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.
Monthly Archive for January, 2005
Sphere: Related Content
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.
I remember hearing Og Lindsley recommend that the most important request one could learn to make was to ask the advocate of a treatment, practice, therapy, or intervention to show us the data. Without clear, objective, compelling data about how those who receive a therapy fare, we shouldn’t be adopting a therapy. To be sure, teachers and others are faced with great pressure to improve learner’s outcomes every day. But, that shouldn’t be a reason to use sham methods.
I find myself falling back on Lindsley’s advice frequently in considering topics in learning disabilities. Sadly, there are many faulty recommendations about how to treat LD. I’ll comment on some of these in the next few weeks.
For now and for those who are interested, there are some good sources. In a new book edited by John Jacobson, Richard Foxx, and James Mulick, Controversial Therapies For Developmental Disabilities: Fads, Fashion, and Science in Professional Practice, an impressive array of authors contribute chapters about the mistaken methods that have been advocated in special education and related areas. The book’s a bit pricy ($125 list), but the ideas are very valuable.
I shall not provide advice about individual children. I know there are many people who use the Internet to seek assistance with problems their children or students are experiencing; via various sources, I receive requests for help every week. I have not and shall not respond to them. To be able to consult about an individual with learning disabilities, I must obtain much more data than I get via messages requesting help, meet with multiple individuals, and assess situations; it is not currently possible for me to do so via the Internet.
One might wonder why I’d elect to devote time to a blog about learning disabilities. Beyond the obvious reason (communicating my own views), there are several explanations, and I list some of them here.
Blogs provide an unfettered means of communication. There are no, publishers, editors, or others between me and anyone who elects to read the words I type. The downside of unfettered communication is that I’ll publish something ill-thought, poorly written, or just plain wrong; I’ll take that risk, in part because of the consequences of the feature of blogs discussed in the next item.
Blogs also permit readers to interact with me by submitting their comments. Thus, if I say something wrong, someone will come to my rescue. (This, of course, has risks, particularly the risk that someone will hijack the comments to promote something inappropriate, as spammners use e-mail; I’ll watch the comments and I reserve the right to remove inappropriate content from comments submitted by readers [or robots].)
Blogs are a rapidly expanding medium, as Lee Rainie wrote for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Rennie reported that data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project beginning in 2002 show that the number of blogs is increasing rapidly and the number of blog readers is increasing even more rapidly.
Blogs are rapidly being recongized for their impact on communication:
- ABC News identified bloggers as “People of the Year” for 2004.
- The Washington Post publishes a list of blogs it considers the best in an array of 10 categories.
Some other’s answers to the question of why he or she writes a blog:
- http://radio.weblogs.com/0108247/2002/12/04.html#a139
- http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/000760.php
- http://www.webmasterview.com/blogging/why_blog
As a category of special education, learning disabilities is the subject of strong questioning. The field is battered by critics, both from within its own ranks and from outside the area. Because I’m concerned about this state of affairs, I plan to use this forum to explain my views of Learning Disabilities. I expect to devote most of my musings to the defense of LD, but I shan’t hesitate to offer my own criticism, as well.
Regardless of whether I defend or criticize LD, it must be understood that I am expressing my own views. What I post here does not represent the official position of my employer, any organizations with which I’m affiliated, or anyone else. In that sense, these musings are mine and mine alone. I share them here to promote open discussion and with the hope that discussion of the issues I raise will be beneficial to the area of LD in the long run.
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!”