presenting with a language-based learning disability (dyslexia), benefits from regular classroom interventions, as well as small-group, remedial programs.” I often feel a chafing and want to loosen my collar when I read passages using this language. Phrases such as “research indicates” or “research proves” beg me to ask, “What research?” Show me the data!
Sometimes, when people use those sorts of phrases, there are plenty of data. Often, however, I fear that the phrasing simply stands for something more akin to this: “I believe x is true and if can find an article that proves it.” In general conversation, maybe that’s acceptable, but when one is talking about students’ outcomes, it makes me uncomfortable.
Upon reflection, I realized that I’d mentioned Og Lindsley [in a missing post] but not given enough infomation about him to permit interested readers to learn more. I’m correcting that in this post.
Lindsley was a student of B. F. Skinner, from whom he probably learned about the importance of frequency of responding as an index of behavior. Based on his work at Harvard with individuals who had schizophrenia, he began discussing what he called “behavior therapy.” After working at Harvard on diverse other projects (including the Experiential Typewriter!), Lindsley moved into education. As a professor at Kansas University, he advocated systematic recording of learners’ behavior and plotting of the data on “standard celeration charts” (see more at Standard Celeration Society) and other practices that came to be known as “Precision Teaching.”
One of my favorite quotes from Lindsley is this:
Children are not retarded. Only their behavior in average environments is sometimes retarded. In fact, it is modern science’s ability to design suitable environments for these children that is retarded….The purpose of this paper is to suggest techniques of designing prosthetic environments for maximizing the behavioral efficiency of exceptional children who show deficits when forced to behave in average environments. [Journal of Education (1964), 147, 62-81]
Although he referred to students with mental retardation, I think it applies quite well to LD. I have sometimes used this statement as a stimulus for essay questions in my classes on LD. We need to devise prosthetic environments–teaching places–that will reduce the disabling experiences that students have.
Henry Pennypacker wrote a nice remembrance of Lindsley for the Cambridge Center; it includes a letter that Lindsley sent late in his life. There is a good biography on the Australian PT site. Also, K. Lake provided a brief biography of Lindsley and a module about PT for a class on learning.
NPR Morning Edition on Mel Levine
National Public Radio’s Morning Edition aired a report by Margo Adler about Mel Levine on Monday 24 January 2005. An audio account of the story as well as related materials is available from the ME site, so I shan’t recount it in detail here.
I was intrigued by Adler’s note about Levine’s critics. She reported that Levine’s methods have been criticized for having only anecdotal evidence of benefits, without peer-reviewed research. Levine responded (I’m working from memory here, paraphrasing) that researchers work on topics that are too narrow, that research isn’t likely to affect policy, and that he’s interested in promoting a humanitarian movement. That’s a topic for a later posting, but the gist of it will be “Bologna!”