Liz Ditz has an article about for-profit tutoring centers’ benefits for children with Learing Disabilities. It is worth a read.
Sylvan, Huntington, Kumon, Score: where do they stand with remediating specific learning disablities like dyslexia?
Link.
Archive for June, 2005
I’m late in reporting this development, but it still seems worthy of note here. Virginia Postrel, a columnist for Forbes magazine, wrote about “Disabilities In the E.R.” in November of 2004. Ms. Postrel mused about accommodations provided for people taking tests used in determining admissions to graduate schools.
Over the past decade students with learning disabilities have gotten used to having extra time on tests and, in some cases, separate rooms to reduce distraction. In many cases that makes sense. Giving a dyslexic third grader extra time on a standardized test makes it more likely that his answers will show what he knows rather than how fast he reads.
But a sensible accommodation for little kids can create a misleading double standard for adults. How much you know isn’t the only thing that matters in school–especially when you’re training for a demanding professional job. What patient wants a genius doctor who can’t focus in a distracting environment, reads so slowly that she can’t keep up with medical journals or tends to misspell drug names on prescriptions?
Link for the Forbes original (requires free subscripition) or for a copy stashed at Ms. Postrel’s site, Dynamist.
Cameron Marlow of the MIT Media Lab is collecting data about Weblogs. If you maintain a blog or contribute to one, you can help the folks there develop a statistical picture of the people who contribute to blogs by completing an anonymous survey. I contributed to the power of the data set. The image is a link.
The Internet is growing rapidly in the blog direction. The “blogosphere” is expanding rapildy, I spent a little while capturing some blogs on Learning Disabilities. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those I have encountered.
Sites that appear to focus on Learning Disabilities:
- Carol Sadler (Woodstock, GA, US) describes herself as an advocate and “the parent of two wonderful children with multiple neurological disabilities who receive special education services under IDEA.” She has http://iepadvocate4you.blogspot.com/
- Amanda Lawrence (location likely southern CA, US) wrote that she “has worked with numerous children possessing various types of learning disabilities and children with Autism” in what appears to be the first and only post to her blog. It’s available at http://mandy8587journalblog.blogspot.com/
Authors who mention their own Learning Disability:
- Amanda B. (St. Johns, Newfoundland, CA) has The Viscious Cycle
- Ashley, of Ontario (CA) at a mishmash of thoughts
- Homekirk at http://www.livejournal.com/users/homekirk/
- Insanedazy maintains a diary at Inside My Life
- Kate Thaler has Wet Feet
- Kristyn Marie Hammond has ya don’t say
- Olympiada has Child of the Light
- ShelbySnellen at http://journals.aol.com/jschoolingl/ShelbySnellen
- Trudging (Jane V. King?) has Outright Mental Defective
Michael van Baker, a Seattle-based writer, writes entries in his blog about books he’s reading. One of them is Mel Levine’s latest. Interestingly, Mr. van Baker arrives at the fascinating conclusion that Dr. Levine argues for a new variation on a 1950-60s concept, N. Kephart’s “perceptual-motor match.”
Perceptual-motor match was a critical part of Kephart’s ideas about children’s development and accounted for many Learning Disabilities; see Slow Learner in the Classroom, for example. The theory was that motor skills develop prior to perceptual skills and and children had to learn to match perceptions with previously developed motor information. Therapies based on Kephart’s views generally had little or no beneficial effects of learning of students with LD; for research, see Libby Goodman and Don Hammill, “The effectiveness of the Kephart-Getman activities in perceptual and motor and cognitive skills. (1973, Focus on Exceptional Children, 4, 1-10) and Ken Kavale and P. D. Mattson, “‘One jumped off the balance beam’: Meta-analysis of perceptual-motor-training.” (1983; Journal of Learning Disabilities, 16, 165-173.
Anyway, here’s a quote from Mr. van Baker’s analysis.
Simply put, we say we understand things, we “grasp” them, because we learned to grasp objects, and that neural memory of “grasp” is what is activated when we are trying to “get” something.
That’s probably too simple, but Levine approaches from the direction of learning disability and makes a similar discovery. Kids who have developmental disorders affecting their motor skills can have pervasive trouble grasping concepts. To master any abstract behavior it’s necessary to revisit its physical expression.
I’ll leave further comment on Dr. Levine’s views for another post, definitely one that will fall into the category of “musings.”
Here’s a link to the entry in which Mr. van Baker talks about the match. There’s also another entry on Dr. Levine’s latest book.
“Local education professionals are giving their input on a reauthorization of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and some of the proposed changes are causing controversy,” according to Courtney Craig of the Bowling Green Daily News (KY, US). The proposed changes for identifying students with Learing Disabilities is one of the issues identified in Mr. Craig’s story.
According to Johnnie Grissom, associate commissioner for the Kentucky Department of Education, a major concern for the state lies in identifying learning disabilities. Districts currently follow a model to identify special-needs students, but the federal draft would take away that model, leaving each district with its own criteria for identification.
“That could be a big problem because kids could be (learning disabled) in one district and not in another,” Grissom said. “We have to come to some agreement in the state. … That’s a huge issue. You can imagine transferring from one district to another, being considered learning disabled in one and not in the other.”
Link.
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